Evan Luthra - The Best Way To Predict the Future Is To Build It

Full transcript: Evan Luthra on London Real

2:57 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Evan Luthra, the serial entrepreneur, blockchain expert, investor and motivational speaker. Your journey began at age 12 when you began writing a technology blog and then developed an app that helped you reach millions of readers. You sold your first business for 1.7 million dollars at 17 years old and made the Forbes 30 under 30 list at the age of 27.

3:28 You first discovered Bitcoin back in 2014 and from there began investing heavily in the blockchain space. Today, you’ve built and invested in over 400 companies with a combined market cap in excess of 100 billion dollars. You are a member of the Forbes Technology Council and regularly contribute to Forbes magazine, Entrepreneur and Cointelegraph. Ultimately, you believe that Web3 has the power to transform the lives of millions of people around the world and that Bitcoin represents the biggest wealth transfer in generations. Evan, welcome to London Real.

4:01 Thank you, Brian. Pleasure to be here today. It’s great to have you here. You know what? I think we jump right into it because the bull market is back.

4:07 And I want to just jump into your brain and find out what is Evan thinking about what the next 12 to 18 months holds for us. What do you think is hot? What’s happening? And I think what everyone wants to know is what are you investing in? You’ve seen a few cycles. You’re pretty much OG in this space. So what do you see coming up?

4:28 I mean, for me, it’s very, very exciting to see what’s happening in the crypto markets right now. We all knew this was going to happen, right? All these last cycles that we’ve got, this is my third bull cycle, as you would say, that I’m properly involved in. And, you know, what was happening is basically Bitcoin’s adoption is growing. There’s more and more people understanding what’s happening with Bitcoin, why we need Bitcoin and why we need to take power away from the governments and from the banks.

4:50 And I think that’s what’s really happening. What happened during the last cycle was, you know, at first, the big banks used to say Bitcoin is a fraud, Bitcoin is a scam. They realize they can’t stop. Most people eventually realize that you can only delay technical progress. You can’t stop technical progress. It will eventually come. The better solution will eventually win.

5:08 And Bitcoin is just a better form of money, right? And that’s why I think it’s able to get all these adoption. And now with ETFs, we’re seeing over 10 times more demand for Bitcoin every day than Bitcoin has actually created. There’s more than 10X the demand for Bitcoin every single day just from the ETFs than Bitcoin actually being created. And that’s been the graph ever since the ETFs have gone live. And it’s been a really, really exciting time.

5:30 I mean, to most people, I actually tell them you need to understand, if you want to understand Bitcoin, you have to ask, why do you need banks? Why do you need governments? And to really understand that you have to go back a few centuries in time and you have to understand you need banks and governments to enable trade in different parts of the world. Somebody from the UK wants to do business, somebody from India. That’s what banks and governments enabled.

5:51 They enabled the trade to take place in a matter that was trusted between both parties. But what’s happened over those many years is that these banks and governments have become quite corrupt. So now they serve their own friends. They don’t really serve the public anymore. They’re not a public servant as they’re supposed to be. And I think that’s what Bitcoin is truly solving, right?

6:10 Today, if I want to get a loan, I can walk into any bank and get a loan in a minute. But my chef, my driver, who actually needs the loan, which will have a lot more impact for them than to me, they can’t get a loan. They can’t get that because they don’t know the bank manager, right? I mean, and that’s what’s problem in politics and government and banking today. And I think that’s what Bitcoin solved. It takes away that central power where there’s some individuals decide how the power is distributed and gives it back to the people.

6:34 With Bitcoin, you’re decentralizing governance, you’re decentralizing power. I think that’s really, really exciting. And what happens every cycle is that we see adoption coming in, right? Bitcoin works in cycles because of the way it’s been designed. There’s this halving that happens every four years that cuts the supply of Bitcoin for the same amount of effort that goes in by half.

6:57 And as we reach every halving, it attracts a lot of people to the Bitcoin ecosystem and we see the growth coming in. I think that’s what is really happening now that the adoption is really reaching that tipping point. I think this may be the biggest super cycle in a way where Bitcoin reaches everybody or at least a big part of the world. We’re already seeing massive amounts of people in places like Venezuela, Turkey, the Eastern Europe, where there’s either war or political instability, or there’s high amounts of inflation already, like 50 percent of people almost using cryptocurrencies all the time.

7:32 I talk to these people, like all the time, people from Argentina or Turkey, where even Malaysia, I was talking to a friend just a couple days ago, the Malaysian ringgit has fallen like, oh, 50 percent against the US dollar in the last many years. So people are losing their purchasing power. America keeps on printing more and more US dollars, which is backed by nothing but the trust in their army. And then they keep exporting that inflation because the world still runs in the US dollar.

7:56 So they create that inflation and they export that inflation to other countries. And these countries are suffering. These countries are suffering in a really big way. And I think Bitcoin takes away that power from these institutions and gives it back to the people. One Bitcoin is always one Bitcoin. And what you can get with that one Bitcoin is going up over history and it’s not going down compared to what you get when you have fiat currencies.

8:19 Over time, there’s not a single fiat currency that has actually survived, right? Not one single fiat currency has actually survived. We don’t know if Bitcoin will survive. One thing I tend to tell people is they underestimate technology. Technology grows really, really fast. It grows exponentially. So we may have a better form of money.

8:37 But as of today, we don’t have anything better than Bitcoin, right? I think it’s the smartest form of money out there. The best way to store value. It’s easy to transport. It’s secure.

8:47 Nobody can take it from you. And I think that’s the best way to look at it. Is this like more of getting people’s attention to a certain extent? Because it feels like every cycle more and more people hear about Bitcoin. And then they always have to learn about it because sometimes it’s complicated to own. The ETF changes that.

9:03 But once they get it, I guess they call it orange-pilling someone, a lot of people then go into it. But again, it’s hard to get people’s attention. Now, we’re close to the all-time high. I was telling my students yesterday, when that headline goes around the world, that it’s an all-time high in Bitcoin, that is a huge pattern interrupt. Marshall McLuhan talked about that, a pattern interrupt, where people are going to be like, oh, that’s that crypto stuff everyone’s been talking about.

9:26 Now it’s back. And that would get a lot of people’s attention. And you’re saying that might be the final push. Exactly. Because like you said, because it’s easier to access Bitcoin now. And also, technology is growing, right?

9:37 So we didn’t have the infrastructure for a long time in the Web3 space for people to actually be onboarded. You can’t expect my mother to go and download a MetaMask, create a wallet, save a private key, preserve that in a safe way. You can’t expect a lot of people to do that. So we are now seeing these tools that have come in where now you have phones that are basically crypto phones. So crypto is becoming so much part of life for a lot of people that it becomes very easy.

10:04 And I think that’s what technology is doing. And the infrastructure, as we say, is being built and is at a place where a lot more people can be onboarded. And those who actually have interest can be onboarded at this point with infrastructure that’s available today. And Game5, for example, which is the biggest narrative, I might invest in over 150 Web3 games and has been one of the most exciting ways to onboard people. Because if you look at what happened with gaming, right, the ecosystem was always locked, right?

10:31 You would have these big game publishers publish a game. Players would spend hours and hours playing, earning these skins, which they pay the publisher for. And then they leave the game and the skins are there, you know, they can’t do anything with it. But with the weapons are there, whatever they earn in the game, the in-game assets. But now with NFTs and Web3, these assets become tradable. But an individual is still playing the game because he wants to enjoy the game, like he would play any other way.

10:54 But now what the time he spends into the game, he can earn these assets and he can sell them at the end of the game. And that creates an economy that creates a financial incentive around that. When you do that, it opens up a lot more adoption, right? And I think that’s just one of the examples of how, like, Game5 is bringing a big adoption to crypto and Web3. I’d like to say, like, the children who are going to be born now, who are going to be playing iPad games, you know, already for the last many years, children who are born with iPads in their hand.

11:21 They play iPads all day. That’s how parents keep the kids entertained these days. But the people who are going to be born now, who are going to play these next games, they’re going to be Web3 games. They’re not just playing games, they’re actually making money. They’re actually earning in-game assets, they’re learning about finance from a very young age.

11:35 They’re learning about Bitcoin from a very young age. Because eventually you earn that game token, you say, this is interesting. And then you get more interested, you look more into it. I think that’s what is going to happen at a very big pace. And this is one of the industries, this adoption happening in every other industry, as we know.

11:53 There’s a lot of point systems, like the world runs on, that’s all been coming to Web3. I was just talking to the head of AirBaltic, one of the airlines, so I travel a lot. I’ve been crazy about collecting miles and, you know, optimizing my travel. And then this guy is just, and I have all these miles, which I expire now, because I’m at a point now where I don’t spend so much time optimizing that I used to when I was younger. So I don’t use so many of those points, and they expire, right?

12:17 But now AirBaltic is working on a system where you can actually sell those points. You can have, you can NFT them, and you make an whole economy around that. So that’s like value that I can, like that was sitting there, but I couldn’t use, now I can extract that value using Web3. So I think there’s a lot of adoption happening, and there are a lot of companies coming in. And this happened even before. So it’s not like it didn’t happen before.

12:38 Microsoft was like selling stuff. Tesla was selling with Bitcoin, even the last bull market. What happened was, the infrastructure was not able to support it. The transaction fees were too high. The storage, there was, this infrastructure was not there, but that’s what people are doing every day.

12:54 The reason why I like to be in Web3 and blockchain is because the smartest people in the world are in this space and working and building cool things. I don’t work for money anymore. I like to work because I enjoy doing it. That’s the only type of work I do, right? And in Web3, you get to work with the smartest people in this industry. That’s really exciting.

13:11 And you can never discount the hard work of smart people. So eventually you see this adoption happening where now the infrastructure layer, the foundation is strong, and people can actually build tools, people can actually build Web3 solutions, and they can actually tokenize the economy or the company or the industry and have massive growth. And now we are, for example, security tokens. I was actually early into one of the first security token offerings, high dot tech back in 2018.

13:39 This company did really, really well. They raised a lot of money, but it was a security token. Even till today, there’s not really that many places we can trade a security token. But now this year, a big narrative is real world assets, tokenizing real world assets, which basically is security, right? You’re buying a property and you take tokenizing that and then you sell it and you bring all this liquidity on chain.

13:59 So that’s like real estate is a trillion, multi-trillion dollar asset. And when that comes on chain on crypto, there’s huge amounts of growth that’s going to be coming into the space. And that’s just one of the examples. But the infrastructure didn’t exist. People had ideas to tokenize property in the last bull cycle also, but there was no infrastructure.

14:18 You couldn’t do it. Now you actually have the infrastructure. And that’s why I think this is one of the super cycles where we’re going to see massive growth. I think it’s what crypto has been the largest well transfer in generations, as we all know. But I think this is the time that we’re still very early.

14:33 We’re still not close to the all time high. It’s not broken the all time high. So people watching this, like I think they have the opportunity that they’re still very early and they can still get in and still like I like to even tell people like when you get into crypto, don’t come in with the mindset like I have this thousand dollars. I have this ten thousand dollars. How do I make that into a hundred or how do they make that into a million?

14:52 That’s the wrong mindset, right? Forget what you have. Think out of the box and say, I’m this individual. I want to understand what Bitcoin is. I want to understand web trees. I want to understand what tokenization is.

15:03 I want to understand how it works and how can I add value. You know, I’m passionate about fashion. I’m passionate about hospitality. How can I use Web 3 disrupt this industry? And you will find people with similar ideas or similar passions already working on cool products, join the telegram community, share ideas, become a community moderator, you know, start adding value and you will win for sure.

15:26 Like one of the quickest, easiest ways to win this industry is just chase airdrops. Like I like to say if you’re able to spend 20 hours a week this year chasing airdrops, completing challenges, you will probably make anywhere from two hundred to two million dollars in free money just by investing time. You don’t have to. Maybe you have to invest five hundred dollars in gas fees over the whole year. For people that don’t know what that means, what does that mean chasing airdrops and what does someone have to do?

15:51 Chasing airdrops is all these new companies building building protocols and building solutions. They want people to know about that and they have these tokens like which investors like myself pay. They normally sell 20 percent of these tokens for like let’s say two million just to give you a high level of numbers and they keep the other 20 percent of distribute to the community. Right. And let’s say they distribute two million dollars worth of tokens to the early adopters who use their product.

16:14 And if you’re on the website, they’re going to give you credit for being there. They’re going to give you credit for being early, for being using the product and telling your friends about it. There’s hundreds of such products coming. Right. And if you spend time an hour chasing, you spend 20 hours or you chase 20 airdrops a week, you end the year with a thousand airdrops.

16:36 Each of those airdrops, I’ve had airdrops which have reached six figures in volume, but I was obviously early. But that’s the key. You can also be early. All you should do is just be curious and understand and spend some time. And, you know, that’s why I said find what you’re passionate about and join one of those telegram communities and find because technologies and Bitcoin and blockchain is just a distributed ledger technology.

17:00 The technology is eventually going to disrupt existing industries that we know and they’re going to solve problems around us. Right. So if you can if you can be in one of those protocols or projects that are solving a problem that you care about and if you’re an early adopter and you’re early proponent, you will get that airdrop. And that airdrop would be worth a lot of money. And I mean, this is what a lot of people do right now.

17:21 And this changes lives of thousands of people that I know that have changed lives just by chasing airdrops. And this is normally a better strategy than trying to come in with ten thousand dollars and saying, how can I make my ten thousand into a million? I would rather recommend give your time instead and decide how can I add value to this space. I love working with crypto because I mean, even before crypto, like I have my own company, I have two hundred engineers who work full time for me.

17:45 The company is still there. I’m not that deeply involved because I like to work in crypto. And crypto is amazing because here, the more value you create, the more you get. It’s purely a value centering economy. If you’re able to create value in Web 3, you get paid for that.

17:59 Regardless, you’ll get paid sooner or later. You will get paid sooner or later. It’s like karma. It’s like this industry. I love that about it. It’s purely about karma.

18:06 You are here adding value for others. You will get value back. And it’s not like other places where in crypto, like most of my team, which works with me, they all get paid a cut of what I’m making. It’s not based on a salary, which all my other employees in my Web 2 business were. I would keep 99% of the value generated. They would build the app.

18:26 They would build the solution, but they only make that fixed salary a month. Versus when the app became really successful, I would get all of that value. That’s how Web 2 used to work. You maybe have a little bit of ESOP, but that’s not really the same. But here, I’m talking like 30, 40, 50% of what I make goes back to my team.

18:44 And I’m happy you do that, and I make a lot more this way. But I’m happy you do that also because I’m winning. I realize that. When you look at just purely numbers, you’re like, oh, you’re paying too much. When you do that over a while, you realize that you’re making way more than you would have if this team was not actually with you.

19:02 And crypto is purely like that. This industry where you add value, you get value back very quickly. And I think that’s very beautiful about this space. And that’s why, like I said, the smartest people in this space work here in the blockchain Web 3. It’s so true. I guess in the Web 2 world, over time, if you added a ton of value, you might get it back.

19:22 But there were so many frictions in the Web 2 space here with these tokens that can literally move like lightning. You’ll find that if you’re putting out good energy, sooner or later, they’re going to find their way back to your wallet somehow. So it’s also all about collaboration versus competitiveness. Web 2 and generally the world, most industries are very competitive. They compete with each other.

19:46 How does Zara want to sell more than H&M? How does this guy want to get more than that? How do I compete? How do I beat? How do a Ferrari sell more than Lamborghini?

19:53 In Web 3, everybody works together. We collaborate. I don’t care. In hedge funds, I want to get the best deal for myself. In crypto, I share my best deals to the people because they bring me the best deals back.

20:07 It’s a very collaborative society because everybody wins. The community wins too. When everybody wins, everybody is more happy. You also want to be in a position where you have people around you all winning. That’s how you have more success.

20:21 When the people around you all start winning, then they can enable people around them to also win. Then you’re basically in a winning circle. In crypto, because it’s so new in a way, we know it’s a disruptive technology. We know it’s going to have such an impact because it’s finance. Finance runs the world.

20:38 We know it’s going to change how the finance system is run. It’s still very early. Many people have to be touched by it. Eventually, the whole industry will grow. If you are in that industry adding value one way or the other, you will just grow with the industry as the industry grows.

20:55 That’s what has happened in Web 3. I know more than 10 CEOs who have started projects who all started as community moderators. They started as basically joining a community in crypto, became a moderator where they would just help other people who would join and how to get involved in what they can do for that community. They realized, hey, this is a problem I can fix. Started building a company, and now they’re doing super well.

21:18 Many of those companies have gone on to create tens of millions of dollars in value where this founder was basically a community moderator, maybe less than $1,000 a month when he started. That’s the beautiful thing about crypto. When you’re there and you find that once you understand Web 3, once you understand crypto, you become already the special 1 to 10% of the world who can actually explain it to other people. A lot of people still don’t understand. A big downside about crypto is that most people don’t do their own research.

21:47 They depend on other people to tell them what to do. I think that’s just maybe human life. Most people just look up to other people. That’s why influencers like ourselves have so much influence in this space. I always tell people, do your own research.

22:00 Do your own research. Don’t do what I do because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m learning with you. This industry grows so fast. It changes every day.

22:10 I don’t know what I’m doing sometimes. It’s better to do your own research, but most people still don’t do that. They don’t do that. They’d rather still ask me again or ask somebody else, what should I buy, what should I do, because they don’t have that self-confidence in a way. What they don’t know is that even the guys at the top are literally building it right now.

22:27 They’re still building the protocol. The development is happening every day. Even the difference is we are okay, we are nimble. We can move fast and break things. It’s okay in crypto to break things.

22:38 It’s not a problem. You can fail and you can start again. You can fail again and you can start again. That’s what we have seen. The biggest companies in crypto have failed.

22:48 FTX Luda. In the next couple of weeks, everybody who ever bought Bitcoin will be in profit. That’s after some of the biggest companies in the world failing. That tells you a lot. I think we’re at like 4% global adoption or 5%, which is like 1998 in internet years.

23:05 If you think about what was the internet doing in 98, were people even on the internet in 98? Probably barely. You’re thinking about, okay, that’s how much growth we have to go. For people that are new, I think before you said, look, starting off with Bitcoin is like a no-brainer. Get some, maybe understand that Bitcoin.

23:20 And then from there, you say you can broaden out. Maybe look at a layer one, maybe look at some defies. I think you’re a fan of exchange tokens because those always seem to survive. Then you talk about gaming and AI. Is that kind of a path that you recommend?

23:32 Obviously, they should do their own research. But is that a way to kind of look at the ecosystem? So obviously, tokenization generally is what is happening here, right? And tokenization is happening. And when you say you mentioned all these different narratives, AI, RWA, exchanges are great tokens because they have a very strong utility, right?

23:49 So the more the utility a token has, the more it has potential to grow. And that’s what you need to look into. And there’s these narratives that crypto will have more impact on a certain industry and less impact on other industry. I like to tell people tokenization is going to change the world, like in a big way, because every business, every ecosystem, every is going to become a dollar, going to become tokenized. And a very simple way to explain this is, right now, I ask you, what’s the best car to buy?

24:17 What’s your favorite car, Brian? In general, I actually don’t love cars, but I drive. I don’t drive also. I just use the example. I drive for 10 years.

24:24 I use this example because most everybody loves cars. I drove around in some guy’s super car. I called it like a Jesko. It was some sweetest $10 million super car. I guess that was kind of cool.

24:33 Okay, so you would probably say a Rolls-Royce or Bugatti. I think that’s a coin-a-seg. I don’t even know how to pronounce that name. Yeah, that’s it. I know the Jesko, but yeah.

24:42 So even you will say that, you know, I would say maybe buy a Rolls-Royce because I don’t drive, you know, I like to be driven. But this is right now in the current world. Let’s say Toyota and Honda come up with a token. They already have shares, but they’re not accessible. You have to be a credited investor or only accessible to like less than 10% of the population who can actually access shares of these companies.

25:00 But most people can’t access it. But let’s say they come up with a token, easily traded, but anybody can have that. And then that token allows you to have some sort of claim in the business. For a business to be really successful, there’s three stakeholders involved. There’s the user of the business, the manager of the business, and the owner of the business.

25:18 Right now everybody wants different things. The user wants to get the cheapest product, the best product, owner wants to make the most money, and the manager wants to basically keep everybody happy and make the business grow. But the incentive is not aligned. With the token, you make the user a part owner and a part manager and you align the incentives. Let’s say Honda and Toyota come up with a token, and you get the Honda token, I get the Toyota token.

25:41 And next time somebody asks us to buy, and if we recommend Toyota, we get a sliver of revenue that Toyota makes, I’m going to say buy a Toyota. You’re going to say buy a Honda, because you’re a part owner. Even if one person ends up buying, maybe you get a few pennies in your inbox, right? So that’s the difference. You make a part owner.

25:58 Let’s say the next step from that is what we’re already seeing with DOWs. I wrote about this in the end of 2022, where I think how it’s going to be the year of DOWs, and we’re only just seeing now a lot of progress. What happens is now if Honda and Toyota make $10 billion, let’s say in the year, the board decides where that $10 billion is invested. Maybe that board is not in the right mindset, right? Maybe they don’t have the exposure what the people actually want, but as a token holder, you can actually vote.

26:22 You know, I want you to build a yacht and invest in a new yacht because I like to be on the water. Maybe you say you invest in a new plane because you like to fly. You want to have more efficient flying. So instead of the company deciding, now the user actually has a pot, say. And I think that makes it a lot more aligned incentive, and that’s how people actually feel more part of the business.

26:41 When you make the user a part or an apartment, that’s when business exponential grow. And we’re going to see this happen with every business as we know it. As more and more people have wallets, as more and more businesses get tokenized, as you tokenize your estate, or eventually every business, I believe, will also be tokenized. And we will be living in this, you could say the cart or some people with like whichever token you have, that’s the company you support, that’s the company you feel for, and that’s the company that you actually help grow.

27:09 And I think that’s going to help business also become a lot better in how they do and how they deal with their customers. Do you think Web3 changes the world fundamentally as human relationships? Because like you said, this whole competition thing has been drilled into us. We’ve even been told that it’s based in Darwinism, which some people disagree with that. Peter Thiel, famous investor, says competition is for losers, which I love that concept.

27:31 And he says in school we’re taught to compete with each other, which is silly because all of the great people don’t compete with each other. They go do their own crazy ideas, whether you’re Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or whatever. Web3, it instills cooperation. Do you think as this gets adopted more and more, the world might actually change to where we actually realize that we cooperate with each other and then we go forward? Do you think it actually can change humanity, not just corporations or protocols?

27:56 So remember Web3 and technology, I like to say even before Web3, I was always deep in technology and I’ve been using technology to make all the impact that I’ve been able to do. And I invest in technology, and when I look at businesses in Web3 and outside of Web3, how they’re using technology to disrupt things. So Web3 is going to give us the tools to basically enable decentralization, enable distributed governance, enable finally giving power back to the common man.

28:20 Web3 is going to give us those tools. But remember we saw a lot of friction. They don’t want to lose that power. They don’t want to let that power go. They tried for a long time to say Bitcoin is a scam and Bitcoin is a fraud.

28:32 They just realized they couldn’t stop it. And then they’re like, okay, let’s see how we can collect fees on it. So now they’re trying to make the fees. So Web3 is a tool. How we use it and how we implement it, technology and how we use it in our day-to-day life is going to depend on the people that, as humans that actually make that thing happen.

28:49 So end of the day, Web3 is definitely a great tool and it can make humanity a lot better. Technology generally is a great tool. I like to be a lot in Web3 because that’s the part in technology, that’s the space in technology where I feel very happy working because it’s all about giving back, it’s all about collaboration. Technology is going to be involved in this space. AI is another technology that’s going to change the world in a very, very big way.

29:13 So it’s for sure, we know that today technology is changing the world in a very fast way. And maybe AI, maybe blockchain, internet has already changed the world. The culture has shifted so fast in the last 20 years, right? Most people, I have to say this in my speeches and conferences, most people underestimate what technology will do in 10 years and overestimate what’s going to happen in two years. But technology grows, unlike every business grows like 10, 20, 30% a year.

29:42 You pick up any car business, restaurant business, they grow on a normal growth rate, right? There’s so much to grow a restaurant, you have to create a new dish. Every time you have to keep creating a dish. But in technology or any other business, you want to sell a hotel room, you have to clean the hotel room, prepare the hotel room, you want to sell clothing, you have to make a new jacket, new jacket, new jacket. Technology, you make the app once or you make the protocol once, seven billion people can use it tomorrow.

30:08 So technology grows exponentially, grows in a J-curve. You go like this, you don’t see any growth for the first few years, that’s where you have to be involved, so you get the air drop. You get it early. But then you have this point where people realize, holy shit, this is amazing, and then everybody can start using it. And that’s what happened, we saw that happen first with Facebook, then with Instagram, then with Snapchat, and now with open AI, chat GPT, that was five days a million users, right?

30:35 And a month, 100 million users. So that’s what technology is. But there was 10 years of AI being built. That didn’t happen overnight. People think AI is going to change the world in the next two years.

30:45 That’s been 10 years of work happening. Or 50 years if you look at it. So that’s the idea. But now it’s reached the J-curve, AI is going to remove so many, it’s going to change the way everything happens today. 100% is going to change.

30:59 People have no idea what to expect when it comes to AI. It’s going to change the world. I could fire half my staff right now. I could fire half my staff today and replace them with AI. People who know how to use AI are going to be the superman of the future, the superwoman of the future, who can just use AI and make things happen.

31:16 Sam Altman was just saying, there’s going to be this company soon, a billion dollar company built by one person. And AI, which is not possible before. So I think that’s, the world is definitely changing. There’s a huge culture shift. You know, images, we used to watch, look at images in the gallery, then inside a photo, and now you scroll, right?

31:33 Movies, you see proper movies, then you start seeing short videos. Now you just scroll on TikTok. You know, the whole culture and everything, even like relationships, right? There used to be marriage, courtship, then came sexual freedom. Now you just swipe on the app, right?

31:51 The culture is changing. And it’s not a gradual change. It’s a change that’s been happening over the last many years, a couple of decades. A metaverse is a big part of our crypto. I like to talk about this, right?

32:03 There’s a lot of metaverse companies. I own land in over like two dozen metaverses. But a lot of it’s still early. A lot of it’s not developed, so it’s still early in that opportunity. We thought the metaverse had come around in the last bull run.

32:14 Facebook changed its name to meta. Metaverse companies blew up. And Facebook, arguably the top five largest company in the world, you know, controls and minds and narratives. A lot of people know what people are thinking, what people are moving. There’s a big reason for Mark Zuckerberg to change his name to meta, because he can predict the future better than most people can.

32:31 I like to say the best way to predict the future is to go build it because the guy’s building it. So you want to know, you want to listen to them, right? And so I think with what the metaverse, most people think of it as a virtual place where, you know, like a movie where you go and live. But I like to think of metaverses as a moment in time. Like in AI you have this idea of singularity where artificial intelligence is better than human intelligence.

32:52 That’s when you’re living in a singularity. I think in the metaverse is this moment in time when our digital life matters more to us than our physical life. And what you see that’s been happening over the last few days and decades is that 100% of our attention used to be in the physical world. That’s where all our attention used to be. Then came TVs.

33:13 They sucked our attention into the digital world. 15, 20% of the time people would spend watching TV all day. So that’s like 80% physical, 20% digital. Then came computers. Massive change, you know, another 30, 40% went to the digital.

33:26 But people are spending half their time on the digital world and the other half on the physical world. And now with iPhones, you go to a restaurant, go to a cinema, people are always on their phone. You’re spending 80% of your time in the digital world. Even when you’re talking to somebody, you’re still on the phone. You’re always alert with the Apple Watch, seeing what’s happening.

33:42 You’re spending so much of your time into the digital world. And what’s going to happen eventually is with the Apple Vision Pro, which just came out, you’re basically in the digital world at all times. Yes, you have augmented reality. You have the screen, I can see you, but I’m also seeing the screen. But my attention is always in the digital world.

34:02 This is not a new thing. So I was actually building apps for Google Glass back in 2013. I was one of the first 10 people in the world to make apps for that. They used to call me a glasshole because nobody liked having a guy with a camera here walking in front of them. It was too early for his time.

34:16 But it’s happened now. Because Apple launched it, everybody welcomes it. Everybody wants to buy the Apple Vision Pro. It’s a little bit expensive, probably a couple of years before it becomes accessible to everybody. But it’s happening.

34:28 And wherever your energy goes, wherever your attention goes, that’s where your energy goes. Wherever your attention goes, that’s where your energy flows. And wherever your energy flows, that’s what you’re living in the metaverse. So I think it’s going to become much more important for people to live in the metaverse and people are going to start spending a lot more time. It’s a gradual change that’s been happening and technology is making this change possible.

34:50 So how we live, how we play, how we connect is all going to be disrupted by technology and it’s already being disrupted by technology in a very big way. And Web3 is one of those technology innovations that has happened that’s going to distribute governance, I like to say, and distribute power back. But I said, Web3, all of technology is changing how you do everything, 100%. And we’re already in a metaverse. Sometimes people think, oh, I have to be an avatar in a room hanging out in some land.

35:18 No, you’re in a metaverse if you’re on a Zoom call. Exactly. You’re already in a metaverse if you’re interacting digitally with another human. That’s the metaverse. That’s what it is.

35:28 If you care, how do people used to play? People used to play basketball and football. Now they play a fortnight. More people play a fortnight than basketball and football combined. That just tells you, more kids play a fortnight.

35:39 So that’s living in the metaverse. How do people work? You used to go to a boardroom, now you do everything on Zoom. That’s living in the metaverse. How do people play, work, enjoy?

35:50 Identity. What matters more to you? Your life on Instagram, how you look on Instagram, how you look in your life. You could be in your pajamas on your bed. You could care much more about my photo that I’m posting.

36:00 And that depends on your age to a certain extent. So my dad, who’s 81, he doesn’t have a digital identity. My sons are 6 and 7 years old. Their digital identity is everything. And a teenage girl in high school, her digital identity could be the most important thing.

36:15 It’s more important to them than their real life. They don’t care if they have pimples in real life and it affects their health. They care that I want to have pimples in the photo. So that’s much more important, right? And that tells you, at that point, you are already living in the metaverse.

36:29 You can say whatever you want. But when your digital life matters more to you, you are already living in the metaverse. It’s only a question matter of time when the avatar is going to be there. It’s going to represent you. That’s probably the future.

36:42 I’m very grateful and I’m very blessed and I’m always grateful for the life I had today because of the opportunities and places I’ve had. I can live my real life. I can go out every night to the bar. I can buy drinks. I can enjoy. I can fly where I want to go. I can travel.

36:57 I come from a place like India where 600 million people, as many people in Europe, double people in the US, they don’t have the same opportunities. They make $500 a month. And then you look at Africa, it’s a similar situation, right? For these people, when they’re making only that few hundred dollars a month, they don’t have the same opportunities that I do. For them, the metaverse is a blessing.

37:22 A great example is, for example, Romero Brito is the most licensed artist in the history of the world. He’s got the most licensed brands. He has the largest art gallery in the world, the physical art gallery in Miami. If you want to go to his physical art gallery, you’ve got to be his private art collector. His art is starting, the cheapest one is like tens of thousands of dollars.

37:42 So you can’t really go to his gallery unless you are already very influential and very wealthy. So, like, how can the rest of the world, the 90% of the world enjoy that gallery experience and see that Romero, who’s the most licensed artist in the history of the world, has created all this amazing art all this time, that’s why I’m working with him to create his metaverse gallery. So now, for like a dollar or just doing some quest, you know, some airdrop and running off, like maybe sharing his photos or art, you can join his metaverse gallery, see all the people and amazing people that he’s worked with, the amazing creations he has made, amazing brands, and you can see that guy’s history and enjoy.

38:18 You’re not going to be the same experience as in the real gallery, but as close as you can get to it without spending the tens of thousands of dollars that you would need to go to the real gallery. So I think that’s very exciting. So I think metaverse is going to, and it’s going to change the way for a huge part of the world. More than half, three billion people, which is a big part of the world, is going to change the world and how they live and how they play.

38:41 And I think it’s going to be, it’s going to be the fastest in India. It grew the fastest in India because 600 million people in India got access to the internet for the first time when India’s billionaire Mukesh Ambani gave internet to free to all these people with GEO. These people had no internet before. And now what did they have? They had internet all their time.

38:58 TikTok watching, entertaining themselves. They can’t go to the bar. They can’t go to their restaurant. They can’t go every night to spend money. They can’t afford it. They got to feed their family in that 500 or so dollars.

39:08 Maybe it’s 300, maybe it’s 800. You know, that number is irrelevant. You can’t really go out and enjoy your reality. And that’s all you have. You can’t really go out and enjoy your real life like you see on Instagram what people are doing.

39:20 So for them, but you could do that in the metaverse, you know, you could spend that time online and that’s what is really happening. And that’s changing the way the world in a very, very big way. And soon they could now work in the metaverse. They could get those same air drops. That’s what is happening.

39:35 So we saw the last bull market, the big adoption. I wrote about this on articles on Cointelegraph and Forbes where I said the last bull market will come because of GameFi. There’s going to be a big adoption of people going to play games and earn tokens. And that’s exactly what happened in Philippines and Vietnam where five-year-old children and 50-year-old grandmas started playing these games not because they enjoyed it, but because they were able to earn this money.

39:57 Because somebody in Europe or in the US, you know, their mother’s credit cards are already attached to the iPad. They’re going to spend $10 to just upgrade the level quickly. But in Philippines, if you can make $10 a day, you’re doing great. If you’re playing a game, sitting on your couch, not having to do labor or hard, intensive work which you’re not passionate about, you’re going to do that. You’re not going to go do that labor job.

40:18 And if you can do a little bit better, because there’s some sort of skill involved, if you can make $23 a day, hallelujah. You’re doing a lot better than you were doing your normal labor job. You’re driving a taxi or being a waiter. So at that point, Web 3 has bought that adoption in, right? And I think that’s what is really, that’s again, when you bring tokenization into these things, it becomes really, really exciting.

40:40 So we already live in the metaverse. Now with Web 3 being attached to it, people are trying to make an economy out of it. Because what’s going to happen eventually is, what’s happened in the real world also, right? Wherever attention goes and that asset becomes more valuable. Why is property in London or in New York or in Paris way more than in some part of Africa or some part of Vietnam or some part of India?

41:04 Because this is where people want to be. This is where more people want to come, and the prices go up. I think the metaverse will become like, they’re going to have a lot of different metaverses, but the ones that people actually want to spend time in, whether people actually want to give their attention, the asset prices of those metaverses will go up. But in this time, it’s open. You can still have the chance to invest in London and Manhattan 200 years ago, because we are part of the change, this current generation that we have.

41:31 We are literally seeing this change take place from going to a world where 100% attention was in the physical world and now 100% attention to the digital world. This was not happening before us. So you have this chance now to really maybe buy property in London and New York 200 years ago, and that’s the kind of opportunity that a lot of people have today because we are still building this next generation. We had this, I don’t know the homo sapiens and all this evolution of mankind, of humans.

42:04 Now with New Orleans, there’s chips planted into people. They successfully had that already done, where they already had a chip, and the person is happy to have that chip. Like I said, technology grows exponentially, not linearly. So it’s not going to be 100 years before everybody will chip. Probably a few years where everybody will have chips that will make them smarter, and people are going to enjoy this.

42:23 Instead of having a phone, this will be your phone, or this will be four days in your eye. So that progress is coming, and when that progress happens, you start spending more and more time in the metaverses. The metaverses that actually contain the attention are going to be worth a lot more than the land in that metaverse is going to be worth a lot more than the land in New York or Paris. That’s fascinating, man. Talk to me about art, because you are a huge art collector.

42:47 You also bought a ton of NFTs in the past, and I’d love to hear a list of your collections. Obviously, the NFT market was super bullish, and it was kind of a bubble. It crashed, but then last year we saw the ordinals market explode in a crazy way, which is basically kind of an NFT on the Bitcoin chain. What do you see as the future of NFTs, of art? And just tell me, in your opinion, what is art and what is digital art?

43:15 Because at the end of the day, we are humans. We want to connect somehow, and art is a way for us to connect, and digital art is also maybe the next evolution of that. So there’s a couple of questions in there that I can answer in different ways, like what is NFTs and then what is art and what is digital art? NFTs, right now, most people think of NFTs as digital art. That’s not true. NFTs is a technology.

43:37 NFT is a non-fungible token. When you have one Bitcoin, I have one Bitcoin. We put it in a bowl, and then we take it out together. It’s still the same Bitcoin, right? It doesn’t make a difference.

43:48 Your Bitcoin is not better than my Bitcoin. NFT is basically a non-fungible token where I have something different attached to my token. You have something different attached. It’s non-fungible, and so that’s why they have different values. Maybe I have a photo of a pig with a green hat.

43:59 You have a photo of a pig with a yellow cap, and that’s why they have different values because that speaks to different people. So that’s the NFT. NFTs can also be used as a technology. I think in the very close future, our driving license, our passport, our identity documents, land records, car records, everything will become NFT. I don’t like to store any of my watch paper documents and sitting in my house in Tulum.

44:29 My ownership property from property I own in Zanzibar is sitting in my house in India. It’s all a mess, right? I have all these assets that are around the world, and ownership of these assets are basically pieces of paper that are sitting in different parts of the world. To compile them is also a problem. Let’s say I’m sitting in India talking to D-Lab, like, all right, this watch is yours, but I have to go to Tulum to pick up that paper and send it to you.

44:52 NFTs are basically that ownership on chain, so it becomes a digital asset. It’s a wallet, and you can always prove ownership because you can’t lie. The blockchain never lies, right? That’s the best part. So that’s what NFTs, I think, is going to be the real big use of NFTs, is identity, is to prove ownership, is to prove provenance.

45:13 He bought an apple, he scanned it, and the NFT tells where that apple has gone. It was grown in this farm, and this part of Zanzibar moved to this ship, went there, and that NFT, which is a digital token, has all that history about that apple. There’s a true potential of NFTs that most people are yet to realize, and I think it’s going to change the way a lot of the things in a lot of business, a lot of the world is run. Like I said, like a lot of, for example, in India, a lot of the land records are already on blockchain, but they are not on blockchain behind the scenes.

45:46 The user doesn’t know that. But it’s going to happen eventually where most users will have their wallet and then your most ownership will be in your wallet, and that’s what’s going to happen. NFTs, like most people know it today, like these digital profile picture collections, you have the apes, so I made a lot of money in crypto, and I started buying, and I was told to buy the NFTs at a very early stage, but because I was so busy investing in, I invested in 600 companies today, at 600 plus today, not 400 anymore.

46:15 I knew it was higher. Because I’ve been investing very actively last few days, last few weeks, last few months. I think over 60 companies just in this year. Because the bull market’s back? And now you’re focused.

46:27 I’m fully focused. Right now, you’re putting 10% of effort, you get 100% of results. When it’s a bear cycle, you put in 10% of effort, you get 1% of results. So it’s like a huge exponential growth right now, you get just by being active right now. But yeah, so basically, I bought a lot of NFTs, but I bought them at the peak of the last bull, when the board apes, which were worth $300,000, I bought one ape.

46:53 This is a Richard Milley, but I have a board ape watch also. So I bought a board. The first one I bought was $250,000. And then I bought some more. This is so fun.

47:06 I bought another few. I bought seven apes, spent a couple million dollars on that. And then I ended up buying all the top collections. Seven is my lucky number. I bought seven doodles, seven conexes, pudgy penguins, cryptopunks.

47:18 And now I have a lot. I spent over $5 million buying all types of NFTs. I spent around $3 million on my NFTs. But that’s just because I bought the highest ones. I was trying to create this sort of digital art collection that fits somebody of my stature.

47:32 So I have to have all the top ones. So I keep trying to buy a Picasso. It’s already a Picasso. So I’m still bullish long term. I’ve never sold any of these NFTs.

47:42 So I believe they will all go up much more. Because we are still very, very, very early. If you think there’s like 100 million people using crypto, less than 2 million people actually play around with NFTs. So they’re still very, very early. So I think I’m still going to do fine.

47:58 It’s obviously not as lucrative as I would have thought. But leaving the financial element out of it, like forget the money part of NFTs. I like to think of NFTs that they solved one of the biggest problems that most people actually don’t realize is loneliness. NFTs to me are trying to solve a problem of loneliness, which is a big, which is a trillion dollar problem I’d like to think of it today. When more and more people are spending their time online, they’re not going out to connect with a person and play basketball.

48:25 They’re playing Fortnite. You don’t know who’s behind that avatar. You could be talking, I’m going to shoot you, I’m going to shoot that. But you don’t know who that person is. There’s no connection there, right?

48:35 When I used to play basketball or football with a friend, you would become friends. You would actually build a connection. So there’s a huge problem of loneliness and depression, which linked a lot of mental health problems today, that people don’t talk about it as much. A lack of birth rate and drug addiction all comes from that. All comes from loneliness.

48:53 If you had a friend who could tell if you’re not doing well, you wouldn’t have the suicides. Suicides happen because their own friends don’t realize that person is living in depression. How would they? Because they’re not connected. They’re only talking online or WhatsApp.

49:05 You can’t tell how a person feels on WhatsApp. The emotions never come across. I think NFTs have found a way to create these communities of people with similar interests or a certain stature. There’s different ways to look at it. Now, everywhere I go in the world, I travel a lot.

49:20 I’ve been on over 100 flights every year for the last dozen years. Even during COVID, I was traveling all the time. And I’m somebody who loves to travel, loves to go to a new place and explore. And when you do like that, it’s hard to build relationships to some extent, because you meet new people all the time. But with NFTs now, everywhere I go, I can always go into a telegram group or the Discord group and be like, what are the board apes, the other doodles?

49:45 They’re like, okay, you want to go with me here? Do you want to go here? What are you going to do today? And they’re always cool. They’re always cool. It doesn’t matter.

49:53 I’m in Hong Kong. I’m in London. I’m in China. I’m in Tulum. Any part of the world I could end up in, I could go to Africa.

50:01 I would find people from one of these NFT collections, which I’m a part of, they’re a part of, they know that we connect because we are part of the same community and the same team, and they’re always happy to connect, always happy to offer value. And that’s the same for me. If you are part of the board ape community or crypto parks, you’re always welcomed to my car sign NFT. You come and stay for free. It’s a public statement I’ve made, right?

50:23 I’m happy to meet with these people who are this early, who would know what’s going on in the space because they think in the same like me. Yeah, that’s cool. And then now what has happened with different NFT collections have attracted different communities, but there’s some sort of similarity. You join the, I don’t know, the one community that’s about people who like to be in plants, even Murakami flowers. So that’s people who actually care about artists like Murakami, traditional artists, or people like to care about plants.

50:51 So you know that’s what you expect. With the board ape, it is what it is. It’s like one of the communities which is the most influential, with the most celebrities, so you know that you will connect with that kind of people. Cryptopunks, one of the OG communities, you know when somebody is a cryptopunk, this is what you expect. If you ask me, NFTs are dead just a couple days ago, there’s a $15 million bid made for a cryptopunk.

51:11 NFTs are dead by any chance. How many punks you got? I got a few punks. I got like two that’s on my public wallet, and then a few more that I bought as investment that I don’t share on mine. So they’re coming back already?

51:23 They’re coming back. They’re already back. I think the flow price is well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars right now. You know we’re back when there’s photos of rocks, ether rocks, right, which are selling for half a million dollars each. I’m here like with one of my friends, he’s an ether rock himself.

51:39 I’m here to buy ether rock. Ether rock is all about the community. It’s not worth half a million dollars because it’s like a photo of a rock. You know that there’s only a hundred of those rocks, and everybody who has that rock is an OG, is influential, is a top player. Either he was very early into crypto, or he did really, really well that he could afford to pay half a million dollars or more for a photo of a rock.

52:03 So you’re buying into the community. It’s like the membership clubs of today, but this is all digital, because like we said, we’re living in the metaverse. What matters more to you? Your membership to animals or membership to ether rock? I would choose ether rock.

52:16 Probably, right? Yeah, because it would give me more value. So project this out to the future, like in this bull run or two years, three years, four years. What do you think that evolution of those NFTs are? So I think all of these early NFTs, like the apes or the punks or the rocks, these are going to be like the OGs of the OGs.

52:34 These were the first NFTs ever minted on chain. I think they will do well long term anyways. There’s a lot where the value is in the community itself. So there’s a lot of new ones like Pudgy Penguins is a great community. They recently went from no, I have had friends telling me to buy them since they were like basically pennies on the dollar.

52:53 And I was like, you know, I only buy the big guys. I don’t really buy the new upcoming collections. I have to be careful about my reputation associating with any community which is not the best. And today, not today, but like a few days ago, they flipped the board apes. At some point they were the number one most expensive NFT.

53:08 A total market cap. A total market cap. Now they’re back to number two, behaves to back up to number one. But they did that. And they went from under one eat to 20 plus eat in like short time because of the community behind it.

53:21 Because of the community. It’s because the people who are part of the 10,000 pudgies, they’re all top builders. They’re all rewarding their community. They’re building amazing things. And they’re rewarding other community members.

53:33 It’s all like builders. It’s all like doers. It’s all community builders. Nobody who’s part of pudgies is like a loser, you know, or just bought like a lot of board apes or like people like me who buy multiple to invest. But pudgies are mostly all builders who actually bought them at cheap and they went up in price because those guys all did really well and none of them want to sell and they’re so close to the community.

53:56 So for a collection like that, the value will stay as far as the community stays. You lose the community, you lose the value. But for collections like Crypto Punks or like the Apes which have been there, which have been the first OG collection of the rocks which have been there for so long, they will stay in value long term and that’s why you see them selling the Sotheby’s and all these places now because these are real pieces of art that are going to have, you can’t go and recreate NFT back in 2017.

54:23 You can’t do that anymore. That’s only going to be the ones that was already there. That ordinals has come to become so big and has been such a big growth and I don’t really buy NFTs anymore after the first five million dollar shopping spree I did. But I’ve started buying a little bit on ordinals because I believe ordinals is that space which has the same opportunity because end of the day, all these NFTs we have in Ethereum, we are betting that Ethereum stays long term, which I’m bullish on, big part of my portfolio is in Ethereum.

54:54 But at the same time, Ethereum is a smart contract technology. There’s a thousand other people trying to build a smart contract technology, right? So versus Bitcoin is the most distributed, powerful system that we know and it’s not going anywhere. There may be a chance Ethereum is not here in the future because there’s better technology that replaces it. But you can’t really replace Bitcoin because it’s not just the technology anymore.

55:18 It’s the collection of these tens of thousands of networks, nodes around the world which keep Bitcoin running, which make Bitcoin what it is. That’s what Bitcoin is backed by. People ask, what is Bitcoin backed by? It’s backed by all these people around the world. You can’t turn Bitcoin off.

55:33 You can’t control it. You can’t censor it in a way. You can’t be a government and that’s what China tried so many times to censor Bitcoin. Every time they ban it, it goes up in price. Yeah, because they arguably tried and then they realized they can’t do it.

55:49 They can’t stop Bitcoin because it’s truly decentralized. Dozens of countries have nodes running and Bitcoin will keep running. And game theory makes it that there’s not one road running. There’s going to be multiple roads running all the time because it becomes a financial incentive to keep running nodes. So that’s what is really beautiful about Bitcoin.

56:07 That’s why I think NFTs on Bitcoin, that’s why the NFTs minted on the earliest Bitcoin are also worth a lot more. They’re especially prevalent. Ethereum, you don’t have that. Yes, when you mint it, it makes a difference but you don’t have special NFTs that are minted on special blocks. You have that benefit that if there’s a minted on a block that happened back in the day on one of the first blocks of Bitcoin, it’s worth a lot more than what’s now.

56:31 So I think that’s what Ordinals is going to be, has also that opportunity to be there for a long time. Yeah, BRC20 is super exciting. We’ve made a few investments in that space. You know, you just spoke really eloquently about community, Evan. We just saw Dogecoin pop like 50% and people always make fun of Dogecoin.

56:47 It’s number nine in market cap right now. And at some point, you have to stop making fun of it and say, well, what the hell is going on here? And what’s going on there is community at the end of the day. It’s another version of community, maybe not as deep as an NFT, but it feels to me like a bunch of people that want to be a part of that thing. And for people that nay say crypto, okay, you got shift that nay says Bitcoin.

57:09 I think he’s being proven, you know, maybe wrong in that sense. And I had shift on the show early on 10 years ago. You got people that nay say Dogecoin, but you’re starting to see that it’s a representation of a human need to connect with each other. That’s what I see. It’s like dogecoin and Shiba OGs and then things like Pepe and these others.

57:27 What do you see there? That is all purely community plays. In crypto, you don’t need a million followers. You need a thousand strong holders who believe in you and hold your token. A thousand strong holder community members is worth a lot more than a million followers.

57:42 That’s how crypto works. It’s like a thousand X scale than the old world of web2, right? You need a thousand X less in order to make a vibrant community that’s even economically viable. Exactly. In crypto, it’s all about community.

57:55 If you have these few holders and they are strong proponents, that’s going to set the floor. The price is not set by the buyers. The price is set by the sellers. And that’s the holders. That’s the people who are actually holding your assets, right?

58:09 And crypto is purely run on community. And that’s why you see these Dogeys and Shiba’s growing because, and this touches back on the point, as Sarah said before, where people don’t do their own research. If you want to make memes part of the culture, then to tell you that, hey, go buy this coin that’s really going to change the system or are you going to make something really, truly revolutionary, it’s just easy to tell people to go buy a token, like a Dogecoin, because the people relate to a dog or they love dogs, right?

58:36 Or go buy a Pepe because it’s a famous meme from the past. And that’s why Elon Musk, right? He’s pumped Dogeys so many times just by talking about it. And he’s also made the statement, right? Sometimes the most ironical outcome is what that takes place.

58:49 And Doji become a global reserve currency, is an ironical outcome. But a global reserve currency is the one that people would trade and trust in. That was the US dollar for now for a long time. It is what Bitcoin is, what people believe in. But there’s not saying that it couldn’t be Doji.

59:04 Why did it spike? Which one? Doge. It spiked because it’s people buying, right? People buying because people think that they can make money.

59:12 There’s people who are telling them that you can buy Doji and you will make money. There’s actual investment advisors telling people to buy Doji. So like I said, I would say even today, 90% of crypto investors, they buy what somebody else tells them to buy. They do not do their own research. They do not read about the projects.

59:30 They depend on somebody else doing research for them and telling them that is still a lot of people. So that’s what it is all about. And a lot of people, it’s easy to explain Doji, then it’s to go and explain Bitcoin. Isn’t that crazy? And it’s a real community.

59:44 And that network might have value in the future just because of its community. And I made reference that he might use it for payments or something. Maybe that’s a little bit far fetched. That’s a little bit far fetched. But there’s value there, right?

59:56 Yeah, 100%. There’s value there. I mean, that’s a huge testimonial. If Elon says, I’ve got another coin, that coin will go 1,000X by the way. So Doji is a multi-brainer market cap.

1:00:06 But people also need to understand Doji is an inflationary coin. They create new Doji coin every single day. There’s new ones created every day. So I don’t really feel long-term it has any sustenance unless it becomes a cult, which is what it is right now. A lot of these meme coins are basically cults.

1:00:21 People pushing backs that they have with other people so that their backs go up in value. But I don’t really play around in memes so much. I don’t hold Doji, I don’t hold Pepe, I don’t hold… Because I actually understand what’s going on in the space. I actually know what products are building.

1:00:36 I’m doing research all day and I want to invest in the products that I think are actually going to change the world. Like you said, they’re actually going to make a transformation. I don’t think Doji and Shiba are going to do that. I don’t think Pepe is going to do that. But for a lot of traders, I don’t trade, right?

1:00:50 I’m an investor, I buy and I hold. Talk about that because there’s a lot of people out there, KOLs and people don’t know what that means, key opinion leaders, that trade. And they’re like, okay, I’m looking at this chart and I’m doing this. You told me the other night, you said, look, I’m not a trader, I’m an investor. Tell me what that means and tell me the way that you engage in the market.

1:01:10 Like how do you do it, why do you do it? How do you get inside your head? So you’ve got to remember, so if you’re seeing any KOL or a crypto influencer, as most people would know them, if you’re seeing any influencer telling you, I’m going to trade there, I’m going to trade that, you’ve got to remember, most of them are getting paid when you trade because they’re giving you a link that you trade through and they’re telling you to leverage trade. I’ve got to tell people, stay away from leverage.

1:01:33 Like I can touch about this later, leverage in different ways is a secret to success in life. But leverage trading is one of the easiest way to get wrecked. I actually tell everybody, don’t leverage trade because… The asset’s volatile enough, right? It’s already wanted enough.

1:01:49 And 90% of people will lose money trading. Trading only a very few small people make money because trading is, you’re not creating wealth. You’re not creating, when I invest, I invest in a business early on and that business creates value and that creates wealth. In trading, it’s player versus player. You’re taking money from somebody else.

1:02:07 So there’s no wealth being created. You basically have to be better than the other guy who’s losing money for you to make money. In trading, 90% of people lose money for 10% of people to make money. So this is great, but it doesn’t work for most people. Most people don’t have the discipline.

1:02:22 They don’t have what it takes to be a good trader. They will come in, they will get involved. That’s why I said, forget coming into the space thinking I have $1,000, $10,000 because when you think like that, you think, okay, how can I trade? And you try to make these trades very quickly. You can’t be an investor with a little bit of money.

1:02:38 You can only mostly be a trader, right? I think how I can use the $10,000 I have and trade my way to a million because you probably lose the $10,000. Come in and think how you can add value to the space and what you can be a builder in a way. So most influencers in crypto, I am friends with a lot of them, my close friends. I know since a lot of them, they’ve become from nowhere to like the top because they made all their money, not by becoming good traders, but by telling people how to trade and making a fee when that person trades.

1:03:08 Let’s say you are an average common man. $10,000 you decide I want to put it in crypto. You see an influencer telling you, sign up now and go buy Bitcoin at like a 10X leverage and then Bitcoin falls 10% and your balance is gone. You’re already liquidated. But you also, when you bought that $1,000 of Bitcoin and you made a 10X, you put a $10,000 trade, your fees is on full $10,000, not on $1,000.

1:03:30 You’re already paying a lot of money in the fees, which is split with that influencer, right? So that’s what happens in crypto a lot. And that is something I, it’s like, like a chicken and egg problem, like I don’t like that at all as much, but also you got to give credit where credit is due that these people actually onboarded a lot of people to crypto, right? Without that, without that shilling, maybe something will never come into crypto. A lot of people come into crypto, they trade and they realize they would have made more money if they just held onto Bitcoin.

1:03:57 If you just hold onto the asset, you would have made more money than trying to trade your way through it. And even till today, this even applies to even me. I don’t trade, but I buy, I buy early and then I do sell my tokens and then sometimes the tokens go up more in higher end value, right? So like holding, like the name of my group I run is called Diamond Hands because you’re going to have Diamond Hands, you don’t try to sell, you try to hold as long as you can and that’s how you get the biggest wins.

1:04:20 And for most people, that’s how actually they have changed their lives in crypto is because they held on. Some of the best investment returns I’ve had is because I made an investment and it wasn’t some really hard chain where to create the world was so complicated to save the world. I never used it and I forgot I had those tokens on them. So I invested a company called Ecomy, OMI, back in 2017, 2018 and it was on this go chain, which nobody uses. Nobody uses it, but that company ended up using it and this company did so, so well.

1:04:48 They got part of the Marvel, Disney, the NFTs for all these guys become a big order company. I invested like a couple million or so market cap and my investment went 150X. I would have never held onto 150X. I would have probably sold it. I was already at a 50X or so.

1:05:03 But I forgot about this investment. I was sitting on this chain that nobody actually uses. So those are true things. It’s very hard to hold. I mean, it’s still got a 5,000% return.

1:05:14 Even a thousand percent. And another interesting fact is, 75% of traders and investors will sell it at 2X. 75% of investors and traders will sell it when they do a 200% growth. And this is something we all know and we all, it’s still hard to control. Even today, I’m seeing so many growth in my tokens.

1:05:34 This is crazy. I’ve made so much money. I should realize some of this. But I keep telling myself, we’ve not even started. The bull market has not even started.

1:05:42 This is going to be a joke. This is nothing compared to the returns I will make. And I’ve done this so many times. And you still want to sell. You still want to sell because you made so much money compared to where you were a year ago, right?

1:05:54 So you’re like, holy shit, this is like a 10X. 10X is easy in crypto if you really can hold it out to the peak. This is a potential 100X. That’s the difference. You’ve got to be careful when you listen to influencers and they’re telling you to trade.

1:06:08 Most people will lose money trading. What I do is I invest early into companies. You may not be able to do that because it requires having access and knowing people. I’ve traveled to 40 countries in person, spoken at 200 events, live in person, talking about Bitcoin, NFTs, Web3. It’s put me in front of a lot of people.

1:06:25 So people reach me out for deals. They bring me deals. So I’m at a point where I get these early access deals where I can have the opportunity to invest in deals early. As a retail guy, if you’re watching this, you could probably join launch pads. You can join DOWs.

1:06:38 You can have some of the similar opportunities. You probably wouldn’t be able to invest big ticket sizes that way. But you could invest a few hundred dollars or a little bit in different projects which are still yet early. And when they grow, you grow with them. And if you believe that project is going to do great, you can do that.

1:06:54 There are groups like Gains Associates, DCI, Dutch Crypto Investors. There’s a few more that you can join. They can find wherever you’re based. Where people are getting access deals, and that’s what you do. And I think that’s always better than trying to trade you over to success because people who are really making, people who show you the charts, oh look how much I made, they’re not really making that money from that.

1:07:17 Most of the photos are screenshot, and most of them are dummy accounts. They’re mostly making money from you actually trading with the link, not with them actually, you know, successfully trading their way. Because if they were, they wouldn’t need to talk about it too much. I know successful traders, really successful guys, and it’s hard to get value out of them. Like I keep badging them, because I know they’re good traders, I know they’ve done well, and I ask them what’s to trade, and they don’t want to answer.

1:07:42 Because why would they share the alpha? Right, what do they say? Those that say don’t know, and those that know don’t say. Exactly, it’s exactly. The ones who really are good traders, they don’t need to tell you how to trade because that affects their alpha.

1:07:56 It doesn’t make the trade as useful if more people know about it. But people are telling you, a lot of these influencers, they make a video, that’s why they have the success they have, because I’ve lived with these influencers in the same villa for like weeks and they are consistent. You know, they make a video in the morning, a video in the evening, Bitcoin goes up or down, doesn’t matter. You make a video and you tell people to trade, right? Bitcoin went up, sign up on my link and trade.

1:08:20 Bitcoin went down, sign up. The idea is they’re getting their money from that trading leagues, and that’s what most people need to realize and also understand that. So that’s something very important for people to know. Investing with a long-term mindset, and not just investing, everything in life, everything in life you do with a long-term mindset, you win that at the end of the day. Trading is a short-term play.

1:08:40 It’s a short-term mindset. So investing is obviously a better way to do. When people ask me how to get involved in crypto, when I mean like people who are like already, you know, already made it to a certain point, you already have some capital, you’re talking just from an investor perspective, I like to say just buy some Bitcoin, buy some Ethereum, diversify a little bit into like, you know, put 10% into, 10% into 10 different RWA coins, 10 different, you know, AI coins, 1% each, and then you put like 30%, 40% Bitcoin, then 10%, 1% different L1s, L2s.

1:09:10 So you have a diversified portfolio, because you know the industry will win, but you don’t know which one will win, and if you don’t have the time, just buy and hold that, and then you see that that will pay you off long-term anyways. And you may not make like 100X, but you overall will make like 10X, which is still better than 0.25X, or like 1.25X you have made buying property or buying into another business, so that’s what I tell people, yeah. What’s KOL capital?

1:09:34 So KOL capital is basically, I’ve been at KOL since before, our influencer, before I got into crypto, right? I was, I sold my company, I was 17, I came into a couple million, I was living this, I didn’t want to go to university, moved to San Francisco, after selling my company, I got invited to speak at TED, got invited to speak at many universities around India, the chairman of Google India, he invited me on stage, because I was building iPhone apps and Android apps, and Android was still early at that time, and Google wanted people to build apps for Android, and I was 17 and they basically used me as a marketing tool and put me on stage in front of 50,000 people in like five different cities in India, they were doing this big Google developer events, they were like, if the 17 year old can build apps, why can’t you build apps?

1:10:20 But because of that, they put me in front of like hundreds of thousands of people, and after being invited by the chairman of Google to give speeches about this, I got invited like hundreds of universities around the world, I got invited to speak at so many TED Talks and stuff, and I built a small following, and I wanted to go to university, I went to San Francisco to join this program called UnCollege, which I also dropped out after a couple weeks because it was kind of slow for me, but the idea was to find something else to do, but during this time I was really enjoying my life, because I just come into money, I had all the energy, I had all the free time, I was going on yachts every day. It was like 10 years ago. I’m 29 now.

1:10:58 So you were bawling on Instagram before there were crypto bawlers. Exactly. I was bawling on Instagram a long time, so that’s why I said I was the first rich kids of Instagram, this is now an old trend. That’s a show called the Rich Kids of Instagram, it’s a Channel 4 show. It was originally an Instagram page, but it just showed all the people who were flexing, and I was on that page all the time, because I was flexing nonstop.

1:11:21 I threw like hundreds of private jets, a lot of yachts, bottles, models, and yachts, and that was the vibe. I was enjoying my life. At 19, at 20, this was great. I was happy that I lived through that, and then I got invited to this TV show, that was seen by 100 million people, it was in like 20 airlines for a while. It was actually here in the UK, Channel 4 that did that.

1:11:44 Then I did a few other TV shows, and then when I moved to San Francisco, doing all of this already got me a few hundred thousand followers. That was actually the chemicals of Bitcoin for the first time, so I was giving five dollars to refer new users. An affiliate link. So basically, that’s how I also got into crypto. I did not think that Bitcoin is going to be that big.

1:12:04 I was like, okay, I have these followers, I like Bitcoin, maybe let’s refer to people, and all of this five dollars that was paid in Bitcoin, here’s the lesson, is worth over 500 today. If you just held onto the Bitcoin, if you tried to trade it, you probably would have lost it. If you just kept that Bitcoin, the coin business, it was over 500 today, right? And that just closed the exponential growth of Bitcoin. That was my first foray.

1:12:27 I was still investing very actively in Web2. When I was in San Francisco in Silicon Valley, I did over 100 plus Web2 investments, equity deals. During this process, I ended up investing in the equity round of Hedera Hashgraph, HPAR, XRP Ripple, these blew up, did big returns, and then after that, I was not looking back. I was like, this is where I want to be, Web3. But yeah, so KOL Capital, so I knew all these KOLs, so I was the influencer before I got into KOL, and I know a lot of these, some of the biggest influencers, crypto influencers today, I know them since before they became famous.

1:12:59 Because I was this influencer in crypto, but I was not the one who created content. I still don’t have a YouTube channel today. Because I actually became famous because of my lifestyle, what I was already doing. I didn’t become famous because of the content in a way. I’m not consistent with my content.

1:13:14 I post like once a week sometimes, right? So it’s hard for me, because I normally don’t make as much money today from my content creation as I would. I’m more of an investor now. So that’s why I don’t put that much time into it. But I think with AI avatars, I just actually had this video of me that I saw.

1:13:31 It’s not me. It’s me saying something that I was like, this is going to change the game. Now I can finally create content, but I don’t have to create it myself. But yeah, so that’s how I started. I met all these KOLs, so I know a lot of the top KOLs in crypto about it.

1:13:49 And a lot of people, and what I have is access to really amazing deals, really amazing investment opportunities. That’s been my biggest asset today, is access to amazing deals. And that’s because you spent the time over the last eight years in this space, traveling the world and making personal, non-metiverse relationships with people. Personal connections. And I will tell you also, this actually follows into my, what I as an individual do full time, which is Casa NFT, because knowing all these KOLs, projects want people, they want to pay KOLs to do promotion, which is, I think, not a landing incentives, because then you’re shilling something you’re getting paid for.

1:14:29 It’s not the best way. Worse is, KOL capital I set up, I went to the price, I’m like, hey, I’m already investing as a VC. Why don’t you design a special round where there’s better pricing, but then I can offer my audience, and then I can offer the audience of all these other 100 people, that we know, that would then go and promote your project. So we are not promoting it as a paid influencer, we are promoting as an investor. So we have your success in our mind, and once we promote it, then we do a better job, because we have our skin in the game, we are risking our own money first when we invest in that project, and two, we want to make sure that the project does well, because now it’s our baby in a way, because we have some sort of investment, you have some skin in the game.

1:15:16 They would talk about KOLs all the time, but it’s really a fascinating phenomenon, because you get these key opinion leaders with big followings, they don’t just promote a brand because you give them ten grand, they literally put their own money and invest it in the brand, which they could lose it all, in the belief that it’s going to go up, and so when they talk about the brand, they have a real vested interest, and they’ve chosen to put their money in the brand. Everyone’s really aligned, web three style. Exactly, you align the incentives, and that’s what they’re doing.

1:15:47 Most KOLs, once they realize this, so I actually realized a long time ago, because I was an investor. I used to work for, first I was giving my hours, then I realized that now as an investor, my money works for me, and leverage is another thing. Now I have the leverage. Leverage of money, I fixed a long time ago. I realized that I can use money to work for me, so I have to work a lot.

1:16:09 Leverage of labor, I also realized a long time ago, when I sold my company, then I hired people who came out to me, I was working for me, I was 200 plus at one time. People work, I don’t have to build code anymore myself. Leverage of code, you can build one thing, and a billion people can use it. I also realized early on when I was building apps, I had millions of users from my apps without actually spending a single dollar and marketing it, and I had to just build it one time.

1:16:33 Leverage of influence is the new leverage that is coming to the world today that people are not realizing so much, but it’s leverage that is very strong. So if you have influence today, you can leverage that, and you can grow. So now I can go into a company, and I can negotiate and say, like the guys who painted the office, I think for Uber or Facebook, you got paid in shares, and that shares went up to hundreds of millions. So that’s the same idea. I could go to a project and say, I have two million followers, give me $10,000 for a post, but that’s the max I can make.

1:17:08 It’s $10,000, I can go to them and say, hey, I’m going to invest $100,000, I’m going to talk to my two million followers about it, plus I’m going to open my doors to the people you know, and I’m going to grow with you, and let’s make this company worth a lot more. And then that $100,000 I invested, yes, it can go to zero, but there’s a chance that it goes to a million or more because we are all working towards it. Normally, most of these companies just spending money on marketing, they will grow anyways.

1:17:37 They will have somewhat option. Maybe do a 2x or maybe do a 20x, that’s irrelevant, but people all grow because they’re actively building, they’re actively putting time in, they’re actually putting resources in, and that’s the most exciting part. And I think that’s what, that KOL Capital is pretty new, I just started a couple months ago, and that came around after knowing all these KOLs for so long, after investing myself for so, in hundreds of companies, knowing hundreds of KOLs, understanding how we can align the incentives better, because I used to get approached by companies all the time to do a paid post, and I managed that part of, I have a team that manages all of that, and if they think the company’s good, they’ll bring it to me, I’ll say, okay, we can help support that company.

1:18:20 But that’s not exciting at all, because there’s only so much you can make. There’s a limit per post, there’s not more than you can make that. Worst is, if I’m going to invest in a company, I can go into Ground Zero, help grow that company, and grow with that company, there’s no limit to what you can do there. What’s interesting, and KOL Capital’s at the forefront of this now being valued at what they can bring to the table. Exactly.

1:18:44 And so what you’ve seen, you’ve brought these deals to the table, where the KOLs now get better terms than the VCs, and these are massive VCs, guys I’ve had on the show from Pantera and all these places, where now the KOLs are getting in at later rounds with better vesting schedules. Because value. Crypto is all about value, the value you bring, the VC, what value he has, he has only money. Money in crypto is very, very easy to come by. I know a lot of people with a lot of money in crypto, so it’s very easy to raise capital, that’s the easy part.

1:19:18 The hard part is actually building something and growing that. And who can help you with that is what is value. And most of these VCs today don’t have a lot of value to offer. You know, they’re focused on how can they improve the bottom line, how can they invest in more deals, but the companies don’t care about that. Worst is the KOL, he has some value, he has one, his own community, that he can bring to you, that’s massive, that crypto is all about community.

1:19:43 So that’s a huge, huge value out of the community. Then he has the other value out of that, depends on the KOL, like you and me, we are individuals, we put our name on everything, Brian Rose, I’m Evan Luthra, everybody knows us. There are KOLs who don’t, who are like behind, like have a photo for like a dog or like a lion, they’re unknown. They are famous like Mac, BDC, Pinto, but nobody knows who they are. They don’t actually learn, they bring community value, but then you can bring, you can add credibility.

1:20:10 Now if we are behind a project, people already anyways look up to us, so then they know that okay, Evan must have read, I like to tell people, do not follow me, because I take high risks, it may not be for everybody. But at the same time, I do my research, right? When I invest in something, I know that this is something that I believe in, and that’s credible for other people. You know, people, Evan has read about this, he knows that it’s something solid. So then we can invest in this.

1:20:37 So you bring all that value that the VCs are not really bringing, because a VC’s name is not an individual’s name. So even if the project fails, nobody loses reputation. With the KOL, if I’m advising a project, if the project fails, my reputation takes a hit. So I’m lending my credibility when I’m getting involved with the project, right? So I have to be careful which project I support.

1:20:59 So there’s things like that, that come into the picture, the value that is hard to put a tangible value to it, but it’s still very, very strong value. And that’s why today, KOLs can go to a project and negotiate a better investing term than what the VC would have invested two years ago. I’ve invested a lot as VC. Today, through KOL Capital, the same deals where I invested three years ago, like $500,000 with like a four-year term, investing to get my tokens, I can invest at a cheaper price today as a KOL with like 12-month resting for my tokens.

1:21:30 And we’re doing that, right? Obviously because of the VC, before I didn’t provide much value, even though I put a chicken in the investment, I made them a couple of groups of stuff, but I didn’t provide much value. Now they expect that they’re going to give me these special terms and I will provide that value, and I’m happy to do that. They’ve also made that progress from the last three years. I was happy to invest three years ago, very happy to invest now, right?

1:21:52 So I had a better term. So that’s what KOL Capital came out to be. But like you said, this all is possible because of access and because I literally travel the world, meeting all these people in person, joining all these groups, joining all these communities. I like to even say to some point, crypto is going to be like the mafia. If you know the right godfathers, you will do really, really well because they know which projects are coming up first and then they can bring you into that.

1:22:18 And that’s what came around to me starting Casa NFT, which is basically the idea is to create like a soul house where we have three people in the real world, not in the metaverse, right? So now if you go to a soul house, you go to a members club, you know what to expect. You know, you go to animals, you expect to see a certain type of businessman, you see a certain type of model or stuff. You go to a soul house, you meet an artist, you meet a creative. You know what to expect when you go to these places.

1:22:44 I want to create these safe places for Web 3 and crypto. People are interested in Web 3 and crypto. If they’re any part of the world, they can go to a Casa NFT and they know the people who are staying there either are already successful in Web 3 or crypto, or I have an interest in Web 3 or crypto. And that’s the idea behind Casa NFT, is to create these real… And the biggest reason, I can get a lot of good deal for today is because people who start these companies, they call me and say, Evan, I want you to invest in my company early on.

1:23:13 And the reason they did that is because of the memories and the moments that have had this with people in different parts of the world when we have that. People ask me, what’s my secret to success? And I think it’s basically taking care of people. It’s making sure people around me have a great time. People will always remember how you make them feel.

1:23:31 They will forget what you said or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel. And ever since I was young, because I made my money early, I was able to do that. I’m fortunate for that. I’ve always loved to host people. I’ve always loved to host parties.

1:23:45 Because anyways, I wouldn’t expect my friends to be able to have the same fun unless I was hosting them. Because they don’t have the same liquidity that I had. So from a young age, from like 17 basically, I’ve been hosting parties where I would pay for everybody and invite people and come and have fun with me, right? So that’s the idea. But by doing this again and again and again over many places, and then first doing it by my friends from high school and middle school, then doing it when I was living in San Francisco, and then eventually now traveling to the conference around the world and throwing parties with like 50 plus events where I was throwing the best party every night that was happening better than the official party and people would have come to my party and they would have a great time.

1:24:22 That built me up to this network of people where we created amazing memories with all these amazing founders who have also been in the space since a long time. So that’s why people now call me when they build the next top company and they’re like, we want you to be in the company so we can keep coming to your parties. Keep having these moments together. I think that’s what Casa NFT came to be, is like, how do I remove myself from the equation? Because these parties that are great also great to some extent because of me, right?

1:24:50 I have a great time myself, so I’m happy to make a great time people around me also because I’m happy to make the setup. So everybody has a great time. But how to remove myself from the equation and still have this setup so people can still have these great times and great memories at a Casa NFT, which is basically House of NFTs by Edwin, and then they can still think of me when the next deal happens. And then it grows bigger than me. The other people they meet, they’re also the create memories and they create companies together and they do deals together and maybe they think of me as a Casa NFT.

1:25:22 I’ll give you a great example, right? So we started Casa NFT about almost three years ago now in India. That was the first one where I had like the gallery. It was a very modern marble, high-end, you know, Japanese toilets, everything top shelf. But it was in India, in Delhi, where I was born and raised, right?

1:25:38 And then I actually opened the world’s first Blockchain Center in Delhi also early in 2018. In the last bull cycle, it was basically a Blockchain Center to like people come in and know about Blockchain. People did similar in New York. And then I closed that, didn’t do as well because the people I put in place were not the right people. But then I opened the Casa NFT, which is an NFT gallery, because I want people to be exposed to that.

1:26:01 Then I was in Tulum. COVID came and then I was in Tulum. And I went to Tulum because I was the only place open in the world. I was like, I was thinking COVID would be over forever. I was like, I got to make a Casa NFT here because crypto people are all about freedom.

1:26:14 So a lot of people end up there. So that’s why I bought a boutique hotel on the beach, turned that into a Casa NFT pretty quickly. So today, the memories and the moments that have come from, now we have in Puerto Rico a location. We bought a huge land in Zanzibar. We’re going to build like a city.

1:26:29 The idea is to have an airstrip. We have a helipad where we have like different, we’ll have a Binance Villa, OKX Villa, Polygon Villa, you know, DWF Villa, all the big stakeholders, market maker exchanges, agency. You want to get into crypto, you can land into the city straight or you can fly in or land with the helicopter and you can knock on every door. And that’s what you would have. And then the idea is to create a small city in that way.

1:26:50 It’s a big coin country, right? But that’s what we’re trying to do, a small proof of concept first. But the moments that have come to these places that have happened, like for example, Casa NFT Tulum is amazing. Pink Floyd came by and they played for free because they had a great time. So many people have come to that place and enjoyed and had these great memories.

1:27:11 I’ve not been there myself. Sometimes I’m having FOMO, like why am I not there? So many good parties are happening. I’ve had major FOMO now because of what I’ve built basically and people are having amazing parties, which I’m not a part of. So I’m not getting a huge FOMO when I’m going to a conference now in Romania on this weekend to speak at a crypto event because I know the opportunity cost is so high.

1:27:33 But I have a huge FOMO that I’m not a Casa NFT because there’s a massive party going on there that I could be a part of. But I know I’m young right now, so I wouldn’t put in the time when I can. And I know that right now the opportunity cost is just way too high not to be in the right places. I’ll party next few years when they went back into bear market. Yeah, I was following you on Instagram and I was looking at all this crazy stuff you’re doing in Tulum and I was like, what is this thing?

1:27:54 It’s not just Evan’s place because there’s a lot of other people hanging out and then there’s DJs and it seems like there’s a party every night and you’ve got your cold plunge and then you’ve got it. So that’s what you created. You bought beachfront property in these places and it’s Casa NFT. Exactly. We have in Puerto Rico.

1:28:10 I don’t go to Puerto Rico much myself. We actually filmed a TV show at the Casa NFT there recently. We filmed a TV show at Casa NFT in Tulum also recently. I think some of the guests have been on your show, Eunice. One of the contestants, yeah.

1:28:20 So the idea is it’s a safe place for web3 people to connect. So normally right now we have like seven rooms in the Tulum property. We have seven rooms in the India property. We have 500 in Puerto Rico and Zanzibar is going to be a 120 room hotel, 120 villas. Bali is again going to be 10 rooms.

1:28:37 The idea is not to build a hotel, it’s to be a safe place. Web3 people can come and really connect and spend a few days. We also don’t want people coming in and out. We throw a lot of parties. 100, 200 people coming to the parties all the time.

1:28:49 We had a great New Year’s Eve party at the Casa NFT Tulum, 400 people showed up. So you can always connect, but the idea is people come and stay. Like if you travel to Tulum, you travel to Puerto Rico, you travel to any of these places, you go book a Ritz Carlton or a Sheraton or St. Regis or whichever Hilton. The idea is if you’re in Web3, you may want to stay at the Casa NFT because you would get to connect with these people.

1:29:09 You go to the ice bath, you go to the gym, you go to the beach, you would meet those kind of people around you. Community. And I’ve had people who have come and stayed and they’ve met each other. They didn’t know who they were before. They were connected, my friends, but different.

1:29:23 They met each other and ended up starting companies together because they met at Casa NFT and they found solutions. And they spent like a month, they had such a great time. They’re like, we should start this company together. And that’s what they did, right? And that’s not just one, that’s happened multiple times over.

1:29:36 So literally multiple times people have come and stayed and met and then they ended up starting companies together. And then most people who come and stay have a good time, right? They all have, they enjoy. The focus for me is like, I don’t look at the bottom line at Casa NFT. It’s basically like it runs at a loss permanently.

1:29:50 I don’t really charge. So eventually I want to do NFT collection, which limits it. So it’s like we want to put 3,000 NFTs. So if you’re an NFT holder, only then you can invite somebody else to come or only then you can come. That’s two ways to think.

1:30:06 It limits the community, so controls who the members are. And then those members which we select can invite other cool people. So it’s a way to grow, but also control. But right now it’s basically just self-finance, right? For me it’s a way to diversify like 5%, 10% of my wealth in crypto to real estate, keeps my mom happy, gives me a peace of mind.

1:30:24 Tomorrow if I go, I don’t know, get a disease and I can’t function anymore, I have this place I can go and always live in. And it’s peaceful and it’s amazing. I don’t have to worry about things. So it’s like, it gives me a peace of mind, it’s a way to diversify. But I don’t really care about Casa NFT’s business model because it almost always loses money.

1:30:39 But eventually I want to create community because that community will make the money, right? Example, like, I would tell you a crazy story.

1:30:46 So I had this human plate dinner a couple weeks ago at this Casa NFT where I had this, you know, there was this lady who was like very sexually free and she’s like, I want people to eat off me, I’ve seen her on Instagram, I want to have like sushi on me, I want somebody to eat on me. I’m like, okay, let’s organize, I would love that. So I did that and then another guy started, he’s like, this is amazing, it’s a human plate dinner. I also want to be a part of it.

1:31:06 I’m like, oh, we already did it. But he was like, this was a guy who started a really good company recently that I want to be a investor in. I’m like, get me some allocation in your company and I will switch you out with a week long stay at Casa NFT and I will throw in the human dinner for free. And he’s like, all right, I’m refunding out of VC, I’m getting you in right now. There’s a real-life situation that happened less than a week ago, a company that’s listing like a week, where it’s in the SAF, the agreement that I signed, the KPI, because he has a co-founder, he put it twice.

1:31:42 One week beats day at Casa NFT, any of the locations with the human plate dinner included for both co-founders. So there you go. It’s working. I could have lost a lot of money doing Casa NFT, but maybe this one investment I was just able to get in will do well, I’m pretty sure, in the bull market, will pay for the next 10, 20 parties that we do. It’s not a tangible value, you can’t put a number on it, you can’t go to the CFO and tell him to do this, that’s why there’s no CFO in Casa NFT, but it works, it works long term.

1:32:16 Like I said, you give value, you get value back. Give value back. How do you stay hungry, Evan? Because I’ve gotten to know you better the last couple of months and you’ve been in this business for a long time, you’ve made a ton of money, but you act as if you just got in this biz and I’ve seen your deal flow and I’ve seen the way you operate. And it’s like almost like every hour, you want to be in on the next deal and the next deal on the next deal.

1:32:41 And it’s nice to be around, it’s refreshing to be around, but it’s surprising. I mean, I think it comes down to like, I actually am very curious and I’m passionate about this. I have a lot of passion for technology. I like to see, I like to understand what people are doing with technology and how they’re doing it. And I like to understand how they’re using technology to disrupt these ideas.

1:33:00 I like to do what I want to do, because I’m not doing a boring job like a VC or a hedge fund manager who cares about the bottom line. Like, I don’t care if my portfolio, like if I sell the token, I’m not trying to time exactly when I sell. I don’t care if it goes 10, 20% difference, it doesn’t make a difference to me. I like to do this because I’m actually interested in those companies that are coming out. I like those companies.

1:33:23 Because that’s why I like to be in blockchain. Like I said, it’s the smartest people in the world. It’s the most innovation that’s happening is in technology. There’s innovation happening in food, but they’re designing how to create a new recipe. That’s not exciting for me.

1:33:36 In technology, they’re trying to create new food altogether. They’re trying to create food that doesn’t exist, they’re trying to create chicken that is not chicken. That is exciting to me, right? So I’ve always been very curious in technology generally. I got my start when I was young and it’s the same qualities that have even today make me passionate and interesting.

1:33:56 When I was 12, my father, he’s an entrepreneur himself, one of the businesses he started failed, and it was a call center, and he had 100 plus 200 computers that were there that people would leave to do the BPO services from. But then the call center failed, he had to close it down, but he would still go to the office and I had my summer break and I would go with him and I had all these computers and start playing with them. I started writing a blog about having these computers and connecting them, making a bigger computer, more powerful.

1:34:26 I started blogging about that, and my blog became the most read blog and LinkedIn’s blogging platform, Pulse. And it was like a top read blog, a top read article multiple times of the day, and that was my first interest in technology, but only because I was curious. I could have also gone to play football or basketball, or when I was with my dad, I could also watch TV while I was sitting there, but I was curious about those computers since a very young age, and I started writing about them, and then that thing would lead to another, and then Apple announced they’re coming up with the app store and I was like, I want to make an app for my blog, how do I do that?

1:35:04 And that led me to be interested in making apps, and I was one of the first few people to build apps for the iPhone, and this was a time when there was literally nobody building apps, there was no competition, and I built apps that had millions of downloads, over 10 apps that were top 10 on the app store worldwide without spending $1 in marketing, right? I made the app for the Icy Cricket World Cup in 2016, in 2011, Icy Cricket World Cup app, and I was 16 at that time, and ICC sued me because I did not know, I can’t use their logo on the app icon, it was a copyright thing, and Icy, so it’s very interesting, so I built apps before, and I knew that Apple goes on holiday at the end of December. Apple is like, they don’t care, and to get an Apple app published, now it’s a lot easier, that back in the day was very hard, and you had to spend like three weeks talking to the Apple team and fixing any bugs and you’re not having any hacks in the app, and ICC World Cup was starting early, and Icy couldn’t get their app approved in time, I already knew that because I had experience building other apps, and after I built the app for my blog, I started to stop doing the blog because I lost interest, I was like, I like building apps more, I want to do apps, and I left the blog, even though it was, I think in retrospect, that was a very valuable asset that I could have kept building, but I didn’t care, I was doing because I was curious,

1:36:24 Not because I wanted to make money, I was doing just because I enjoyed doing these things, and then I learned, I built a few different apps, and then I made the app for, so I made the app for my school, I made the app for myself, I made the app for where I live, the society, I made the app for the Delhi Metro, the Dubai Metro, the subway, and these apps all became quite downloaded, and then Icy around the Cricket World Cup, I never used to play cricket, because everybody plays it, and at that time, there was no app to see the cricket scores, and you would have to go on a browser or something, which is not as convenient, so I was like, I should make an app for Icy Cricket World Cup, and I knew that Apple takes a long time to approve apps, so I made that app much ahead and I already got my app approved in advance, even though the World Cup was not starting for a while, I just put it there, and when the World Cup started, ICC didn’t have their own app live, because they probably had to get it approved, so when people search, and my app was called ICC, Cricket World Cup 2011, Score Watcher, so people search for ICC, that’s the dummy thing I did, I used ICC name and logo in the app, I should just call it Cricket Score World Cup Watcher, I would have been fine, but anyways, ICC sued me, I told them I’m 16, I don’t know what I was doing, you can take the app, and it’s all the users that you are, they let me go, they didn’t shoot me or anything,

1:37:43 But basically, yeah, I made my ICC World app that I built before that failed, I knew that thing, and that’s a big lesson for people, it’s like, you could start a business, I even told you that one of my father’s businesses failed, not him, he didn’t fail, because he’s an entrepreneur, he still keeps going, right? An entrepreneur truly fails when he stops doing something, when he truly gives up, but from my past failures of doing other apps, this ICC World Cup app became the number one app in India, Pakistan, top three in the UK, Australia, wherever Cricket was being played, it was the number one app in that country, the top three app, on my apps every single day, and that was like a big push, right? And that’s the interesting lesson early on in my journey that taught me a lot, like how to be careful and obviously getting sued by ICC, and then also knowing if I didn’t know about pushing my app before, I would have never been able to do it, and that’s why today I respect failure a lot, because that journey early on at 16 told me, if I had not failed before, I would not have been able to win that ICC downloads because I would not have known that, I would have also made an app in a normal time, and I would have also tried to publish it, ICC’s app was published five days later, but five days is all it takes to get millions of downloads and everybody’s already downloaded it, but the World Cup has started.

1:39:00 Those were some very interesting moments for me early on that taught me early on how you can learn from failure, and now I’m not scared to fail at all, like I don’t care about failure, I’m okay to fail because every time I fail, I learn something, and I know that I’m not going to give up, and so I think that’s where a lot of the hunger comes from, it’s like being curious, not being afraid to fail, you know, what’s the worst? You just learn something, right? And I really enjoy doing these things, I really enjoy learning technology, I’m passionate about technology, I’ve been a nerd or a geek all my life, right?

1:39:33 I always wanted the earliest technology gadgets all my time, like I wanted to have the iPhone first, the Apple, Google glasses first, I wanted to build tech for upcoming tech really on. I would say I’m less of a nerd now, when I was a developer myself, I was a total nerd all the time, so it’s definitely now I also like to enjoy my life, I like to go out and enjoy the final things life has to offer, so that goes before I was all the time on the screen, I was 24-7 on the screen, but even now I would say I spent a lot of my time on my screen. I have ADHD, I have severe ADHD, so I was not diagnosed by any doctors, I never went to get diagnosed, I just know it, I’ve self-diagnosed myself, but it helps me in a way where now I’ve built my life to a way where I’ve invested in 600 companies, when I’m working, I’m losing focus, but I’m losing focus from one group to another group, from another group to another group, but these are all business companies, so I’m creating, adding value every time, right?

1:40:26 If I open one group, and he asks me, can you do this, can you do that, I start doing it, I did a little bit of it, and I lose focus, I go to the other group, he asks me, can you do that, can you do that, I’m creating value at all times, it’s just rippling off into different groups instead of being into one focus, if I was doing one focus company, I could have probably built an amazing company also today, but I can’t do that because of the way my dopamine and my system works, I don’t want to take any medication to fix my ADHD, so I don’t do that, but I’ve built my life, unfortunately I’m in a position where I can do that, where I can live a life like that, but yeah, I think it’s the mindset and it’s a lot of these different things, for me like mindset is one of the biggest things in life, is how you live and how you think and how you behave, and like a lot of people would look at ADHD as a disease, and they would be like, oh my God, what do I do, I need to take medicine, I need to like fix myself, I’m like, no you don’t need to, this could be a blessing, you know, you can use this, you can learn from this and you can be better at what you do, so now I’m more hungry because I’m consuming so many new things every day, I’m finding out about, I’m being challenged every day, because I’m talking to 20 companies every day building the future, I’m like, if these guys are building the future, I should at least spend half my time building the future,

1:41:37 I know it’s partying and enjoying, but like, should spend at least half my time, because I’m spending all my time, I’m not talking to one company a day, I’m talking to 20 companies a day because of ADHD, but that’s how it is, it keeps that hunger going, right, so maybe the ADHD is one of the reasons for hunger, that’s just the mindset where you look at things, so that’s what I, and I think the curiosity is over time that’s coming, and it could be possible that, you know, I lose interest in technology eventually and then the curiosity goes, but right now it’s not, and right now I love doing this, I enjoy doing this, it feels great, it’s almost like I’m a deal maker at this point, right, I love this feeling of talking to projects and then being able to negotiate a much better deal than somebody else would have done, it’s like a win, you get a rush, like, oh wow, I just negotiated, this guy with like 10 times more money, 10 times more reputation is gonna pay much more for the same token than I just did because I was good at negotiating, and it’s like all these things they add up, are there any other aspects of your childhood that you attribute to your success, your parents, upbringing or anything, because like you’re a guy in a country of 1 billion, 1.2 billion people, and you know, you’ve been very successful.

1:42:47 Yeah, so I definitely give a lot of credit to my parents, I wouldn’t say that I was born into a rich family, but I had the basics covered, right, so I had my school, I could go to a school, you know, I had the food on the table, I didn’t have to worry about a roof over my head, so you can only, and then Neville, one of the top guys that I’d like to follow, Ravi Khan, you know, he talks about how you can only come up with great ideas when you’re bored, you can’t do that when you’re trying to cover your basic communities, so you know, I had that ability to be bored, and then I had that ability to be bored and also have access to the computer and the internet at an early age, so that’s what also allowed me to do all of these things. I was bored, you know, I was bored when I was on vacation, that’s why I played with these computers, I was bored, that’s why I started building apps, I didn’t like to play football, I didn’t like to play basketball, I think I had those basics covered, and I always also had the support where my dad himself is a fashion designer today, my family’s in fashion manufacturing, but he studied engineering all his life, because in India, all the parents pressure you to go be a doctor, go be an engineer, engineer doctor, engineer doctor, but he got that pressure from his family and he ended up becoming, he did a job, like a normal $500 a month job for a while, like an engineer fixing routers and stuff and TVs,

1:44:00 And then he just ended up in some rich guys, I think office, and then he just ended up becoming a fashion designer, things happened, he got into fashion, he’s relatively good success, but he realized that he didn’t want to force me to be engineer doctor, he’s like, I always did my early childhood doing all of that stuff, so he’s like, I always had that support and freedom to do what I want, so I wanted to be on my screen building apps, I had that support, you know, even when ICC sued me, it could have been that somebody’s like, get the fuck off, what are you doing, you know, you can take a commuter away. I had the support, they’re like, okay, you could have let them know you’re 16, and this was just you did this out of want to actually help people have access to the scores, and you know, I still got the support, like next time try to do something that you’re not using anybody’s copyright, and that’s when I ended up building my company that I ended up selling at 17, so I had that support for sure, and I’m very grateful, I wouldn’t be here if I was not from my father and mother, my mother on the other hand, she’s a very, very, how do you say, tech naive, I have to teach her how to use WhatsApp, she has no social media, she doesn’t ever post a photo, so she’s very still early, but she’s always had these qualities about her, basic qualities about living life, always think long term when you do things, always think about how you can add value for others,

1:45:24 Always give more than you take, and always focus on those qualities that my mother has, my mother is a saint, her full time job is to pray, she prays all day 24 seven, we have a temple in the house, so she lives that kind of a life, I’m almost like a devil when you come back to her, but there’s a lot of qualities, growing up in a home like that, there’s a lot of qualities along the way, also about community, my mother is always, India religions are all communities, India is the country of religions, there’s thousands of gods, and people worship these gods because they get hope, it gives them the feeling of community, so I actually today may not be as religious as my parents, because I can find these communities in other parts, in India, I look from a person who’s born and raised in a culture like India, but has now been a global citizen, and I’ve lived in different parts of the world, and I’ve actually been exposed to see how different people live, and how they react and what kind of mindset cultures they have, and that allows me to have a third person view of different cultures, and I’ve come to realize why people in India, for example, are so religious, because it gives them the feeling of, when you don’t have a lot, you have a community, you have something as hope, you know, that’s what religion gives you, whereas somewhere in like a Western world, where people are generally well-to-do, they have money, they are making a few thousand,

1:46:46 Not a few hundred a month, and they have the ability to go out, religion is not as prevalent, because they don’t need that community, they find that in other places, so there’s many different learnings and lessons, and I think I am where I am today, is because of the experiences I’ve had, and I’ve had some tragedies along the way, that’s changed my life in a very big way, I lost my younger brother to cancer five years ago, he was studying here in London actually, in Stillomaragonia, I spent a lot of time with him in London because of him, because he was living here in shortage, and losing him also is a big mindset shift for me, because my parents, I became independent at 17, I didn’t need to ask anything else for my parents, basically, but they worked all their life, they still kept working day and night, day and night, day and night, father would go to office sometimes on Sundays, so that his children could have it, but he knew that mostly for my brother, because I didn’t need it, I was independent, but then losing him made me also change my lifestyle in a bit, and like, do I really want to, so now I don’t chase money at all, I don’t run after money, and it just comes, I do things I enjoy, I do things I’m passionate about, this is a really great book actually, by Dan Bilzerian’s best friend, Bill Perkins, who wrote Dive at Zero, and it talks about how you want to value moments, because you’re born within this world with nothing,

1:48:04 And you live with nothing, but what you really have is the moments and experiences that you get to live, so is it worth sacrificing this meeting today, is it worth sacrificing going to a dinner with a friend that you really care about for this 95 corporate meeting on the weekend, it’s not, it’s not worth it, it’s never worth it at the end of the day, and that’s what I’ve, and this book is not for people who are just starting out in Korea, let me be real, it’s for point people who have already made it to a certain point, let’s say you’re 40 and 50 in your life and you’ve already made 10 million dollars, or maybe you made a million dollars, you want to give something to your grandchildren, most people like in India, they have a saving mindset, they save, save, save so they can give to the children, it’s a wrong mindset, you struggle even in your old age, you can save your children, give it to them now, you made a million dollars, okay, you want to give half a million, give them the half a million now, not when you die, you can just give it to them now, they will love you a lot more, they will thank you a lot more, because they got that push earlier in their career, you now know you’ve already given them what you needed, you have this other half a million, and now you can spend that, now you can enjoy that with a more free mind and you can use that, you don’t need to say it because you’re already old, you’re not going to be here for a lot long,

1:49:20 You have to consider, I was not really working for money, but I was still working from 12 to 17, and I basically made, I would have said maybe $4,000, $5,000 total during this five years of what I did, and that was also maybe because I won free from competitions and stuff, like money, because my parents were like, don’t try to make money at this young age, so I never put any ads in my app, I never monetized them, everything was for free, but I got some money from winning awards for five, maybe $10,000, in my first five years of work, today if I die with $100,000 in my pocket, I wasted 50 years of my life in a way, if you look at the same maths, you spend five years of your life to make $10,000 and you die with $100,000 in your account, you wasted 50 years worth of effort, so that’s like a mindset change, when you think it from that perspective, that I’m only 29, and I spent five years of my life trying to make $10,000, $10,000 is negligible to me, but it was worth a lot of money for a long time, for a long time it was worth a lot of money, it felt great to have $100 that I earned to be able to take my girlfriend to a date at 16, so that like, if you value money in the same way, then you can’t really die with money, you can’t die rich, because you die rich, you basically wasted your life, so that’s a good way to look at it, that’s again a big mindset shift for me now, that’s why I like to enjoy even more, I’m always happy to host even more people,

1:50:51 I don’t know how long we have this life, you don’t know what happens tomorrow, so if I can change lives of people around me, if I can create these moments and experiences with other people, I think that’s what really matters end of the day, what your experience is through this journey of life, like who you connect with, who you really enjoy with, and what adventures do you get down, and I think that’s what keeps me hungry also, is finding new adventures to go on, with amazing people, I don’t like to be bored, I don’t like to be in the metaverse more than I already have to be, which is like a lot for my business, for the crypto side of things, so in my real life, I try to enjoy and go on adventures all the time, that’s why I keep travelling, because I never learn universities, everything I know is from learning and meeting different people, and like trying different places, and learning from them and seeing how they look at life and what mindset they have, it’s like a real world education in a way, I think travel is one of the only few things and I think it opens your mind, I don’t mean travel to the tourist destinations, I don’t mean join a tour and go see the Eiffel Tower, which is also great, but I mean actually travel and actually go without a destination in mind, I go to Romania, going for a conference, I don’t know what to expect, but I know I’m going to have a great time, because I know I’m going to end up meeting all these amazing people,

1:52:07 Who are going to show me different sides of Romania, so every time I go to a country also, I like to meet all kinds of people from all kinds of walks of life, the influential guys, the really successful businessmen, but also the guys who are going to university, the uni guys who are just getting started out, because that’s where you meet the real talent, the entrepreneurs who are starting the new companies, and then I like to meet people from all kinds of life, like I’ll go to the club, the members club where you spend $5,000 to go in, but I’ll also go to the club where you spend, $5 is max everybody’s spending, and just because you get to meet the different kinds of walks of life, you get to learn different things, it opens up your mind in a different way that you wouldn’t have thought was possible.

1:52:45 Wow, so you’re chasing the moments, not the money. I’m not chasing the money, I’m not chasing the money. But then by chasing the moments, you get the money. But I get the money, because I always live with the way of how I can add value around me. Everywhere I go, I always think, what can I do to add value?

1:52:59 I’m at a point in my life where I have resources available. When I say resources, I mean resources outside of money. Like money I think is cheap, everybody has to offer that to a big extent. I like to think I have resources that money can’t offer, which is my network, which is the people I know, which is things that I have acquired and built, which is basically in a way my influence, in a way it’s like these things which I can offer to people, and I can add value everywhere I go, and the money just keeps coming back.

1:53:26 So that’s the kind of mindset that I live with, and it’s served me really well. It’s a beautiful thing. I was going to ask you how you stay so grateful, how you stay so grounded, how you stay so generous, but I think you kind of answered that with your mom. It’s weird, the older I get, the more I realize that you become your parents. I mean, whether you think you don’t want to become your parents, the older you get, you realize, oh my God, I’m basically my parents.

1:53:51 I’m guessing that comes a lot from your mom, but it’s a very unique thing about you, Evan, because for a guy with all the success you had, and for a guy in these markets right now, and doing what you do in crypto, it would be very easy for you not to be that guy. I agree. I agree. This is like every day my mom calls me, like the first thing is like, you got to be praying, you got to be grateful for what you have. I obviously have this conditioning in a way, right?

1:54:13 I normally don’t get on that many calls at all. My mother is the only one I call every day, so it’s a conditioning in a way, but I’m also very grateful because I know that I have this, right? I know that I’m blessed to have this opportunity and the lifestyle that I leave. I know that. It could have also gone a very different way.

1:54:30 I know a lot of entrepreneurs, and I see that also every day. We talk about the successes that we have had in investing, but at the same time, I’ve been closely involved in companies that have also gone down, that have gone to zero. In those companies, the entrepreneurs and the founders, they may not have done as well, and their life now is nowhere close to mine is. I’m very diversified. So even if the company fails, I don’t fail because there’s many other companies that I’m a part of, but I am still closely linked to that company.

1:55:01 It still hurts. You still feel the pain, but then you see the founder who is not diversified, and there’s no right not to be grateful and blessed than what I have. And I have no right to complain ever. I like to say this. I actually say this out loud, because I like to say what you say comes true.

1:55:20 It’s like manifestation. That’s why they say it’s a spelling, right? It’s a spell, right? I have no right to complain because I’m in a very, very blessed situation where I am today. I literally have no right to complain because I have been involved in the trenches building companies with folks where the companies did not work out, and then I still kept growing, but those folks got stopped there.

1:55:40 And then I have been involved and seen people put a lot of effort and time into things, and they did not go as they had planned. And then, you know, to me, it makes an impact, but a 1% impact because I’m not leveraged and I’m very diversified. So that’s the kind of thing. So I think it makes, I’m at a point where it’s almost impossible for me to not be grateful. So I’m always grateful, very grateful for what I have, and I’m very blessed, and that’s why I’m always happy to share.

1:56:07 And I think it also, like, this kind of a mindset, also, the more grateful for you all, the more you give, the more you get back anyways. And I think that’s what we come to realize over time. And I think these things you don’t realize when you look at the numbers. Like a CFO will never look at these things. That’s why I hate dealing with CFOs or accountants, because they don’t understand how life works.

1:56:27 They look at the numbers game. I don’t look at the numbers game ever. For me, it’s like, yeah, it makes a difference of what price I’m investing, and I’m looking at the numbers that I’m negotiating at that point. But when the negotiation is over, after that, for me, it’s not a numbers game anymore. Like, okay, I’m in the company now.

1:56:43 I’m invested in the company. How can I help them grow? What can I do? And let’s focus on growth. It doesn’t matter if you go like 400% or 800%.

1:56:53 We’re going to grow. That’s the goal. Ten years from now, what’s Evan Luthra doing? So that’s an interesting question always, because if you can only connect the dots when you look back, and if you ask me 10 years ago, I’m going to be here. If you ask me five years ago, Evan, where do you see yourself?

1:57:11 I would have been able to predict that I would have this upwards trajectory that I’ve been having, because like I said, I’m adding value every day. I’m adding value every day. I’m not expecting anything back. I don’t know how it’s going to come back, but I know it’s going to come back in one way or the other, if not now, five years from now, one way or the other. So I know I’m going to be in a much better position than I’m in, but for me, my goal is to go build it.

1:57:37 So 10 years from now, I think the world we live in is going to be extremely different than the world we live in right now. It’s going to be a very, very different world, because technology would have disrupted many more industries as we know, and we still have this little bit of an old generation that’s still part of this world that may not be, who is basically, who is before the technology started taking over. Like I said, before the TVs came along, so that generation is slowly, slowly waiting away, and now we’re going to be living in a generation that’s going into the technical era.

1:58:07 So I think the changes are going to be wild. It’s very hard to predict, but the event, I mean, keeping the same thing, man, keep running after new adventures, chasing new adventures, you know, try to see how I can keep adding value to other people, try to keep building these amazing companies. I want to be at a point where I build this engine, because I have all these companies now, but I want to be able to, like, they can help each other also grow. Right now, a lot of that part is manual, sometimes automated, which is already happening.

1:58:37 There’s my avatar, which you can get to create content that doesn’t actually require me to be there. So I think that, well, that’s the next step, is to create this, because I know I’ve created a lot of value along the way, there’s a lot of ripples I’ve made, but how do I bring it all together so that everybody who’s part of my ecosystem can grow together? And maybe CASNFT enables that, maybe AI will enable that, but that’s the, that’s a little bit of a next step, is to allow these people also to, because for me, all the success I actually wanted, I already have it.

1:59:07 People ask me, like, what’s success, what is success for you, what do you want? For me, success is having freedom to do what I want, when I want, with who I want. That’s the success. I already have all the success I could want, do whatever I want, whenever I want, to the point now that I’m at a point where some of the laws don’t apply to me, right? Because, so, that’s like, that’s the reason.

1:59:27 The laws don’t apply to you? I guess they’re the people you know. That’s the next level of freedom, right? So, I’m not saying all the laws don’t apply to me, but I mean, like, I’ve pretty much hacked the life or the matrix in a way where I know that I have put myself in a place where I can have really true freedom. I have a boat license without knowing how to drive a boat, for example.

1:59:49 So, like, that’s true freedom in a way. So, you get the idea, right? But the only next thing that I really work for, which you could say is a little bit of the reason why I still am working for money, in a way, and not purely doing things I enjoy, is to be able to give this freedom to people I care about. Like, that’s the only next level of success that I want to have is like, because my friends from high school, they’re still working that lawyer job, that office job, you know, they’re still making that $300 a month or so.

2:00:19 They don’t have the same freedom. I would like for them to come with me to Loom and enjoy my parties. They can’t do that. They’ve got to go to work. The next level of freedom is not to do these jets but I want to do these jets and the other people I truly care about.

2:00:32 That’s why I want to get that jet in yours so I can gift it to people I care about so they can enjoy this. One of the reasons also Casa NFT is a big goal is that once I have all these safe places around the world and they’re all fully paid off and they’re like, it’s basically my own hotels that I can then invite people that I care about and then they can have that also be free. So, that’s really the last part, do what I want with who I want. I can pay for somebody’s time but it’s not true freedom unless that person is also free and then enjoying it with you.

2:01:03 I think that’s the next level of freedom and success that I really work for. I think there’s a law of diminishing return with money. Making more money today doesn’t make my life better. Yeah, I can have a bigger jet but it still doesn’t make a difference. It only hurts the environment.

2:01:18 You don’t need a bigger… I prefer to fly now first class than actually take a jet every time because I’ve already done that hundreds of times. So, you could have a bigger yacht, that’s great, but what’s the point of the yacht if you don’t have the right people around you? I think that the law of diminishing returns with money is very true. After you make, at that point, I would say 50 million or so where you don’t have to worry about money anymore and then this number changes to different people if you’re responsible for…

2:01:47 I’m more responsible for my dog and my parents to some extent but even them, they’re independent. So, I’m basically responsible for nobody except my dog. For me, even having 50 million is more than enough. I don’t need more money. All the property I own is 100%.

2:02:04 There’s no depth in any of them. I could live in Tulum, I could live in India, I could 100% all of my life and I don’t have to work a day in my life. I could literally live a very, very good life. But I think the hunger and the goal is to be able to give this life that I have or at least a sliver of it to people I really care about and that’s what also keeps me going because it’s a big part of the hunger is that it would be amazing if I could just pick my friends who are not as fortunate but are my great friends and then just say, guys, today we’re going to Thailand, tomorrow we’re going to Australia.

2:02:36 Do you want to jump on my jet? Do you want to… I already have a hotel there, so I don’t have to worry about your hotel fees because right now all these things add up. I already do this for my mom because I know I have a longer way to go so I always tell my mom, please forget your saving mindset and take your friends on trips or just take them on friends I pay for the trip. Call your 10 best friends because they can’t afford that, her friends can’t afford that.

2:03:01 Tell them you’re going to pay for it. You’re going to pay for that because you can do that. I can do that for you. Call them and go on that trip because you don’t know who has how much longer to live. So that I think is truly one of the best use of money is to create people around you happy and that makes you also very, very happy.

2:03:19 So I think that’s my next level of success is the Evan 10 years from now where I would want to be is Evan who can gift other people freedom. I think the ability to give freedom to others is… Because for me freedom was my number one priority in life and I value that above and most things in life and if I can gift that to somebody else I think that would truly be legendary. That is legendary man. Evan it’s been super cool getting to know you better the last couple of months.

2:03:46 You’re a very fascinating dude with a lot of really cool qualities and I’ve spoken to a lot of people over the last 13 years and you’re right up there. So I appreciate everything you’re doing. I appreciate the mindset you bring. I also appreciate you bringing these values into Web3 and showing the world that Web3 embodies your values because there is a correlation there that a guy like you thrives in Web3 because I think it’s a lot of those same values and community oriented and giving first and I think this is the kind of people we need to represent this industry.

2:04:15 A lot of people see the failed companies of the past some of the greed and they’re looking out for number one that caused that. So this is a beautiful thing for the industry. Looking forward to the future. Looking forward to doing a lot of cool things together that’s for sure. Final thoughts for anybody listening out there either the once again industry in this industry or industry in general or just your final thoughts.

2:04:35 Yeah I mean if you’re talking about crypto and stuff I don’t want to say things because then those things are not as valid maybe a few months from now. Technology grows really fast. On Twitter you know that’s where I share my crypto dots that are actually relevant today. The technology that is actually relevant today. But normally if I want to end this to provide value to people who are listening I would say my biggest I already talked about leverage but like that’s one of my biggest secret of success learn leverage.

2:05:02 Stay away from leverage trading. Don’t use leverage trading let me be clear but learn the quality of leverage how to leverage other people’s time to work for you that’s one of the easiest way to be successful. How to leverage other people’s money how to leverage code how you can build something be used by millions of people you don’t have to repeat the same process again and again. Leverage of media how you can build a community or influence leverage on the best ways to have success and if you can learn these tricks you will grow.

2:05:29 And normally already ending this I would say some qualities that I think that I make a big difference I like to leave people with Evan E-V-A-N so that you remember this E for enthusiasm you got to be enthusiastic about what you do if you don’t love what you’re doing you’re not going to be successful at it that’s a very simple thing in life you’ve got to love what you do so you can go the long way and long term games always win so be enthusiastic about what you love vision, you’ve got to have a big vision you’ve got to dream big the bigger you dream the better it is do not care people who have big dreams and fail do better than people who have small dreams and succeed because when you aim for the moon you miss you hit the star so always aim and don’t be scared of failure have big visions forget about competition go to that crazy thing I like to support people with the craziest ideas because that’s the real fun ones that’s the one that really would also win E-V-A-N AVOS is always ask a lot of people are scared to ask they don’t ask in life I am where I am today because when I was starting out even early on how to build an app I went on forums and asked people how can I do this?

2:06:39 They were not teaching this to me at school I had to go online and ask people and the internet helped me out and ever since I was early and young I always asked people and they would help me I asked people they would help me what’s the worst somebody says is no or tells you to go fuck off but that’s the worst they’re not going to kill you or something if you ask for something so always ask people are very shy and they lack the confidence to ask even if you’re listening to this is the interview but when I go give speeches and conferences and that’s already one of the easiest ways to be successful is to start asking more and then N I like to say E-V-A-N is nimble like you got to be move fast and break things in the industry like technology when there’s so much progress happening at the speed of rocket science there’s like so much progress happening you got to move fast and break things you cannot be following bureaucracy you cannot let some law or something tell you you can’t do this and you will not do that with breaking some rules and breaking things and like moving fast and delivering results because you know that you’re building something that’s an add right to the world so always be nimble so I will leave you with this enthusiasm, vision, ask and nimble and hopefully these qualities help you in your life and for me it all comes down to mindset your experience of life is about your perception of life you know how you perceive life

2:08:07 You could be having a great life but you are comparing yourself to somebody else and that’s why you feel you’re having a bad life it’s all perception, it’s all in your mind what you live and what you perceive is what you really actually experience so work on your mindset enjoy and look toward the mindset and make sure you fix that and you have a good life ahead and that’s what I would say a great example about perspective I was just reading this a couple of days ago I have a friend and it’s a joke, it’s not my actual friend but this guy says I have a friend he has two to three books a week he works out every day has sex two to three times a day he’s always complaining why he’s in a prison so you get the perspective right perspective is everything so the perspective of how you live life really changes your life so yeah, those would be some corey things I would leave you with but otherwise if people ever want to ask me I’m always very approachable you can reach out to me on Instagram, on Twitter or Evan at EvanLuther.com and I’ll party anyway I can thank you so much I love it man, that was fantastic some crazy nuggets there really appreciate you man, keep doing what you do and I’m looking forward to the future thank you, really appreciate this Brian thank you brother, appreciate it man