Gaurav Dubey - Decentralisation Is Our Biggest Weapon Against All Paradigms of Control

Full transcript: Gaurav Dubey on London Real

2:50 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Gaurav Dubey, the marketing expert, engineer, investor, and serial entrepreneur. You are the founder and CEO of TDFi, the crypto incubator and advisory managing a portfolio of over 60 projects. You started your career in the blockchain space in 2015 with early investing, mining, quant deployments, and later running a 20-person trading desk. Since then, you have invested in over 200 token startups and hold eight technology patents for utilities in AI, VR, behavioral analysis, and blockchain. You have said that far too many crypto projects fail unnecessarily despite having a great product, and your goal is to give these companies the right advice to navigate the challenges they face. Gaurav, welcome to London Real in Dubai. Thank you so much for having me. Great job. And good recap of what we have done in the past few years, but the way success compounds on the top of each other or on the top of itself, what we have achieved recently is almost equivalent, if not to what we have achieved in the last three years. So the number has gone above from 55 to around 75 in incubation and investments have reached 300. So just a tiny, fantastic 40% correction. And your assets under management for TDFI are quite big as well, right? So everything is my private capital. I come from a city where in India, which is known for its attitude, there are many movies built on that attitude. And

4:29 Somehow I’m also struck by that. And for the same reason, I haven’t raised external capital ever. And so largely, it’s a family office, my private capital, and we’ve done pretty fine. So AUM, in a family office structure where the capital is always rolling and has multi-modality, multi, like no mandate, multi-mandate, so to say, AUM is actually not the right word, because, yeah. Okay. Yeah. What’s this attitude of this city in India? How would you describe it? And what city is it? The city is called Kanpur. It was very known as the Manchester of the East when the British ruled it. So it’s been an industrial town. Not getting into the detail stories, I’ll leave the audience to go and check out movies and stuff like that, hence boosting the economy. But largely, you know, there’s this inherent attitude of no answerability, honor, trust, friendship, relationship, just about in the blood.

5:34 Although there are byproducts and negative sides to it, but let’s not get there. The positive side is, despite of extensive internationalization, if that’s the right word, I mean, I’ve been out for 12 years now. I had my office in San Francisco. London can revolve Dubai, whatnot. And still,

6:03 This thing of fundraising was never exciting for me because I thought I have not done enough so far. I should know the formula to success before I start taking external capital. And again, I have to correct myself on the point that it’s not exactly how venture capital works. Venture capital is not a promise of success. Venture capital is partnership in a venture and probably it will be a success or not. But for me somehow in this weird mindset of mine, I was like, let us try and make a performer of a Goldman Sachs of crypto, you know, and then go out and say, look, we have solved this, this, this, and this. Do you think you’d fit somewhere first as a strategic partner and then as a capital partner later? I mean, right. One of the major reasons of our crazy success is the fact that we are able to take crazy risk. I mean, there’s no magic in the world, right? We live in the only magic is either hard work, a little bit of smartness and smartness is the right evaluation between risk and reward.

7:20 That I think is the right intelligence that makes a business great or maybe even breaks it to each one their own. And because we had the flexibility of not answering to anyone, we were able to take crazy risk. We were able to test things. We were able to do a lot of, let’s say we were able to shoot shit in crypto. One of the major reasons of our success so far.

7:42 And when I say success, I’m not just talking about our value or money success. As an institution, and as a team of 150 people, the kind of details we know are not even explored by others, are not even experienced by others because like by no means an LP or an investor or a board member would allow you to go and test that detail. This exactly I think can be seen in one more example, which is SpaceX. The official interview of a management of our senior personnel from NASA says the reason SpaceX is more successful than NASA is because we can’t blow up eight rockets and still not have a promise to success. First rocket we, like the first rocket we fail in gets us a notice from the Pentagon, right? Then the next budget is skewed. So the reason SpaceX is what it is is because they were able to experiment and fail for eight failed rockets, I mean failing eight rocket launches and still have no idea if the ninth would be a success or not.

8:56 So yeah, that’s our story largely. Yeah, I love that. I just got done with Elon’s latest biography and he talked about how they were just blowing things up, blowing things up and learning on each explosion. And then the media covers it and says it was a failure. And for them, they’re like, what are you talking about? We just got tons of data and now the next one’s going to be better and better. And so you do something similar inside TDFI, but you can only do that because it’s your own capital, but that way you can fail faster, learn faster. Not in TDFI. TDFI is the product of that learning. TDFI is the final rocket that flew, right? That did the job. Like I said, this attitude of honor and high quality value distribution or delivery wouldn’t allow us to test and experiment on others.

9:43 So we’ve been in crypto, when I say we, I mean an organization, like a huge team that is still retained. So we are literally celebrating five years, seven years of our team members, right? So the team that has been in crypto 24 seven, there was this statement Elon made in 2014. He said, if you work twice as much as your peers, you’ll achieve five times as much by the end of the year, right? Sounds rhyming as well, which is good.

10:15 Exactly. And imagine not just one person working twice as much as the peers, but the whole team working 24 seven like crazy because they had one clear goal. We want to be the Goldman Sachs of crypto. A lot of people say, I mean, you don’t have to be, I know, but that’s at least the first milestone, right? So we did all of that with our capital on the markets, you know, trading, coins, testing, trying, having the best people, you know, head of risk of futures first, head of risk and screen trading of, you know, edel wise, whatnot and whatnot.

10:51 And just endlessly testing. The people used to call us crazy when we gave five bitcoins as the launch budget to a new trader. Like in the first three months of their probation, they were allowed to lose up to five bitcoins. I mean, of course, after five bitcoins, they would lose a job. Yes, I ended up losing my, my supply of Bitcoin. No fun in that. And I can’t claim a success. It was a massive failure. But a wise man that, that, I mean, a real person that I met once said, if you want to build a huge financial organization, you just don’t have to learn how to succeed. You have to learn how I failed. I am in his success. And so, so we have failed massively in a lot of operations. And then we have learned what were the like, like Elon said, you know, the data, we got the data, we understood, okay, exchanges are bad. Okay, our books are not structured. APIs are not structured. Because, because look, we were coming from a quant background of a collective 100 years of experience of the team. They had working quants on SMP 500 on oil on German bonds. There’s no way it wouldn’t work for a 4% a year. I mean, it’s stupid for crypto, but there was no, no way it wouldn’t.

12:10 The only way it wouldn’t was massive failure in exchange operations. And I mean, not sure if this is the right platform to quote. Huge malpractices, massive malpractices by the by the exchanges. So, so, so the kind of stuff we learned on the way about the true liquidity, I mean, what makes you a great human? I mean, why are people some of them at least better in their in their later ages, because they’ve got that immense experience. And all of that keeps going to their subconscious, and they become a great individual to interact with, like a simple statement would look about amazing. Similarly, as an organization, there are a ton of things that you start to learn that nobody else actually had experienced or maybe a few, but your combination is unique. So what we learned about the real liquidity, well movements, media approach of legacy organizations and, you know, in crypto legacy seven years. So how are how are big organizations interacting? And the best part was, we didn’t have to prove this to anyone, we didn’t have to answer this to anyone. So the knowledge really never left the house.

13:27 Now, I’ll conclude by saying, or calling what we call it call as the bottom line of TD five, we probably are not the most intelligent people in the world, we probably are not even average let’s if you would consider, you probably are not even average. But one thing that you can’t ignore about us is that we’ve gone through hundreds and hundreds of startups and their life cycles in the last eight years. There are things we know with as a firsthand experience as an on ground market experience that people have no idea about. Right. And it was our money, our answerability, we were able to test, try, exit, enter, reenter, flip, do anything and everything with an asset. The reason I quoted these five points is because crypto is a publicly traded asset from the first day. This is an industry, which is, which is slightly but still massively different from the IPO markets. IPO markets have, have a success trading on the public in investors interest, crypto markets, before even the companies created the asset is public most of the times.

14:42 And it’s trading, the dynamics are not the same. Although, yeah, one of the things is people want it to be the same and people still look for the same charts, which is different topic we’ll cover later. But, but what we have seen in that process, not being in a fund mandate, so we like not waiting for seven years to exit, not in a rolling fund mandate, you know, waiting to, to quickly raise the next round. So not really exiting early if demanded, but at the same time, based on the conditions of the market and whatnot, you might want some liquidity, maybe a new investment, whatever might the reason be, we ended up doing millions of experiments. And, and that’s why what TDFI today offers is this, this template of do’s and don’ts. Even if we were not extraordinary, this template is because this doesn’t exist. Right. So I think that’s a good summary of TDFI.

15:39 Yeah, that’s some great internal knowledge. And I guess you apply it to all your companies. You, once said that ideas lose and people don’t. And that’s the core philosophy of TDFI. You also said that VCs aren’t trend makers. They invest in the trend. Can you talk a little bit about both of those statements? Cause you just talked about this wealth of knowledge that only you guys have because it was your own money. You didn’t have all these false kind of weird frictions and mandates. Now you’ve got that. Tell me how you help people and how you’re different than a VC.

16:10 Cause that’s an interesting thing because you’re kind of right where the rubber hits the road. Whereas a VC is never there, right? They’re always coming in after once they hear about something, you can actually see it literally incubate in front of your eyes. That’s what we are better known for. We are not sheep. We’re not a sheep. We don’t follow leads of other investors. I mean, there can be a lead in a, in an investment and we come in later, but following as in, it’s not like we’ll only go in a project that has great investors or big backers. We have a history of getting into projects that were declared dead for more than a year or two at times and resurrecting them and they’re still live today.

16:55 And then we have, of course, a history of projects that are massive. They have tier one investors from Binance to FTX. I mean, not so much now tier one, but the best of the best. And we work with them. So you’ve always said that you see so many failed crypto companies where the token is just not performed. And yet when you look at those companies, you see a great product and a great team that just couldn’t execute. And I know one of the taglines you guys say is you focus on the business and we’ll focus on the token. And I heard you talking about this and I’ll let you finish. But you made a really interesting statement. You said that most people trying to start a blockchain company, you know, it’s hard enough in tech to find product market fit.

17:42 Now in the blockchain space, you’ve got to understand tokens, tokenomics, capital markets. And if your token gets, you’re also having to go public much earlier than any other company would in tech in the NASDAQ or anything. And then as the CEO or COO or CFO or CTO, now you’re worried about this token price going into the toilet or going up and going down while you’re meanwhile still trying to negotiate product market fit. And you even said that it’s very, very unlikely that anybody can do all of those things. And I guess that’s where you guys come in.

18:14 I think that’s the very formula of success across the board, live personal business across the board. A few people get to capture access and a bit of control across the board, having their particular skill focused on what they do best. And when I’m saying that, I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean, that’s the maximum you could do. I know there are a few prodigies and some exceptions and people have done a lot. Let’s say human and let’s say real. You can be a finance expert.

18:56 You can be a tech guy. You can be a lot of things, but you can only be an expert in one topic. And the only way you can remain to be an expert is to keep drilling into the same subject. And that’s how you become exceptional. And this is exactly where I connect this point to when you said very little people achieve that success. And I absolutely don’t want to associate this to crypto. So knowing the art of where do I fit well and how do I complete the circle with others is the true art of entrepreneurship. So it’s not at all wrong or bad to not know, let’s say, tokens or public markets or capital markets or this, that, those.

19:46 But what’s wrong is to overestimate yourself to be able to do all of that. Like I’ve been super vocal about this. Everybody use this, use this. And I am sorry, I’ll have to correct you in my statement. You use the first word marketing. I’ve been out loud saying we are terrible at marketing.

20:04 Like one thing that we absolutely have no idea about is marketing. I mean, we’re just not those people for some reason. No matter how hard we try, we’re great observers. Let’s say we are able to see, you know, the amazing work you’re doing other people. We see, OK, this is the template. Let’s copy it. We fail down the line. That’s the that’s the power of expertise. That’s the power of also your nature as a human, as an entrepreneur, which actually reflects as your unique selling point in your business.

20:38 You better focus that on that. Make it your expertise. Start moving in that direction. Be like the leader of that skill and enhance the product. Right. And then leave everything else to everyone else. That’s also an art. A lot of times I’m talking to two startups and they’re like, look, we’re talking to a lot of incubators. We’re talking to a lot of investors.

21:01 We have 20 advisors. They’re top of the line. And, you know, respectively, marketing agencies, advertising agencies are like, look, kid, first, it might be your first, second, fifth or tenth startup. It’s my 50th this month as as an incubator, as an investor. And guess what?

21:23 I’ve been doing this for 18 bloody years. The amount of stories I’ve seen just as stories is more than the steps you will take in the next 15 years in your startup. My size of the template of that do’s and don’ts is like 20 times bigger than than your imagination. And I’m saying that with due humility, with the fact that most of these are failures. So we never claim that we know the formula to success. No one knows. We know 599 ways of how to not build a bulb, as it is, right? So don’t tell me you have all you have all of that figured out or the counter side of this is let’s say we’re talking to all of these people, but we don’t know who to trust. And my problem is you’re absolutely right. But for some weird reason in this world, this cosmos created by the supreme power, ignorance is not an excuse.

22:19 So you can sign up with the wrong advisor, you can sign up with the right mentor, you can sign up with the right incubator, you can sign up with the right marketing agency and lose. And the only one responsible for that is you, right? It’s your bloody responsibility to make your startup a success. And for that you have to do your research, you have to depend on a bit of gut and wit, you know, and your feelings. And isn’t that exactly where you started?

22:48 Like, I’m sure everybody had two or three ideas to play around with before they started up with something. And what was the true reason to start with the one that they choose to write? It was the gut, you know, something that came naturally. So if a startup has finally figured out a way to collaborate, I think it’s already set to its path of success. And yeah, that’s at least what what we keep as a baseline. And that’s why we’ve always to circle it back from where you started our we don’t we don’t trust on the product ever, like last it’s like probably 30% of our evaluation or 25. And then as a product, I mean, everything 70% of our bet is on the founder. How is he responding? He or she? How the responding?

23:44 How did they interact? You know, how collaborative they are? How open they are? I don’t remember the exact statement, but Einstein said the factor of intelligence or the scale of intelligence is the ability to to switch or to change. Yeah. The scale of intelligence is the ability of a person to change. Right. So how quickly can they change? And this is one of the statement much said recently about Larry Fink in my last interview. And by much you mean Anthony. Skybridge Capital. Skybridge Capital. Legend. Legend alternative. One of the largest alternative trading. Right. Gonna guest on our show three or four times. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah.

24:27 Great individual. I love him. I think the world loves him. But but he said he was talking about Larry Fink and how he how Larry Fink Joe’s about Bitcoin just about a year ago, a year before he his team actually called Anthony and said, you know, we are starting something like a Bitcoin ETF. I shares would like you to come in. And and and actually Anthony became the first check in the Bitcoin ETF of BlackRock. Right. And he helped educate them. Exactly.

24:58 So so he says the the biggest quality of a leader is to flip over a dime. They can flip over a dime like like now. So he didn’t go on with the joke. Like Larry didn’t go on with the joke he made to the whole industry, including Anthony. One day in Abu Dhabi said, oh, so you’re dealing with this Bitcoin shit. Right. So I think that is what we judge largely about a startup founder and and how are they evaluating others. Now call me call me a shiller or call me biased about my own product. I think everybody should be. But if you’re not able to look at what we are doing, the way we are doing and the way we have done it, I don’t think you have an eye for to evaluate success. We’re taking a very, very small portion of your company. Because we know our our gig. We know our not not we’re not valuing ourselves on the value we’re adding to you, but also not just the value we’re adding to you, but also on on what does it mean in the larger scheme of things? If we come in and start exploiting your company, we can I mean, we are anyone in the position of power is usually in a place that they can choose to exploit. But that’s actually the power of a great company or a great product that, you know, you still keep doing what you keep doing consistently, persistently, keep creating a great track record and make people you know, love it and fall for it. And that’s how also probably you make a good sales funnel.

26:37 Right. So yeah, that’s how we assess projects. People fail. Sorry, ideas fail. People don’t is absolutely the bottom line truth of my life. What does that mean?

26:48 Um, so it’s not a tagline to TDFI. It’s a tagline to BizThon.com. BizThon is one of the instruments or our infrastructure under TDFI that we use for scaling our incubated projects. So if you’re an infrastructure, if you’re a DeFi, you need startups to build upon your infrastructure, you need your services to be integrated into the into the future of business tomorrow. So BizThon is a free to operate, you know, we only spend money on this. We don’t take any form of cash or anything there. The partners like, you know, the top layer ones, layer tools, service companies come in and announce rewards and awards. But for us, it’s a nonprofit. It’s a part of our infrastructure. And what it does is that it operates hackathons, but not with the intent of producing lines of codes, but with an intent of producing business. And, and it has, you know, all the jargons, you know, AI integrated to evaluate teams and people of of of similar mindset. And that could make probably make a good startup together. We have mentors from from the top cores of the world that keep coming in at various stages of their growth. But but because the structure is not a hackathon, it demands a little more than that, that very modus operandi of a let’s say hacker or hacker known the great platforms, by the way, but therefore hackathons in a hackathon, people would participate, proceed to the next level, fail, you know, probably 10% would go to the semifinals and then so on. Here, you’re actually creating a business,

28:33 Which means if you’ve succeeded above a milestone, you now need a bigger team, you need people to build faster scale faster, that’s one of the most important properties of a startup, that it should know how to scale exponentially at the right time, right? So in in in Bizthon, while we have innovated practically everything from the scratch about a hackathon, it’s not a hackathon. One of the things we are super proud of is the fact that people don’t lose. So anyone who comes in as a participant remains at the platform throughout the journey of that hackathon or a Bizthon as we call it. And every time there’s a there’s a scrutiny or there’s a failure or a qualification above a level, 70 80% startups would fail would not qualify above, you know, but now that the the the qualified startup are at a bigger and a better level and they have certain, you know, cash in the pocket, we have cash delivered or reward money delivered to the startups at each level, they now can pay at least some incentives to onboard new people. And guess what? These people were a part of the journey.

29:47 They, sorry, they make an absolute fit on the top to the next level people because they saw what didn’t work. Again, the same format, they they know at least two ways how to not build a bulb, right? And the new team needs people who understand the format, who are of a similar mindset, probably were actually competing with them in a similar product. I’m a hyper patriot, but that does not means that I don’t like the rest of the world. I actually love the Silicon Valley culture, which is actually nourished on the very factor. Five people will sit over a table in a meetup. And instead of discussing, I mean, instead of trying to know what the other guy’s guy is doing and integrate it in his product, they’ll say, okay, you’re doing that portion of the same pipeline. Let me actually leave that for you. We’ll integrate your company in our product pipeline as a service product, right? I mean, as a service. So I become your first client and validator. And I focus on just building this part of the business. And hence five people end up dividing and conquering probably the same field or whatever, and being the first five clients to each other. Okay, right, right. So so you and you end up creating a great company, a great validation peers that you’re not paying for, but are actually using your product. And they expect the same from you. We have sort of inculcated the same culture. So people who were competing

31:14 In the round just a few hours ago or can now join the same team and build it together. Okay. And that’s why people don’t fail in this idea. Okay. So you focus on the ideas failing, not the people. We don’t focus on the ideas failing by the way. We focus on ideas succeeding.

31:32 But I think your point is, I guess that with founders, sometimes they can feel like they’re failures and they can feel like that they fail sometimes. And you try to separate the idea from the founder and encourage them to keep going, to iterate on that failure, to learn from the failure, to welcome the failure. I mean, there’s a great saying, you either win or lose. I think it was Conor McGregor’s book, right? I always tell my kids that we win or lose. What did we do today? Oh, we won. We lost. No, we win or learn. Sorry.

31:59 We win or learn. And it seems like that’s what you’re thinking about as well. Exactly. The famous Batman movie statement, why do we fall, Bruce? Why do we fall? Right. To rise.

32:10 So I actually use that more often. But yes, as an incubator, we are, I mean, we call it a TD5 family. And we have a lot of video testimonials to this on our YouTube channel, on our website, that there is no way to create anything substantial in life without the right emotional quotient. And how could you be a great advisor or a great partner without having an emotional contact? And as soon as you step into that boundary of emotional contact, and there’s no looking back. And these are young founders most of the time. So they have many issues. I mean, there are personal issues, family issues, partnership issues, operational issues, cultural issues, border issues, COVID issues, and everything else. Right.

33:08 And our entire team has been trained and has been selected on their emotional quotient. So more as a therapist, I wouldn’t call ourselves, you’re not that great. To a certain extent, that might be part of your job. I mean, the best we can do is at least hear them out. And then the worst we can perform on that is look at the same template and tell them, look, this has already happened. This is this is this times. And you know what, people ended up succeeding at the end. So like there is light at the end of the tunnel. I am giving you a statistical firsthand review as a company.

33:49 And then of course, there’s a personal side to it. But therapist is a big word. I know people often use it, but I don’t think we’ve done enough. But yeah, we have participated in all sorts of personal, professional matters. And I don’t think we can make a great company without that. Yeah, no company’s made. How do you evaluate a founder? I was here in October, a future blockchain summit. And you grabbed me and we jumped into a room at the TV five booth at the future blockchain summit. And we had a talk for like an hour, hour and a half.

34:23 And, you know, we were both getting inside each other’s head. But I felt like by the end of it, we kind of knew who we were. And I was fascinated. I didn’t really know much about you. And I learned a lot about what you do in your spare time and meditations and all that, which I want to get to. But how do you evaluate a founder? I’m guessing you want to try to know who they are because you’re betting on your founder. Like you said, it’s 70% founder. How long does it take you to do that? And how do you go about doing that? Because that’s who you’re betting on, but you’re investing all of your energy and emotion as well into this small number of people.

35:00 So there are two parts of the answer. First is a more philosophical part that I’ll cover. It is a Michelangelo effect, as we call it. So we don’t see a great founder immediately most of the times. We see a great future. So, you know, when Michelangelo looked at the rock, he found or he saw a David inside. But guess what? The rock was already proud of itself.

35:32 I mean, it was a frickin’ rock, right? For all good reasons. And this is our pain. This is our job. And this is our success. The same thing. This Michelangelo effect. When a startup talks to us and got by our side, we’ve been extremely successful. Being an incubator usually means dealing with pre-MVP super early stage companies. The kind of companies we have ended up incubating and advising are often already valued and invested at above 100 million or 50 million to the least valuations, which means they’re post-MVP. They’re doing a good job. They’ve already achieved a certain degree of success and validation of their product. So it’s a tough point to be at for us.

36:20 The pain. This guy already or this team already thinks they are a success, which they are, like I said, they are already a degree of success. It is a rock, no doubt. It is a massive rock. Our job is to tell them that there is a David inside. There is this incredible success within the rock. There is a David inside. So that’s our job. And this is exactly where I’ll come in on the second point when I do it later. So the job, and I’ll explain the job later, the success is to buy their trust. The moment we have their trust and they’re willing to abide by this template, not us as, you know, the word of God, just this template. They’re already there because, I mean, why do we use Google Maps to not take wrong routes? Is it efficient?

37:22 Oh, my God. Yes, it is efficient as good words. So if simply somebody has got this formula, you know, information is success already has got a formula. People like us who have it in our subconscious from the last eight years living the journeys of startups. I mean, it is if not a multi-billion dollar company, it’s certainly so much better than the rock. I mean, that’s a no-brainer. Even if it wasn’t me sitting here and just the template talking to you, you would agree to it, right? Now, let’s quickly shift to the second point that I was trying to make, which is essentially the job. I told you we are massively terrible at marketing, but this helps. And this is where I’m answering your question about how do we judge them.

38:20 We are not the A16Z of the world. We are not the finance of the world. We are okay credible, but people still have to do a bit of research to know that. And that’s why it actually doesn’t takes us a lot of time to assess someone because people are mostly real in front of us. Your conversation with A16Z would be very different from the conversations you’ll have with us. One of the other ways we have done this, and I told you we’ve been doing this for 18 years in equity, the same startup incubation, the same startup investments. And we have got our lessons and our own private template as well. We don’t, we have sort of dissociated money from us because the largest craving, the biggest craving of a startup is money. That’s something you don’t have as an unlimited supply. I mean, those who have it essentially are the ones talking about money being not the pivot of success, but those who don’t usually think that they’ll get money and they’ll succeed, right? So they’re only looking for money most of the times. And what we did as our branding is that we said, we’ll do everything for you and we’ll make you qualify for big money. We won’t take you to money or put large money. And there’s a reason that as VCs, as ONX, that I’ve operated for like 2015 till 2019 and 20, we were writing like $5 million checks, single checks, $10 million checks. We are the largest investors, first largest investors of, you know, $16 billion, $20 billion layer ones, like Koti, we were like till last year,

40:04 The largest holders, some of the biggest projects from Wall Street, hyper-institutionalized crypto products. We were like 11% share owners valuing above $15 million in early rounds. But in TD find the capacity of trade dog group, we don’t write anything above 100 or 200 or 250k. And we negotiate like anything on that because we don’t want this capitalistic reputation to go out. The moment that happens, people stop being real to you. And our assessment fails. I mean, it doesn’t really fails, but let’s say we won’t be able to achieve the same assessment, the same quality of assessment in the first two hours, over one hour of an assessment call. And we’ll have to, you know, do like five, six, seven calls, throw some drama around their startup on the calls. But, you know, emotional intelligence is a pretty evident thing. You really can’t hide it and you can’t act on the top. So it’s not too tough. I mean, right. You’ve got a system now where you can spot the ones you want and they behave the way they should behave with you.

41:15 Yeah. So you have a way. It might change that. Yeah. It’s a Takeshi castle. People have to go through the same hurdles that the castle has planned you to. What’s your read on the market now? Because you’ve been through many cycles, many more than most people have. You’ve invested through those cycles. I’ve watched content from you in the bear market where you’re like, hey, we’ve been here before. This is the perfect time to buy. You didn’t blink an eye. And you’ve seen multiple bear markets. Winters lived lived lived through. Yeah. And from 800 million AUM, like you said, but that was like in exchanges. So we can quote it to below 50 who have lived.

42:00 That’s lived. Yeah. And I had Brock Pierce on the stage of future blockchain summit. And he said, I don’t trust anybody who hasn’t been through a bear market and is still here. I think is what he said. What do you see right now? You know, most people, I think, if I pulled them in crypto would agree that we are in a bull market or at the start of one. The spot that the Bitcoin ETF has been approved. The Ethereum one is being rumored. Where do you think we are right now? What do you expect to happen this year and the following years? And then based on that, what are you doing with TDFI and the rest of what you do? I know this is probably the trickiest question in any conversation, especially the recorded ones. And no one knows where they are or where we are. Like you recently just said, I think an hour ago, a man plans God laughs. But like I said, ignorance is not an excuse. So as an institution, we’ll have to take a stance. We have to make a prediction and live by it and just probably have a backup plan for it to fail and then resort to that. So yes, our perception internally, not an investment advice, is that here in one of the most active political years of all time, we have more than 40 nations going through an election this year.

43:25 It’s not rocket science. You know, you can go and look at the charts of countries going through elections and the capital markets. It is meant to swell. Yes, there’s been, you know, 2000 and so on, some years in the US capital markets where they were not able to bloat the markets enough. But look, bottom line, we have gone through a bad time, short term and long term, like the 2021 bull market was not really a bull market. It was a bull trend for a very short while.

43:59 So like Peter Schiff says, you’re wrong. In capital markets, you’re wrong the moment you say it’s different this time or someone else said, but the statement is important. If you plot these charts on the larger scheme of things and probably the charts of the last 200 years or 100 years, sorry, you’ll see that the market of that scale is actually a small bull trend of that scale is a larger, at a larger scale is just a blip in the bear trend. So we’ve really lived a long bear trend, which means we have to have a slightly longer bull trend or a bull market. It is just about, you know, the stars are aligned, the political year, the recently bad markets, whatever super inflation in the US and many other economy for the same reasons and others, you know, everything is pointing towards a great trend in the next two years. Although there’s a big consideration of a massive disaster right after, but let’s not talk about it. Let it be all rosy and pink. And, you know, I want to talk about that later. Right. So, so we, I mean, I was, I think on Mario show on, on one of those shows that they were doing on the Silicon Valley bank and the moment the news of the resurrection of the bank came, I announced like, and this is something I don’t do, but I announced, look, bull markets begin right here, right here. We are in a bull trend.

45:37 End of the story. Let’s get there. Really? As soon as they were bailed out. As soon as they were bailed out. And it was not just me, by the way, there are a few characters in the crypto ecosystem, the finance ecosystem that, that are known to make accurate predictions.

45:53 All of them made it. One of my favorites is, and I’m going to quote it here. You can definitely clip it out of the video is Arthur Hayes, the exe of Bitmex and now Maelstrom said, ready for a motherfucking bull market. Like that’s how loud people like us were who have actually lived the trends. So why? Because of the event itself, not just the event. Okay.

46:18 The event was like, you know, was sometimes when the cheetah misses, uh, it’s, it’s subtleness. Sometimes when, when the whales and the governments are getting ready for something and they, they had their ways, you know, below the water level. So you never see them, but there’s a fin that pops out at times and people know there’s a shark, you know, sometimes there’s a tail that wags and the deer would know, you know, the buck would know that there’s, there’s a predator there. Right. So, so that was a little blip. Everybody caught on. It’s just some people caught. That was a clear hint that, you know, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a movement inside, right. And we’re all very small players, by the way, the real movers and shakers don’t come to shows and, and talk about it. They never make their predictions cause they’re the one making the markets that we’re trying to predict.

47:11 Right. So, so it wasn’t just the bailout. There were other signs. There were many, many things around, but this was like one blip of the fin above the water level. And since then we’ve been deploying extensively. We have, we have written many saps. We’re just going all in, uh, in, in April basically. That was April, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

47:33 And I think a lot of institutions started deploying and that was basically what reflected in the markets in the next three, four, five months. Um, you know, everything started piling on the top of, um, each other and, and the markets went bull. My concern is the fact that we’ve really not achieved anything major in terms of production. And I want to quote this video from Ray Dalio, how the economic machinery works. I think it’s a, it’s a Bible of economy.

48:05 Everybody should watch it and, and how he plots the production cycle, sorry, in the reference of the camera, the production cycle, and then the speculative cycles on the top of the production cycles. And then in between that, the sentimental cycles on the speculative cycles and this, these larger cycles are basically bull markets. And, uh, sorry, the smaller speculation, the smaller cycles are bull markets and bear markets are trends. And then the larger cycles are recessions, you know, sorry, recessions and, uh, depressions and so on. So for some reason we are definitely heading to a massive collapse. And I know you said you want to talk about that.

48:53 So here I am talking about it. We are heading for a massive collapse. Um, the real estate markets this time, uh, are, are heavily bloated, not just in the US. Right. Um, and I’ll stick to Ray Dalio’s plan. When he talks about something that is specific to the failure of US, he refrains from saying US. So I’m also trying to refrain from naming countries here that are involved in that. So we’re looking at a massive bloating of real estate market. We’re also looking at a massive bloating of tech stocks and market, although we all know they’ve been corrected, uh, to a large extent, but, but this recovery is, is still, I think, I mean, and, and, and not just the, the recovery, the pace of the recovery will proceed to something which is not real. And that’s what I precisely want to point. And I don’t want to sound like a technical analyst here. I’m just saying these are, these are the macro, um, aspects that we are looking at. Now, how does that influence our business? Um, not to, you know, leak the secret sauce, but we believe in, in the three level in, uh, or let’s say three stages of the life cycle of a token, the acquaintance, the experience, and then the life cycle. I mean, then the life later on the maturity, we want most of our projects to go out now. This can be airdrops. This can be public launches. This can be, uh, public sales, rare launches, fair launches, whatever, build the acquaintance of your token project now, because post hollering is when the

50:43 Institutional money starts, you know, racking the Bitcoin prices, the DJ money. And when I say DJ money, I only am talking about anything beyond Bitcoin, right? The DJ money starts to flow out of Bitcoin, the crypto money, and that money is not looking for a great experience. The period of experience essentially does not mean that you need to have a token holder acquaintance will do the job. You have to build a greater acquaintance experience is what happens by itself. So that is, that is the job of the token project. And, and again, that’s the secret sauce of what we do to build that experience. How will the experience we build without the user holding the token and with token hold a user holding the token is a different story, but the experience will be built. Like you said, while, while we had our conversation, we had a good, uh, we had a good note of each other, but the experience about us kept building while we were not together. I was watching your videos. I was talking about you. You were talking about me. That is the experience part. It does not requires for us to be together. And when the DJ money starts to snowball below Bitcoin and to the other asset, you should have created an experience to have a mature life cycle. Interesting. So we are focusing largely without even depending on the future of 2026 and, you know, our collapse, our intermediary collapse, uh, like we had in the 2000, you know, pre-political years, not even trying to confuse people with, with too much of

52:20 Knowledge and too much of speculation. We have a straightforward plan. Build the acquaintance now. We’ll build the experience later. And I said, we, because we call ourselves your token manager, everything. And when I say that, I mean, the, the acquaintance will need a tokenomics that would empower the whole, whole life cycle, right? So we need to be before the acquaintance begins in your project, right? And then if the experience is right, the life cycle is usually, the maturity is usually better than average. And of course, it will need constant, uh, work on it. And that’s where, you know, one of our portfolio or call it one of our group company, group infrastructure company TDMM, trade dog market management comes in.

53:09 Um, to quickly touch upon this topic, this has been a big concern and a bad experience of almost all the institutions in crypto. It’s not just trade dog that has built, uh, infrastructure around market making and market management. All large institutions are either building their own market making market management, uh, infrastructure. I mean, animoka has built one. Um, I know a few more, uh, and a few more that have tried and failed, by the way, because not everybody can, can build, you know, a capital market instrument or a capital market infrastructure. And then, uh, the others are at least trying to buy in to market making market management institutions where they have a control on the board, not the control, at least access to what is happening inside, right? So market making and market management is largely required from the experience and the, the, the maturity stage, which is basically lifetime. And this is where I would like to like shill the, the job of TD fire. And that’s why we call ourselves incubator and lifetime advisory, because the kind of plans we’ll embed in tokens in your incubation stage will mature in the next three, five, seven, 10 years of your token life cycle. And that again, would take me back to the first minute of this conversation, which is the experience that we have had going through life cycles of tokens for eight years in our portfolio is what plays down the road in the entire journey. Now, a lot of people don’t ever think about this and the founders are

54:49 Running around 99.9999. Right. The founders are running around trying to get financing, trying to figure out what the hell’s going on, let alone hiring, let alone a product, let alone marketing and customers. And so they throw something together. They probably don’t even understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. And they’re not thinking a year out, two years out, five years out, seven years out, what the token price is going to be, what the liquidity is going to be, who’s going to own it, who’s not going to own it.

55:15 And so they’re kind of doomed from the start or they have to get lucky and they think, oh, maybe it’ll be like a Facebook IPO and then we’ll just all be partying later. Everyone thinks like that. The token world is very, very different because you don’t, and you said this before, have the mature capital markets and players that you have with an IPO. You don’t have the syndicates. You don’t have the due diligence, the regulatory that set those things up to be winners. And in tokens, it’s highly unregulated, still very cowboy out there. Can you speak a little bit more on what a market maker does and how without one, how you can have a great company, a great idea, product market fit traction, and it could be over if you don’t have either the market maker and or the tokenomics from the beginning. So I’m a big fan of crypto and especially tokenization. And that’s why like I’ve taken the position of a CEO in TDFI and not actually stayed with my equity companies. That is why, you know, a decade old business.

56:20 We invented fire and it used to light up from the bottom, heat up towards the top, and that was it. And that’s how we used it most of the times. The modern shape of fire is so advanced that there is fire in the bulb, but it’s not heating so much. In the other forms of lamps, there is actually no heat. It’s so energy efficient. So when we develop a technology or when we develop a phenomena or identify a phenomena, we don’t essentially have to stick to it forever. We have to evolve.

56:56 Tokenization of an organization is a similar evolution to equity. Equity was amazing as long as we didn’t identify tokenization as a financial phenomenon or an instrument. You can dilute equity endlessly. Consider it a power, but okay, good for you. What I would consider better is a finitely acknowledged economy, which is tokenization. And dilution, which a lot of people don’t understand, means that you start off owning 10% of the company.

57:27 And if you don’t pay attention, you could end up later with 1% of the company. Less than one. Less than one. And that’s why you see these founders, and you’re like, how come Jeff Bezos doesn’t own still 70% of the company? Or how come the founder, he used to own 100% of the company?

57:41 Why does he own 18% now and he’s getting kicked out because of his board? That’s because of dilution. And it happens in equity markets. I remember the first time I learned about dilution was when I was a dot-com CFO in New York City, and I started figuring out how it works. And I was like, oh, that kind of sucks. So you get new financing, you get a higher valuation, but you own less of the company.

58:00 I’ll tell you a funny thing about what you exactly said, and lines in between lines. And this is the funny part about the world. And this is also funny about marketing. You talked about Jeff Bezos. What was his past profile? He comes from a heavily educated financial background.

58:20 Exactly, right? He’s a success in a company that is publicly traded, has created milestones, and literally landmarks of financial success, of public market and public assets.

58:36 Mark Zuckerberg did, we all saw what he did in the, or what his team did in his favor in the movie, The Social Network, right? He actually resorted to non-dilutable shares. Larry Page also has a similar story on how somebody advised him on the stock holding patterns. The reason you don’t see those who you don’t see is because they don’t come from an informed financial background, and they’re the ones who were thrown out in their longer journey of going public.

59:11 It’s called survivorship bias. See the winners, and the only reason they won is because they understood capital markets and acted in the very beginning. Perfect, exactly. So we’re only talking about those who actually survived through the survivor fit market. We’re not talking about the other 15,000 companies listed in the public markets of the world where nobody knows the founder and the founder has exited, or founder has taken a back seat or whatever because they don’t have the right interest aligned, right?

59:40 Right. So let’s not even get there. The reason I’m committed to crypto is because I see the future of finance and hence humanity with crypto. I see this as a major, I mean, it’s not even a patch fix. It’s right from the scratch fixing of a financial system that we have brought ourselves to. And that’s the core of my passion in crypto.

1:00:06 So let’s talk about tokens as an evolved form of equity. 100% non-dilutable finite supply of an asset that’s, of course, technically enabled not to be deceived. Not just your today, but your tomorrow with or without you is bent to this instrument. How amazing is that? All you got to do is do the right technological because it is a technological solution. I mean, the bulb is a technological solution. You just can’t blame that, you know, fire isn’t really technology. It is. So it is a technological solution to equity, right? You have to resort to other technological fixes to make it work better. Now, what do I mean by that? Make the bloody contract that is owning the token responsible for owning the revenue, the transactions, the engagement of the whole organization, or at least try and make systems that will make sure that the company has no secondary interest, but just this instrument of value, the equity.

1:01:13 As soon as you have done this, you have cheated the future of cheating, right? So this is like you see how passionate about that I am, but there’s a problem. We have done this incredible evolution tokenized, but we have still gone back to the IPO world, the same capital markets, to deal with this new instrument. Now, this is taken over by centralized authorities to still play the same stupid games they were playing or stupid games they were playing in the financial markets.

1:01:49 This whole idea of launching a token into the public, the hype, the road shows, the this, the that, that’s just a hangover or carryover from the IPO markets. A good one, if done right, as we move towards more regulatory paradigms and a better controlled paradigm. And by the way, by no means I’m saying that DEX is a fix to it, like the AMM DEX is not a fix to it. Yeah, probably centralized order books would be, but again, I can talk about that as a separate topic. So we are still evolving in this, but I would want to stick to just this value system that we have created. Now, the degree of trust this instrument can hold is exponentially more than the degree of trust the equity instrument would hold.

1:02:38 Right? Now, it’s not a board that can kick you out tomorrow. It’s nothing that can change this. It’s immutable. It’s blockchain. Now, what we want to do is to read between the lines of this technological innovation, let’s say that there’s a, there’s a, there’s a flip side to it.

1:03:01 You really can’t dilute more equity to borrow to get a new CFO. You can’t issue more shares. You can’t do this, that. So you have to plan that. And this is exactly where we are.

1:03:14 We are making a disastrous step or, or, or action. Like there’s no, there’s no action on this point. People are forgetting the fact that this is an immutable contract of value and that the project has to be planned for 10 years. You really can’t shift the instrument later. You can’t make a shift to the instrument later. Now, this is where we come in. We say, look, your advisors are asking you for 2% or 1% or 0.1%. Your exchange is asking you for this percent. Your market maker is asking for a loan option contract. I mean, all of this is like you said, a hangover of the older instrument, which is not exactly the same here. The, the 3% of supply that you’re about to give is basically more than your circulating supply. It’s your, it’s more than the entire asset, or the entire value out there. Do you know what that means? This person, because of the structure of the contract, the loan option contract has no incentive for your token to work upwards. Or let’s say has incentives because he has options for later.

1:04:25 That’s because they’re more financially informed than you. So they’ve structured their contracts in a win-win-win position where none of these three wins are yours. But bringing this to the perspective and the question that you posed, market makers have structured themselves, of course, they were better informed for finance, in a win-win-win position, which essentially means the project can only win if they are above average. Like there’s no, there’s no natural growth curve of the startup success. Like if you are 10x good, doesn’t mean you’ll be 10x successful, means you’ll be dumped. If you’re 20x good, doesn’t mean you’ll be 20x successful. No, you’ll be dumped, right? Because they want to focus on those who will be 200x successful, which also means there’s no one believing in your future, which is the essence of entrepreneurship, right? So there are a few exceptional projects who have had, of course, exceptional advisors who knew these tiny details and have given them the right advice to not fall into the 10, 20, 30, 40 bracket and straight away look like there are 100x success. And hence, the markets, the market makers and exchanges would respect them and lead that. Which also brings me to one of the first points I made, which was ignorance is not an excuse. So you got to know all of this. But what we do in a way is, first of all, make sure that the template of tokenization is right, but also make sure that these parties, these parties with malicious interest, know that

1:06:09 This project will not fall into their trap. And that’s where the market maker actually comes. The market maker’s primary job in a capital market is to supply liquidity. That’s it. Why would they supply liquidity? Because there are multiple asset holders, multiple stockholders. They have the stock sitting for 10s and 20, 10s of years, and they wanted to do something like produce a yield.

1:06:35 So they give it to a market maker. The market maker uses it for the liquidity provisions, makes a bit of yield, which is the added profit for the investor. That’s also the reason why there are multiple market makers, because each financial institution has their own trusted market maker. And hence, nobody has just about enough supply to match the multi-trillion dollar daily liquidity of the capital markets, of the stock markets. Crypto house, however, is a very different story, right? Here, you barely have one, two, or three percent of your supply circulating on the first day, most of the times. Ten. Then, none of these holders have it liquid. So what you do as a project is that you give a percentage of your supply to the market maker to do the liquidity provisions, which is absolutely opposite if you see by intent. And also, let’s not forget, this is not a regulated market. So the regulator is not checking the audited books of a market making company. There is no regulated, audited, controlled exchange infrastructure that is interconnected through fixed APIs, which is the very, very standard of capital markets.

1:07:48 Not just the regulators, but the participants are hyper-regulated in an ethical conduct to operate across the board. The investor, DMATs, market making institutions, exchanges, traders. Everybody is in this framework of regulation. Crypto, wild, wild west. So now, this liquidity is supposed to do the same magic that it does in the capital markets. But guess what? There is no organic liquidity. This is exactly where I do my usual speech, which is, how did you learn trading? Did you ever learn trading? Did you ever spend like five minutes on trading? I mean, I grew up on a trading desk in New York City, and I found it. So I learned it by making a bunch of mistakes and watching people around me. And I used to make markets as a dealer, and it’s a dangerous thing to do. But did people train you on charts ever?

1:08:47 Yeah, we looked at charts. It was also listening to information. But you did TAs? Yeah, somewhat, somewhat, somewhat. Do you believe TAs are real?

1:09:01 I believe they can be a factor in making a decision. If you look at a chart long enough, you can convince it’ll tell you the future, but it never will. Okay, great. I mean, we are not getting to the philosophical side. We’re just going to a basic trader mindset. Now, you’ve learned those TAs. You go to the first library down the road, or a bookstore down the road, ask for the first book on trading. And it’ll tell you the exact same things, the MACDs, the Heikenachis, the Fibonacci, the same W patterns, shoulders, shoulders. Those charts were built by analyzing, or through analyzing, or by analyzing the capital markets that have a few trillion dollars in daily liquidity, a hyper-regulated market, a modus operandi of listing an asset after a certain degree of success. And then these charts are applicable after the infrastructure being there. Now, the same guy comes to crypto exchange and wants to plot the same TA on an asset that has just launched yesterday.

1:10:06 There’s no real liquidity. I mean, there’s no parallel to the liquidity of those charts. There’s no parallel to the interest of those investors. There’s no sync between the multi-parties of this ecosystem. And the trader still expects the same charts to appear.

1:10:26 He or she or they would still trade by the same thoughts they had from the other markets, right? Byproduct or the result is that we have a similar looking market. Great. Sometimes, for a new project, that really doesn’t work out. Because there’s not enough trader interest, organic trader interest, to actually come in, plot their own visualization of charts in these newly-born charts, or let’s say not so liquid charts, and make it work for the other traders. Question, who fills the gap? Market maker? I don’t know. I can say. But do you think this is a real gap? Do you think it’s a real problem? Oh, of using old analysis tools in the crypto. No, that the world of traders and speculators that you want to come and trade and buy your asset and hold it come from a mindset of a certain chart, of a certain liquidity, of the capital markets. And your charts have no resemblance because of the three factors I said. Yeah. Do you think there’s a gap? Huge. That is the gap between the success and the failure of a token project. And when I say token project, I mean any and every token project. That’s the difference of success between or the perspective of The Rock and David. Somebody has to come in and fill it.

1:12:02 I don’t know who. But you do that. It’s something that you do. We try and implement a few things in the tokenomics that the release, like I said, acquaintance experience and lifecycle looks like that. So I think I understand what you just told me is that we didn’t even talk about projects, whether they’re in GameFi or DeFi. We didn’t talk about NFTs. We didn’t talk about BRC-20 chains because that has nothing to do with it. In your view, if you don’t have the basic fundamental capital controls and interested parties acting in the same way, then that thing is almost destined to fail. Like it had. Like it has. And that’s why you’ve seen so many failed token projects. That’s why we created TDFI. Right. Because when you look under the hood, these companies aren’t failures necessarily didn’t have to, but the token failed by design because no one ever thought about it. And they assumed it might react the same way other capital markets do and it didn’t. It’s almost synonymous to have a great technology founder and a bad token project. Almost synonymous. Because if they’re so concentrated on the technology, they don’t focus on the token. They have no idea of how finance works.

1:13:11 And by the way, I know there are massive success in the top 10 that are great technology products. And like I said, you, you said something about the, the, the, the success metrics or something. You only see the people survivors. Yeah. But the number of projects we invested in that had incredible tech, like incredible tech, undefeatable, unprecedented tech that failed in the last seven years or six years are much more than those top 10 or top 50. Okay. So now all the founders right now are on the edge of their seats, thinking, Oh my gosh, I haven’t even thought about my tokenomics. I don’t really know what a market maker is. I’ll have to, I’ll have to stop you there. They have actually thought about it, but the words are corrupt. Tokenomics means a pie chart that simply distributes a hundred percent token in some random weird number to different parties. I have practically never, almost one percent of the time, let’s say 99% of the time, I’ve never found a rationale behind the token distribution chart and that they call tokenomics, which is not by far. I told you the, the utility, the transactions, the engagement, the very, the very financial part or a sense of a project integrated technically to a smart contract is the beginning of a tokenomics, not even the end.

1:14:46 Right. Planning this token structure, this, this, this instrument of value for the organization for the next 10 years is tokenomics. And then playing and executing the plan embedded in the token chart in this tokenomics exactly in the liquid market till the time your tokens are at least 50% in circulation or more is tokenomics. Powerful. It’s very powerful. Let me tell you how powerful it is in quick, quick examples. Stellar, now called Lumen, never raised capital on the token project, right? They never sold a single token. That’s what I mean. A hundred percent token supply till date, which is billions of tokens now valued at, I think, above 10 billion market cap or something like that, not sure, but still billion dollar chain has only given all the tokens for free. Where did the value come from? Somewhere, right economics, right distribution.

1:15:53 So there’s a role of economics that I keep pointing out to people. Yes, this tunnel is a great tech. I used to use my favorite example, Cardano. Now they have a product, but for the first four years, while they were on the top three and the top five charts, they were actually building a product all that while, but the token was always top five, right? Because they had good tokenomics.

1:16:17 They had, I mean, any infrastructure project usually succeeds because of the right tokenomics, because it is the very ethos of Bitcoin. It is the very ethos of Bitcoin white paper. So infrastructure projects usually don’t suffer this crisis because their token, I mean, they’re also copying it, not that they’re making a cautious decision, but they’re copying Bitcoin and they’re copying Ethereum and so on. So they really don’t have a lot of space to diverge from the straight tokenomics, which is embedding all of this into the token. Although they do it, let’s say, they do it good for a large percentage of goodness or they do it right for up to a certain percentage, not entirely. And that is what defeats them when they are trading publicly, right? But the bigger problem is in the larger crypto ethos, which is not infrastructure projects, where the token really can’t be embedded into the smart contract like GameFi.

1:17:21 You wanted me to talk about GameFi. Games essentially don’t have a transactional tokenomics so far. Some of them do and they’re great. But what are people doing with game tokenomics? I mean, and SocialFi, social media tokenomics, making loyalty structures like Gari, you know, the Chingari token, 60 or 30 million dollars raised. I mean, some multiple of 10, let’s take. What is the token doing today? Practically nothing. Why? Because the company has a parallel revenue model and then they wanted the Gari token to be a loyalty structure.

1:17:57 Right. Multiple instruments of value. So, yeah, I can talk about that for days. As if the token space wasn’t already complicated enough, you know that you have to know even more about it and that’s what you guys do well. Yeah.

1:18:11 Let me switch gears a little bit. You come originally from India, you spend time in America, you’re now in Dubai. Can you talk about these three regions? Why are you here, for example, what do you see coming out of India? What will the future be coming out of India? We haven’t seen a ton of successful projects coming out of India, but there’s more coming along.

1:18:34 And yeah, can you speak on those regions and are you staying here in Dubai? Before COVID, pre-COVID, I was living out of my bag, like literally. I was traveling, you know, 200 nights, 250 nights a year, living in hotels all around the world. Despite of having offices all around, I would not stop at a place. Why? Are you restless or you have companies everywhere?

1:19:03 Yeah, of course. I have companies everywhere. And yeah, for the last eight years, I haven’t been restless, thanks to meditation and the spiritual practices. Which we’ll get to, of course. But you were always on the road, basically, for COVID.

1:19:16 Yeah. And that very much relates to a part of your question about India. Because at that time, India was not this land of opportunities, though they always branded it to be. It was not like you wouldn’t meet the biggest entrepreneurs, the best opportunities in India. You can’t really at that time. Then two things happened parallelly.

1:19:41 Of course, let me complete. So I was roaming around to gather this value to check, to see what’s happening, talk to people, get new perspective, and give them what we have, or, you know, get the best deals. We had the capital, you know, better deals, we had the technology, better deals, better deployment. So I was doing all of that. Call it business development, if, I mean, for the right reasons. Then COVID happened. One, two, the political scenario in India took a U-turn. And rest is history. We all have seen, I mean, you mentioned it. I didn’t, right? India is the next, you know, the next big thing. Everybody’s looking at next 10 years of India. Even Indians are talking about investing in India for heaven’s sake, which is quite a magic. The whole world is moving towards India. So that’s one thing which we’ll cover later. But I have always, I’ve been a resident to Dubai for 11 years, 12 years now. And I’ve been coming here. During COVID, when there was like nowhere to go, and a bit of restlessness that you might quote here, got us back to Dubai because people were coming here. We had the export 2020. We had JITEX here with Future Blockchain Summit in 2020, which was incredible. I mean, what do you want? What else would you ask for, right? So, like, real people, humans engaging here. So we started coming here. I started coming here. My team started coming here. We started calling everyone from around the world to come and meet here.

1:21:27 And people were like, what really? Yeah, I’ll come. So we started having friends over. And October, November, December, I mean, until March, so October of 2020, until March of 2021, we were like building the ecosystem here without even calling it building the ecosystem. We were just meeting friends from all around the world, empowering events with, you know, our knowledge and access of blockchain. We partnered with some of the largest events of the region, you know, multi-specialty events. So Agora, which is an investor startup connect, we partnered with them. We created their second day as their blockchain day, their DeFi day back in those days.

1:22:10 We partnered with JITEX, which is the largest technology fest in the world. And with Future Blockchain Summit, we became the largest sponsors, the largest partners. We had a stage of our own, a pavilion of our own. And that’s when it actually started that, you know, that you saw this year also. And I realized, I either am meeting practically everyone from my network, from around the world here, or I can call them. And it’s not, and it’s almost similar to calling somebody from, you know, south of London to central London. Actually, I think the latter is tough. So these days, it’s easy to get people here. It’s so much more easier to get people here. So I said, you know what, let’s start actually making a base for the first time. I mean, post-COVID, because during COVID, we wrapped operations in a lot of places. And let’s find this new base here, because that cuts down on our movement, you know, massively. And this is just four hours from India. So it gives me the power to have my headquarters back in India, which is better labor, my native town, and then have our sales front-facing office in Dubai, and absolutely no reduction in the amount of connections you make, actually more now. So that’s about us and the world moving to Dubai, Dubai being the epicenter of connectivity, of engagement, of business, right now. Is it the center of crypto now? Is it the most important town in the world in crypto?

1:23:57 Not yet. Okay. What is? That’s hard. I couldn’t think of that.

1:24:00 It’s very hard. Yeah. You know what is? The place that is hosting the biggest event. So during October, Dubai is with Jitex and Future Blockchain Summit and all the events around it during, I think, token 2049, Singapore is the epicenter of crypto. During Paris Blockchain Week, Paris is during consensus, I think, Texas, Texas, yeah, state is Vegas, Austin, yeah, sorry, Austin, Austin is. So yeah, crypto is where crypto town assembles wherever there’s action.

1:24:47 Again, you can choose to clip this out of the video, but this also goes back to my statement in one of the videos from the stage, which is capital is a bitch. The last thing you have to worry about is for you to chase capital if you are a great project, right? It follows you. So crypto follows the best events. Everybody assembles there. Like I was in Davos around the World Economic Forum a few weeks ago, and everybody was there. Like it felt like a crypto town, like walking on the roads, every fifth person is nodding to you, waving to you, and it’s a crypto guy. So crypto is everywhere. Okay. But this town is becoming more and more filled with people in crypto, more and more. Yeah.

1:25:35 Natives. It’s still not the center. Maybe it doesn’t have the population size, but it’s becoming more and more. The biggest thing, yeah, I think the biggest friction is the weather for largely the Western audience, because the Western audience comes from a cold weather. I think, I still think it’s a bit of a stigma, not an entire reality, because I’m freezing inside always. So this place makes you freeze.

1:26:00 But I think that’s a bit of a stigma that’ll go away slowly. Second is the banking paradigm is still not supportive of crypto. We have a regulatory paradigm that supports, but there’s a big difference or there’s a big gap between the startup pre-regulated phase of a startup. That’s actually pretty big, by the way, and are regulated and hence banked. And there’s like no banking infrastructure in the middle. Right. For entities, yes, individuals are able to get their banking for sure, which is, you know. But for crypto entities, that’s still a friction here in Dubai. Big, big. Right. A UAE. A UAE. Okay. And it will be fixed, but it will still take time. No, it is being fixed. But look, this will, I think the government already knows this, but this is how regulators move. Right now, regulation is always a top down approach.

1:26:59 You can’t really go bottoms up. So right now they’re going with the biggest regulating, the biggest businesses, creating an infrastructure to bring them into the ethos, which is, of course, a very tough job. And they’re doing incredibly well with that, which means the smaller ones don’t have everything sorted out for them. So I think slowly it will, you know, come down to regulating smaller businesses as well. Vara is doing an incredible job with scale, and it’ll happen soon. Okay. Talk to me about meditation, because when I bump into everybody in this town and I mention your name, they all talk about your meditation. You’re the meditation guru. Go to your meditation practices. They go to India with you. I think you invited me to India as well. I haven’t taken you up on it. But talk to me about meditation. Why is it a big part of your life? Why do you also spend so much of your time teaching it to others? Because it seems to be an important thing for you. I hate to say, but I’ll have to correct you at many, many points here. I’m not a guru. That’s how I learned. I’m not a guru. Guru in the meditation and spiritual world is the ultimate authority or the ultimate figure. A guru is an enlightened master that has attained the pinnacle of spirituality in the body form, and of course, will evolve beyond. So I’m not a guru. I’m just a small practitioner of that. Why did I start?

1:28:31 I don’t know about others, but I was a miserable human being, like by all means, except money and material success internally, like I was angry, I was whatnot. So when you were that bad, a small change actually is visible to you in the first shot. So when I was exposed to meditation,

1:28:57 The change I witnessed in me in the first five days of practice in the ashram in India was phenomenal. And one thing that came out loud from inside is that why would you live like the way you were living if you can live like this? Like a state of absolute bliss. I mean, of course, it’s a journey and depends on how much do you dedicate yourself to that. But I mean, if you can be happy and create, why would you choose to be miserable?

1:29:32 Was the first question and then the answer also dawned upon, or let’s say as a part of the practice is because we have actually practiced being miserable for all our age, and not just this life if you believe in past lives. I mean, right now I’ll have to stop at beliefs. But how can a practice that long really move away from you? The only answer is practicing otherwise. Now practicing otherwise is a practice while the other while the first one is natural.

1:30:05 So being miserable, being greedy, being, you know, torturous to others, being whatever, you know, oppressor, suppressive, all the great words that we have is our practice. We want to own our relationships. We want to own our material. We want to own our share in the market, in the world, mark our name, whatever. All of these are great things, but the anxiety behind achieving it is the part that makes you miserable. Now it sounds like a great statement and, you know, wise and whatnot, but just realizing this wouldn’t take you to this. It’s like realizing the fact that the cars can take you from Dubai to Abu Dhabi. You figure out, okay, I sit in the car like this. I hold the steering and I’ll drive. Can you? Can you move out of the parking lot? Sorry.

1:31:09 So it only comes with practice. So knowing that it works is not enough. You have to put it into practice because then there’s a, there’s a funny way my master puts it, right? He says, you can come back, come to me with questions. I’ll give you the answers with a condition. You can’t question my answer on why is it so? Because I am not the creator. I’m just a guy who has figured out the maths or the science behind something. Like why is there a gravitational force to an object? I mean, why? Because that guy had something in mind, you know, who created it. So there’s a structure to the cosmos. We are just like practically nothing in the larger span of nothingness, right? And as that, we really are not in a position to question anything. All we can do is abide and go by it. So to abide, we have to understand. And understanding the structure is like this. We have a body, we have a brain, we have a mind, we have a conscious behind that. At least that’s still where Elon agrees, a public testament.

1:32:33 And then there’s something called a subconscious and then beyond, right? We know this structure, we can’t usually shouldn’t challenge it or take that as a fact. So what happens now is your body and your brain, the place that it came from goes through the mind and its current construct. What is its current construct? A backup of your subconscious and your conscious.

1:33:00 And all of that flows through your mind into your body. How did how was this formed? The brain was formed all the way, you know, in the first nine months, and then beyond the mind was formed from your birth till date. And in between, a lot of things kept going below and settled in subconscious. Do you expect one realization? And boom, the entire construct of the cosmos will fall flat at your face or, you know, kneel down at you, bow down at you. Not really.

1:33:36 The way it took you years and years of practice to get to this state, you can be a great person, you can be a miserable person. I’m not actually coding a person on this. But if you want to be better, this entire construct has to be changed. And that will only change with the amount of work you do on it. And that’s exactly meditation. Number one, two, I am not even although I’m a qualified Acharya and trainer, but I don’t practice that my personal reasons. But as whatever I do is not much of teaching education, teaching meditation, what I do is introducing meditation, because we have a bigger problem at play. From the genesis of meditation, which was the Shiva Sutra, which is practically 10,000 years old, to Patanjali Yog Sutra, which is the current Bible shape and form of yoga, anything that comes from about yoga comes from that book. It can be breathing, it can be postures, it can be cartlessness, it can be mindfulness, it can be beyond. I have only taken a small responsibility, because I’m fairly not that great a guy.

1:34:55 And for that, what I do is, in my meditation sessions, and we have a big WhatsApp group, a lot of people, although we don’t promote networking, but we have quite some accomplished people there. And what I do is essentially call them on weekends to sit, talk, and experientially walk them through those two scriptures, the Bibles of meditation, through experience. And through that, I tell them, look, this is how the book goes. This is where you start sitting, which is posture, asan. Now, there’s a whole world of asan that calls itself yoga, and which is just like 10% of the whole yoga, like the entire practice is yoga, people have started picking up small portions and calling it yoga, they’re right, the wheel of the car is still the car, the steering wheel of the car is still the car, the seat of the car is still the car. But is it really a car? With just one component missing, is it really a car? Will it work? Not really. So what people have done is they’ve picked up small portions, or pieces from the larger practice of yoga, and started calling it yoga, they’re not wrong, but they’re also not entirely right. I’ve taken the tiny job of introducing this to the world, I mean, into my tiny little world, largely crypto and finance, but everybody’s welcome, like it’s not a crypto finance thing that we do. So yeah, I quickly give them glimpses. And then say, whenever next time, you’re attending a meditation course, or a meditation gig, or something on the name of

1:36:37 Meditation or yoga. First of all, information is the power. So you know where you stand in the longer structure, right? I can always, I can be wrong in correcting you at times, you know, I can say this is not red, this is green. In an unlikely scenario where I’m highly convincing, you might agree this is green. But what happens if I give you the entire color spectrum?

1:37:06 My first problem is that I have to put a name, the right name, to the entire spectrum. And then there’s like, then there’s no red and green, like, then you know everything. And then you it’s your job to plot green and red, wherever they are, respectively. This is what I’ve taken as a job. As a practitioner, I think I’ve seen more people influenced by bad meditation, and their dedication cracks my heart, like they’re doing four hours of meditation, three hours of meditation dedicated their life to it. They do get relaxed, of course, a little bit of practice, you know, one sip of coffee is still better than no coffee, but a cup is always better. Right? So it’s not that the practice they’re doing is not working for them. It certainly is. And meditation is such a powerful thing that it will influence you at every degree of activity that you do or engage with it.

1:38:04 But what happens is people engage with just the preliminary parts, get the relaxation, and they think that’s everything. That’s pretty much the same Michelangelo effect. They’re happy being a rock, not able to identify the David in them. So so yeah, that’s what we do. You’re more than welcome to join us here. For those who find this engaging and something that they want for themselves, I guide them to a place of practice. I guide them to a place where they can actually do it for five days, really meet a guru, really meet, dedicate a practice, a format that they can replicate at home. With me, the best they can achieve is they get to know meditation end to end, probably. And, and they can start the basic practice of being happy, blissful, calm, and productive in their day to day life. Wow. And that’s when you go to India, that’s when you take people. After that, you can go to India.

1:39:08 Or is that in the five days? Is that when you go to India? And that’s where you learn all the nuances of meditation. And a lot of people these days are probably only taking a tiny little part, and they might be doing it to death, but it pains you because they could be doing so much. It can be so much. It’s like going to the gym and only knowing how to use one machine. And they’re in the corner using that one machine for four hours, and you’re thinking, wow, look at the wealth. Yeah, look at my arms. Look at all the things you couldn’t even reach. And then a straight, you know, body like me in between. It’s also, I call it like learning a language. You start learning French and you’re like, oh my God, this is so weird. And then you stick to just the the alphabets, the characters, and you just keep practicing the characters all your life, never actually getting into the language and the beauty of it. I actually wouldn’t want to use the French because I’m not very acquainted. I want to use the two languages, Arabic and Sanskrit. You start learning Arabic and the poetry behind it and the expression. Like, sorry, you start to learn Arabic and you say, oh, done. I love Arabic. I can communicate. It’s so amazing. But that’s not Arabic. The poetry is the expressions are like a unique word for an expression that has never been expressed in any other language in less than 200 words in one word. That’s language. That’s a

1:40:21 Beauty. That’s what you live with. This is exactly and when somebody so like this is one of my problems and pains, I want people to know poetry. I just the world would be such a beautiful place if people would know poetry and not in just one language. The very sophisticated languages of the world, Arabic, Sanskrit, Hindi, at least the ones I know. I mean, I’m talking about them. I’ve seen pretty good poetry in English, but somehow I love the Arabic and others. And those who know all these languages also love it. So I have a little bit of validation on the top. That’s the word here, which is probably very unique to the region and to Arabic for sure. So I was having flashbacks when you were talking about your meditation experiences, because in 2010 in London, I signed up and paid for a class in Transcendental Meditation. And people don’t remember, but at the time there were no apps, there were no YouTube videos. There was no way to really access 2010. And I was on YouTube and I remember there was nothing on there. And so I went to a class and I spend in my disbelief because I thought it was kind of silly. And there was an old videotape of the Maharaja that was stuck in the VCR and I had to go to a ceremony and bring a piece of fruit. And my logical man mind thought this was insane, but I paid like a thousand pounds for this class. So I made sure I went and did it. That’s called pay price to action, anybody in business. And I went through it

1:41:51 And got off a kid you not. Literally, I think four weeks later, I woke up one morning and I realized how miserable I was. I could finally see how miserable I was. I was in the city, working in finance, making ridiculous amounts of money. I had this beautiful flat. And then I saw, I was drinking myself to death, no friends, no family. And I was just a mess. Sounds a little bit like you. And I literally, family and friends. I was drinking like crazy, but family and friends.

1:42:19 I didn’t have any of that. And I think two weeks later, I went and resigned my position in the city, just walked away. And nine months later, this show was born. So this show was born from a meditation session. Congratulations. Yeah. And it’s been incredible since. And I’ve kept the practice up, track of doing more with it, but I literally listened to it. I couldn’t see. Yeah. There’s a very important point you made here. And that’s, I think that has been the biggest gap of the Indian yoga, you know, the very foundation of meditation and the Western world, because the yoga only talks about happiness bliss, which is okay. I mean, it’s okay. Not everybody is miserable. I mean, people in villages, people having a simple life are not that bad, by the way. And even if they’re not, even if they’re bad, they don’t know about it. You are heavily exposed to the world. You’ve seen great people. I mean, you see a video from Ray Dalio and a billionaire talks with an absolute calm on his face and a brilliant smile. You know, he has something you don’t write and others don’t. So that exposure is important. But, but the guy in the corner of office that he has been for 20 years actually doesn’t even know there’s something like that.

1:43:34 So the reason you were exposed is an exceptional example, but a lot of people don’t even know that bliss exists. So in fact, but the important point, yeah, this story of, so not everybody’s pursuing happiness, they think they’re happy again, the same Michelangelo effect, the rock is happy in itself. But productivity, decisions and amplification of those decisions into financial matters, which is the perceived happiness for practically everybody is something that the Indian yoga, the yoga misses out to populate, to market. And, and, and, and the beauty of this conversation is that it came from you, not from me, right? You said you started meditating, you had clarity in your head, you started developing clarity in your head, made you make a pivotal decision of your life, which has made you a better person, a better entrepreneur, a more successful individual, but at the same time, be a happier, more fit mentally and physical person. I mean, pinnacle of a human being, or on the same journey, at least, you know, this is not advertised yet. And this is, this is something that has to go out.

1:45:02 As a cultural Indian and a yoga practitioner for 10 years, it also doesn’t come naturally to me. That’s why when I gave my long pitch, I didn’t even talk about productivity, it doesn’t come naturally to me. But talk to me about it. In between my meditation pursuit, when I was actually living 20 days of a month in the ashram, when I was meditating nine hours a day, which actually means your 24 hours are meditation, right? I, I, the whole crypto over next journey went from a $1.3 million cash amount in investing, I mean, in crypto, to 2018, $800 million AUM. What do you think it is? It’s just right actions, right decisions.

1:45:51 This was when we were building the infrastructure, just the right decision. I abandoned my mining, like the entire mining operation, I never looked back. I think I abandoned of $30 million worth of cards and whatever. And I said, guys, you take it over, I don’t have time. That kind of decision, that kind of clarity, by the way, I don’t have it now. It is a byproduct of that degree of meditation, not a byproduct of this degree of meditation. Right? So, and in that meantime, I ended up assembling this trading team, I said, guys, I’ll come to us, I’ll, I’ll participate in the liquidation of these cards and, and monitor tiny, you know, pennies here and there, probably would save a couple of millions, you know what, here, we are setting up the future.

1:46:37 So I’ll actually dedicate that time on the hedge fund, which is, which is a better financial, better, more aggressive financial instrument than a mining ops. So my point is, these, this decision making, these decisions are the one that will make you a better person by all means that I said, and that comes from meditation, right? Even very intelligent financial decisions, market decisions come from that deep meditation, which gets you really down to who you are. And then it all is clear, right? I always say, I think everyone knows exactly what they need to do with their lives. The problem is, there’s so much noise out there that you can’t connect your head to your heart. And when I spend a lot of time meditating, I find that everything flows, right? Yeah, just in maybe not any decisions, you just know what you’re doing to the outside world. When they have to happen, the calmness is the, is the playground of the right decision making. What we don’t have is that calm playing field. How would you know you have a great player somewhere in the team unless you get them to bat, right? What we do in our life is we don’t even get the best decision to come and bat and observe them. We don’t even have the space and scope to observe them, right? You can still shoot eight rockets in the space and not collect the right data and still be a massive failure.

1:48:01 The reason SpaceX is a massive success is because they were collecting the right data. Right. Right. Yeah. Gaurav, I could talk to you all day, but I want to get your final thoughts.

1:48:11 First of all, if somebody has been really, if somebody has been inspired or become curious by something you said today, how can they learn more about some of the things you talked about, you TD phi, et cetera, including if they want to be incubated by you and otherwise final thoughts on the market on, on everything. Okay. Sum up, right? Crypto is in a very, very beautiful spot in the, in the landscape of the world right now. It’s a industry that deals with tech and innovation, but also has a financial exposure and it’s not just an exposure.

1:49:00 It is, it is finance redefined itself. So it’s a very, very powerful place to be because it’s a place of money. The journey from San Francisco to New York, the journey from around the world to London, the journey from Asia to Dubai, which is the journey of innovation and inception, innovation, development, and financial exposure is in crypto. And if you, if you see that, put it at the, as the foundation of what we are planning to do. The very first step is what are the chances of success of this financial instrument of basically my product and organization, which is represented by a financial instrument token. This subset of the publicly traded market or capital market is on the receiving side. It’s a low potential market, which is receiving potential from others. ETF is one instrument. Trading is another instrument. Capital inflow investments in startups is another instrument. All the instruments of the outer financial world are feeding into this monster. So you are on the receiving end, which means a low potential market. I mean, low potential market is a wrong word. Sorry, sorry. It’s a financial term. Let me be cautious. It is a market which is on the receiving end.

1:50:33 Money from the outer world is coming to this market, which means this market has only one way for now, at least, which is upwards. And that’s why we have all these, we call them Dubai boys, with the Lamborghinis in their first month of crypto and Bugatti’s in their third month of crypto. No one can actually lose. It’s very, very tough to lose here because there’s money coming from outside. You’re not really trading. You’re only receiving capital. So I’ll sum this quickly. So it’s very, very hard to fail. Amazingly well-placed in terms of the foundation, foundation on the top of the receiving end. And then finally, you’re also redefining the very foundation of value for once. It is non-inflatable. It is finite supply, which is basically the same thing, but not. It is immutable. It is decentralized and not controlled by intents of a single individual. It is a future. So, and then a decade or 12 years, and now I’m going back to the financial markets. 12 years is the usual terms of large funds, venture funds. We all know that, you know, seven years, 10 years extendable to 10 years, 14 years. We have had our 10 years, like they say, right? You’ve got your 10 years to build.

1:52:05 That’s a common saying in the production world, in the startup world. So you’ve given it your 10 years. Crypto has now got its 10 years. Bitcoin, I mean, crypto in token developments, Ethereum tokenization is also getting to its 10 years. This 10 years plotted on the macro financial markets, as we discussed, massive political year, you know, great dip observed in the past few years, only weighs upwards for at least a while, backed by these these phenomenas. If you are in crypto, it is your once in a lifetime opportunity, 2024, to place yourself, no matter what happens in 2026, if it’s a great collapse. I mean, that’s a part of your planning.

1:52:58 If you have an advisor that at least is talking about the 2026 collapse or the 2027 collapse, I mean, make treasury, make inventory. Haven’t companies survived through multiple bear markets? Those are the only ones that you know today. Jack Ma has a statement that I keep very close to my heart. He says, sometimes success is the ability to live because the rest will just die.

1:53:24 Right. So the ability to survive, the ability to be bare minimum, you know, maybe Hibernate live. So what’s the point of having great financial advisors if they can’t advise you against a stupid bear market because you’ll have many in your next 10, 20, 30 years? Right. So I think the collapse is not something to worry about. It’s something to plan about, have those people who have the kind of financial capabilities to plan, not just this, but many such macro market implications or real world implications today in the structure of your tokens, in the structure of your company, and then create as much of the future as they can.

1:54:10 Like you said, man plans, God laughs, but still God gives you the opportunity and the capability to at least plan. I think that is God’s way of telling you that I’ve given you a capability that is your share of freedom. I will allow you to execute your plan because that’s your share of freedom. So it’s not like God’s laughing and always destroying your plans. God is enabling your plans based on your capability and your admins and your dedication and your perseverance. So I think, I think that’s how I would sum it up for a startup.

1:54:43 And that’s what we are addressing today. And that’s my passion. And that’s what I’m here to do. 2024 is the year. It is. All right. I got chills when you were saying that. Yeah.

1:54:53 So, God, thank you so much for sitting down. Thank you for opening up your brain. I think you’ve got a lot of people thinking deeply about how they need to structure their company. And I appreciate it. I think you’ve done the infrastructure you’ve built. And, you know, like you said, you’ve been huge in the JITEX and in all the conferences here, I mean, the huge part of this scene and promoting so many companies. So thanks for the start. I will take you up on the meditation offer because I feel like I’m over in the corner of the gym using one of the machines and I can do more. And I agree with you. It’s an incredible practice that if people can take it in, it’ll literally change their life and make them allow them to tap into great, great knowledge that’s inside of them, but they just, they never get.

1:55:35 We’ll be better as a human race. That’s the bottom line. Yeah. Right. Imagine the top government officer, the top company leader, the top people of the world practicing four hours meditation, being the calmest, most polite, most kind people. The world would be a beautiful place. I know. I think they used to call it the Maharizha effect.

1:55:54 If 1% of the people meditated, the world would be a completely different place. Yeah. And everybody else would then feel calmer and it would just kind of… Osha said, the day this world will have 10,000 enlightened people, it’ll be heaven here. Right. That’s a very similar thing. I like to have a small percentage. All right, let’s make that happen. Thank you. Thank you for sitting down with me.

1:56:14 Thank you for having me. It was an incredible conversation. Somebody told me this year in Davos, when I started my talk, I said, this talk is about Anthony speaking and me speaking less. And then when we finished the 45 minutes conversation, everybody started coming and congratulating me. And I was like, guys, like quite literally and honestly, for the first three people, I said, are you mocking me? Like, I didn’t even say a thing. And he’s like, I think they were like, no, you have no idea. Then probably you were right that you don’t know how to moderate because it was your modulation that brought the best out of the speaker. And I can feel it today. If I had done anything good, it’s because of the way you’ve brought it out for me. Sometimes my job is to shut up and listen.

1:56:59 Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Let’s do this sometime. And thank you to Web3 TV. We’ll see you next time on London Real.