Mark Yusko - Bitcoin, Inflation & Why Blockchain & DeFi Are The Greatest Wealth Creation Opportunity Of Our Lifetime

Full transcript: Mark Yusko on London Real

3:14 This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mark Yusko, the investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. You are the founder, CEO, and chief investment officer of Morgan Creek Capital Management, the renowned investment firm managing $2 billion in assets. You have over three decades of experience in institutional investing and follow the endowment model as a core philosophy. You believe the transition to the blockchain standard is the biggest investment opportunity of a generation and your expertise and opinion are regularly featured on networks like CNBC, Bloomberg, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

3:47 You have said that the greatest wealth is created by being an early investor in innovation and that a crypto summer could begin as early as the second quarter with the Bitcoin having propelling its price beyond $100,000. Mark, welcome to London Real. No, thanks for having me. Really excited about the conversation today. I appreciate you wearing the Bitcoin orange scarf.

4:10 I like it. I guess, I guess, pocket square, not scarf. Yeah, yeah, pocket square, that’s good. You saw it, you looked into that. Nobody else in London would have noticed the Bitcoinality of that.

4:21 So look, I appreciate that. Can’t wait to jump in and talk about all these things. You know, you do have that tweet pinned to your profile for the last five years, saying that the greatest wealth is created by being an early investor in innovation, but the end of that, you say you’ll be mocked, ridiculed, and criticized for your non-consensus actions, and then you say it’s absolutely worth it. Maybe we start there, because you have a classic way of looking at investing, you’ve worked for some very classic, seemingly lower risk institutions, and yet your core philosophy is kind of being the one that goes against the grain.

4:58 Can you speak on that, Mark? So, look, it’s really interesting. If you think about what most of us think of as investments, stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, right? It’s where you grew up, it’s where I grew up. We all grew up in some way, shape or form.

5:14 But I will argue that none of those exist in the absence of innovation. I actually believe innovation is an asset class that precedes stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, right? You have to create the new companies, the new ideas, the new inventions. And so I had this upon moment, you know, a long time ago, 1996. So I was working at my alma mater at Notre Dame and we had made a bunch of investments in venture capital and this little company that no one had heard of at the time called Sequoia, right?

5:51 Now, household name and venture capital had made a little investment in a company and no one had ever heard of called Google. And our little investment in Sequoia’s little fund, about half a million dollars, grew to about 200 million, right? I would say that there should be a quad. No, today I’m called the Google quad. And I had this aha moment that investing in that infrastructure, in this innovative idea was how you make great fortunes.

6:28 And I’ve been doing that, you know, the rest of my career. Now, what’s funny about that is at the time our board was like, no, that’s a dumb idea. It’s a dumb name. Like now it’s a verb, right? You Google it.

6:41 And at the time it seemed like a dumb idea. There were 20 search engines. Why did we need another one? Well, they weren’t a search engine. they innovated a better way to process information.

6:54 And most people have no idea that there are 1.7 billion-ish websites in the world. Half of them are owned by Google. So what are you talking about? Like, well, here’s the way it works. When you type a question into the search bar at Google, it goes to a website where all the information addressing that question, that question has probably already been asked. That’s why it anticipates what you’re typing.

7:22 And it has a website that has all that information, so they don’t have to search the whole internet for the answer. They have it nicely indexed and all those other things. Now, if you happen to ask a new question, then they create another website with that information. And it was that simple innovation that’s led to trillions of dollars of value and fundamentally changed the way we all think about searching for information, processing information. And so it’s a long winded way of saying the innovation was what drove the wealth creation which drove the investment opportunity in the stock of the company, the bonds of the company and we denominated it in some currency and may interact with commodity markets.

8:07 You said innovation is even an asset class in itself. A lot of people would have a hard time with that it seems like such an intangible. How do you look at it like that? Well, again, great question. So, I look at it like if I want to invest in stocks, it’s pretty easy, right? I can buy an ETF, I can buy a mutual fund, I can actually buy the stock, you know, your old haunt, I could buy a derivative that, you know, derives its value from that underlying security. Okay, that’s fine. But what I really want to do is I want to invest in the businesses that are being formed around these new ideas. Well, I do that through venture capital. Well, ultimately, what is venture capital? Well, I’ll argue it is that asset class that is innovation because yes, you take capital, cash, and you invest it in a common stock, a preferred stock, sometimes a convertible bond. So those securities then get created, but because they’re private, they don’t trade on an exchange and they’re really hard to dispose of.

9:25 Now they are accreting value for the good ideas and destroying value if it’s a bad idea, But ultimately, I will argue that that venture capital allocation or growth equity allocation is that asset class. So, it’s a little bit of a nuance, but that’s the way I’d just like to think about it. Yeah, it’s a really interesting way of looking at it. And so, when you started seeing blockchain, for you, it was just a big light bulb. And you said, this is amazing.

9:53 And I wish I was that smart. No, no, no. I wish it would have been a fast light bulb. but I’d be a lot wealthier. So I joke, and it’s actually not a joke, because it’s true, I was handed Bitcoin and blockchain technology on a silver platter the same month as the Winklevoss twins, May 2013.

10:16 Problem was I was not partying with Charlie Shram and Ibiza. I was with my friend Dan Morehead, who was telling me that after 10 years working together where we had funded his hedge fund, this macro hedge fund, that he was shutting down the hedge fund. He was going to send all the money back and he was going to spend the rest of his career focused on blockchain and Bitcoin. And look, in 2013, I was not running drugs on Silk Road. I was not a cryptography student.

10:46 When he said the word Bitcoin, I’m like, yeah, I’ve heard of it, but whatever. When he said blockchain and infrastructure, Like I’m in venture capital, innovation is an asset class, he explained the whole idea that it’s a ledger. I got that. Now, I should have got Bitcoin, but I didn’t. And so I was a traditional investor.

11:15 And Bitcoin was kind of this weird thing that bunch of nerds and geeks were playing with their magic internet money. And I talk about that, that period 2009 to kind of 15 was the first they ignore you phase bunch of nerds and geeks playing through magic internet or whatever. And, but I was intrigued and my friend who I respect and admire, I was going down this path and he went from managing a billion dollars, Brian, to 17 million people thought he was crazy.

11:52 They gave him $17 million to launch his blockchain fund and only about a couple hundred thousand in his Bitcoin fund. And I put money in the blockchain fund, which is up, I don’t know, 12, 15 times. That’s great. But I should have put money in the Bitcoin funds up 350 times. But that’s no story.

12:09 I didn’t. But nine months later, first quarter, 2014, I used to write these long letters to my clients. I mean, they were long, like 40 pages, like my longest was 87 pages. And everybody said, why do you write so much? No one’s going to read that.

12:25 I’m like, it’s not for them. It’s for me. If I can’t read what I wrote, how do I know what I think? So the process of writing it helped me think about markets. And people wanted to read it great.

12:35 But I wrote one paragraph in 2014 that said Bitcoin was an interesting, special situation. I got hate. I mean, Brian, people said they would fire me. They said, you’re an idiot. Don’t talk about this stuff.

12:49 Go back and do your job, stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities. Wow. Okay, and the price was 500 bucks. This was March. By September, it was 178.

13:00 Like, they were right. Six weeks later, 1,000 bucks. Like, no, there’s something here. I talked to my friend, Dan. I started to really understand what this was and its triple entry accounting, which is the real innovation.

13:14 Make a long story short. My son graduated from college in 2015, and he’s always wanted to live in San Francisco. Since he was a little kid, he’s wanted to move from Chapel Hill to San Francisco. It’s where all the tech is. And I said, all right, go talk to Dan.

13:29 He’ll get you a job at Coinbase. It’ll be great. So he goes out, talks to Coinbase. He’s like, I don’t know, dad. Maybe it’s gonna be a big deal, but I’m gonna go with KPMG.

13:40 It’s safe, gets me to San Francisco, and I’m like, you’re gonna hate it, Which he did, he quit after nine months and he did hate it. And when Coinbase went public, he called me up and said, all right, fine dad, you were right. Should’ve gone to Coinbase, but you’re not as smart as you think you are. I’m like, oh, do tell, I told you to go to work at Coinbase. Like, yeah, but you didn’t lever up the house and put all on Bitcoin.

14:01 Like you, that is fact. And so in 16, I finally convinced clients to get over the fear, we finally embraced it, but we didn’t go all in. you know, we started out, but by then I had that aha moment. So it took me almost four years to have the light bulb moment. And I actually couldn’t make this up.

14:26 I was in an RV, again, with my son and my rest of my family, in Eureka, California, right? And I had the aha moment, literally the Eureka moment, where I realized that blockchain technology is simply an operating system. And there’ve been lots of operating systems, right? Mainframes ran on COBOL and FORTRAN, mini computers ran on Spark. The personal computers run on DOS or Windows.

14:58 The internet runs on TCP IP, which you and I are using right now. The MobileNet runs on iOS and Android. And the TruthNet, which is the internet of value, will run on blockchains. And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. And that’s why I spent most of the last five years focused in the space.

15:19 Truth nets. What do you mean by that? Ah, great. So if you think about what the internet did, let’s back up even further. So for hundreds of years, actually probably thousands of years, the church had a monopoly on information.

15:38 Right? People couldn’t read and write for Bionarge and there weren’t printed textbooks and you went to church and they told you as the elders kind of what to think, how to think, they reported the news and they controlled information. Gutenberg came along with the printing press, busted that monopoly wide open. You could now print things, you could disseminate, still had to teach people to read and write, but busted the monopoly. So the monopoly shifted to the state.

16:11 State owned media or state influenced media controlled the narrative. But then the internet busted that wide open because the internet made information bi-directional for the first time. In the old days, you and I wanted to invest in Argentina and we were concerned about the election. What did we do? waited for someone in New York to fly a reporter down to BA, write a story, send it back, the editor thinks about it, two days later, it’s on the third page of the New York Times, maybe we read it.

16:45 Today, what do I do? I go on the internet, I go on Twitter, I go to a Periscope, and I see people lined up for days in the rain, waiting to vote, chanting this guy’s name, he’s gonna win. So, information became bi-directional. And what did that do? Well, it busted the monopoly of media and commerce.

17:11 So, ABC, NBC, CBS, all their market cap went to Netflix. All the mom and pop stores, their market cap went to Amazon. Well, what does blockchain do? Well, blockchain busts the monopoly of finance. So, for 800 years, the finance companies have had a monopoly on trust.

17:37 In the old days, I lent you money, literally. I lent you money. Okay. Here’s a hundred bucks. You come back a year later to pay me 110.

17:45 I had written down in my ledger, not 100, but I’m an unscrupulous guy. I wrote down 200. I broke the trust. You trusted and I wrote down 100, single entry accounting. So, 800 years ago, the Medici’s, the benevolent Medici’s came along and said, all right, Brian, you keep a ledger, Mark, you keep a ledger.

18:06 And we, the benevolent Medici’s, for a small fee, will make sure that the ledgers match. So that Mark wrote down a hundred, Brian wrote down a hundred. Ah, but I could pay the Medici’s a little less, something, something. And I write down 200 and they’re like, oh, Brian, Mark’s ledger’s right. You owe him 200.

18:24 So we had to trust that these third parties, these banks, were doing the right thing. And for 800 years, they’ve had a great run. And they make lots of money being the trusted third parties between the exchange of value. So like, if I wanted to send you money, you have to have a bank account, I have to have a bank account, and they charge us a fee. You trust that my money is safe in the bank, that I send it to you, that they actually send it to you and that you get it.

18:56 That’s all trust. Well, what blockchain technology does is it goes from dual entry accounting to triple entry accounting. Now you have a ledger, I have a ledger, but there’s this third ledger that exists in an encrypted form, permanently, immutably. We don’t need to trust anybody. We have truth, right?

19:22 Mark has a Bitcoin. It’s on the ledger. Mark sends it to Brian. It’s on the ledger. Truth.

19:29 We’re replacing trust with truth. The internet, the mobile net, the truth net. And how does that change humanity? Because that’s what gets fascinating. You’d sound like it.

19:44 Oh, it’s just an accounting system. It’s just a ledger here over there. It’s a little book or a thing. but it actually changes the way we interact with each other as humans in a massive way. In a massive way.

19:55 And again, you know, it’s funny. Someone said, you know, what’s the key to a great interviewer or a great podcast or whatever? And people say, oh, you know, you invite good guests and you let them talk. Like, nope, nope, that’s not it. What makes a great interviewer podcast is asking great questions, doing research, preparing, No one, no one, the topic asking good questions, but then listening to the answer and asking better follow-up questions, which is exactly what you just did that, that better follow-up question is okay.

20:29 Yeah, you described this thing. It’s, it’s interesting tech. That’s fine, but wait a minute. This fundamentally changes how humanity interacts. That’s a big statement.

20:40 That’s a big question, but it’s exactly right. And the insight is this. If we think about how we have interacted, okay, for the last 800 odd years, we all have this relationship to things that we think we own, right? So we have things of value, but do we? We’re actually experiencing today, there are bank runs happening in the United States and all over.

21:11 Why? Because people are realizing that, wait, when you put your, your money in the bank, it’s no longer your money. It’s the bank’s money. And you have an IOU that most of the time is money good unless you woke up in Cyprus in 2012 and they took three quarters of it to, you know, plug the hole. Or this morning at Silicon Valley bank, maybe it’s not, but it’ll all be there because the you’ll step in or JP Morgan will step in, probably announced they’re going to buy them on Sunday.

21:46 And all of that is to say we have this trust relationship with these bigger institutions and they verify who we are, KYC, AML, all of this stuff. And they are the gating agent So that you and I can transact well with blockchain We don’t need them. In fact, you don’t even have to know who I am Actually physically personally we can interact in what’s called a zero knowledge proof way Where the ledger can say yeah, this person over here has this asset. He wants to transfer it to that person They don’t actually have to know each other They can transact in the digital space in the encrypted protected world And we have to pay anybody anything over here So it allows us to break the shackles and I use that term intentionally because it connotes slavery, right?

22:51 You think about if you’re a salaried employee in Fiat in fiat currency Fiat Has this negative thing called inflation? Well, why is that negative? Well, what it does is it steals your wealth. What do you mean? That’s not what inflation is. That’s exactly what it is. It’s a devaluation of that currency over time. So if you’re paid in fiat and the government devalues it through inflation, you have less wealth. Where does that wealth go? It goes to the top of the pyramid.

23:27 So wait a second. So now I can take my money and instead of giving it to these institutions, who can devalue it at will, I can move it into this secure storage vault that doesn’t have an inflationary bias and it can preserve value, that seems superior. And I can exchange it with people, that seems superior. But here’s the cool part. If I have an asset and it devalues every day, what am I incentive to do?

24:02 I’m going to send you to spend it today because it might be worth less tomorrow. If I have an asset that doesn’t devalue, I don’t have to spend today. I can actually be more creative. I can think about the future. I can think about what can I contribute to society?

24:19 And I actually believe, and this is a big thing, actually Jimmy Song, you should have Jimmy Song on here sometime. He makes a much more eloquent case about this, but Jimmy is, oh, so there’s a perfect. So I mean, Jimmy talks about this in that you’re unleashing incredible creative potential, which look, humanity moves forward because of human creativity, human ingenuity, innovation, that and it all kind of wraps back to this idea that innovation comes from that, that I think innate desire for us to make the world better, to make our relationships better, to be productive members of society as opposed to death slaves.

25:07 It’s fascinating because, and you could argue that’s obviously marked the upward surge in civilization and you could look at the internet as a tool that all of a sudden empowered all these writers and filmmakers and all this amazing innovation that we’ve seen countless examples of. Yes, not to get political here, but you could compare communism to capitalism and say, well, look at all these people that came up with innovations because they were awarded. I guess you’ll take it a step further and say, this capitalism, this free market that you thought you were in, when you’re paying a salary on a fiat currency that’s inflated, maybe it isn’t as encouraging innovation as it could be.

25:45 Ah, so look, capitalism is awesome, right? Ferris Bueller said it best, right? Isms are not a good thing, right? Basically isms are just aren’t, except capitalism. Capitalism is good.

25:59 Communism, socialism, you know, feudalism. Isms are bad, but you know, fascism, I think you’re supposed to be studying European fascism that day instead of going out into Chicago, but capitalism is good. Cronyism, bad. What’s the difference? Well, cronyism is what happens when capitalism concentrates power at the top through dictatorship and then devalues the currency super fast.

26:29 Argentina, Venezuela, you know, Zimbabwe, we’ve got lots of examples around the world. It’s actually happening in the West today. They’re kind of following this dictator playbook, more cronyism, less capitalism, more bribery, or we’ll call it lobbying to cleanse it, Still bribery, still corruption. But at the end of the day, what all of this does is it links those incentives to the wrong place. When you concentrate power at the top in cronyism, you concentrate all the power at the top.

27:08 Now, communism does the opposite, right? It says, well, everyone should share equally. Well, then there’s no incentive to create. And, you know, communism fails when you run out of other people’s money, ha, ha, ha. But capitalism, true capitalism, incense every participant to contribute the most.

27:28 And that’s why, as we’ve seen this move to Web 3 in the creator economy, you think the internet was amazing, which it was. Web 3, more amazing, because here’s the thing, Web 1 and Web 2, who got rich? So this guy, Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet. Everybody says, well, who’s Tim Berners-Lee? Tim Berners-Lee, pretty amazing guy.

27:50 I think he, did he get knighted? Yeah. He’s English. Yeah. Got knighted.

27:56 I mean, amazing guy. And he invented dinner. What did he do? Well, there was this guy, Vint Cerf, who wrote a protocol called TCPIP. And it was just one of 80 different protocols.

28:08 And in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee wrote 9,600 lines of code which converted the first or created the first web page. Now, like I said, there’s 1.7 billion of them. And so he invented the internet. Well, why is he not a rich guy? Well, he’s doing fine.

28:26 And the thing I love, he took that 9,500 lines of code, turned it into an NFT and sold on Sotheby’s for like 12 million bucks, which I think is awesome. I wish I could have bought it. But the cool thing is, the sad thing is, well, who got rich? Zuck. Well, how did Zuck get rich?

28:44 We stole an idea from the Winklevoss twins and he created a business where he created an app that uses TCP, IP every single day, gathers the data of all the customers, gives away an art, something for free. By the way, if it’s free, you’re the product. And then he sells your data. Same thing like 23andMe. pay money to give your DNA to a company who then sells the DNA to a drug company for a thousand dollars. Like I would have happily sold it for a thousand dollars, but I didn’t know how.

29:17 So ultimately, the internet, web one and web two, enriched a very small number of application developers and people who controlled the data. Web three says, oh, wait a second, I can own my data. I can own my health data. I can own my shopping history. I can own my browsing cookie in an NFT form, which is mine permanently. And I can sell that when I want. I can expose it to whoever I want for a price or for free. And that ownership economy through blockchain technology enables, I think, maybe the greatest unleashing of creative power and innovation.

30:07 And that’s why I think this is the greatest opportunity I’ll see in my lifetime. Yeah, I could agree with you more. I started a crypto and DeFi Academy about two years ago, and I’ve graduated about a thousand students from around the world. And I try to explain to them what the banking system kind of does and how it’s involved So many aspects of your life and it’s taken out what 68% of global GDP out of the economy every single year and you have Yeah, every and you and I always tell them you have no idea it’s happening and You know this future is where you know, you can actually first of all understand control your money which you’ve always been taught you don’t understand your money and it’s for these experts over here and you know, you can you can also learn about your money and then of course own your own data and and just open up all these amazing innovations.

30:57 You have a term called incumbent, which I think you referred to the financial institutions. And Mark, I really want to know, how are they dealing with this, especially maybe in the last six months? Because for a while it seemed that they weren’t taking action, but then lately it seems like they’re taking lots of action. Lots of action. How do you break it down?

31:20 It’s back to the quote. And I wish I could remember the guy who actually said it, because everyone thinks it was not Mandela to I’m playing it. So it’s the famous quote, you know, first, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Gandhi, I think they always give him credit for it. No credit, but there was some other guy who said it, but it doesn’t matter.

31:46 So I argue that the 2009, which was the creation, the birth of Bitcoin, first application of blockchain technology. I mean, blockchain goes back further than that almost 30 years, but the first application and 2009 to 15, first they ignore you. Whatever. Okay. Then they laugh at you. So 16 to 21, like ha ha ha, whatever, nerds and geeks.

32:15 But then what happened is when a billion dollars leaves the banking system, converts to crypto. Who cares? Multi-trillion dollar industry, a billion. No, who cares? 10 billion? Yeah, whatever. 100 billion? Okay. Now this is a problem. So the incumbents, the banks, the financial system says, wait a second. Well, now we fight you. Well, how do incumbents fight? Well, they fight with regulation. And that’s been the case forever. I mean, most people have no idea. Everyone’s heard the term red flagging or red flag, you know, red flag this. I asked you all the time, where’d it come from? No idea. I’ll tell you. So horse and buggies were de rigueur for years and the horse’s carriage was created. And the horse and buggy guys were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don’t like that. We don’t want that. So they paid a little something, something to the New York municipalities and they passed a law called the red flag law. And if you had a horseless carriage, you had to hire a human to walk in front with a red flag to signal that you were coming so that you didn’t run into the horse and monkeys. No one’s ever seen someone walking in front of a car with a red flag in, you know, that’s alive today. But that was real. And so when the internet came out, right? They said, wait a second, why does it cost $3 a minute for Mark and Brian to talk on the phone overseas? That’s ridiculous. You can do it for free. Well, free is bad for the incumbents,

33:56 For the telephone companies. So they tried to pass a law. Again, lobbying, bribery, they tried to pass a law that would make voice over IP, which you and I are using right now, illegal. Now, Al Gore, who did not invent the internet, but did stop that bill in its tracks. So he does get some credit, right? He does get some credit. But now we’re at financial services.

34:24 And so starting a year ago, the incumbents, the banks were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, These companies that are taking money in a fiat system, which pays zero, so you put your money in the bank, they paid you zero, then they would turn around and buy treasuries for three, have a riskless trade. Life was good for the banks. Not good for customers, but good for the banks. You could take your money out. You could buy a stable coin, deposit it at a Celsius or a a block fire, Voyager, and they would pay you 6%.

35:02 Because there was a trading company that would use that stable coin as the other side of a long short transaction, and they’d pay 15%. So you lend it 15%, you pay six, you make a nice spread, everybody’s happy. We’ll accept the banks. So the banks called on the regulators to basically shut them down. Now they’ve got shut down, then FTX comes in, turns out there’s a bunch of fraud.

35:26 So now you got this whole specter of, you know, fraud, oh, it’s a crypto failure. Oh, no, no, bad person doing bad things, right? The FTX people stole money, which caused, you can’t call them banks, but online financial services or decentralized finished services companies to have asset liability problems, which made them, you know, to go into restructuring. But banks restructure all the time, right? We’ve had 538 banks fail since the gold financial crisis, since the gold financial crisis, forget the gold financial crisis.

36:01 Today, another one failed, Silicon Valley Bank. So that’s not a big deal. They get restructured, they get merged in, everybody’s fine. But where we are is that 68% you talked about of global GDP, that’s 7 trillion with a T, dollars a year of rents paid by people like you and me for stuff that we don’t need. Like if I want to send you money right this second, okay?

36:30 I don’t have to have a bank account. I can hit a couple of buttons on my phone and send you Bitcoin immediately or send you stable coin immediately, okay? Without friction. Like if I was, if I had a mother-in-law in El Salvador, which I don’t, right? Max and Stacey are down El Salvador.

36:47 But if I had a mother-in-law in El Salvador, My mother is in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but if she were in El Salvador and I want to send her some money, she would get 70 pesos on the dollar. What? Well, Western Union takes a cut and the Bank of International Settlements owned by the Rothschild family takes a cut. This is crazy. Any money that moves across international borders pays to the Rothschilds because they set up a treaty 400 years ago, 400 years ago, and it’s still to this day, people are paying.

37:20 I heard a great stat, this is amazing. Clan Rothschild is worth more than the other three quarters of the population of the world. The bottom three quarters of the world equals the Rothschild family. Anyway, so here’s the thing, if I sent my mother-in-law in El Salvador, my mythical mother-in-law in Salvador, a Bitcoin, she would get 100 pesos on the dollar. And that’s better.

37:50 And if she used the ZAP to strike app owned by ZAP, which we’re our investors in, and Jack Mallers, she again would get a hundred cents on the dollar. And we use the Bitcoin blockchain, we actually don’t send Bitcoin, but I can take fiat here. She gets fiat there, it gets converted to Bitcoin to go across the rails. And that’s ultimately what’s going to happen is this old legacy financial system, Swift, ACH, Fedwire, old technology, horrible technology.

38:25 I’ll tell you one funny story about that and I’ll let you talk. So we had an experience where we had a client in Australia and they got spooked, they got hacked and a wire transfer went to the wrong place because the hacker sent, you know, information. Long story short, we call the bank to say, hey, can you help us try to track down the money? They’re like, no, we lost the swift message. What do you mean you lost the swift message?

38:55 Like, well, it comes on a fax and we can’t find the piece of paper. I’m like, are you kidding me? There’s no electronic copy. There’s no, there’s no track record of this swift message to say where the money went. I’m like, no, bad technology that needs to go.

39:12 Wow. And it will. That’s a crazy story about that. Crazy story. But these institutions, they’re going to go kicking and screaming.

39:21 So how does this transition go out over the next 10 years, Mark? Yeah, look, they always go out kicking and screaming, right? The telephone companies went kicking and screaming, but now what do the telephone companies do? They turned into internet companies, right? You don’t pay for long distance, you pay for your internet service, or they sell you mobile phone services or, or, or whatever. So they will either innovate or die. You know, Darwin was right. Adapt or die. And so I think the same thing’s going to happen here is right now, what’s happening is the first stage. So the first stage of the war is we’ll squash them. So I tweeted this out yesterday. I said, so let me get this straight.

40:06 Okay. Crypto is destabilizing for the financial system. That’s the narrative that people are putting out there. Okay. And because of that, the banks that were facilitating that like Silver Gate and Signature Bank need to be shut down. Crypto companies need to be shut down. Okay. I follow your logic. In order for the current banks to take over those crypto businesses. Whoa, whoa, whoa, timeout. I thought you said it was destabilizing for the economy.

40:46 So basically what you’re saying is destabilizing for the incumbents, but if the incumbents run crypto, then we’re good. Okay. But that’s the way it always happens. Think about the, think about the 2000 boom, right? Webvan, total failure, pets.com, total failure.

41:06 Why? Because the incumbents, right? The pet food companies on the ground didn’t want you ordering your pet food from the internet. Today, Chewy.com is a $20 billion company. It’s the same company As pets.com, Amazon or DoorDash is the same as Webvan. It just took 20 plus years to kind of get through that. And it’s like all wars. There’s the war at the beginning and the frontline, the people, the intrepid few that go out there to the frontier. Some of them take arrows.

41:45 And that’s what’s happening right now. And some of these early companies, whether a Celsius or BlockFi or others, nope, they get put asunder. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re going to transact in digital assets and every stock, every bond, every currency, every commodity, every piece of real estate, every piece of fine art, every collectible car, every private business, every everything, all $700 trillion of global assets will eventually be tokens, which just means an entry on a ledger and will trade on blockchains, not in databases, run on cobalt. To this day, if you whip out your Visa card and use it, you are participating in a cobalt-based mainframe computer database. That’s all Visa is.

42:37 Mike, you got to be kidding me. No, it’s actually kind of a moat because no one knows how to hack The only problem is when it breaks, we got to put a light on at the Sunnyvale retirement home and some 80 year old comes over and fixes it because they’re the only people who know how to code cobalt. That’s an inferior system, but it’s really profitable for visa and for MasterCard for American express. And they’re going to fight tooth and nail to stop this better system, which would be, you know, hard wall to hard wallet.

43:07 I saw a picture today, someone tweeted out all the things you can buy in Costa Rica directly with Bitcoin using your digital wallet. No bank, no nothing, no broker, no middleman, no six to eight percent of GDP disappearing. That’s awesome for us as citizens, but it’s not good for the incumbents. So in the fight, there will be casualties, unfortunately. But ultimately, I’m very confident that the tech will win.

43:41 Just as I am, I remember I tell the story of this life cycle of tech. So there were no computers in the 30s and 40s and 50s, and then the mainframe computer was invented in 1954. And it was awesome. Companies like DEC and Wang and Burroughs and great companies, IBM. 14 years later, there was an innovation around the microchip and suddenly we had many computers. So you didn’t just have a big company, you know, small companies, but companies could have computers.

44:13 And I grew up in Seattle and there’s this little upstart called Microsoft. And I was joking. A lot of my friends don’t work anymore. Cause they’re smart enough to go to work there. I wasn’t.

44:23 I always protect myself and say, yeah, if you’ve seen the original Microsoft 11, you wouldn’t have worked for them either. It’s kind of a rough picture. They’re multi-billionaires. I’m not, I shouldn’t make fun of them, but we all look bad in the seventies. They just looked a little worse than others. But Steve Balmer’s mom famously quoted the deck CEO saying, honey, why is your work for that?

44:43 I mean, no one would ever want a computer in their house. He has 18 billion reasons. He was right. Mom was wrong. 14 years later, there’s an innovation around the internet.

44:52 Paul Krugman said it’ll never be more important than a fax machine, maybe a little more important than a fax machine than 14 years. And it’s always 14 years. Why? Because young people always create everything. Because they don’t know what they don’t know and they don’t know any better than to try something new.

45:09 And so it’s a half generation and the creative class is always young. Mark Andreessen was 19, Larry and Sergey were in their 20s. Young people create everything. So in 2010, the mobile net comes along. And I remember being back in Seattle at Craig McCaw’s family office.

45:27 And, you know, famous investor in mobile phones. And I asked this guy, do you think the mobile net will be as big as the internet? He’s like, Mark, you kidding me? Ask people if they want a computer, like whatever. Ask them if they want a phone.

45:41 Like, I already have two. I don’t need another one. So yeah, the mobile net will be bigger than the internet. Well, now we got the truth net. And that’s 2024, which is just around the corner.

45:52 And so the inevitability of blockchain, the inevitability of the truth net, the inevitability of you and I being able to transfer seamlessly without trusted intermediaries is as obvious, okay, as it is that if I want to buy something, I don’t go to the store anymore. I punch it up on Amazon or some other delivery service and it comes. But 20 years ago, no way could that happen. No way would you believe that was going to happen. No way would you believe that I could carry around more computing power than NASA had when they sent somebody up the first time into space.

46:35 But we do. And tomorrow we’ll have more. No way people could believe that the Bitcoin blockchain, the system of interconnected computers, that is the Bitcoin network, is 1,500 times more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Not 1,500%, 1,500 times. It’s been up for 14 years.

47:05 It’s been down for 0.0002% of the time, not one fraudulent transaction. Think about that. Hundreds of billions of dollars of value, plenty of hackers trying to hack it, not one fraudulent transaction in 14 years. How many times you had to get a new Visa number because someone hacked Visa? Plenty.

47:27 Okay, it happens. So this is inevitable, the way you’re saying it. Just for the quick aside, you mentioned FTX. What do you think actually happened with that? You’re going to put me on the spot.

47:43 Get kind of mad at me like, Mark, you can’t say stuff like that. Like why? So the black cats are going to show up at your house. I’m like, yeah, I don’t think they care about me. But here’s the thing. My personal opinion, and it’s just my opinion. I don’t have any real, I mean, I actually do have some facts, but this is my opinion. I don’t believe Sam Bankman freed and Caroline were the masterminds of anything. I think they are useful idiots.

48:10 If you’ve seen the Manchurian candidate, that’s what I think. And I think there is a much higher power well above them that masterminded the whole thing to create FTX as a fraudulent organization to disparage crypto, to slow down the adoption. I believe it, and I actually think I have some data that could support that, but you don’t have to, I mean, not you, but people don’t have to agree with me, but I absolutely believe it. And I believe what’s happened over the last 18 months is a concerted effort to slow can’t kill because it’s the tech, but you can slow the adoption. And how do you slow the adoption? You sow seeds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. You make it harder to on-ramp an off-ramp from digital assets out of fiat or into fiat, which is exactly what they’ve done. And you create a credibility issue by having what ostensibly was the second largest exchange in the world, which it never was. It was a fraud from day one. Go out of business.

49:27 Now, if you think about it, you perpetuate a fraud and you steal $9 billion, which it appears they did. Someone should go to jail, right? Bernie Madoff announced that he was a fraud. The next day he went to jail and he never got out. He died in prison. So actually right up the road here in North Carolina. So it’s weird to me that Sam’s hanging out his family house, you know, surfing the internet, doing whatever he wants. The Carolines cut a deal that is not going to go to jail. It’s just weird. So I guess if you know the right people and the last part of it that I think is super weird, Brian, the original judge that was supposed to try the case got removed.

50:16 And the new judge is the wife of the lawyer as Sullivan and Cromwell that set up FTX. That’s weird. That’s just a weird coincidence. They’re going to start calling you a conspiracy theorist, Mark, if you’re not careful. Well, and that’s fine.

50:35 I always refute that by saying, look, it’s only a conspiracy if it isn’t true, right? If it happens to turn out to be true, then it’s no longer a conspiracy. But I think here’s the interesting thing. In the old days, if I wanted to curry favor with you, I’d meet you at the park, you we’d go to Trafalgar Square, and we’d sit down on the bench, and I’d take off my backpack, and after we were done chatting, I would leave, and you’d say, Mark, you left your backpack, and I’d just keep walking, and you’d look inside, and it’d be full of cash, not traceable, no way to get in trouble, and you’re happy, I’m happy.

51:19 Here’s the weird thing. If you were going to do some bad stuff, which There’s lots of evidence of bad stuff at FTX, political contributions, kind of weird stuff, money laundering. Why wouldn’t you do it in cash, which is untraceable? Why would you do it on chain? Like we have on chain transactions from governments to FTX, from FTX to Alameda, to from Alameda to a shell company owned by SPF, from SPF to political candidates.

51:52 It’s all on chain, right? That’s not conspiracy. That’s fact. Like that, that’s right there. Lots of people have seen it. Lots of people have talked about it. Why would you do that if you wanted, if you didn’t want to get caught? I don’t know. It’s weird. If you wanted to blame crypto, cause here’s the thing. If I steal money from my customer and I give it to a political candidate, who’s the bad person, me or the technology I used to do it? Well, they’re trying to paint the picture that it was the tech that’s evil. No, the person who did it is evil. It’s weird. And so you think the whole thing was orchestrated just to slow the industry down from day one? That’s my opinion. I’m entitled to it. No one has to agree with me but I do believe that I appreciate that too I like how you stick your neck out because a lot of people in your position wouldn’t do that matter of fact nobody in your position does that Mark well I do appreciate it and look people say that’s not very smart in fact it’s funny this is actually where I’m doing the opposite but my wife has only seen me speak one time she came to Vegas for a conference and at the end she said Mark you can’t say things like that. Like, what would I say? She says, no, no, it’s not what you say. It’s how you say them. I’m like, what do you mean? Should we say things so forcefully? So what’s wrong with that? She says, well, people will believe you. Well, that’s the whole idea.

53:24 That’s why you give talks. She says, well, what if you’re wrong? That guy just changed my mind. It’s like Lord Keynes, right? He gave a talk a week later, gave same talk, changed something. And the guy in the front row said, Lord Keynes, last week you said exactly the opposite. Like, sir, when the facts change, I changed my mind. What do you do. And so this time I’m doing the opposite. I actually am saying something that I probably shouldn’t say, but again, it’s just my opinion. And I’m a data guy. I look at data and draw conclusions. And when I look at the data, when I look at the fact that Alameda had 400 investments, Okay. 400. All public. This is public. I’m not making this up. This is all public. It’s in the filings. You can go look at it on the web. 200 of them were single person LLCs owned by SPF. That’s weird, right? The other thing that’s weird, I’ve been in venture capital a long time. It just means I’m old. Never in the 30 years I’ve been doing this, have I ever seen an LP give money to a venture capitalist and then have the venture capitalist turn around and make a multi-hundred million dollar investment in that LP’s company. It probably happened and I just didn’t see it, but I said, I’ve been doing this a long time, I’ve never seen that. I’ve never had any fund I ever invest in, invest back in me. As a VC, I’ve never invested in any LP that’s given me money. Just never seen it. Sam put in $250 million

55:14 Into Sequoia and they invested back in him. I’d just never seen that before. It also seems interesting to me that Sam’s mom and dad happened to have all these ties to people places where the money ended up, like Sam’s mom runs a foundation super PAC, right? That allows people to get around campaign finance laws and make excessively large donations to certain candidates, including Ms. Warren. I don’t know. That just seems weird, right?

55:55 This guy was 29 years old and he was the largest donor to Biden’s election campaign. I know there’s plenty of other people richer than him, but how did he become the largest donor? I don’t know. It’s weird. And again, those are just facts.

56:12 Those aren’t suppositions. Those aren’t hypotheses. Those aren’t conspiracies. Those are facts. Those are data.

56:19 I don’t know. It’s weird. Yeah, it is weird. You make some good weirdness observations there, Mark. me about the market because most of the narrative these days is crypto winter, crypto winter, crypto winter. I believe you asserted that the crypto winter ended, I think June 15th of last year and we’re in the crypto spring. And you’re good. You’re good. You got me down to the day. It’s interesting. As we speak, Bitcoin is almost exactly like weird, like almost exactly the the same price it was on June 15th last year.

56:54 And, but in between, we did have the FTX dip all the way down to 15,000. We said, oh Mark, that proves you are wrong. That was still winter. I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Remember what spring is.

57:08 So there are four seasons, you know, winter, spring, summer, and fall. And I will argue the four year cycle of crypto follows this about a year each. It’s actually more like 15 months, nine months, but in different sense. But, um, long story short, uh, in spring, like I live in North Carolina, but once every 10 years we get what’s called a snow cane and it’s basically a nor’easter and it gets stuck and it dumps in, in March, 12 inches of snow. It should never happen in North Carolina, but, but once in a blue moon, it does.

57:45 That’s kind of what I view FTX was. It was a snow cane. It was hurricane Sam, and it all happened in what was a pretty interesting, we were making higher highs and higher lows, lots of support, increasing volumes. Everything was looking good. We’d gone from 17.5 on June 15th, all the, well, it ended the day at 20,000, but it hit a low intraday of 17.5.

58:14 I thought that was the bottom. We’re up back up 24 and then bang, we’re down to 15 with Sam. Well, then we got all the way back to 20 and then we’re back to 24. Well now in the last couple of weeks, we’re right back down to 20 with the signature bank and, and Silvercra, Silvergate and all this other stuff. But my point is spring.

58:39 It’s rainy. It’s cold. It’s wet. It’s muddy. It’s volatile, you know, in like a line out like a lamb.

58:45 So, if you look at spring in the last cycles, it wasn’t up and to the right, it was dead flat with lots of all. It’s kind of what we’ve had. We’re dead flat since June. I will argue we’re a month to two months away from summer. What’s summer?

59:04 Summer is where people anticipate the halving. The halving is one of the most ingenious pieces of coding I can think of. And what do I mean by that? So if you think about a new asset, you need to get attention, okay, in order for people to adopt it and embrace it. Well, one of the things about assets, if they move, people will follow it, right?

59:35 It’s the hunter-gatherer thing, right? If someone were to walk by the hallway out there, I would look because I can’t not look, right? Now, the opposite is true, right? not moving, I can’t see it. I tell the fun, the story that, you know, my wife says, Hey, go get the ketchup. I open the fridge, no ketchup, honey.

59:49 She walks up, grabs the bottle. If it ain’t moving, I can’t see it. So, uh, the having does this every four years, the block rewards get cut in half. Now, what does that mean? Well, if you and I are minors, we, we buy computers, we plug them in instead of going out to AWS or, or Azure, and selling our computer power, we sell it to an algorithm and we get paid block rewards.

1:00:18 We get paid Bitcoin. Well, our cost of electricity is fixed. Our machines are being depreciated. So if the number of rewards we get falls in half, we’re out of business, unless price goes up. So there’s a natural incentive for the price to rise.

1:00:37 Well, as the price rises, people are drawn to it. And so what you see is this upward trajectory of growth that follows along something called Metcalfe’s Law Curve, which is the more participants in the network. But human beings are gonna human. So what do human beings do? We do two things really well.

1:00:57 We buy what we wish we would have bought, and we sell what we’re about to need. So when that price starts moving, and it gets to fair value, more people come in, And we go from investors who buy things below fair value to traders who don’t really care about fair value. They just want movement. That is, it gets a little higher, the speculators come in. They’re like, oh, this is going, I need to have it.

1:01:18 Well, then the problem is the gamblers come in and the gamblers borrow money and they push it parabolic. And that’s why we see these parabolic moves. Well, then we’re so far away from fair value. Again, another good Englishman, Lord Newton, was right. Gravity rules.

1:01:36 And the price goes back to fair value, but it doesn’t go to fair value. It goes through fair value because people panic and they sell. And then we get the winter, right? We’re down a lot. And then we start the whole cycle again.

1:01:51 And so I will argue, next halving is February next year, nine months ahead of that. Sometime around April, May, we’re likely to see increased demand for Bitcoin. And when does that demand peak? Is it post-haven? Yeah, I don’t know, that’s a great question.

1:02:08 So it usually peaks, you know, it depends again on human nature, but it peaks post-having and it depends how quickly you get above fair value. So if you think about history and it doesn’t mean that this has to happen, but it makes some sense because of the way Metcalf’s law works. But every halving has added a zero to the price. Meaning, we’ve increased the market cap by tenfold. So we started at ten, we went to a hundred, then we went to a thousand, the last halving was ten thousand, and this halving will be a hundred thousand.

1:02:46 That’s fair value. The problem is, we don’t stay at fair value. For the ten thousand halving, we got all the way to seventy thousand. And actually, Max, who I love, who you’ve had on the show, would say, oh, we’re going 200 like that’s a little too far above fair value. That’s more the next having. And because of that, the crash was, was inevitable. And we did crash this next having, if we 10 X market cap again, we’d be at a hundred. Then I think we do see 200 or even 300 because that’ll to be the craziness. And each wave above fair value gets a little bit lower just because the law of large numbers, right? When we were at 10 going to a hundred, we went all the way to a thousand. That’s 10 X above before we crashed back under a hundred. Then we went to a thousand the first time we went all the way to 20,000. And then the next time we went from 10,000 to 70,000. So that number starts to shrink. So next time, my guess is 200, 300,000 will be the peak before the next trough.

1:03:59 Okay. Gotcha. And you mentioned our mutual friend, Max Kaiser, who famously came on my show in 2013, which is dating me and was screaming about Bitcoin. I just bought some Bitcoin for about a hundred bucks. And we were complaining about the lack of liquidity because there was no liquidity back then.

1:04:17 Was there? None. There were no liquidity providers. There was no liquidity pools back then. And it’s funny, but there’s an old clip on YouTube of Max saying, as soon as somebody starts providing liquidity, this market’s going to kick off, which is fascinating.

1:04:32 Now I would go on to have a conversations with Andreas Onsenopoulos in 2015, 17, and 19. And he would talk about the future of money, the internet of money. mark this before that term DeFi was coined. And then we saw, you know, DeFi explode in the DeFi summer of 2020 was a big event, which caused me to get into this space. But at the same time, Max Kaiser refused to come back on my show. And I’m looking for you Max Kaiser, by the way.

1:05:01 Come on, Max. Come on, Max. We’ll do it together. We’ll do it together. He didn’t like it because I was looking at DeFi as an old derivatives trader, a fixed income derivatives trader. I looked at it and I was like, wow, look at the total value locked.

1:05:14 These young kids are doing the innovations that I felt like we were doing back in the 90s with interest rate swaps and all these complex caps and floors and constant maturity treasuries and all the stuff that I was actually doing with, you know, Dan Morehead was in the same place. We’ve had him on the show at Bankers Trust and Dan Tapiero was doing business with those guys. And so, you know, I looked at it and thought, wow, look at this amazing innovation. And I started teaching decentralized finance and looking at all these incredible protocols, and the innovation blew my mind. Because of the tokenization, they could do things we could never do on Wall Street. And I embraced it. Tell me about your experience with DeFi and even your investments going forward. What are you looking at? Because you don’t strike me as a Bitcoin maxi, even though obviously a lot of your friends are Bitcoin maxis.

1:05:58 No, it’s so great. And I love that you and I are like brothers from another mother almost, in that we seek truth through dialogue and debate and discourse. It’s like the greatest thing ever. They say, I got paid for 30 years to talk to the smartest people in the world about investing. That’s awesome. And I would allocate them capital and just amazing.

1:06:23 And you’ve interviewed some of the leading lights in all of finance. And if you can’t learn something, you know, you’re just, you’re not paying attention, which is easy. So you also like to learn. And when you see something that resonates, like you say, you are a derivatives trader, you start. And the idea of humans structuring derivatives contracts versus code.

1:06:47 It’s a no brainer. It’s a no brainer to think that all of it, like all of Goldman Sachs structure finance desk, all of it should be on chain, but the Bitcoin max is like, Oh, you’re a shit coin or you’re, you’re talking about a theorem and it’s a rug like guys. Okay. Bitcoin, digital gold, perfect store of value next 5,000 years. It’s the base layer. It’s money, right? Money is an asset that exists in the absence of a liability. There’s only I’ve been one for 5,000 years, that’s gold.

1:07:23 Everything else is built on top of it. That’s why they put gold in central bank vaults, okay? Yes, Bitcoin will replace that. Good, awesome. But blockchain has some other applications.

1:07:35 Smart contracts are really good. And I do, I’m sorry, I do spaces at night, you know, with all these kids. And it’s so funny. I’ll go on a Bitcoin space, like get out of here, you shit-coiner. What are you talking about?

1:07:50 Way more Bitcoin than you. That doesn’t matter. You have Ethereum and you have Solana and you have the graph. I’m like, yeah, I made a lot of money on all of those. So sue me. And then I’ll go on Ethereum space and I’m like, get out of here, you Bitcoin maxi. I’m like, I own more Solana than you. What? And so this tribalism is not good. Tribalism is not good. What’s good is take an objective look at the data and the tech and build.

1:08:21 And to your point, you saw it, you embraced it, you educate, you empowered a thousand kids to, and what I love about that, there’s this great story. I moved to North Carolina and I went to this event and there’s this big self-help guru down here. There are 200 people in the audience and she says, all right, everyone stand up. All right, raise your right hand, repeat after me. I will never, I will never teach a child read. No, I’m not going to say that. Come on, come and say, I will never teach a child to read.

1:08:51 She says, okay, good. So why, why, why do we have to say that? It says, because everyone in this room has the capacity to build an organization to teach a thousand children to read. Genius, genius, right? Teaching one person about DeFi, good. Empowering a thousand people to power a a million people to empower a billion people, better.

1:09:13 So this idea that it’s just Bitcoin, just Ethereum, no, it’s the technological evolution, not revolution, it’s evolution, back to Darwin, adapt or die. And as we embrace all of these ideas and constructs and bring them into the world in which we all grew up in, which is financial services, and that’s what I say, What blockchain will do to financial services is what the internet did to media and commerce. But it doesn’t just transfer market cap, it expands.

1:09:49 Because by liberating that 68% of GDP that’s wasted through rents, we now unlock, as Jimmy Song would say, creativity, ideas, ownership. And the creator economy, the direct to consumer economy is so unbelievable. I was with these kids, and I can call them kids because they’re children, like younger than my kids. These two guys, young guys from USC, they already built a business that is the number one studio for TikTokers, right? Every TikToker, and I don’t know TikTok, but every TikToker anyone’s ever heard of, they helped create.

1:10:29 They sold it, and now they’re doing a new business where they have a technology to take NFTs, which NFTs are the future of everything. Every asset in the world will be an NFT. And all that it means is a digital property right. A non-fungible token is a digital property right. It’s a title to property.

1:10:49 It’s not a monkey JPEG. I mean, it can be, but it’s more than that. But they have an idea to make the NFTs uniform form by making the metadata uniform and allowing you then to modify the NFT based on experiences. So, think about McDonald’s. Right now, they spend all this money on ads, most of it wasted because people never even see it. Here, they can send an appendage, a sticker, a modifier, to an NFT, to a community, right, who’ve already identified as people who like this type of food, they’ll cut their advertising budget, their profits will go up, they’ll spend more on growth and innovation, and it’s a flywheel effect. Like, I want that. I want that. And that is just one little tiny example of how this technology and how this integration of talent, Because at the end of the day, innovation comes from talent.

1:12:01 And I’ve never seen, and again, I’ve been around a long time, I got white hair to prove it. I’ve never seen a migration of talent as incredible as right now. The internet was close. The internet, every smart person I knew, from college friends to people I was interacting with, from law, from finance, from iBanking, to consulting, to healthcare, all going to the internet. It was awesome and we built trillions and trillions of dollars of value.

1:12:33 Now those same people, same talent pool, younger, new examples of it, not the same people, but the kids, are coming into this space and just one little story and I’ll let you go and then I’ll let you talk. You know, I did the last live event before the lockdowns in 20 in New York, a digital asset summit, and I gave just similar comments about the migration of talent is like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s amazing. It’s what keeps me young and energized. I’m an old guy and I love hanging out with these young, smart people.

1:13:07 And he comes up to me afterward, this young guy comes up to me and says, would you call my mom? I said, what? He said, my mom thinks I’m an idiot. I left this big law firm. I’m working with this crypto company. I’m like, yeah, let’s call your mom.

1:13:17 So we called his mom said, no, your son is not an idiot. He’s really smart. He’s building something for the future. It’s going to be awesome. And just like Steve Balmer’s mom was wrong, his mom was wrong.

1:13:27 And just no offense to his mom. She was just trying to protect him. But it’s kind of like when I told my son, you know, don’t go to work at KPMG. No, I was trying to protect him. Do whatever you want. And now he works for snowflake and he’s doing great.

1:13:43 And I’m really proud of him and it’s awesome. But you should follow your passion and you should follow, and that’s what’s happening right now. And when passionate people rally around the technological innovation, super powerful. Yeah, yeah, it’s one of the reasons I love being in space is because of all of the passion for everybody building here. And like before we move on, you mentioned those, you know, digital property rights.

1:14:10 I mean, I’ve had Yatsui from Anamoka Brands on the show twice, actually here in the studio in October for when the Token 2049 conference was here. Love it. He’s just incredible. When he just really articulates, he calls it digital colonialism, which is kind of what Zuck’s been doing to us. And then saying it basically all comes down to digital property rights.

1:14:30 If you can really master that, everything falls into place. And when Yat said that in here, I mean, I studied economics at MIT, but when he said it, it really clicked because it does come down to rights and freedom and ownership, which is why the Maxis love Bitcoin so much because it brings back your rights that when you don’t have currency, yeah, sovereignty, and then all of a sudden your freedom of speech and freedom of finance and it’s like, whoa, this is more than just money. This is my life.

1:14:57 Oh, Brian, it’s so it’s so good. Colonialism leaves a bad taste in people’s mouth. It’s like, you know, people are trying to, you know, we invented it here in Britain, you know, they’re trying to cancel, right? They’re trying to cancel roads. Cecil Rhodes, right?

1:15:10 A guy who’s produced some of the great thinkers on this planet, right? But through the Rhodes Scholarship, they were like, oh, he’s a bad person because he was a colonial, I’m like, stop. At the time, that was accepted. It is what it is. Yeah, we should do better, but don’t hate the Rhodes Scholarship because you don’t like Cecil Rhodes, stop.

1:15:34 But if you think about it, Where in the world do we have the greatest innovation and wealth creation in the places where English common law, which was a residual leftover from the bad look, I’m not, I’m not excusing colonialism. I am not. But the leftover of property rights, the ability to own property and have a rule of law and court system, that and fractioners are banking, change the world. And if people piss on fractioners are banking and they’re like, oh, we need a replacement. That’s why I need Bitcoin only and only Bitcoin and never lend it, never trade it. I’m like, stop. Name a country that has a weak or non-existent fractioners or banking system that you would live in. Oh, wait, not Not you, but anyone.

1:16:36 I defy anyone, name a country with a weak or non-existent fractionary bank system that you would live in. It is amazing. And yes, re-hypothecation has risks. Yes, runs on bank or bad, yes. But all of it’s manageable, right?

1:16:52 All of it’s manageable. Risk is manageable. Risk can never be eliminated. It can only change form. It can be managed.

1:16:59 It cannot be eradicated. And I would say it’s like energy, right? Energy cannot be eliminated. It can be changed. I can turn heat energy into light energy, right?

1:17:13 I can turn, you know, methane gas into Bitcoin. That’s a conversion of energy. I can put food in my body and get hamped up and converted into energy, but I’m changing the form. I’m simply changing the form, and the same thing is true with risk. But ultimately, risk, volatility, that’s your enemy.

1:17:35 They’re your friend, right? That’s what makes the world go round. If we all want no risk, you put it all in treasuries and we all lose. Don’t you have a T-shirt? You have to destroy your wealth over time.

1:17:45 Don’t you have a T-shirt that says embrace volatility? Embrace, man. Oh, you are so good. Volatility. You are so good, I do.

1:17:52 I should have worn it today. I love it because it says embrace volatility. Volatility is our friend. Volatility will make the world goes around is what innovation drives and the upside of volatility is manna from heaven. Explain that statement.

1:18:06 Wow. Wow. You’re good. Well, look, you know, spirituality aside, man from heaven just means that you’re creating a gift, right? And whether it’s directly a gift from God, whether you believe in that or not, I will argue that innovation, creativity and wealth creation are gifts, right?

1:18:33 I’m grateful every day, right? I’m grateful every day. I wake up, that’s a gift. I get to come to work, work with people I love, that’s a gift. I get to take capital in a capitalist, capitalistic society and deploy it and try to make more money in a venture capital scenario, that’s a gift.

1:18:50 And I get to work with innovative creators who are building the future, huge gift. So that monochrome heaven, okay, look, I’m prone to hyperbole, it’s my nature. Um, as my wife, my wife says, you’re frequently wrong, never in doubt, occasionally wrong, but no, never in doubt because the thing about it is, um, I do have lots of doubt and I’m skeptical about everything, but once I get conviction, once I do the work and get conviction, then I don’t have doubt because the reason I believe that is those who doubt themselves and don’t have conviction and therefore don’t make decisions and deploy capital because they’re afraid of loss, afraid of volatility.

1:19:39 They lose. Now, if you do deploy capital and you do take risk, you’ll lose sometimes too, but that’s okay, but you’ll win more than you lose. And look, I’ve been blessed. I’ve had some great mentors, my, my, my, you know, favorite, maybe not that I should have favorites, but you know, made the most impact on me. It was Julian Robertson, And God rest his soul passed away last year.

1:20:02 And Julian had two rules that he lived by. One was, actually a lot of rules he lived by, but one in investing was live to fight another day. When you’re wrong, just cover. Just cut your loss. You’re wrong.

1:20:21 The market’s not wrong and you’re going to be proven right. You’re wrong. Just move on. Live to fight another day. But the other one, and this is what’s so hard, and most people do the opposite, right?

1:20:31 They want to prove they’re right, so they double down. He would never double down. He had an uncanny ability to double up, which again, most people don’t want to do. As soon as something starts to work, they want to sell it. They want to take their profits.

1:20:44 He would double into it. He would press the winners. And Paul Tudor Jones, another legendary investor on his dorm room at Virginia, had a sign and said losers, average losers. And the corollary to that is winners, press winners. And all winners lose more than losers because they take more risks, but they don’t care about losing.

1:21:11 And I shouldn’t talk about the other school down the road since it’s March Madness season and it looks like Carolina might not make the tournament this year, unfortunately. Lost last night to Virginia and Duke is gonna make it. But, you know, I got to spend some time with coach K and whether, you know, look, I’m a Carolina guy. I’m not Carolina guy. I’m a Carolina fan.

1:21:31 I’m a Notre Dame guy, but I respect coach K right. May the greatest basketball coach that ever lived all respected to John wooden and others. Um, K is pretty amazing and I get to spend some time with him once and, uh, it was funny, you know, a couple of things. When he said, you know, Mark, we have the same job. I like humor me coach. I don’t see it.

1:21:52 Like, what do I have in common with like, so that we both, uh, try to identify talent. We go recruit that talent. We assemble a team. We drop a game plan. We put the team on the court and we sit down. It says, I never take a shot.

1:22:08 You actually don’t deploy capital. And this was before I started deploying capital, but wow, same job as coach K. Awesome. But then he says, something that it was made a profound impact on me. He says, you know what separates the average player from the greats.

1:22:22 Like, no, but you’re going to tell me, right? And he says the average player focuses on the last play. And we’ve all seen it. How many times you see somebody miss a shot and go commit a stupid foul? So the great player always focuses on the next play. The great player doesn’t even remember taking the shot. They go back, play good defense, steal the ball, make a layup.

1:22:46 Instant erasure. And Gene Smith, the other great coach had had a similar philosophy about mistakes. We’re all gonna make mistakes. We’re all gonna miss shots. We’re gonna make mistakes. We make bad investments. We’re gonna go, you know, on the wrong thing. Says you have to rouse. You gotta recognize it. Admit it. Cool. Really hard. Admit it. Learn from it and forget it. If you can’t forget it. If you’re constantly afraid of losing, if you’re constantly afraid of volatility, you won’t be successful, particularly in investing. You have to be willing to, one, make decisions without perfect information. So you got to be able to move forward all the time.

1:23:31 You got to be able to cut your losses fast, press your winners, and to learn from the mistakes you’re inevitably going to make. Because the greats, right? George Soros, Julian Robertson, they’re right 58% of the time. But as Soros said, that truck gets quoted all the time for, it’s not whether you’re right or wrong, it’s how much money you make when you’re right and how much money you lose when you’re wrong. That’s what life’s about.

1:23:53 Yeah, amen to that. It’s how much cash is in the register at the end of the month. And I think a lot of the crypto jade traders and these new kids forget that sometimes, which is what I kind of try to do in the economy. All of them, I know. It’s fun to watch.

1:24:07 What are you investing in now? What looks interesting? Because there’s some incredible companies out there and some incredible bargains. We started London Real Ventures about a year ago and we’ve been making some really interesting investments because we didn’t get involved in a lot of the madness last year. And so we just invested in a company building NFTs and Metaverses.

1:24:29 There’s actually a really interesting company doing Metaverses for enterprises that’s working with Deloitte and Touche and doing it all without ever telling the customer they’re they’re on the web. I mean, they’re on, they’re on a wallet. They’re doing it all to where they have the experience. What are you looking at? Yep. So look, the metaverse is, is, is big and vast and, and I think going to be going to be amazing. And we’ve done the same thing. We’ve done some metaverse studio investments.

1:24:52 Okay. Sam, I’m most compelled by wallets, wallets. If you think about the internet, the internet was just a bunch of nerds and geeks playing with this, you know, messaging system before Mark Andreessen came along and invented the browser. The browser was the seminal event, the disruptive technological event that made the internet possible. And the iPhone or the smartphone didn’t have to be the iPhone, but the smartphone was what made the mobile net possible.

1:25:29 Cause we all have a supercomputer in our hand. I believe wallets are what will make web three. So web one was the browser web two was the smartphone web three wallets. Look, the Gen A’s my granddaughter who was just born six months ago will never have this. She will never have a leather wallet ever, never generation will never have paper money.

1:25:55 Right. Generation alpha. Right. only have digital wallets and digital currency. And so that’s pretty cool.

1:26:04 And so that wallet and whether it’s a hard wallet or a soft wallet, both are important. So we invested in both. I’m super excited about a deal that we’re investing right now, Ledger. I think Ledger, Pascal, the CEO of Ledger is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met, right? College dropout, couldn’t get a job, fought his way in built this amazing business, you know, just had record revenue last year. And for the quarter, uh, as people moved off chain onto to sort, they, they, they, they now custody, 20% of global crypto, 20% wow. Awesome. That’s what I do. And they’re new.

1:26:47 Let’s use ledgers and the second week module to the new device is a game change. Okay. It’s a game change because what most people don’t remember, is when Napster got shut down, um, Michael Dell, I don’t know if he actually did the innovation or if he just was first to, to find it, but there was an innovation called MP3s and basically a, a digital version of a song. And he had a little stick kind of looked like a ledger. It was a little stick and you put it in your computer and you could save 10 songs and took about 40 minutes to download a song. It was clunky and, but it was first And I had one, I had little headphones and I walk around, I thought it was so cool. And then Steve Jobs said, no, not elegant, not, not cool.

1:27:37 And he built the iPod and fundamentally changed Apple forever. Fundamentally changed the digital age forever because it, it changes from focusing on the what the technology to the why, why do you want the white headphones to be part of the community? Why do you want the elegance of being able to see the screen so you can see the artist and or the art and so they sold millions and millions and ultimately billions of dollars worth of of iPods and then they did the iPhone.

1:28:08 So if you think about wallets right this ledger it’s functional but it’s ugly and it’s hard to use and this little screen you can’t really see it so what they do they hired the guy who built the iPod for Steve, brought him in and said, build us the same thing. And so they released the stacks. Uh, and it’s beautiful. And now will ledger be the Apple of web three? It’s not a guarantee. They’ve got a big headstart, a lot of competition, but you know, and, but if they are, how much is that worth?

1:28:49 A lot. So pretty excited about that. Also excited about a couple of other wallet companies on the soft wall. So we have one that makes the whole experience easier. You just use your email address, which everybody’s comfortable with their email address.

1:29:02 They don’t want to do a seed phrase. So that’s interesting. They’re actually based in London, like that company called Akon. We’ve got a couple of other kind of NFT-related related businesses look I’m a huge believer in NFTs I’m part of the on chain monkeys family you know they just created the first inscription on Bitcoin pretty excited about that so that I believe it’s an awful the maxis by the way the maxis going crazy of course no that’s not what it’s for Mike no it’s exactly what it’s for that’s one for you my highest value chain the highest value chain should store the highest value assets. Look, I don’t know, because I’m not really a techie, but I don’t know for sure. Like I know for sure that the internet is composed of IP, internet protocol, TCP, IP, which is the base layer, FTP for files, SMTP for email, HTTP for websites, and www dot that ties it all together. Got it. Going forward, Are we going to map that?

1:30:11 And Bitcoin’s the base layer, Ethereum’s the www dot, Filecoin is the FTP, and Polkadot or Cosmos or somebody else’s SMT, HDSP, yeah, maybe. Or is it Bitcoin, one chain to rule the world, Lightning, L3, L4, maybe? Or is it a bunch of L1s with bridges, maybe? I’m not smart enough to figure that out, so I’m going to invest in all for now. And if the maxis figure out a way to get it all on Bitcoin and lightning and L threes and of course, God love them.

1:30:45 Great. I’m happy in that world. But this, this ordinals idea is genius, mad genius because you got these sats, they have space and you can describe if you do it correctly, like, like Danny Yang, who’s mad genius, mad genius, the founder of, of Medigood, uh, that runs on chain monkeys. If you can do it in such a way that you don’t use a huge amount of block space, you don’t slow the network down, and if you think about where would I want my highest value assets to be, I want them to be on the most used network, the safest chain.

1:31:23 So the maxis should be embracing it, not pushing it away. And here’s the thing, most people are not toxic maxis. Even if they play that on TV, they’re really not. What they are is early adopters who want to continue to have an advantage. I get that.

1:31:45 I like that position. But they’re not as toxic as they think they are. Yeah, it was funny for me to see this NFTs on Bitcoin blow up and then I saw stacks blow up. And then I remember I had Dr. Mani Bali on my show about 15 months ago, then we had this whole conversation.

1:32:01 He said, Brian, no one else is doing DeFi on the Bitcoin chain. Nobody else is doing anything like this. And I look at the top 200 market cap protocols, and there’s no one doing anything with Bitcoin. And I remember walking out of the interview thinking, if I was a fund manager, I would probably put some money on that. Yeah.

1:32:20 Yeah. That’s the genius of just saying, wait a minute. the data is not correlated to this reality. And so I can act on that. And that’s a pretty cool insight.

1:32:38 Yeah, I didn’t do anything with it. So it’s too big to do other things. But yeah, you’ve got basically the most robust, the biggest, highest market cap network in the world. And you got one person looking at potentially some other protocols on it that everyone else is using. On the outside chance, he might be right, and nobody else is doing it.

1:32:54 So it’s gonna be exciting. Seems like a good bet. So moving forward, and just to wrap up, you’re bullish on the future. You’re excited. You think there’s great opportunities in this market, and you are convinced, often wrong, but never in doubt, and you’re just looking forward to the next 10 years, knowing that this will all happen.

1:33:13 It’s just about how it happens. Yeah, look, I’m trying to live by focus on the next play. So always looking forward, and yeah, make lots of mistakes. That’s human nature, but learn from them and get better. I am incredibly optimistic, incredibly optimistic.

1:33:36 I’ve had more fun in the last five years than any time in my career. And that is not saying anything negative. I loved working for the universities. I loved the first 15 years working at Morgan Creek, but I’m just having more fun. And it’s partly about the people I’m hanging out with now young, smart. I mean, I met with a young entrepreneur today, just unbelievable. I just did this presentation yesterday, these two guys out of USC. It’s just so inspiring to be around people who are looking forward, who are looking for solutions and innovations as opposed to protecting their little nest egg. And I lived in the protect your little nest egg world for a long time and it paid the bills and it was fine. But when I’m really honest, I had the most fun and actually made the most money when I was investing in that innovation as an asset class, in that venture capital piece, in that growth equity piece, in that backing great ideas. I’ll give you one example. So in 1994 recession, you know, back when they jumped interest rates and there’s a big recession.

1:34:53 That’s right when I started on Wall Street. So I remember that. Yeah. And I was working in Notre Dame. And there was this guy, he got laid off by Bell Labs.

1:35:05 And he said, you know, can I take my project with me? And I’m like, yeah, whatever. Dense wave multiplexing. They don’t know what you’re talking about. And so he went out and he pitched every Silicon Valley firm.

1:35:20 And they all said, no, we don’t get it. It’s like, why so clear, right? Fiber optic cable, you shine a white light through, you get X capacity. I take a prism, I break it into colors, each color carries the same amount of light, I say amount of information, I increase the capacity of fiber optic cables. Like, oh, that’s stupid, that would never work.

1:35:41 Colors are different from white, no, it works. Only person that believed him was his retired third grade teacher in Philadelphia. She gave him her life savings $300,000, probably not the best investment decision actually, but good ending turned into 300 million. That company became Sienna, which became a multi tens of billions of dollars business because it turns out you can, you can actually go up to 128 colors and increase fiber optic capacity. And we all benefit, you and I are benefiting from it right now.

1:36:17 And that’s freaking awesome. That is awesome. The guy’s laid off, he’s desperate. He gets told no and no, and he’s persistent, but he’s got a good idea and he’s got an innovation and he made the world a better place. And that woman believed in him, right?

1:36:36 And she was willing to risk her capital, which again, may or may not have been the best decision in the world, but turned out great. And every place I look where investors do that where investors do that and overweight innovation as an asset class, whether it’s Yale, whether it’s Notre Dame, whether it’s UNC, whether it’s pension funds that have been good at this like the Canadian pensions, whether it’s government of Singapore, I mean, how about this? We have social security.

1:37:10 They have social security. We put social security in bond. Well, they actually don’t even do that. We just write ourselves IOUs. They take the money and invest in the most innovative companies in the world.

1:37:23 And they’re massively overfunded. I can solve all of our social security problems right now. Take all that money and create a national venture capital pool. And everyone with a great idea could get back and the government would own a piece, just like they own a piece of GM. They would say they bailed them out.

1:37:45 Yes they did. And they made a bunch of money. That’s good. Investing in innovation is good. And so that’s why I’m optimistic.

1:37:56 And look, is there bad stuff going on? Yes. Are there obstacles in the way? Yes. Do the incumbents not want to be disrupted?

1:38:05 Yes. But in the end, Darwin was right. Adapt or die. And the death actually isn’t even that bad, right? It is an interesting thing.

1:38:19 People are like, oh, AI, and automation, and all these jobs are going to be… Here’s a fact, okay? We have lots of innovation that’s destroyed jobs, right? Factory workers here in North Carolina lost their jobs to Chinese manufacturing, right? Automation, robotics.

1:38:40 Here’s a fact. There are more jobs today in the world than any time in human history. Full stop. Despite all the jobs that have been lost, despite all the innovation that’s come, because innovation doesn’t destroy jobs. It creates jobs.

1:38:56 It creates businesses. It creates opportunities. And this resistance to it is just nonsense. Speaking of AI, are you investing in it? For sure.

1:39:07 For sure. Not enough. Is it hard? It’s so early. Right now?

1:39:12 Pardon? Is it hard to invest in our value? right now, you need to invest two, three years ago when it wasn’t popular, the valuations now are silly and people will lose a lot of money, a lot, like a lot of money because investing today in AI is like investing in pest.com in 1999 and a bunch of them are going to go away because the problem with, with AI is it can seem exciting and social media amps it up, It seems exciting and social media amps it up. But let’s take chat GPT.

1:39:45 It’s a great innovation. It’s like transformer, check it was invented by Google, which is kind of funny. And they put it open source and this other company took it and they added a bunch to it. So I’m not taking anything away from some salmon and open AI, they’re good, they’re great. They didn’t invent it, but what is it?

1:40:03 It’s, it’s a structured language anticipator, right? So it’s really good at reading old stuff and spitting out new stuff. Write a poem. Okay. You can write a poem.

1:40:18 It’s a good, is it bad? I don’t know. It’s all art is, you know, in the eye of the beholder, might be a good poem, might not be a good poem. The problem is, is if the old data is full of mistakes, it’s going to spit out mistakes. You can’t correct them because it doesn’t have actual knowledge.

1:40:32 I met this professor out in California and he’s like the king of AI. And he said, I hate the term. 90 plus percent is not intelligent at all. Yes, it’s artificial, but it’s not intelligent. And most of what we’re talking about really isn’t intelligence.

1:40:50 So it was a long way to go. It’s amazing. And a lot of money is going to be made. but my eighth grade computer teacher back before computers right we’re dealing mainframes and you know the dial-up said a computer is as smart as a screwdriver only what a human tells it to do and he said no no that’s not true the computer is gonna program itself we’ll see not so far so today it’s still about what the humans tell it to do. And the AI, I don’t know if you’ve seen, I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures, right? Of, you know, too many fingers on the hand or the torso spun around. Yeah.

1:41:32 I did the, I did the, you know, the avatar thing and I got 50 images, a third of them. Yeah. They kind of look like me. There was one look, just like Harrison Ford. I’m like, yeah, Oh, I like you. Yeah. I, I guess, I, that’s exactly what I look like. Um, a third, No, they were random pictures of like astronauts and stuff and whatever that’s not me a third unrecognizable I mean horrible like awful like you should be embarrassed that you let them out of of the system.

1:42:07 So a long way to go a long way to go. Yeah, no really well said mark really appreciate your time. I really appreciate your candor and I love how you just speak your mind. You know, one of the most valuable commodities and rare commodities in the world is not Bitcoin, Max Keiser, it’s the truth. And getting people to just be honest about how they feel and it’s lacking, especially in the financial world.

1:42:30 And you shine through with that. So thank you, Mark. I really appreciate that. How can people follow you? I know you’re active on Twitter.

1:42:36 How can people learn more about Morgan Creek Capital as well? Yeah. Well, Brian, first, thank you for those kind words. That actually means a lot, makes my day. I do believe in a couple of things.

1:42:46 I don’t have the answers. Questions, way better than answers. Loved your questions, loves your prep. And I love the fact that we could have dialogue and debate in search of truth because I agree. Truth is the most valuable asset in the world. And truth is an absolute defense. That’s why I’m not so afraid of saying certain things because if it happens to be true, I’m protected. But you can find me at at Mark Yusko, just m-a-r-k-y-u-s-k-o on Twitter. I’m actually pretty good on Twitter. Uh, my wife’s says I spent too much time there, but it’s awesome. I had this global network of friends and associates. Um, it’s amazing.

1:43:27 My favorite example is amazing. So I took a vacation in, in Greece with my wife and I posted a picture and a guy sent me a DM saying, you’re, you’re in Greece. How’d you like to meet the head of the bank? And this was like the week that the Greek banks were shut. And like, yeah, that’d be awesome. And an hour later, he was walking me over to the president of Alpha Bank, armed guards, gates down, no cost, and walked me upstairs.

1:43:56 It was me, the bank president, his assistant, and two guards. Hour and a half in, I’m like, I got to go. I, my wife, he would talk to me forever. The Alpha from that meeting that It came from a tweet. Unbelievable. So I love Twitter, uh, at, uh, so, uh, Morgan Creek cap.com, uh, is our website and there’s information there. Um, the best way to get to me is through my assistant Pam. So, uh, when you figure out how to get to her through P Clark, um, that’s how to get to me. Uh, and I’m pretty good on DM, uh, on Twitter as well. But, um, I really, look, I, this was fun.

1:44:38 I love conversations with people who one are really good at their craft, which you are, but also people who engage in dialogue as opposed to having a script and staying in between the lines. So I appreciate you. Let me go off piece a little bit. No, I really enjoy it. You know, a long form nuanced conversation is what the world needs because you can’t boil everything down to a 10 second piece of video or a quote taken out of context.

1:45:09 You really have to spend that time to understand and to hopefully change your mind, have your questions tested. And again, if you’re a Bitcoin maxi, great. You know, having to give to a bait, make sure you really know why you believe what you’re so vehement about. And yeah, I’ll talk to you some of the time about all sorts of experiences we had in 2020. No, no, we should.

1:45:31 And just on that point, there’s a book, Actually, I think it’s called belief and it talks about the way humans do this wrong, right? The way we create a belief is we’re given that belief by our parents, by the media, by our peers, by, by common, you know, wisdom, conventional wisdom. And then we seek information that supports that belief and we reject anything against that belief. That’s the exact opposite. What you should do is take all the information, think alone in solitude. In fact, everyone should should download Leadership in Solitude by William Durese Wits, best six pages you’ll ever read, spend time in solitude, contemplating what you believe based on the data. That’s how you should form a belief, but we all do backwards. And so what I actually love to do is seek people with opposite views to have dialogue and debate in search of truth. And now the problem is you’re not allowed to talk to people. Left can’t talk to right, you know, up can’t talk to down. No, that’s what you need to do. Yeah. And not to talk to persuade the other to your view, talk to listen and learn and discern you may still believe what you believe and you may believe it more but occasionally you might change your mind yeah and that’s better for all of us yeah so I’ll just finish with a little fact and we’ll talk about this another time on on April 6th of 2020 I had a guest on on my in my studio here and we talked for three hours and we had the second largest YouTube live stream

1:47:07 In the world 65,000 concurrent people were watching us Wow the biggest live stream was Trump’s coronavirus briefing that night and he had a lot of contrary views to the mainstream media about what was going on with tests and viruses and masks and he put it out there he’s 67 year old man lives on the isle of white here we weren’t inciting violence or overthrowing governments or anything and based on that viewership it probably would get on on to be watched 30 or 40 million times maybe the single most watched video podcast of all time and And Mark, about 20 minutes later, YouTube deleted and banned that video for the first time in nine years I’ve been doing this. And I thought, no. Yeah, I thought, oh my gosh, I thought censorship happened to the weirdos until you’re the weirdo.

1:47:54 So we went on a pretty much a six month fight for what I call digital freedom of speech when a lot of messages were being suppressed. But I always wish that his ideas what I got out there so people could have just openly debated him, talked about him. And if you think they’re wrong or crazy, great, but to suppress them and not allow people to engage with them because they’re potentially dangerous, man, it’s just not the way forward, I don’t think so. It’s not the way forward, but that is the beauty of Web3.

1:48:24 Yeah, exactly. Where again, we can all own our belief systems and our ideas and exchange them. Again, you can choose to engage or not. You can choose to accept or not, but you won’t have this kind of hierarchy saying, oh, that’s dangerous, that’s bad. Who’s to say?

1:48:50 The world should decide. So I applaud what you do. I am humbled and grateful to have been included because you’ve had a lot of amazing guests. So thanks for having me on and we’ll do it again sometime. Thanks Mark, you’re a super cool guy.

1:49:05 Really appreciate you. Follow this man on Twitter and stay with me here, but we’ll say goodbye to everybody else. Thank you so much. We’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care, bye.