Robert Beadles, President of Monarch Token: Bootstrapping a Business in Crypto

Robert Beadles is the President of Monarch Token and the Founder of CryptoBeadles. In this conversation, Robert and Anthony Pompliano discuss digital wallets, the current fundraising environment, how Robert thinks about bootstrapping businesses, and why he keeps his head down and keeps shipping. -----Curious about Cryptocurrency but don’t know where to begin? Storm Play is a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for you time. Simply download, register and discover microtasks that meet your interests and be rewarded with Storm Bolts. These Bolts can then be converted and withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency, including Storm Token, Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC.). Earn cryptocurrency rewards by playing new games and trying out cool products! Download the app to start earning crypto here! https://bit.ly/30pSxh9 (Available for iOS and Android). -----If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Robert Beatles is the president of Monarch Token and the founder of Crypto Beatles. In this conversation, we discuss digital wallets, the current fundraising environment, how he thinks about bootstrapping businesses, and why he keeps his head down and keeps shipping. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Are you curious about cryptocurrency and you don't know where to begin? I've got a great way for you to try. You can use Stormplay, a free and fun way to start earning in exchange for your time. That's right, you don't necessarily have to make a financial investment to begin. You can simply download, register, and then discover these micro tasks that they present you that meet your interest, and then you're rewarded with these Stormbolts. The Bolts are

• 0:58Anthony Pompliano?

  then converted and can be withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency, including the Storm Token, Ethereum, or my favorite Bitcoin. If you go and download the Stormplay app today, you can earn cryptocurrency rewards by playing new games and trying out cool new products. It's worth a try, and it's a great way to get started. Remember, go check out Stormplay in the App Store today. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang bang, I have Mr. Robert Beatles here, better known affectionately as Beatles. Sir, thank you so much for coming on and doing this.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  It's always great to hang with you, buddy. Thanks for having me.

• 1:57Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. You've been around Bitcoin and crypto for a long time, and I think that you've got a pretty unique background. So maybe talk a little bit about what you did kind of pre-crypto, and then some of the other non-crypto stuff you got going on now.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Right, okay, so how far back you want me to go? Like, to the beginning, the beginning?

• 2:18Anthony Pompliano?

  The day you were conceived.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Well, it was a sunny day outside, you know, it was... So, um, well, I guess I'll just start, you know, kind of, you know, just give it to you quick and dirty, I guess. So, uh, Christian, father, husband. I met my wife when we were like 14 years old. So, uh, we ended up getting married in, in a little town called Reno, Nevada at 17. Um, I planned on going into the, uh, the military and, but we found out that she was pregnant with our first son. I think you met Aaron, the big, uh, the big moose that goes with me everywhere. So, uh, you know, we planned on, you know, planned on, you know, starting, you know, starting our family and all that kind of stuff. So I didn't end up going into the military. I ended up going into construction. I'd already had kind of a construction background as well as a software background. So, you know, getting married that early, having a kid that early, it kind of forced me to really

• 3:06Speaker 01

  step up. And so I ended up building one of the, uh, the largest construction service companies in California. Uh, that was around, I think, two, well, we started around 2004, 2003, something like that. And then, uh, around 2009, you know, it pretty much got up and running on its own, you know? God blessed us, had a ton of great people with me, still do. And, uh, they were able to pretty much, you know, run it without my involvement. So it allowed me to kind of go back to my roots of, of software. And, uh, I created this, uh, this reusable envelope, uh, for the post office. And so, you know, we had the patents and all that kind of stuff on it. And at the same time, I created this, um, this digital greeting card. It was actually, you know, it's a paper greeting card, but it allowed you to put your own photo or video or electronic gift card right

• 3:51Speaker 01

  in it. And the post office really dug it. They liked it a lot, but they liked the tech for other reasons. So anyways, the greeting card did great, you know, went in a bunch of stores all over the world. And then we started working for the post office, doing a bunch of stuff for them. So we created a, a software company in 2009, basically around, you know, doing stuff, you know, for the post office. Around 2011 or so, um, I saw this guy, Max Kaiser. So Max, you know, Amazing guy, you know, I've interviewed him before. He's a, you know, a ton of fun, but he was talking about how, you know, there's this thing called Bitcoin and he was talking about how the central banks, you know, destroyed the company or destroyed the country, you know, attacking the world, all these big corporations and how Bitcoin could save the day. So I really started looking into this thing called Bitcoin.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  And then of course, this thing called, you know, Maxcoin and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, that, that bug just kind of bit me. And so from around 2011 on, you know, I really became pretty hardcore in Bitcoin, at least dollar cost averaging and things like that, keeping up with the tech. And then, um, you know, my friends and family, they knew that, um, you know, that I got into, um, you know, Bitcoin and crypto and, and, um, they were always asking me questions and it seemed like when that 2017, um, you know, ICO craze hit, when we started seeing Bitcoin and Ethereum and everything started, you know, shooting up, I was just getting bombarded, man, by, by people that I hadn't talked to in years. But they knew that I, you know, was in the space and so they're asking me the same questions over and over and over again. Until some of my friends and family said, hey, man, why don't you just do a video, throw it up on YouTube, all the basic questions.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  All the stuff that people keep asking you that you have to keep, you know, explaining over and over again. So I created a YouTube channel, you know, just for fun called, you know, Crypto Beatles. There was, you know, that is just for, you know, friends and family, right? And so it kind of helped them navigate the, uh, the crypto waters. So that way they could, you know, figure out what an exchange is, how to safely store their crypto. How all this stuff is super volatile and it could go to zero, how they can lose all their money. And so I made, you know, a couple of videos for them and they loved it. And they kept asking for more and more stuff. And so being as how it was super volatile, what I actually ended up doing, and I still do to this day is I give away a hundred dollars of crypto on every single one of these videos. So people could start getting into crypto on my dime.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  So that way they didn't have to worry about, you know, making a mistake. They could use my money to get into crypto and I've done this, you know, I don't even know how many times, probably four or 500 times. And so, you know, that, you know, took off. And so we, you know, had this YouTube channel, still do. And then through all of this, researching all these projects, talking to all these different founders and CEOs, you know, I quickly came to realize that, you know, there's a big, big hole in the market for something that's really, you know, super easy for people to use because blockchain is so difficult to understand. We wanted to create something that would allow them to be able to use it without having to understand how it all works. So, you know, that kind of, you know, gave birth to Monarch. So Monarch Wallet is something we created, you

• 6:46Speaker 01

  know, right around the end of seventeen, early eighteen. You know, we've got a ton of people on it. And hopefully, it's going to be the one stop shop for everybody that wants to get into crypto. It's, I don't want to talk about it too much right now. But anyways, that's kind of the quick and dirty. Feel free to ask me about anything that I just said, and we can dive deeper or move on to the next thing.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, I mean, look, you've been around the space for much longer than most people. What do you take away from some of those early days?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  It is still early days. Like, people just don't understand. Like, they, people just don't understand. Like, what people get, you know, today, for the most part, is still speculation. Like, you know, the use cases for blockchain just really, they're not there yet because the tech isn't there yet. And it's still really difficult for people to understand. It was difficult back then. But people like today, like even our customer service with Monarch, people don't even understand that you need to have Ethereum to send ERC20 based tokens. You know, there's just so many little things, these little nuances people don't understand. And so, you know, there's, there still needs to be this education process that, you know, people like, you know, yourself, myself, you know, people just have to learn. They need to be

• 8:00Speaker 01

  more, more educated in the space, realize that, you know, this is more than just for speculation, that there really is, you know, a value proposition behind just watching it go up. Or down and all the cool things that it can bring. And so I would say one of the biggest things that you know, still holds true from then to now is people just don't understand the space. They don't understand blockchain. They don't even really understand crypto. And a lot of the people out there talking about it really don't either. They're just using buzzwords and you know, bumper sticker slogans and stuff like that. They just, they, I mean, you ask them like what a guided tour puzzle protocol is, they're like, I have no idea. What is that? Do you realize that Bitcoin, you know, could totally go to zero and crash tomorrow? They just, they don't understand. And so there needs to be more education in the space for sure.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And so what drove you, or first, let's talk about what is Monarch? And then let's talk about why you're building it.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Okay, so Monarch is hopefully going to be, when I call it a wallet, it's a wallet for all the best services and companies in crypto. So think of it as one app to access them all. So basically, you would have one login, one KYC for the services that require KYC. There's a lot of stuff out there that doesn't. Like you can download the wallet right now. You don't have to KYC. You can use the DEX. You don't have to KYC. But basically, think of all the best services, all the best companies in crypto, all in one app. So that way you just download that one app. No matter what you want to do in crypto, if it's, you know, playing games, if it's, you know, buying crypto, selling crypto, earning interest on crypto, you know, having access to STO platforms, if it's, you know, file storage, anything and everything you can possibly think of in crypto, you'd be able to do it from one

• 9:34Speaker 01

  super simple user experience. So that way people don't have to understand how blockchain works. They'd be able to start using it without having to understand, you know, all the intricacies of it. And one super simple login, kind of like a Facebook or something like that where things just work. And so like today, you know, we've had over, you know, a quarter million people, you know, download it, use it. I've got a, you know, a beta tester, you know, like army, you know, through all my different channels and people, they tell us, you know, what they love, what they hate, and allows us to just kind of really tailor this for the people. So I mean, right now, for instance, you can download the Monarch Wallet, you can buy and sell cryptocurrencies from your bank account, credit card, you can earn interest on those cryptos.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  You can use our decks to be swapping between ERC twenties right there, you know, in the app, you can track the market, you can track your portfolio, you can track the news. And of course, the most important part is you own your seed, you own your keys. So you always control your crypto, anywhere in the world you go. You can take your money with you, you're basically a mobile bank that needs permission from no one. And so all that is available, you know, today and over the next, you know, year, you're just going to see more and more and more stuff added to it that just brings more and more value to the users. And of course, we've also, you know, acquired our, you know, our broker dealer license, you know. You know, waiting on, you know, FINRA and SEC approval, we got a bunch of other licenses we've applied for. So there's tons of other things that we're bringing to the space.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  And not to mention, you know, we have some of the best and brightest people in the world on the team. I mean, we have like the co-founder of LinkedIn, you know, we've got Roger Ver, you know, we've got. We got Celsius with Alex Mashinsky, like the creator of VoIP. I mean, we got David Zimbeck, the creator of the smart contract, the creator of the PEG, the world's first real estate transaction on the blockchain. We build everything in-house and, you know, it all works. So anything else you want to, anything else you want me to touch on?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  You mentioned a couple of people in there. What I want to ask about is Roger Ver. I think a lot of people are intrigued by him in the sense that. He was, you know, one of the earliest supporters of Bitcoin. He did a bunch of work and now has, has moved on to work on other things. What's kind of your, your, your experience with him or kind of your relationship with him?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, he's one of our lead investors, advisor, partner. He's a great human. A lot of people misunderstand him because of the whole Bitcoin.com thing. They realize that you go to Bitcoin.com and, you know, it's Bitcoin Cash. And so they are upset that new people coming into the space are afraid that they're going to be, you know, kind of bamboozled, so to speak, with buying Bitcoin Cash instead of Bitcoin. And so, you know, he's got kind of a negative stigma around that right there. But what people don't understand is Bitcoin is where it is today because of people like Roger. He was one of the initial pioneers that really pushed adoption, that, you know, pushed people to download wallets to actually use it in commerce.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  And it's unfortunate, but you know, he and you know, the Bitcoin core team kind of got into it. They had, you know, a difference of opinions. And so he basically went over to the Bitcoin Cash side. Believe it or not, he is not the founder of Bitcoin Cash. He just moved over to Bitcoin Cash. After it had already forked, he had got into it, you know, like I said, with the Bitcoin core team. He left Bitcoin. He, like I said, he was one of the original people there pushing it. So he owned like the domain, you know, bitcoin.com as well as a bunch of other, you know, whatever you want to call it, intellectual properties. And he just applied that to Bitcoin Cash and has been promoting that ever since. And as you can see, it's, it's, it works better than Bitcoin. So obviously, there's a store

• 13:14Speaker 01

  of value with Bitcoin that Bitcoin Cash doesn't have, but as a means of paying people, Bitcoin Cash is far cheaper, it's far faster. You can't argue with it. I mean, it's like just use it. I did a show just like a week or two ago where I wanted to see, you know, who would get a dollar of Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash faster and how much would it cost? And at that time, it cost me $23.55 to send $1 of Bitcoin and it cost me $0.09 to send Bitcoin Cash. It's pretty ridiculous. But, you know, Roger is a human. I mean, he's a great guy. Like I said, he's just a little misunderstood because of the whole Bitcoin, you know, .com thing and, you know, being with Bitcoin in the beginning and then Bitcoin Cash. But

• 13:55Speaker 01

  he still loves both, just as I do. And I think as people, if they see what he's, what his actions are, you know, maybe it'll, it'll change the, the opinions of the people that have kind of a negative, you know, sentiment towards him. Just look at people's actions, not so much their words and look at all the stuff that he's done. And I think people, you know, will really start to respect Roger a lot more for the people that don't already.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And, and so you mentioned this idea of being a fan of or supporter of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Like, when do you think that's possible, moving forward? And if it is, like, what type of person?

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Does that? Do you think it's somebody who just sees two separate use cases? Or just kind of talk me through that, because that's I think a very interesting way to look at um the world not being as binary as many want to make it to be.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, people, there's, there's too many tribes in crypto, right? So people need to realize that there's use cases, right? You got boats, you got cars, you got planes, right? You got different types of food, you know, you got Taco Bell, you got Burger King, you got round table pizza, you got fine, fine dining and cuisine. People need to stop, you know, looking at things so many, so, you know, like it has to be this or that. There's other things and you can enjoy them all. So Bitcoin for a store of value, I think is incredible. I think Satoshi should win the Nobel Prize. I think that it's, it's probably one of the best inventions, you know, definitely of my lifetime and probably, you know, one of the, one of the biggest in, in human history. It's, it's incredible. It can, you know, free the people. But as a means of paying people, as a cash, peer-to-peer cash system,

• 15:27Speaker 01

  as Satoshi originally wanted it to be, it is ineffective. It is too expensive. It does not work like that. Use Stellar, use Ripple, use Bitcoin Cash. That stuff is fast, it is cheap, and you can pay for a cup of coffee, you know, and it's going to cost you less than a penny, you know, for that actual transaction. If you're using Bitcoin, like I said, it cost me $23.55 to send $1. Just $1, that's what it costs. You can look at the blockchain, I can show the hash. You guys can see, I'm not kidding. Especially when the network, when people are trying to buy it or dump it, I mean, with all the, with all the volatility that comes with Bitcoin, it can be really expensive to send it and you know how long it can take. It can take days to actually receive your Bitcoin, depending on network usage. So as a store of value, it's incredible.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  As a method of payment for goods and services, it's, it's inefficient and it's expensive. And so things like Bitcoin Cash should be used in its place. And for stores of value, where you're speculating, where you're just holding on to this is, is a plan B, you know, in case like, you know, the governments go down or, you know, fiat, you know, hyperinflation, you have your Bitcoin there. It's your safeguard, it's your plan B. But it's not your, it's not your entire life savings. It's not, uh, your, you know, Bitcoin or nothing, right? It can't be that way. It's not that way. Just, just take your emotions out of it, step back and just look at it for what it is. It's incredible. It's amazing. It's the best, one of the best things ever created. But not to be buying coffee with. So at the end of the day, if you're trying to go away from fiat and you're trying to use crypto, use something that's fast and use something

• 16:53Speaker 01

  that's cheap. And right now, that's Bitcoin Cash. So that's just, you know, kind of my opinion on it.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  And so I, I think that if I play devil's advocate here, right, there's a lot of people who would argue, like the hardcore Bitcoin community would argue that Bitcoin is first to store value, right? And so this idea of kind of sound money is important, but they would say that over time Bitcoins volatility will decrease, it will become more scalable, and eventually it will have many properties that are necessary to buy coffee with, for example, on a, you know, daily basis. But it'll be built on this highly secure, highly

• 17:36Speaker 02

  decentralized network that just takes time to build. Do you buy that argument? Do you disagree with that argument? Kind of where do you come out with that?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  All right. So here I get a little controversial here. So yes, I, in a nutshell, I agree with you in everything that you said there. However, I think they should leave Bitcoin the hell alone. I think they should leave the fundamental blockchain alone. They should not mess with it. The way Satoshi made it, you know, it works. It is slow. It is methodical. It is reliable. It is stable. They should leave it alone and start working on, you know, like second layer and then third layer solutions. That's what they should be focusing on. The Bitcoin core team should just stop working on Bitcoin. People don't realize how dangerous it is. They don't realize that, look, there is a team of people right now, some of the best and brightest in the world, working on Bitcoin. But they can have a bad day. They

• 18:31Speaker 01

  can make a mistake. And if they do, it'll destroy Bitcoin. Like, people don't understand that. They've already had, you know, like if you look at like that common, I think it was like the common vulnerabilities and exposures report where they talked about, they tried keeping it secret, you know, that there was, you know, a DDoS attack, you know, where they could have shut down a big part of the network. There was a, a chance that people could have created billions of Bitcoin. And it was one of those bugs that was caught, luckily, you know, before somebody exploited it. But could you imagine if tomorrow there's billions and billions of Bitcoin out there, what that would do, you know, to the world? Sure, they could roll back the chain. They could destroy them just like they did in 2010. But what does that do for the mindset of the people that are talking about this as a store of value? That's why I say, you know, kind of like leave Brittany alone.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Dude, leave Bitcoin alone, leave it the hell alone, leave the, leave the blockchain itself alone and just work on second layer solutions. So that way, like you said, you can use it for cash, you can use it for stuff like that. Don't mess with the, with the original chain because there's just too many chances of something going wrong. And then everybody that's built their whole business or their whole life around crypto, it's all tied to Bitcoin. Just look at the market cap. So that, that's one of the controversial thoughts I have and, and people, if they actually just again, step back, take the tribalism out of it. Take their emotions out of it and look at Bitcoin for what it is. It's supposed to be reliable, stable and, and trusted, right? Because you don't need to trust the people that are, you know, basically running nodes and all that kind of stuff. It just kind of does everything on its own.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  That's how we want it, but the more we keep, you know, screwing with it, the more we keep working on it, the bigger the chance it can fail. We can have problems with it. So work on the second layer solutions. That way you can use it for a cup of coffee. But today, I mean, if you look at the Lightning Network, you look at all that stuff, it's great. It's, it's amazing. You know that it's going to get there one day, but you can't right now. You gotta run a node, they gotta, you gotta download all this crazy stuff. People, there's just no way that the average person is going to get this, understand it and use it. When they could use something like Ripple or Stellar or Bitcoin Cash and just send it and it costs them less than a penny. It's super simple to use. So I think you're right, it'll get there one day, but not today. And I think they need to leave Bitcoin alone and just work on second layer solutions and then third layer for the UX UI for people.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Got it. And, and one of the things I always, um, you know, say in, in crypto is, uh, because people are so bullish and it feels like we know a secret. A lot of times we only talk about the bullish stuff. What, with that in mind, what would you say are the negatives or, uh, the potential risks and challenges with Bitcoin Cash? If you had to say, you know, look, I'm bullish on it, right? But you think that there's some risk or challenge? What would be the one or two that that jumped to mind first?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  So I mean, I guess it's okay. Are you using it for a store of value or if you're using it for cash? Right? So if you're going to be looking at it in terms of, you know, I'm holding on to this because I expect it to appreciate in value. All right. Then there's all kinds of things that could go wrong. Right? I mean, there could be another fork. There could be delisting. There could be, you know, you know, something wrong with the code. There could be all kinds of things that would eventually, you know, maybe drop it to zero. But if you're using it as a cash system and you know, you buy 20 bucks worth of it and use that 20 bucks for, you know, for whatever, um, you know, there's not a lot of risk there. If you're using it uh for a store of value, then I mean, with any investment, I don't care what it is, um, there's always a risk of losing your investment in anything.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  The safest thing I would always say would be real estate because you know, obviously they're not making any more of it. Right? So uh, aside from real estate, I mean, anything that you invest in and if you're holding for just the upside, you know, is dangerous. I don't care if it's a company. I don't care if it's a crypto. There's a, there's a chance that it could always go to zero. So if you're using it for cash, I don't really see a downside. If you're using it for a store of value, you know, it's risky just like anything else.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Um, all right. So let's go back to uh, to Monarch for a second. Um, you know, you, you've built this, you, you've got a team that's going and, and um, or we started recording, we're talking about, you know, just the fundraising process in general for entrepreneurs. Maybe just give us kind of a, you know, where you feel like a lot of uh, the fundraising environment is today. Um, we're recording this in uh, June of uh, 2019. So kind of where, where do you feel like it is today? Um, and for entrepreneurs to go out and fundraise for other companies?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  In a word, hard.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  It is, uh, it is always difficult for people to, uh, to raise money. It seems like, um, you know, through the successes I've had, uh, with all the other companies that I've built, you know, uh, obviously the grace of God, hard work, amazing teams, um, you know, we've, we've always grown it organically. So we've, we've never, you know, raised money for any of our other companies. We've always just kind of, you know, funded everything that ourselves. With Monarch, it was the same thing from the beginning. We, uh, we basically created a wallet that, um, I think is, you know, better than anything out there. And at the time, there was crazy, crazy evaluations on companies. There was market caps of like $800 million on, on things with white papers. And basically everything that they

• 23:37Speaker 01

  said that they were going to do on the white paper is what the Monarch wallet did for free. Right? And so we launched with something people could use. And then we just keep dropping tech every, you know, every week, every month, we're always doing updates, adding new services, adding new features. But one of the things that I found is, you know, paying for everything yourself gets kind of old, right? And I think anybody can, can realize that. And not everybody has the means to do that. And not everybody has the means to, you know, develop, you know, some, some amazing, you know, DApps and, and, uh, software, you know, in-house themselves. And so when you go to raise money, one of the things that I quickly found was that we had done, well, not maybe, maybe I didn't realize, but they were telling me, these big VCs and whatnot, that we actually had done

• 24:21Speaker 01

  too much. Right? So they needed something to hype. They needed like a, a white paper, an idea. They needed something that they could go out and build up a bunch of noise and they didn't even care about delivering tech. And so when I saw that, and, and I was hearing this more and more and more, that the tech doesn't matter. The tech doesn't matter. You need, you know, you need a, you know, a great story. You need a, a great white paper, a great idea. I'm like, but dude, we're, we're dropping amazing tech. We have users. We're actually generating income. We actually have a business here. And they're like, yeah, but you know, we want something that we can, you know, hype up that, you know, the tech hasn't been dropped, you know, the stuff that we can, you know, drop in, in, in little bits and pieces and raise more and more money and get more and more excitement. And so.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  For people that are like trying to drop value, for people that are trying to build something that people use, it is extremely difficult. The people that I see getting funding and stuff like that, it's where they don't have working tech, right? I mean, just look at the ICO craze. Look at all the money that was raised. It was just off a frickin' white paper. It had nothing to do with tech. So it's very difficult to raise money in this environment. I haven't met a VC yet that appreciates, you know, working tech. They want, everybody that I've met, they want something that, I don't know, something they can just, you know, brag about coming one day and then just keep building hype and raising more and more money, you know, from other avenues to help, you know, fund the, fund the, I guess, the mission or the endeavor or whatever.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  And then, you know, getting their tokens on, on different exchanges and then using all these market makers to, you know, push the price of it up and keep it stable. They call it price discovery, but really it's just, you know, making sure their, their investors can, you know, cash out and stuff like that. And so through this whole process, and as you can see, I just tell people the way, the way I see it, I don't really, I'm not very political or bureaucratic, you know, I'm not, I just kind of tell it the way it is. So I, through everything that I've seen over the years, it's, it's disheartening for entrepreneurs that really want to bring value and drop tech in the space. If you've got just a great story, a white paper, you know what? You might do really, really well. But for people that are actually dropping tech, those are the people that are struggling the most in the space.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  And everybody keeps saying, well, this market's great. You know, like you got Brock Pierce, amazing guy, you know, he says, bull markets, you know, produce bullshit, bear markets, bear fruit. That's what he says. Very true. But what they don't tell you is the, the projects out there that are actually doing really amazing stuff and dropping really good tech, most of them don't get funding. You know, it's the ones that are coming out with, I don't know, with the ideas. So that's kind of, that's kind of my take on the space currently.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And as you look at that, right, you know, this idea of building companies that drive revenue and become sustainable, what do you feel like is the biggest challenge for entrepreneurs trying to do that? Is it simply just getting the right product and finding that product market fit? Is it a lack of experience, kind of scaling? Where do you see that those challenges?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  So I guess, you know, it's, you know, kind of the speed of the boss is the speed of the team, right? And so you, you need to have, you know, a really great team. So if you're really trying to drop, drop, you know, tech and things like that, and you're trying to create a business that... That actually generates revenue, you need to have an amazing team. So you know, put your your faith in God, work your butt off, have a great freaking team, figure out, you know, what it is you're you're I wouldn't say passionate about, I would say figure out, you know, what it is that you're good at. And then the the passion comes with that. And then when you find, you know, what you're good at, the niche that you're trying to fill, the team behind it, the ability to to deliver tech and things like that and fill that need,

• 28:01Speaker 01

  whether it's a service or a product, people will pay for it, right? Because there's stuff out there that people want and people need. And if you're able to figure out what that is, and if you're able to do it, the money will come. You know, it's just work your butt off, trust in God, and drop amazing, awesome tech, or a service, or whatever, and the money will come. It's it's really kind of that simple. Obviously, you know, it helps if if you have money to to fund the endeavor. And so, you know, maybe, maybe they'll be more successful than than I am at trying to, you know, to raise money. Because I'll be honest, you know, I really don't spend a lot of time at all doing it. I have a few meetings with VC people, I hear what they say, and it just kind of turns me off. And I'm just like, you know what, I'm just going to keep

• 28:44Speaker 01

  building, and the money will come. And that's what's worked for me through all the companies I've ever built. You know, I've I've made mistakes along the way. I've had, you know, businesses that, you know, have failed, you know, but I've created a lot more value than, you know, than than most, and I've created a lot more, you know, money than than a lot of people. And our businesses overall are extremely successful. And it's just because, again, you know, trusting God, working your butt off, you know, finding a need, filling it, and then the money usually comes.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Absolutely. That makes a ton of sense. As you look forward, what uh, what are you excited about for from Monarch? Like, where do you guys go from here?

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Well, over the next year, what we want to have happen is we create the the wallet, right, that is that one app to access them all. So we've already integrated about four amazing companies into our app. And I'm hoping within like, the next year, we'll have pretty much all the the best services and companies out there integrated into the app. So, within the year, We already have, you know, amazing stuff in it already, but within the year, you'll have pretty much anything and everything you want to, uh, to be able to do in crypto from one place, from one login, one KYC, all that kind of stuff. And so people don't have to understand, you know, like I said, all the intricacies and, you know, all the, all the stuff that goes into blockchain that makes it so complicated for even veterans to understand.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  We just want that, that Facebook experience, right? Right there in the palm of their hand, no matter what they want to do financially, whatever they want to do in crypto, whatever they want to do in blockchain, even video games, all that stuff, all right there from one app to access them all. So the best companies, best services, all in one place, all in one app. We've got, you know, a good chunk of that now that people can, you know, download it right now from the Apple Store, the Android Store, and they can already see what we've done. But over the next year, I just hope it's going to be, you know, that, that one app that, uh, everybody uses because anything and everything they're going to want to do, they'll be able to do it from one spot easily.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And, and where do you see kind of crypto going, right? Is this something where, um, a lot of the user experience, uh, challenges that we currently see eventually just get, um, kind of fade to the background and, and the user experiences do improve and you can do all this stuff off your phone? Um, or, or do you think that there's going to kind of be a compromise, right? The user experience will get a little bit better, but also users will have to get more familiar with some of the more technical aspects of, uh, Bitcoin and crypto. And, and so we kind of have to meet in the middle. Like, do you think that it's just the tech has to eventually meet the consumers where they are? Or will there be some level of education and familiarization that, um, will, will be helpful for users and investors to, uh, to, to get through?

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, there's a couple of things to that. Like, if you wanted everything to work today, then it would have to work just like a centralized solution. Um, if you, if you're looking at crypto long-term, obviously there's going to have to be some education process, but if we ever want this to take off. If we ever want people to use it, we've got to dumb it down. We've got to make it a very, very simple streamlined experience that is, you know, something that grandma can use. I've always said that, you know, it should be like Facebook to where when you hit that thumbs up button, you don't need to know what protocol. You don't need to know the code. You don't need to know how it works. You just hit the little thumbs up button and you've liked something. It's got to be the same thing with crypto. You hit that little send button and you're sending money. You know, you, you look at your wallet, somebody sent it to you, you've received it. You're using blockchain

• 32:09Speaker 01

  stuff, but it looks just like a centralized solution. And so that's where we have to be for this to work. And so it's just like the internet. It just takes time. It takes time. It takes patience. You know, for people that expect this to blow up overnight and just be, you know, blockchain, everything, uh, you know, tomorrow, it's just never going to happen. It's going to take time to develop this all out. And, you know, developing all this stuff ourselves, I mean, we see there's, there's only so much you can do with the tech that we have that's out there right now. We still have to kind of wait for things to be built to make it, you know, as amazing as we want it to. Um, we can keep making that Coinbase experience where it's very centralized, uh, where the user gives up their, their private key or their seed. Uh, they give up control of their assets. You can

• 32:54Speaker 01

  do that now to where you see Coinbase. It's super successful because not only do they have, you know, a great business model, but it's very easy to use. And people, they give up their freedoms, just like they do, you know, we could go way down the rabbit hole here, but people give up their freedoms, you know, for things that are easy, for things that work. And so for stuff to work today, you need the Coinbase, you know, um, approach. For things to work tomorrow, you need everything that we want to be doing in, in blockchain to work kind of like Facebook. And, um, it's going to take us a minute to get there.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Got it. And so go a little deeper on this idea of like Bitcoin as a liberator, um, or potentially not, and kind of how you think about that.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Right. So, you know, for, for years, I've always told people that crypto is like the greatest liberator for the people, or the biggest enslavement of the people. And what I mean by that is, you know, Bitcoin is incredible, right? It's, uh, you know, if you look at the way Satoshi designed it, you know, peer to peer, you know, trustless network of money that you can send to anybody, anywhere. You don't need to worry about boundaries or borders and all that kind of stuff. It's incredible. Uh, but it's expensive. And so. When you release blockchain into the world and then these central banks, these governments, they look at this and they realize, oh my God, this is incredible. Did you realize how much control we could have over our population? It's kind of like Pandora's box. It's like,

• 34:17Speaker 01

  oh my God, what did we do here, right? So we release Bitcoin to the world and then these governments, they look at the, you know, the blockchain and they realize that not only can we track every single one of these tokens or coins and see exactly where they go, how they spend it, who's using it, who's holding it. They could even probably do geolocate in the wallets and figure out exactly where in the world they're at. But they could basically, you know, through social controls, shut off people's, you know, I guess their own currency. So depending on, you know, what government, you know, implements blockchain, if they do it as a dictatorship, this could spell a lot of trouble, a lot of trouble for people. I mean, if you look at places like China, there's so many, so many different levels

• 34:59Speaker 01

  of just craziness there that the government does to their people. And if they control the currency completely digitally to where they can inflate, deflate, lock up, recall, you know, or just seize all these assets and everybody's using this instead of fiat, you know, it's very, very dangerous. So there obviously needs to be things like Bitcoin out there that people use. But if people just all create, you know, if people all just, I guess, embrace one currency, you know, some type of, you know, global coin per se, you know, we could end up with a lot of problems. And so that's, that's kind of what I mean. The greatest liberator or possibly the greatest enslaver.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  And it's pretty crazy when you start thinking about the various implications if Bitcoin ends up becoming the global reserve currency and kind of gets that mainstream adoption.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, if it becomes a global currency, I mean, that's, that's amazing, but they need to stop messing with the underlying code. You know what I mean? Keep, keep working on the secondary solutions. Leave, leave, leave the underlying, underlying blockchain alone.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  You are adamant about that, my friend.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Leave Bitcoin alone.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  All right. Before I finish up, I always do a rapid fire set of questions. What, what do you think the most important company in crypto is?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  So, I mean, of course, you know, I want to say Monarch, right? Because it's one app to access them all. But, you know, obviously Bitcoin. Bitcoin is, you know, is how everybody got into this. Everything is pegged to it. Everything goes the way of Bitcoin. If it goes up, you know, people were happy. It goes down, people were sad. Everything's kind of tied to it. If it fails, you know, it's going to be really hard to, I guess, pick up blockchain, dust it off and put it back into use. And then Facebook, of course, because they got three billion users, they could wipe out the banks, they could wipe out Visa, they could wipe out Mastercard. I think they got like eighty million businesses on there, like three billion users. They could, you know, bank the unbanked. So I would say between Bitcoin and Facebook, those are probably my two favorites.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Got it. What, um, what do you think your most controversial thought in crypto is? Leave Bitcoin alone?

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I mean, that's, that's one of them for sure. Um, you know, obviously, when I tell people that crypto is the greatest liberator, or the biggest chance of enslavement of the people, that, uh, that definitely does it for them too. So. Um, I say Bitcoin can go to zero. Um, if they keep messing with it, they end up, you know, screwing it up. But, um, yeah, those, probably in crypto, those are, those are two, two that I have. I mean, we could, we could dive so far down the rabbit hole here. But if we kept it outside of crypto, but we'll leave it at that for now.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  What, um, what's the one regulation that you would change or improve if you could?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Um, so one of the things that I've always thought was it'd be great if there was just like a 10% flat tax. So force, you know, the governments to stop printing money. Yeah, that's, that's the biggest thing, right? Because, you know, you've got all this inflation that just keeps killing the people, you know, they're just, they're making less and less every single year. And then the government's taking more and more every single year. So there's, there's a big problem there. So I would, I would force the governments to, you know, stop printing money. Because, you know, we're huge deficits. And then just incorporate a 10%, you know, global flat tax. So that way it doesn't matter if you make a trillion dollars a year, or if you make a thousand dollars a year, your fair share is 10%. And the government is then forced to use that 10% to pay for things, not just keep printing money and destroying the people's wealth.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Got it. What's the most important book you've ever read?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  The Bible. Man, that's, uh, geez. You got a 4,000-year-old history book. And I believe everything in it's, you know, true. I think that there's a lot of people out there that, you know, disagree and they think that, you know, it's a, it's a myth, right? But. If you, if you build your foundation upon sand, everything is not stable. And so a lot of the dates that people use to say that the Bible is in fact not real is, is in error. And if you look, they have, they've proved that most of the stuff, almost, I think 20,000 sites or whatever in the Bible, they've been able to actually find and prove that it's real. And then if you look at the archaeologists that came over from, from Britain

• 39:03Speaker 01

  back in like 1950, she made a mistake when she aged or I guess, said how old the, I think of the walls of Jericho were, was, she was off by like 200 years. And so everybody started using that timeframe, especially like in Egypt, to, to date everything. Cause she dated the, the, the walls of Jericho 200 years, like in the future. And so when people started building upon that, that foundation, it, it threw everything off, you know, across, across the globe. And from the 1950s to now, you've seen more and more people, they become, you know, less and less Christian, they believe in the Bible less and less. And it was because of her date that people kind of, you know, hung, hung their hats on. And as soon as you realize that, hold on, she's off by 200 years and there's plenty of documents and

• 39:47Speaker 01

  now, and now actually meetings going on, trying to reverse what, what date she put on things. If you go back a couple hundred years, you realize that everything in the Bible lines up just perfect. So you can actually see, you know, 4,000 years of, of history and you can see where we came from, you can see where we're going. You know, most all of our governments, the way we lived our lives, all of that stuff is based, you know, off the Bible. And for people that think it's a myth, you know, they should, they should do a little bit of, a little research. There's a, a really good documentary that came out not too long ago. I think it's called Patterns of Evidence, Exodus and Patterns of Evidence, I think Moses. They should check those things out. Might, might change their viewpoint on things.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Aliens, believe it, don't believe it.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely believe, man, but it's it's different, though. The way I believe is, you know, Genesis, Chapter six, right? So when when the angels fell, those to me are aliens when they when they mixed with with humans, as it says in the Bible, those became like aliens, demigods, all that kind of stuff. It got so bad on earth that God created the flood, you know, got rid of them. So I still think that they're they're still here. I still think they're among us, but I think that if you just read the Bible, it basically tells you everything you need to know about aliens and so and all their advanced technology and all that kind of stuff. It can all easily be explained right there in the good book.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Got it. And then what do you think is your biggest fear when it comes to to nature and outdoors? Like, if it's not aliens, what do you fear?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Sharks.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Well, you know, so I spend a good chunk of the year in the Bahamas and we can actually see the sharks, you know, right from right from our house. So we can see them out there, but it seems like over the past, ever since I was like nine years old, going forward, anytime I get in the ocean, there'd be a big ass shark and I've almost been attacked. I've been attacked by sharks like two or three times. You know, they tried to trying to eat me. So I have a real legitimate fear of sharks. It seems like every time I get in the ocean, there's some monster shark there ready to ready to devour me. So I find myself doing most of my my waiting from the beach in just maybe ankle deep water. So sharks, other than that, I fear nothing on land.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  Got it. And then what one question you have for me to finish it out?

• 42:07Speaker 01

  You know, a question that I like to always ask people just to kind of see what they've done with with adversity growing up or just in life is one of the things is like, you know, what's what's like your biggest failure in life that you've ever had to overcome, you know, and then you ended up succeeding at?

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Biggest failure in life? Man, I have failures every single day.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's like the biggest one that, you know, it's like, man, that was pretty devastating, but then you overcame it. Now you're better for it.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that I had a very infamous, you know, short stint at a at a large tech company. And while I was there, I was, you know, only there for a couple of weeks and was forced to kind of make make some hard decisions about just, you know. Who I was as a person and kind of what I thought was the right way to uh to behave and and uh and conduct business um and uh you know kind of made the decision that I thought was uh um I can go to sleep with at night, right? And so I think that whenever you get uh one of these like high-flying jobs um that's

• 43:14Speaker 02

  got a lot of uh kind of you know just press coverage and and people are paying attention it's a hot company and all of that uh there's a lot of pressure that comes with that um and uh you know there's probably a lot of my friends who uh who would have just kind of hung in there and said you know it's not that bad, right? Um but uh but for me it was uh it's kind of one of the core you know tenets of uh of who I think I am and who I want to be um and and so that was uh fairly devastating uh in the sense that for the following you know two, three years uh I had to answer questions about it every single time um you know hey look what happened there and I think for me

• 43:54Speaker 02

  it it ultimately um I fell back on this idea of uh do the things that you think are right regardless of if they're popular or not um and then uh it was also a great filtering mechanism right anyone who had kind of a problem um with uh with the decision that I had made I essentially you know convinced myself it's probably not somebody I wanted to do business with anyways um and so you know it's it's the whole adage of like look for the positive and and a whole bunch of negative um but I do believe that that is uh one of the best ways to uh to address uh negative situations and it's probably the one that I would say.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  No, you're you're absolutely right. One of the biggest things you can you can take away from life is you gotta do what uh you're comfortable with because you at the end of the day you gotta look at yourself in the mirror, right? So you gotta make sure you're doing what's right for yourself and what's right for the people close to you and at the end of the day it's that's what matters.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Well, look man, I really appreciate you doing this, it's a ton of fun uh even though I may disagree with you on the Bitcoin Cash uh uh stance, I am uh

• 44:57Speaker 01

  [laughing]

• 44:59Speaker 02

  You know, every voice needs to be heard and uh and I think you did a great job articulating kind of you know why you believe on the things you believe but I really appreciate you taking the time and I'll have this again in the future to hear an update on uh on Monarch and how things are going.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Appreciate it, brother. And for the people that are listening, you know, we have that monarchwallet.com/pomp. So if they want some free Monarch tokens, just roll on over there. Monarchwallet.com/pomp and get some free tokens.

• 45:29Anthony Pompliano?

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• 46:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, everyone. Pomp here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.