Tory Reiss, Co-Founder of TrustToken: Down Mt. Gox, Through Silk Road, to Justice Reform We Go

Tory Reiss is the Co-Founder of TrustToken. In this conversation, Tory and Anthony Pompliano discuss Mt. Gox, Silk Road, the challenges with tokenizing assets, drug decriminalization, criminal justice reform, financial literacy, and the automation of personal finance. ----- 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 These Bolts can then be converted and withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency, including Storm Token, Ethereum (ETH) and Bitcoin (BTC.).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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  Tori Reese is the co-founder of Trust Token. In this conversation, we discussed Mt. Gox, Silk Road, the challenges with tokenizing assets, drug decriminalization, criminal justice reform, financial literacy, and the automation of personal finance. 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

• 0:58Speaker 00

  then converted and can be withdrawn into your favorite cryptocurrency, including the Storm Token, Ethereum, or my favorite Bitcoin.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.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Alright guys, bang, bang. Here I am with Tori. Thank you so much for doing this. We've got a lot to cover. Welcome.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Thanks, my man. It's good to be here.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Alright, background. Where, who are you? Where do you come from?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  So I'm one of the co-founders of Trust Token. You're, as you know, one of the investors in said company.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Yes, disclaimer, disclaimer. We invested, disclaimer.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  We were based in San Francisco and we tokenized real-world assets. We got our start with the US dollar, true USD, and since then have rolled out a series of other currencies. But for myself, I guess how I got into crypto dates back to 2011 and 2012.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  Early.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was an interesting time, you know, it was, I was in college at the time, Northwestern, and I was, I was one of those early customers of Silk Road. And, you know, it was during those sketchy days where you would be sending cashier's checks to, you know, random addresses in China and things like that to load an account at Mt. Gox. And during that period, I also got into the white paper. And, you know, it was one of those things where I didn't have any money to really invest, but it was like I would trickle invest over kind of the trailing years and kind of went all in in 2013.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Okay, so in 2011, 2012, let's talk a little bit about, I think everyone's heard of Mt. Gox, they know, hey, there was this big issue, some people understand, some people don't. But let's talk about the user experience of like how you could buy Bitcoin, right? You could obviously mine it back then, but buying it is not like, hey, let me just go sign up for a Coinbase account and like hook up my bank and now I own Bitcoin. It was very full of friction and it was frankly not easy, right? And so just like describe like what you would have to do, the different steps to actually get Bitcoin.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, what's funny is it actually gives, it's an exercise in what a lot of, I guess, monetary experiences or financial experiences are like for people in the third world today, where things are very, very manual, there's a lot of steps involved and a lot of room for human error. It was literally a process of, you know, you go find a local bank of a, bank of a, ah.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  You go find a local bank branch and you get a cashier's check made out for a fixed amount of money that you're going to be mailing to them. Then they would give you an address and you you then you would either send a wire or send the cashier's check to just what you know, what is effectively an anonymous account, right? Which is the bank of of Mt. Gox at the time. And then you'd wait, you'd have to wait for them to receive your wire. It might be two, three days, or you'd wait for them to receive your cashier's check. And then, like magic, quote unquote, like four days later, you see your your account balance.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  And you would just see that now you have X number of Bitcoin in your account.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  And it was all Bitcoin, right?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  It was just Bitcoin.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  In kind of pre 2013.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  And and so then, once you get it on Mt. Gox, if you wanted to use it on Silk Road, how did you go from Mt. Gox to Silk Road?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so so that was a process. So Mt. Gox is an exchange, so you could, you know, trade spot with the US dollar. But if you actually wanted to get it to Silk Road, then you have to, you know, first off, got to get the Tor browser, figure out how to how to set that up and and protect your privacy, or so you thought. Then you create your account on on Silk Road, and you would have to then, you take your address, you'd go to do a withdrawal, you have to verify your identity with Mt. Gox, which that takes another few days. Then you would send a withdrawal request to Mt. Gox to then send it, send the Bitcoin to load an account on Silk Road, and then that would kind of give you a balance.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  Got it. So basically, you tell Mt. Gox, hey, I want to take my Bitcoin off of your platform, I want you to send it to this wallet address on a different platform. They obviously could figure out that it was Silk Road, but they were just sending it from one digital wallet address to another digital wallet address.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  Okay, got it. And so when you signed up for Silk Road, and I don't think we've talked to anybody on a podcast about Silk Road specifically, you signed up for like a user account? Like, here's my real name, here's my last name, here's my username, or?

• 5:58Speaker 01

  It was just usernames.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Got it, okay.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  So it was no, no real names. And you, you know, I mean, you can use it, there's, there's tons of innocuous things on the Silk Road. Like, I think it's been turned into kind of a big legend today in terms of, you know, what was going on there, in terms of, oh, there was human trafficking and drugs. To be honest, like, the early days of the Silk Road, that was maybe some dark corner of it, but the majority of it was, you know, people could transact. I mean, there were things like... Fake IDs or weed.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  But then there's also just actually, there was like just a lot of e-commerce and a lot of things that might be restricted that they couldn't get shipped to, let's say, the UK or the US.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  What were the like, non-Vice stuff, right? So take out the drugs, take out like all the fake IDs and all that kind of stuff. Like, what were the kind of more traditional e-commerce products?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  There was actually a lot of like memorabilia and there's also a lot of like banned books, like weird stuff like that, like in certain countries where they wouldn't be able to buy, you know, certain media or information. Like, there was actually a lot of that saying like, you know, free the information.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  And you could buy that all on the Silk Road. So it's interesting because it's an exercise in anti-censorship. And so, you know, whether you were in China or India, you know, the United States, you had access to all this material. And obviously, there's the Vice-centric stuff, but then there's also just this more censored information.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, lots of shared ethos with Bitcoin, obviously.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  All right. And so as you're getting more and more involved with Bitcoin through Silk Road, et cetera, was there a feeling at the time that like, oh, Bitcoin's going to become this huge thing? Or was it literally the same thing as, you know, people today, they go and they use their Starbucks credits or their Amazon? It was just the means of exchange and they didn't really kind of have foresight into how big it would become?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Everyone that I interacted with, we were just using it as kind of medium of exchange. It was more just like, we liked the idea that it was anonymous or, you know, felt at the time anonymous.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  More anonymous than US dollars.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. It really, because of the user experience, like the UX was so bad that it was so hard to imagine it becoming mainstream in any way. At that time, it was just kind of like, wow, this is such a pain in the ass. Like, why would anyone want to use this? Oh, but the privacy is great, right? So that was like, I think, the initial hook. And that's why it appealed to those markets. But it was really when I started to see some of the early infrastructure popping up like Coinbase, where, you know, that was where in 2013, when I was doubling down, 2013, yeah, that was when it was, it was, you know, it was to Coinbase. And I was like, whoa, Silicon Valley is getting into the game and like, you know, things are changing.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's becoming more real and. I think when you see the infrastructure, you start to see, oh, I'm going to be able to take fiat and not have to go get the cashier's check.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm going to be able to actually like get it back without having to try to track somebody down in China.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  So makes makes sense there. And then so you've gone from kind of early days of Bitcoin Silk Road that really, you know, what I like to think of as some of the initial product market fit of this technology with people who said, look, I want to use it for the anonymity or the pseudonymity. I want to use it because payment processors can't shut it down like all of that. To today with Trust Token, you guys are now looking at how do we take every stock, bond, currency and commodity over time and digitize them, right? Give them similar attributes or properties that Bitcoin shares. Just talk a little bit about kind of why settle on that as a thesis and kind of where you guys have gotten so far.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I mean, the the way that I think about it is if you if you look at sort of the traditional payment infrastructure that banks rely on or and governments rely on, there there were, you know, early on, there was the idea of correspondent banking, the idea that banks would just have accounts with each other and then they could settle liabilities and credits with each other. And that was kind of how they would quote unquote move money, but there was still a lot of counterparty risk in that because banks fit, you know, would fail all the time. There was also a liquidity problem because, you know, if it was a large enough transfer, you know, you'd have a lot of money that you owe out to other banks and things like that. So there's a real liquidity crunch. And so that was solved with the introduction of, you know, deferred net settlement systems.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  And that's like today, ACH, you know, the automated clearinghouse and in Euro One in Europe and really every country or region is kind of cobbled together their own deferred net settlement clearinghouse. And what they would do is instead of actually doing a transfer for every single transaction, they would settle up at some set time and they would do the net transactions. So like, you know, if you had sent me money, but then, you know, net at both banks, you know, there were so many businesses and individuals transacting with each other that the actual net amounts that would need to be transferred was a lot smaller. So that solved a lot of the problems, but not all of them. So then the the kind of the solution that was introduced was, you know, the central bank and this idea of we're going to now have

• 10:54Speaker 01

  what's called a real time gross settlement layer. And and that's kind of like, OK, well, everyone will just have an account with this central bank. And then we can settle in real time and we'll actually settle gross amounts. And what's wild is if you look at Bitcoin, Bitcoin is just a global real time gross settlement layer.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  So so we had already seen that.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  We forget that, right? Yeah, everyone always thinks of Bitcoin as the asset in which you hold. But the network is probably one of the largest in the world. I mean, Mastercard Visa are bigger, but it's bigger than Venmo. It's bigger than Apple Pay. It's bigger than all these other ones. And so there's somebody choosing it.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Totally. And what's crazy is actually, so everyone you just mentioned, like Venmo and PayPal and all those guys are actually deferred net settlement. And so what allows them to be so fast is, you know, the the money is not actually moving. The money is held in, you know, a single account or they'll just net settle between various accounts. They hold in different countries, same with like Transferwise and things like that. So that there's actually a lot of disadvantages from a deferred net settlement network to Bitcoin's, you know, real time gross settlement. And and the idea is, you know, to your point, it's like there are trade offs, but like the reason it's slower and the reason, I mean, that's for security. But it's also because they're doing real time gross settlement. Like every single transaction can't be duplicated.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  You're removing counterparty risk and it's it's fundamentally a better system. It's just there's trade offs.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  Absolutely, that makes sense. And so you guys started with US dollars, right? And you created true USD.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  You know, I, being an investor, it's always fun to tell the story of like, you start with zero transaction volume, right? And it's now grown into the third largest, second largest, depending how you look at it. Stablecoin in the entire ecosystem. Talk a little bit about, you know, why start with the US dollar and how you guys went from, you know, kind of zero to hero, if you will, in another trajectory here.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, so we we now do about $3 billion in 30 day, like trailing 30 day volume. So people are really. Really using it and it's really exciting, obviously, to build a product that people are getting a lot of utility out of. You know, the the the process, like the thinking process was, okay, if Bitcoin is this massive real time growth settlement network, how do we apply that same sort of technology, which is a global real time growth settlement network to traditional currencies? Because that would be really valuable. Because even today, it's still a mess. There's Fedwire, there's Chaps, there's, you know, there's so many competing real time growth settlement networks that, and none of them work well together. That's why it's so expensive, inefficient and slow to move money in traditional banking system.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  So we looked at the US dollar and we're like, well, this is clearly the most well understood financial asset or financial product in the world, right? So it's like, if we tokenize that, you don't have to explain to someone what a US dollar is. And not only that, but we knew it would have all the advantages. We built on Ethereum, but it'd have all the advantages that you that you see displayed in Bitcoin.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And so it was very much a situation where we built it and, you know, at the time it was, you know, it was five, five of us, six of us. You know, this was early, we launched in March of 2018. And we launched on Bitrix and then, you know, shortly after, when we listed on Binance, the world was ready because Tether had really fumbled the ball, like they had lost users' trust in so many ways that we got a lot of adoption very quickly and things just started taking off after that.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  Got it. And so as this thing's grown, you guys have added other assets, right? Maybe talk about the other currencies that you've added. And then we can get into a big one that you didn't add and why you did that.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so since then, we've we've recently launched Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, GBP, you know, British pound. And we're preparing, we are going to be launching Hong Kong dollar. We're working on Japanese yen, we're working on Korean won. And as well as some South American currencies that we haven't publicly announced yet. And really, our logic there is there's a lot of second order effects and, you know, possibilities. When you have all of these fiat currencies running on a single global settlement layer

• 15:02Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  that you can do some really incredible things, both for individuals, for businesses, in terms of how they move money and removing, like truly moving, removing the middleman.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  What would be an example?

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. So we have some real world examples. For example, there's businesses in Argentina that are doing commerce, let's say, with, you know, other businesses in Europe or in Asia, and they have suppliers that they have to pay and/or they have to receive payments for for products that they ship out. And they're taking a haircut of, I mean, it can it can range, but I'm not exaggerating when I say 10 to 30% just to move the money.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Oh, I literally tweeted about a week ago. I went and I was in a store and I saw MoneyGram kiosk. And I went up to the MoneyGram kiosk and I was kind of joking around at first. I was like, oh, this will be a funny tweet. But I started pushing all the buttons and essentially had got right to the checkout page of sending $100 from New York to California. So all within one country, $12.50 fee.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Right? On top of the $100.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  And so that's a intra-country fee of sending US dollars from one location to another. I can't imagine what it would have been if I said, I want to send you from New York to Argentina or New York to Asia or somewhere, right? Like, it's pretty incredible how egregious the fee schedules of these these companies are.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's because they can afford to charge huge fees. It's like, you know, we need to move money. And, you know, fortunately, the the human coordination problem that has led to the inefficiencies and how banks move money has created this real arbitrage for private enterprise to step in and say, well, we can move it more efficiently than banks. These guys are, you know, years behind. But we're gonna, you know, we're gonna take our cut. Now, what's crazy is if you look at what's possible, any transaction on Ethereum today costs one cent. And it doesn't matter how big it is. So I can send you $10 million anywhere in the world, and it's going to cost one cent. I can also send $100, and it's going to cost you one cent. So I mean, that's, that's wild. And it's, and it's on

• 17:17Speaker 01

  a technology that has really spread globally. So there's developers and there's businesses

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Individuals building on, you know, on, on blockchains or specifically Ethereum or Bitcoin. That really, they don't speak the same language. They never met each other, but it's this incredible human coordination effort where we've all standardized on a couple like core technologies.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  You didn't do the Euro. Why?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're, we're, we're working on the Euro. So, so we've been, we've been chasing the Euro for, for a while now. There's a ton of demand for the Euro, which is ironic, given that, you know, it's zero to negative interest rates right now. But they have some pretty intense requirements for what's called an e-money license, which is what you need to, to move money, transmit money in, in Europe. That include performing KYC on every single person that touches your token. So, I mean, you know, here in the US, like we perform it on the first hop, like the person making the purchase. But once they go and they have a transaction or they send it to someone, that's not really our responsibility. There's no way for us to track that. I mean, we're not surveilling that.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  The, the difference is in, in Europe, and I, I think this is going to really kill a lot of innovation there. You have to follow it every single hop.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Well, it's not just follow it. You have to KYC and AML every single person who receives it.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, that's right. And it's, it's, it's a massive surveillance effort. It's also a massive burden from a cost perspective on all the payment service providers there. But ironically, it actually creates a huge black market. That's why there's so much money laundering there. That's also why there's so much kind of cash transactions and sort of under the table transactions is because it, it, it pays a lot better to be a criminal there than in places where it's really efficient, where you can move money affordably.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Most of the latest banking money laundering crimes have occurred in Europe, right? Where, you know, the big one, I think, I forget the exact numbers at this point, but I think it's like $200 billion laundered through one single branch in Estonia.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  I mean, it's just that the numbers are so large that it's, it's quite overwhelming, actually. Right? All right. So as you guys are doing this, what, what comes next? Once you get outside the currencies, anything there that, that you guys are looking at?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah. We. You know, we've made a commitment since very early on. We made, we make a few of what we call kind of timeless bets. These are things where regardless of what happens in the space, like this is kind of how we want to operate. One of those was making the commitment to work with regulators and kind of follow the law, protect our users, like you'd be shocked.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  But that's one commitment. The other has been, you know, we've made a commitment that we're not going to marry ourselves too closely to any one technology and that we're going to kind of let the market and let our users kind of show us where the greatest pains are. And what we've found most recently is to your earlier questions around global payments, we see that as today, one of the largest opportunities with the most inefficiency, the most user pain for cash, you know, cash to cash remittances, which makes up still about, it's something like 90% of the global remittance market is still all this cash to cash. We're working on and exploring solutions there as well as solutions between SMEs and enterprise businesses and how they move money.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  So you can think about all these tokenized currencies as literally just tools in our toolbox. Like they're just products that it's not in and of itself, not the solution. The solution is now the second layer of intellectual property and technology that we're building to help address these, these global payment problems.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Makes sense. Speaking of laws, you're from Colorado.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  And Colorado recently began to decriminalize

• 21:06Speaker 00

  certain chemical compounds that I think have been misunderstood or just not addressed on a national basis. Maybe talk a little bit about what's going on there.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  I'll caveat all this, you're not an expert necessarily, but you're from Colorado and I know that you at least know what's going on. So we're going to talk about it.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, not an expert. The, yeah, I tweeted about this the other day, actually. The, the, this was just passed fresh legislation in Colorado. Colorado is really kind of taking the, the stance of they want to be the leaders when it comes to. Forward, you know, progressive legislation around uh drugs and and you know substance law. I mean, really, it's it's a reclassification of uh drugs in the United States, which has to happen, in my opinion. But uh psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, was just decriminalized. And you know, it's funny, because I actually talked to my parents about this, like, right after it happened. And they're both like, oh, yeah, yeah, we voted for that.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  And I was like, what? Because I mean, my parents are, you know, pretty straight edge.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  Not the people you would expect. They're like, yeah, let's go, uh, let's go vote for the magic mushrooms.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, you know, no alcohol. They don't do any, like, no substances in the house growing up. They're just nothing, right? Very clean. Um, but the difference is, it seems there's been a real shift there, where in Colorado, um, you know, people are taking the, a lot of people have experienced it empirically, right? So they've they've either taken psychedelics, or, you know, they've had negative experiences, let's say, with alcohol. So they're very jaded around, like, what culture might tell you is, you know, the right substances to consume versus what their real world, real life experiences have taught them. And so I think it's great, you know, it's it's gonna, it has to happen at the state level before anything can happen at a federal level. Um, but there's a lot of progressive thought there.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  And the idea here, um, many of you know this that are listening, but but just in case not, uh, decriminalizing doesn't mean that it's legal. It simply just means that uh they will not enforce the law that is currently on the books, right? Which is a nuance, but it's an important nuance, because it it actually changes the incentive structure for law enforcement.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Yeah. So it it's it's basically a, it's instructing local law enforcement to not make it a priority to enforce uh or or pursue charges against individuals, especially especially individuals. Not, I mean, it's different to talk about criminal organizations or dealers. That's that's a whole nother conversation. Those will still be, you know, prosecuted for sure. Um, but individuals with, you know, personal amounts on on them will likely kind of be given a slap on the wrist and and let go.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Got it. And and we've seen this now with uh with marijuana, you know, cannabis. Uh, I think it's now we're at twenty-two or twenty-three states that have decriminalized uh personal possession, right? And uh, and, you know, I think it's Baltimore. Uh, I could get this wrong, so don't quote me on it, but. In the city of Baltimore, the Attorney General or whoever actually presses charges, essentially, there was no ruling. They just stopped pressing charges on personal possession of marijuana.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  And if I have it right, I think the police officers continued to arrest people and then eventually realized like this is not worth the time because they're just going to get let go later. And again, it's changing the incentive structure or changing the kind of top-down direction of where taxpayers' resources should be focused. And I think that your caveat there of personal possession is very different than like if you are growing and distributing on a large-scale illegal narcotics, you're likely to get in trouble.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Right? I don't care if it's decriminalized in your region or not. What do you think has to happen for us to go from decriminalization to like actual true legalization?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes. I mean, we're actually watching the playbook get written with marijuana, with cannabis. You know, I was in, you know, I grew up during the exact era in Colorado where marijuana was at the cusp of being decriminalized and not only made legal for medicinal, but also for recreational purposes. And so it was honestly, as a kid, it was a very confusing environment to be in because, you know, the law was, you know, don't consume marijuana, it's illegal, you're going to go to jail. But in practice, I was exposed to parents and families where they would say to their kids, I don't want you like drinking in our home or drinking and driving, anything like that. Oh, but if you want

• 25:32Speaker 01

  to go in the basement and smoke, we're going to look the other way. And it was like this very mixed message of like these authority figures, like they were all condoning it and versus, you know, what the law actually reflected. And so I think that was actually very formative from my perspective, but I think it's also formative for when you look at the path that it's taken. It's like, first, let's prove the safety and the efficacy in medicinal settings. And I think for a lot of these substances, very much so, including psilocybin and magic mushrooms, there are very real medicinal applications. And I mean, that's being proven out at John Hopkins, at NYU, you know, a lot of these very well-established programs through well-controlled, you know, studies that are being put in front of the FDA. And I think if they can first prove

• 26:15Speaker 01

  the efficacy, then you can get the foot in the door, sort of broader exposure, so that people can come to realize that what they were told in the 70s and 80s during the quote-unquote war on drug was act war on drugs was actually complete bullshit, right? And it was very much politically driven.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Well, and to me, you know, I've had, I always consider myself incredibly lucky because where I sit on a daily basis, I get to meet people who are devoting their lives to go and build just cool stuff, right? And a lot of times it is technology-driven, but more and more it is, I'll just put it in kind of the healthcare bucket as well. One of my partners, Jason Williams, built and sold a very large healthcare company, and so we probably see a higher degree of that than most. And I've seen now two or three people pitch us on this idea of microdosing, like the psychedelic psychedelic drugs being used to treat, whether it's PTSD or other sorts of, you know, whether it's diseases, however you want to categorize them. But it is in

• 27:14Speaker 00

  controlled environments. It's done in a kind of prudent and very measured way. And from everything I can tell, it works, right? And so I always kind of try to understand different sides of the story or the arguments. And from law enforcement, right? If you've kind of been raised or conditioned to believe the war on drug story, it makes sense. Those people should go to jail. Right? Like, okay, that's a very kind of straightforward, easy to measure approach. Now, if you look at it from the patient, right, the person who's actually suffering from one of these things, if there's anything out there that can help them, they want it, right? They want access to it. And it's not to abuse it. It is simply because, hey, I wake up every day and, you know, I have PTSD, and if you can give me something to get rid of it, that's great.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Then there's like what I'll call the medicinal approach, right, or perspective, which is they actually struggle with what can have impact and what is the ethical ramifications, right? Like, there are certain medical procedures or certain medicines around the world that will apply. There's data that suggests that they solve the problem. There's also the ethical question of should we provide that, right? Like, you know, opioids is probably a great example of this. We're like, yes, they do. They were effective. They do change your pain tolerance. But are there side effects that make it? Maybe we shouldn't, you know, just hand them out like candy?

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Probably. So where's the balance, right? And, and do you think that we'll run into that with some of the psychedelic stuff and cannabis? And we've got to kind of find where the boundaries are? Or are you more in the camp of like, you know, hey, you can die from drinking, but you can't die from smoking weed?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I, I, I actually think you raise a really good point, which is, uh, I'm actually not one of those hardcore people that thinks, um, you know, oh, these substances are just inherently good. There's, you know, nothing could go wrong. Um, you know, whether it's LSD or psilocybin or, or even, you know, ketamine, which was recently, uh, approved by the FDA for, for various treatments. Um, you know, I, I actually think, and this is, I had a really powerful conversation with a cousin of mine who's, who's a pediatrician. And, um, I, I think, you know, when it comes to relationships with substances, it's like the thing you have to work on first is your relationship with yourself. And, and I think the issue that we have is, um, a lot of times, like with these issues,

• 29:37Speaker 01

  they're made kind of black and white. Like, oh, is the substance good or bad? And it has nothing to do with that. It, it actually has to do with, you know, are we perpetuating a culture of education, of, you know, personal growth, self-care? Do we have safe spaces to kind of have these conversations? You know, if you look at Europe and like their attitude towards drinking, you're able to have an environment where you grow up drinking with your family, having wine with dinner, and alcoholism is a lot, you know, is less rampant. I mean, there's obviously countries that drink a ton in Europe. I'm not saying they don't drink, but their relationship with themselves and with the substances is very different. And I think in America, you know, we, we, you know, we're a country founded on puritan values. And I think one of the puritan values that has kind of been overplayed is one of

• 30:18Speaker 01

  complete abstinence or complete, you know, celibacy, like in all these examples, um, it forces you to not deal with the relationship with yourself and kind of self-control, self-knowledge, to then you can have a healthy relationship with people, substances, life experiences, et cetera. Um, so I, I think ironically, like, I do think a lot of these substances are a thousand times safer and better for you. You can have wide-ranging benefits versus, let's say, alcohol. Or cigarettes are a lot of socially sanctioned substances.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  But I think it does need to be paired with a societal level conversation around substance abuse.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  That's very real.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Well, and it's funny to hear you talk about this because I think we probably share a lot of the same views in terms of, you know, a binary world's almost never good, right? Just like, like, you know, I get very nervous when people say, you know, X is good or bad, right? It's usually, well, if X is applied in some way, right? Or certain people or, you know, whatever it is. So I think the nuance is always really important.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Except with Bitcoin, maybe, right?

• 31:21Speaker 00

  Well, Bitcoin's great, so yeah, there's really no bad side, duh.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  No, but I do think that, you know, you also, similar to myself, I think the John McAfee's, the Mike Novogratz, there's all these other people who've come on the podcast, criminal reform, right? And kind of criminal justice has become this huge issue where I think that the war on drugs really led to kind of a desensitization of like, we're putting humans in cages, right? Like, just so we're clear, like, that's what jail and prison is, right? It's like, we are literally confining somebody there. And so I usually go to the extreme and I say, you know, whether you believe in kind of the criminal reform and everything, but let's just start with the most extreme case, right? Like, should we put people in solitary confinement?

• 32:11Speaker 00

  I'm of the belief like, that's actually really bad. Psychologically, it could be considered torture, right? And so like, if you kind of go to the extreme and then you start walking yourself back, you realize that like, again, there's no binary good or bad, right? Like, people do bad things, they should be punished. When they don't do bad things, then they should be okay. But it's, you know, the question becomes, what is the punishment, right? So maybe talk a little bit about kind of criminal reform and kind of how that relates maybe to some of the, the decriminalization of drugs and all that.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Criminal justice reform is something that I have a very personal relationship with, and it's something I care about pretty deeply.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  I actually, you know, I recommend to, you know, everyone that I ever, you know, talked about this subject. I mean, there's obviously a few great books. But there's a really great documentary on Netflix called The Thirteenth.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  The Thirteenth?

• 33:01Speaker 01

  The Thirteenth, yeah, highly recommended.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  I've never even heard of this before.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Really powerful. And, uh, you know, the, really the, the concepts that are talked about in that movie is how the American prison industrial complex was, you know, has largely been a result of political motives that date back to, you know, uh, post-Civil War, when we started to have suffrage, suffrage and, you know, you could, we were giving, uh, African-Americans and minorities the right to vote. Uh, there was another way to kind of have control over these minorities and over these other populations. And so it was very politically driven to create a lot of legislature and as well as a platform, you know, which Nixon coined, you know, the war on drugs.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  It is similar to, you know, a lot of what we're actually seeing today, where it's very easy to create a, a powerful scary narrative, uh, that is a veiled form of racism. And, and you obviously have to follow through on a lot of the threats, right? So it's saying like, oh man, the biggest threat to America is drugs. And, you know, it was a very successful platform and, and there was a lot going on during that era. Um, you know, I also, I highly recommend people read, uh, the electric, uh, yeah, the electric Kool-Aid acid tests.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  Okay, that's a book.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Tom Wolfe, incredible journalist, might be my second favorite after Hunter S. Thompson.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  We're gonna get to Hunter S. Thompson. All right, hold on, keep going.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  But, you know, you, you start to realize that, um, these, there was a lot going on when these substances were really being discovered and popularized, uh, in the United States and, and abroad, that kind of got really, really mixed in. And ironically, I actually think this, this could very possibly happen with, with crypto, where new, new technologies, let's, let's look at these drugs, let's say as new technologies, kind of get swept up in the zeitgeist of the time. And so, you know, marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, like all these substances were just emerging, right? In the, in the sixties and seventies. And so when they got caught up in this, in really what was a, I, I think a very racially driven, um, you know, war on keeping minorities from voting.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, it, it was. It was almost like we threw the baby out with the bathwater and we kind of came back with this blanket stance of just all drugs are bad and let's not take the time to understand them. And it was, a lot of it though was, was removing, stripping people of their right to vote, you know? And if you look at the South, and also, I mean, the US represents 5% of the world population, but we represent 25% of the global prison population.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  It's crazy.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  It's staggering.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  It's absolutely nuts.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  And, and

• 35:45Speaker 00

  And by, and not to interrupt you here, but one of the things that I've, I don't know what the data is, right, but anecdotally, the way that prisoners in America are treated, the environments that they're put into, the amount of prisoner-on-prisoner violence, right, all of these things, the, the lack of education and training for them to be set up for success when they leave, we're really far behind in a lot of these categories, it seems like. So it's not just we put a lot of people in prison, the way that they're treated, and then the lack of training to set them up for success, it's just not a good situation.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, people should check out Defy Ventures, which is working to address just that problem, which is like re-entry and, and that, that's really what it should be about, should be about rehabilitation, it should be about education. Instead, like, we're labeling people as criminals. Also, the fact that it's privatized, like, the majority of the prisons has been privatized, they're literally using it as subsidized labor, right? So they're also charging the government, they're getting paid to hold people in prison. So again, when you talk about alignment incentives, there could not be worse alignment of incentives than they're paid to put prisoners away. And, and beyond that, they then get their free labor to, to, you know, whether it's produce license plates or, or do, you know, tons of manual labor.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  For pennies on the dollar.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, 12 cents an hour. Like, it, it's, it's completely inhumane. And I, I think, you know, there, there needs to be massive, massive changes to, to fix this system, and a lot of it has to happen through legislation. But I actually think a lot of it also has to do with reforming drug laws. And like, you know, a lot of these nonviolent criminals who are in jail for, you know, possessing crack or, or, you know, having multiple drug offenses. Um, you know, that they're in on these insane mandatory minimum sentences of, you know, 10 to 15 years. Uh, and you know, I, I kind of was forced to face that directly, you know, around college time myself. And when you come to see the system up close, you can kind of see all of its scars and all of it, you know, all the kind of terrible aspects to it. And I think

• 37:50Speaker 01

  the reason why it's not part of too many mainstream conversations is because most people don't ever get exposed to that system.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Like the minorities that do get exposed are in it.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  And don't have a voice.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Well, and, and part of what I've seen, um, is you get a bifurcation, right? You get people who, uh, have never been exposed and therefore they, you couldn't expect them to be educated about it, right? They just never had the opportunity to cross it. And if they were, they, they actually may be interested in it. And then you get people who have experienced it, but as you described earlier, they're labeled as criminals. And so their voice, whether they have one or not, is drastically softened by, oh, you're a criminal, right? And there's very few people who I think have been able to, um, be thrust into the experience and the

• 38:45Speaker 00

  environment of, I'm not talking about, hey, you know, you got drunk and you got arrested in college and, and you went to the local jail cell, sobered up and let you go. I'm talking about like legitimate prison, right? When somebody goes through that experience, uh, it almost feels like the people who make it out on the other side and have a voice to talk about criminal justice reform, et cetera. Uh, they had to do something so spectacular, right? And, and really spectacularly bad to get there in the first place, that people will listen, not because they went through the experience, but because of what they did to actually go, right? So like, you know, the Jordan Belforts of the world, et cetera, right? Of like, you know? It's celebritized or made sexy, kind of what got them there, right? And if you even look at, you know, like a Mike Milken would be another great example, right?

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Where, um, you know, very, very well-known guy, very wealthy guy, you know, gets into a kind of a bad situation, right? Ends up going to jail, comes out, has the personal network, has kind of the, the foundation to stand on and, and say, hey, look, you know, here, here's kind of who I am and what I want to do moving forward. That's not the average story, right? The average story is the exact opposite, it feels like.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Well, you don't hear the average story.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  And, and I mean, I think there are some people that are doing a lot. Um, Cut 50 is a great organization that, that's, that's working on this. I would also suggest people check out an organization called Breakout.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Breakout, okay, what's that?

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Breakout's really dope. It's, it's actually, so criminal justice reform is a component, but they're very much more just social impact driven, started by a, a friend of mine, Michael Farber. Um, they do these, these urban conferences, you can name it like urban gatherings where they really take you deep on a specific city. So, I mean, and cities all around the US, like, you know, Oklahoma City, Chicago, Austin, I mean, you, you know, you name it, Atlanta. Uh, and they gather all sorts of movers and shakers and, and we're not talking like tech or, or finance. I mean, it's, it, there are those, those people who show up, but it's people who are passionate about these kind of like on the ground issues and they kind of take a microscope, uh, you know, to all these problems and they surface them along with all the beautiful components of like the music, the art, the culture, the food.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Um, and I think that's what it takes, it takes to your point, like not many people have had to actually face it. So it's very easy to ignore problems that you've never, that you, that you don't know exist or that you only, you know, kind of, but only at arms, arms length.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  All right, so hold on, before we get into some of the details around this, uh, tell the story of what happened in college so that everyone kind of understands the, the perspective that you're coming at this from.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. So it's, um, It's a difficult story to retell. It took me a couple of years to kind of to own it. And

• 41:25Speaker 00

  And the one thing I'll say here is it's obviously incredibly sensitive. And so it's important, I think, for people to hear this from your perspective.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Of like, it's a, I have a lot of friends who've been through all kinds of different things, right? Some of it legally related, some regulatory related, etc. And the devil's always in the details, right? So like, just kind of you tell us a story in your own words, and then we can get into some of the ramifications, etc. Of, you know, why you believe the world or see the world in the way that you do.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, and you know, I actually have learned, I think, one positive thing about about this whole experience is like, you do learn, there are, there are two types of people. There's the people who who want to, will give you a chance to kind of tell your side. They want to hear the truth. And then there's those who kind of just, you know, they write you off, they'll, they don't even want to touch it, right? And I think it's actually been net like a positive thing.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  It's almost like, it's a great filter mechanism.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  It's the best filter.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  The people who, I don't even want to say don't care, but are open minded and empathetic and are good listeners are usually the people you want to hang out with anyways.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's no, it's so true. And so, you know, the scene, to set the scene, it was, you know, it's senior year. I went to Northwestern, which is in Evanston, Illinois, and there's this student festival every year that we that we hold called Dillow Day. And it's, you know, we bring in some pretty big acts, you know, they've had everyone from Kanye and

• 42:57Speaker 00

  It's like the the college La La Palooza.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. A lot of Midwest school, actually, a lot of colleges do this where they'll have like a one, a one day, like big student festival. And, you know, we're, we're a bunch of really nerdy kids that work our asses off all year, you know, round and burn the candle at both ends. And so it's kind of like a release at the very end of the school year. And I was living at the time in off campus housing with 14 guys in this just big, big old house.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  Jesus.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, those were the days. I was living in a room the size of a closet, you know, sharing a bathroom with the five guys. I mean, this is, this is college days.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  College.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  College. And, you know, you, you, you asked earlier about Bitcoin. Well, you know, so we, this was the golden era of the Silk Road. And, you know, everyone in our household had kind of locked down jobs. And we wanted to kind of go out with a bang. And so we placed a group order, you know, just I'm not getting anyone's names involved in this. Just, you know, we placed a group order, ordered a couple of different things, you know, some weed, some LSD, et cetera. And it was for the houses, kind of, you know, houses consumption. And, you know,

• 44:05Speaker 00

  You had to like stock the pantry, basically.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  We stocked the pantry. We were hosting, you know, and look, this is, we own fully, like, we explored these things, but, you know, we were, we were, so we had this, right, for our house. And the, so the week before, we get an inbound kind of text message from one of the friends of people outside the house saying, hey, you know, there's this kid who reached out to me. He was wondering if you guys had any extra MDMA?

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Was that like ecstasy, right?

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  And he was wondering if anyone had any extra. And so, you know, I didn't, but we sent out a message to kind of, we had a group chat at the time and said, hey, does anyone have anything extra for this kid? And, you know, one of my friends said, oh, I got too much from my girlfriend. Happy to kind of give him some. So we connect, you know, we connected them. And a few days later, this is during reading week. So everyone's in the library like 24/7 studying. The kid comes by and the kid is, you know, picking up. So the text goes out, hey, this kid's here. And the kid who was, you know, selling a bit of his portion was in the library. And so he's just like, hey, can someone run up to my room, go grab it off my desk and give it to him?

• 45:17Speaker 01

  So went, went inside, got it. I was one of the only people home. So gave it to him, had this whole conversation with him, like, hey, you gotta be safe. I'm not even kidding you. Like, we spoke for like 10, 15 minutes because he was this younger Asian kid. And I wanted to be okay. I gave him literally Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which is another one of my favorite books. I'm like, hey, be safe out there, whatever. You know, and, and, you know, he takes off and I don't really think anything of it. Few days later, it's now the day before this festival and we're having a big tailgate at our house. So I've gone shopping for groceries and I'm unloading my friend's punch bug with my friend in front of our house. And we're taking like, you know, the grocery bags out of the trunk and I see this SWAT van like parked around the corner of our house. I'm

• 46:02Speaker 01

  like dang, they're really like stepping up the police enforcement for DIL-O day. And as I say that, like, I see this stream of police officers carrying riot shields, shotguns, like the whole nine yards come streaming out towards our house.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  Wait, they're coming out of like the SWAT van?

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Out of the SWAT van, like, holding the shields. Like, they go, and keep in mind, this is a janky old house. There's no locks on the doors. We never locked it. I don't think anyone had a key.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  It's literally college, right? You could walk into anybody's home.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  They take a battering ram, bust the door down. They're running in with shotguns, like drawn, like screaming. And we're like seeing this all go down. We're like, holy shit.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  There's people in the house like for this tailgate or?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  No, this is the day before.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Okay, got it.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  So I pull out my phone. I text everyone. It's like, don't come back. Like, don't come home. Don't come home. There are police in the house. And then I wipe my phone. I'm just like, I don't know what's going on. I have no idea why they're here, who they're after, what's going on. And my friend and I are standing there just like watching, like, you know, frozen. And one of the guys, one of the police officers on the street sees us and he's like, what's your names? So, you know, we each say our name. And as I say my name, he comes running over, tackles me to the ground, gets like a boot on my chest and is like cuffing me. And they're like, you're under arrest. You know, they take me up on the porch and I'm sitting there in handcuffs and they're like, they're tearing apart the house. I mean, they've got drug dogs in there. They're tearing up the walls, like flipping mattresses. I mean, they're going crazy. So they proceed to search the

• 47:25Speaker 01

  whole house. Suffice it to say, you know, they find what you'd expect in the house of 14 senior guys. You know, there's like some weed, some, you know, bong, like a mixture of, you know, different substances.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Stuff that is like more recreational type.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Not like, nothing in large quantities, but just, you know.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  You guys don't have bricks of cocaine hiding in the walls and somebody gets caught in the bathroom flushing it down the toilet.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  They keep so they they keep coming to question me and they say like, tell us where the drugs are like, tell us where the money is. And you know, I I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm not gonna talk. I plead the fifth. Like, I want to talk to my lawyer. And long story short, you know, I'm sitting on the porch handcuffed for two hours while they tear apart the house. Hands going down, they bring me inside.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  People are coming out of their houses like neighbors and stuff.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Everyone's like gawking, what is going on? And, uh, you know, finally, uh, they take me inside and all the drugs are on the table. Again, like meager amounts. And they're like, all right, um, tell us who's like, who belong, like who this belongs to, like which room is who so that we know like whose drugs are who. Otherwise, we're gonna charge you with everything here. And I'm like, I get it.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  Do or die time.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  No, I'm like, I I'm pleading the fifth. Like, I I want to talk to my lawyer. Like, you know, that's not like, that's not a line. I'm not gonna name names. It's not gonna help anybody. And they say, all right, we're gonna charge you with everything. And so, you know, in the state of Illinois, possession, even of like a single pill, uh, you know, is is a felony count. And so I was charged with five felonies, or no, sorry, it was three felonies and two two misdemeanors, but the most severe misdemeanors. Um, and each of those felony counts held a 15 year mandatory minimum sentence.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  Holy shit.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  So I get, you know, thrown in in the back of a squad car, taken to Evanston jail.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Do you talk to the cop on the way?

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  What's that conversation like?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  I mean, I I could just see, they're in this frame of, you know, that that they're just, they're enforcing the law, right? And they're in this frame of like, good guy, bad guy, role playing, but like, this is their life, right? And, um.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  And they just got a bad guy.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  And they got a bad guy and they're doing the right thing. Totally, totally. And, um, so they take me back to the station, fingerprint me, throw me in the sale, uh, in the cell, you know, take all my, uh, you know, shoestrings and belts and all, right? And so I'm sitting in the cell and, you know, to be honest, I, uh, I started going to the darkest place I've ever been. You know, like I I had the year before lived in Israel and had gone there to kind of find myself and started meditating, got really into eastern psychology and, you know, had been at the happiest and most centered I've ever been that senior year, you know, had actually, for the most part, you know, been. And definitely been in the best place, you know, mentally that I've ever been.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  And yet, you know, in that cell, I started the self-talk turned into like, maybe, you know, walking through all the possible outcomes. I'm like, being a felon in the United States, where I don't have the right to vote, I can't get housing, like, you can't get a job.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  Serious.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  You do, you are, when you're a felon in the United States, you're subhuman. And it's, it's wrong, but that's just like the facts. And I knew that because I, you know, I had done, this sounds so silly, but mock trial for all of high school to the, to the level of like not competing in nationals and things. And so I had a pretty good sense of, you know, how our, our justice system works. And so, long story short, I'm sitting there. I basically get to the point where I'm like, hey, it probably would be better to go to sleep and not wake up than deal with, you know, my family, the criminal repercussions, jail for forty-five years, da, da, da, da. And I see these like, these dark thoughts come in. And the, the thing that I really credit completely to meditation and, and all that time I spent

• 51:05Speaker 01

  in Israel was this moment of, of clarity of like, this isn't who I am. This isn't my voice. And, you know, I jumped off the cot, I was sitting on the cot on the wall in the jail cell. I pulled the cot down to the floor. And again, this is like the cheesiest, most millennial thing ever. But I, I dropped down, I start doing yoga, like sun salutations.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  No, push ups.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  I'm dead serious, on the floor, because I'm trying to get out of my head. I remember, I need to just get into my body and like, stop like hyperventilating. And so I, I calm down. I'm doing these sun salutations. And these guards come running in. Like, I'm not doing it for more than maybe two, three minutes. And they come dashing in and they're like, get, get up, like, what are you doing? Like, put that back on the wall. Like, they, they think I'm trying to hurt myself or doing something crazy, whatever. So they have no idea what, you know, what the hell is going on. They've never seen someone busting out this sun salutation.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  They're putting their boots on people's chests. They're not used to the yoga.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  But the craziest thing is that that voice goes away, right? So I'm all of a sudden, I'm totally, I'm like, I'm happy. I feel, I feel everything's gonna be okay. And I say to them, hey, can I speak to the arresting officer? The guy who's kind of leading the investigation. So they think I'm about to confess. So they go, they go get him. Maybe 30 minutes later, he comes walking in. And the crazy thing that changed was I saw like all this like toxic fear and like all these negative emotions, the fear, the loathing, like hating our, you know, our government, hating the officers, hating all these people. I knew I needed to kind of flip that on its head for me to survive. And so it was ultimately, I knew the kind of, like when he came walking in and I looked at him, I saw him for the first, literally the first time, because even though I talked to this guy for, for hours, as he's, you know, trying to question me and tear apart the house and everything.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  But I saw him for what he was, right? And what he is, which is he's, he's a civil servant, which is like one of the hardest jobs you could ever ask for. You see the worst in society and, you know, a lot of people hold it against you. And I saw like a guy who's just, has to hold this frame, you know, who I am as a criminal and who he is as a savior, right? For him to go home and not, you know, beat his wife, let's say at the, at the end of the day, right? And, and I, I saw that and, and I, I felt an incredible amount of, of empathy. And so when he came over, I just, you know, again, Colorado hippie here. I say to the guy, listen, this isn't going to mean anything coming from me, I imagine, because you've probably already written me off as a criminal.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  But I want you to know that whatever happens to me from, from here on out, where my life goes, everything, I don't hold you accountable. And I want you to know that I appreciate you and I see, like, I really, I admire what you do. And you're just, you're following the law as it's written. And I don't want you to hold anything, like I don't, I don't want you to hold anything on my behalf. And, and I also want you to know that I love you. And I said, I'm dead serious. I say this to the guy in the cell. He is, and he's this stone face, you know, like we still wearing his flak vest. Bad boys, bad boys. Yeah, like scrapped, right? Scraped, like, and, and, you know, he just looks at me with this like disgust, like this weird confused look. And he turns around, doesn't say a word, walks out. But the craziest.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Crazy, I felt so light. I'm like, this is great. I'm gonna go to jail. I'm gonna get jacked. I'm gonna read a ton of books. I'm gonna meet really interesting people. It's gonna be fun. It's like, you know, I don't have to worry about where my next meal comes from. So, so I just all of a sudden had these stories of like, oh, you know, I'll get out of jail, move to Israel. Who cares if I'm failing, blah, blah, blah. Everything was fine. So, fast forward the story. I get transferred to Cook County Penitentiary, which is somewhere you don't wanna be. It's one of the worst and most notorious prisons.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  I'm pretty sure that's like one of the most popular places they go for the show Locked Up.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  It is terrible. And I'll tell you, you know, I was in a cell with something like sixty other men. And I was the only white person in the cell, which I learned a lot. I learned so much. And I, you know, I was there. There's no clocks on the walls, right? There's no windows. You have no idea what time it is. You're not yet, you know, guilty quote unquote, but you know, you're there. You're only referred to by a number that they write on your wrist, which as a Jew had a lot of, you know, crazy triggers for me, but they, you know, they, there's just a hole in the, in the floor where everyone's, you know, you piss some shit in front of everybody else. And you're not, no one will talk to you, tell you what's going on, right? You're just, you're, you're in this room. There's not even enough room for everyone to sit. So, most people are either standing or kind of laying on the floor or up against the walls.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  And, you know, you're there for one day, two day, three, it depends what day of the week and, you know, how things are getting sorted out on the other side. And inside, everyone's just-

• 55:25Speaker 00

  There's violence? Like in terms of, people are like fighting each other?

• 55:28Speaker 01

  No, not in there. In there, everyone's kind of like, it's this us versus them feeling. So, it's very much this sense of like, hey, we're in this together. Uh, and, you know, everyone's like, you know, what you in for, white boy? Like, and, and there's all these conversations and, but it was funny, cause like, as soon as I'd be like, oh yeah, three, three felonies. And they're like, respect.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  Oh, you didn't just get drunk outside the bar and tell a cop that, uh, you know, he was stupid? Okay, alright, you're, you're legit.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, but you, you know, I saw all these people who were, this is just another, you know, this is just another trip, right? They do this-

• 56:00Speaker 00

  They've been here before.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Oh my god, it's just part of their lives, right? And there's other people who, you know, there's tons of insane stories around, you know, false accusations, domestic abuse, like all this stuff. Anyways, and, and that's a much longer story, but I just, it was very humanized. I talked with- So many people, I mean, I'm a, I'm a talker like you tell. And, um, you know, so and I end up getting out on bail. I'm not considered a flight risk, which again, a big part of that is the color of my skin and, you know, where I go to school, all that kind of stuff. But really the important part of the story.

• 56:28Speaker 00

  How much was bail? You remember?

• 56:29Speaker 01

  So I, I had no, I didn't have to pay. I was out on bail, but it was zero dollars. So I get out of bail, you know, suffice it to say, my parents had written me off there.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  How excited are they right now?

• 56:43Speaker 01

  They're like, you're, what are you, drug addicts, you're crazy, like, we don't want to talk to you, we're disowning you. My brother was really there for me and, and so my friends were, but, um, this.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  What about the, uh, the 14 guys that you lived with, what were they doing?

• 56:56Speaker 01

  They, they were, it was, it actually really had a weird impact on my relationship with them because on some level, I think there was a lot of, there was maybe a lot of guilt because I didn't name names. They asked, right? And there was plenty, I could have very easily done that. And I took the fall for a lot of people. I mean, I definitely was, you know, I'm not free of blame. I mean, I was, I was gonna, you know, consume substances, no question, but, but I definitely, you know, I was honorable in terms of I didn't want to bring anyone else into it. But I think there's a lot of difficult emotions in there. And so although they were really grateful and we hugged and had a really wonderful end to, you know, college together. I think it put kind of like a wall between us that I was never really able to, um, break down again, because there's a lot of, a lot of stuff there and,

• 57:41Speaker 01

  the, you know, they all went on to graduate. I was meanwhile, like facing trial at the school. So, you know, whether or not I was going to get my diploma, as well as facing the criminal charges.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  And the school can almost be worse in some cases, right? Depending on what happens in the criminal side of it.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. So four years, right? And all that debt and all that. And I was a week away from my diploma, right? From walking. And, uh, so I had this war on two fronts. Uh, I don't want this to draw on too long. This has already been a, a long story, but, uh, the, the, the real kind of. The miracle that kind of played out for me was I, you know, I started, so I got my background check from Microsoft where I started my, my first job after school. It came through the day before I was arrested. So I went and I, I started work while I was still under trial in Chicago and I'm commuting between Minneapolis where I'd never set foot in my entire life and Chicago where I'm, I'm on, you know, facing 45 years.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  And I'm terrified every day that they're gonna-

• 58:39Speaker 00

  Let me work on Windows 95. Let me go fight 45 years.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and I was, I thought every single day, I'm like, today's the day they're gonna fire me. They're gonna find out. You know, like this shit was, it was, you know, in the news and I'm like, they're gonna find out. It's inevitable. So I was just, I had the, you know, fear of God in me of like, I'm gonna be so good at my job that they can't fire me. And so that was the attitude I went into work every single day. It was like, I'm just gonna crush this job. And on the other front, I'm, you know, my lawyer told me, and I, I got one of the best criminal defense lawyers in Chicago, but again, taking out loans to, to pay him. And I basically, he said to me, look, if this goes to trial, it's not a matter of if you go to jail, just how long you're there for. There's just no question. And so he's like, if you don't get a plea bargain. And so we went for the

• 59:25Speaker 01

  first pre-trial hearing and, you know, the DA says, hey, this is open and closed. And by the way, I still don't know how, why am I arrested? What happened? Why was I the one that was thrown here? And I, I didn't know after that first pre-trial what had, what had happened.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  I gotta guess.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. I had a guess. I had a good guess. But what I later found out, and so she, she said, no, no deal. Right? And so-

• 59:45Speaker 00

  Didn't even offer one.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Didn't even offer one. Right. And so we go to the second pre-trial hearing, you know, that's, it's maybe three weeks, a month later. And I find out in the meantime, through the, through the deposition and whatnot, that the, an anonymous, you know, confidential informant told them that I was a large drug dealer who had been selling to them for years and, you know, was known renowned in the area, yada, yada, yada. Like, and they, so it ends up this, this kid, this Asian kid, you know, had been arrested a month earlier for, you know, he had mushrooms and weed and he was, he was actually dealing. And then to get out of his sentence- He went on this campaign. He was just trying to get any name he could possibly give to the police. And then whatever story they wanted to hear to kind of get out of trouble himself.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  It's like the classic, classic story.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I didn't even, I'd never met this kid in my entire life. Never, you know, set eyes on him. And he had, you know, thrown, thrown me under the bus, right? And, and he got off scot free, by the way. They dropped all charges against this guy. But he, he wrote, you know, whatever the police officers wanted to hear. And so I'm up against, it's a, he said, he said, situation. And, uh, you know, the evidence is, look, there were, there's drugs and, and there's a written testimony and like a recorded transaction. I mean, like, what else do you need, right?

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  So in the eyes, did they have video?

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no video, but there, there were, you know, he went in with the police, like, meaning they were, they were on to give him the money.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  So, um, so I basically had come to terms with like, this is it. Like I'm, I'm going to jail. Like it's, that's the, that's my reality. And, uh, I was trying to put my affairs in order, you know, um, the people that really stuck by me, like my close friends, like trying to, hey, take, you know, take my stuff or have this, like whatever.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Here's my Bitcoin.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm living out of a friend's parents' house in Minneapolis. Like, I didn't want to have a lease that I'd have to break, you know? I, I wasn't, I had to get a car to get to work. I was borrowing a car, like, and, um, and you know, the, I came in for the final pre-trial hearing. And, uh, so I flew back to Chicago and this is for the testimony of the police officer. And he comes walking into the courtroom and I haven't seen him since I told him I love him. And he comes, he comes, he comes walking in and I jump up out of my seat, you know, I'm in my, my Sunday best, as they say for, for court day. And, and I, you know, I jump, go walking up to him and I, I just, you know, I, I just put out my hand, I shake his hand. I look him straight in the eyes, say, you know, Officer Stone, so, so good for you to be here.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Um, I hope you've been well and I really appreciate you, you being here today. Um, and, and that's it. Like, you know, nothing crazy, but I just, you know, really look at him and, and see him as a person the same way I did before. And he goes into the, he, you know, he's sequestered with the DA so they can review his testimony, whatnot. And he's out of the room for five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And he comes back out of the sidebar and he comes walking past me and, and walks out of the courtroom. I'm like, oh, he's going to take a piss. And she calls over my attorney. He goes off and five minutes later he comes running out and he's like, I don't know what the fuck just happened, but they're going to offer you a plea bargain. They're gonna drop all the charges, except for one possession charge.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  You plead guilty to that, you do your probation.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  You're done.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  You're cleared.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  You're completely cleared.

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  I'm, I was, I was crying, I was like, I, cause I literally, I was mentally, I was in prison. I was like already like in that place, in that space. I'd been doing my research, I was like, I was okay with it. And, um, and so that man, I mean, again, I don't know what was said behind, behind closed doors, but, but I, I owe my life to him. But I think like the bigger story that, that I've taken away from it is, you know, it was a selfless act, but it was, it was, if I, if my skin were any other color, or if I was raised in any other type of environment, right? Like where.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  Well, it's just, there's so many people who are sitting in that seat, ready.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  And what they say is.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  Walks in.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Fuck you, pig, right? I mean, that's what they say, right?

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Or, and again, I'm sorry, I don't wanna be stereotypical as well.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  But, but the point is like, you know, not everyone is gonna, is going to treat, like, treat him on a human level, right?

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  Well, and whether they do or they don't, it probably doesn't even matter because he's not walking in there and saying, drop the charges.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  That's right. He, he's viewing them as a criminal regardless, like that's his frame. So for whatever, I unknowingly, you know, shifted his frame and he didn't see me as the person he wanted to put away for 45 years. And, you know, the, the thing is that I think in this country, if you fit that stereotype, if you're the type of person that he sees most days committing crimes, you, you're in jail, right? It's, it's just, it's done. You're there, you're gone. And I was given a second chance and it had nothing to do with who I was as a person. You know, it was kind of like where I was born, uh, and you know, who I was born to and the opportunities that, that were afforded to me. And, uh, I, it has completely changed my perspective on life.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  And I, I, you know, I think it's, that's what's shaped a lot of my views as well.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  I think it's obvious when you get the exposure to how the system works, right? Uh, and you don't, you, it's almost, it's very similar how I think about crypto, right? A lot of people in crypto saw the global financial crisis, but, uh, they were just old enough to pay attention, just young enough where they actually didn't have their assets at risk. Um. And so they were educated by, you know, trial by fire type situation, but weren't really burnt.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  Uh, similar situation to you, right? Like you get to go through all the motions. You just don't pay the penalty on the back end.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  You get the indoctrination and now, you know, you have a very specific view of the world.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And I'll also say like, for what it's worth, um, for people that have been in the, you know, in prison or have had difficult experiences in their life, um, you know, it, it, it's only a mental barrier that's can prevent you from, from, you know, doing your own thing, you know, like when I quit working and, you know, taking a salary and, and took a plunge as an entrepreneur, I was terrified that no one would back me because of like that story was in existence, right? And, and, you know, there were plenty of VCs who wouldn't even take a meeting, right? But what we talk, go back to what it means to have a filter, um, the ones who did, they sat down and, and they led. I mean, almost every, it comes up in every job interview when I'm raising money, whatever.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Uh, but they'll, the, the, the people who really get it, they're gonna ask and they're gonna wanna hear your story. And, you know, they'll say, you know, tell me, tell me your side and they'll, they'll understand you on a human level. And I think like, um, but the only thing that'll stop you is, is fear, right? So like, if you're too afraid to take that initial plunge, you know, be self authored in the sense of whether you wanna start a business or, or help people or, you know, um, you know, be in, be in the spotlight or not, uh, you, you really have to, uh, be willing to kinda take that leap of faith. And, and you'll find the right people, like they'll be attracted to you.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  I, I completely agree. Wha- what led you, uh, to switch gears here? So you, you actually spend time, I know, uh, going in and doing kind of, uh, financial literacy training inside of, uh, classrooms. What kind of led you to that? And, and kind of talk a little bit about the work that you're doing there.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it's ironically, it's actually somewhat intertwined with the criminal justice component. Cause it was, it was almost born out of necessity personally. Um, there's. A, uh, there's a pretty wild story that I, that I was referencing from, from college. And I, you can tell me whether or not we actually have the time to get into it because it's, it can be a long story. But the kind of outcome of that, uh, experience was I was in a pretty desperate situation personally, where I pretty much had to fend for myself and, you know, I was under maybe sixty five thousand dollars worth of student debt at the time, you know, was just fresh out of school. And, uh, you know, I, I basically had a choice, which was, you know,

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  give up and, and kind of be broken by the situation or take complete control of my life. My finances, the opportunity that I had, uh, and, you know, dig myself out of that hole. Um, and, you know, I was kind of at that point hanging on sort of by a string. And so I, I doubled down. I just went super, I went super deep into, um, you know, personal finance, financial literacy, reading every book I could get my hands on, talking with people. My roommate was, you know, a financial advisor, so I got to.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  That helps.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got to take all his practice tests while he was training for all of his, you know, series sixty five and, and all of his various, uh, registrations. And so, um, that was really a transformative period. And then after I was able to help myself and, you know, get out of debt, um, which I, which I managed to accomplish in, you know, twelve months and then.

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  How do you do that? But like, what's the secret?

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  The secret is you don't have, you don't have any fund that costs money.

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  You just have a lot of discipline. It's, it's literally behavior change, right?

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  And it's a matter of like taking control of the money that's coming in and every single penny that goes out and being really thoughtful. Um, and, and, you know, I love working with people on this and it's really empowering. Like to a lot of people, this is like a scary concept that you want to keep kind of at arms distance. Um, but I actually think as soon as you kind of given the tools you need and the knowledge you need, I've seen people's faces just light up and it changed. Like people literally make massive life changes after these courses because they realize, wow, on the path I'm on right now, things are not going to end well. Or the path I'm on, I'm never going to get what I want.

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  What, what would you say are like the one or two things that? People do, as you've talked to them, that they do, that if they just stopped, right? She said like fun, right?

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Well, no, no, no, I should not, please, I do not ever.

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  Well, I want you, I want you to like unpack that a little bit, right? Cause it's not just, hey, don't live a life of fun.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  Oh, definitely not.

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  It's a certain type of activities that fit in that, that I'm assuming that you're talking about.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I should clarify. I took it to an un, almost unhealthy extreme. Like I was, like I said, in a very difficult situation and I kind of did what I thought was necessary. It was, you know, means it was like a matter of survive all the time. You know, thanks to all those kind of extenuating circumstances. What I tell people actually in these courses, you can have also, you can have every type of fun you want, but you need to understand the cost. And I think it's not just that, but it's also making sure that all of the things that are actually important to you, like know what your life's priorities are and your goals are. Make sure you, you've automated your finances and so that you're paying yourself and you're taking care of all these things that actually matter to you, that are going to make a difference in your life. And then with what's left over, go do whatever the hell you want.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  Literally have a great time, but the automation is, and like removing your decision making from the process is going to be the best decision you can make. And Ramit Sethi, I think, was one of the people that really helped push this forward with, you know, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, which sounds gimmicky, but it's an incredible book and.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  Well, so here's one of the things that to me is so interesting, right? Cause I think this is, uh, this is like a well-known financial trick that sounds stupid and it's so simple, nobody does it, right? Which is like pay yourself first, right? And it's this idea of, uh, it's kind of like a startup, right? I always tell founders, I don't care if you raise a million dollars, five million or 10 million, you're going to spend it in 18 months.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  Like whatever's there, it's gone in 18 months.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  That's very true.

• 1:10:48Speaker 00

  And so like, like, trust me, you should think about how, you know, what are you going to do in 18 months? Because you're going to spend the money.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:55Speaker 00

  And not because they don't want to do that. It's just that that's just human nature. That's just how it happens, et cetera. And so. Very similar to that, you're gonna spend the money that you have sitting there in a discretionary account, right?

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  Most people don't have the discipline to save. And so it's almost protecting you from yourself and saying, look, when money comes in with through a salary, investments, whatever, immediately almost hide a portion of it from yourself.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  But make sure that you are thoughtful and disciplined about where it goes and why you're putting it there.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I think even the, you know, some of the smartest, you know, people that I've met, whether it's in Silicon Valley or, you know, in any of the places I've lived, whether, you know, it doesn't matter if you're working at Facebook or, you know, you're, you're working an hourly job. And, and I think the level of financial literacy tends to be the same. And you're right, it's human nature, like the level of discipline. It, it, you know, whatever money's deposited in your account is gonna be spent by the time your next paycheck comes. And that's kind of, that's, that's very much human nature.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  And then talk about how automation fits into that.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, I think crypto actually has enormous promise in, in this regard. Because, uh, you know, the levels of automation that are available to people today, they're actually, so they're the best they've ever been. There's no question about that. However, it's still incredibly manual. It's pretty difficult and it takes, you know, it just takes time, like setting up automatic transfers, doing the math ahead of time. It's, it's kluge. Uh, it's, there's not really, there aren't very many elegant solutions. But what's crazy is a lot of that is because the bank's technologies, like your ability to quote unquote, read, write, uh, you know, to let's say your financial accounts, which is moving your own money around and, and, you know,

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  making if this, then that type decision trees, things like that, just is impossible because they create this walled garden where, where your money sits. And it's not like, it's not because they want to protect your funds. I mean, obviously they, they do. But it's more just that the, uh, the mindset, they're not technologists, right? They're financiers and their best interest, their incentives are to keep all their money and, and, you know, keep it in their, you know, in their accounts. Now in crypto, um, with it, let's say a wallet address, you know, the technology is actually incredibly simple to automate what money goes where and in what percentage. And do that all via smart contract or through very easy interfaces.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  It's really easy to interact with. And so like if you have your money on a blockchain, all of a sudden, if you start thinking about wallet addresses as accounts or bank accounts. You know, people who are using true USD today, we're their bank account, right? They're they're holding it and effectively banking themselves, which is again, another powerful concept. With a lot of ramifications, but it also means that you can actually build the the perfect bank account with full automation. Where you're deciding what portion's going, let's say, towards, you know, my retirement, what's going towards my short term goals, my long term goals. You know, towards having fun, what type of investments do I want it going into? A lot of that can be, it can be made at the point where when every time you get paid. All of your money goes exactly where it should, and you don't have to make any decisions. And I think like that would be the.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  That's the ultimate level of, let's say, you know. Personal finance is when all those decisions are made ahead of time, and then you live your life, you go do what you're great at.

• 1:14:08Speaker 00

  It's funny, because I had a rod on the podcast and. You know, he talked about this idea that not only are most people not great at personal finance, they are really bad at investing. You know, if you're, you know, use kind of the extreme example, if you're a school teacher and you teach, you know, history. The idea that you have to earn a salary and then you need to become educated on. The stock market and bonds and currencies and commodities and how to build a portfolio and just all of these things is wild.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Crazy.

• 1:14:42Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  It's a lot to expect.

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's just an aspect of personal finance that they have no exposure to, etc. And so he's really excited about this idea, less automation and more just like. Bitcoin as a store of value that could potentially steal market share back from other asset classes, right? So real estate, art, all this stuff. This may be one of the first times in his opinion where simply buying an asset and holding it ends up solving all of those investment decision. Problems and can help to.

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  Preserve the value of your wealth.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  And again, you can debate whether he's right or not, whatever. But I think it's a really interesting idea that goes in line with your idea of like automation of just like set it and forget it, right?

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  And then how do you end up in the place where you want to be?

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And again, you know, I think crypto has a place in people's portfolios. I know you're on one end of the spectrum. You're on the hardcore end and you know, I think, I think everyone gets to make the most important investment decision you'll ever make is your asset allocation. And it's really an expression of kind of your hypothesis about the way the world's going to play out, right? And so most people don't actually have a well-informed hypothesis. They shouldn't make that decision, right? There's some well-established guidelines that you can follow, like through, let's say, a target date fund, something like that. But what's cool is to your point, it's like, I think another element here is the access to investments, like, you know, a lot of the technology that's coming about

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  in crypto today ironically has the most utility outside of the United States. And that's what we're finding also for our tokenized currency is it creates enormous value in places with capital controls, let's say like Korea or Argentina, or in places where you have unstable banking and you know, wild hyperinflation like Venezuela or Argentina. And I know that's been tossed around and bandied to the point where it's somewhat meaningless. But when it comes to actual access to basic financial services, you know, we're providing them still with fiat and I think with Bitcoin. I think it's incredibly promising and I think it's really exciting.

• 1:16:52Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Speaking of currencies and assets, I know you've got some unique thoughts around Tether and regulators.

• 1:17:04Speaker 00

  Talk maybe a little bit about why, you know, Tether may be one of the first assets or projects where on a global basis, regulators really make an example of them.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that what was recently announced by the New York AG is sort of the, in my mind, the death knell for Tether. You know, we've known for The longest time that they were co-mingling, you know, their corporate funds with the escrowed funds behind Tether. What we didn't know was that there was as large a shortfall, you know, 850 million is non-trivial. But, but the truth is that like, I think regulators are actually taking a very clear stance in the space and are starting to put out a lot of clarifications around, you know, their positions and how, what sort of licensing you need, et cetera,

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  et cetera. And I'll tell you that in most cases, when, you know, there's this early Wild West type industry where everyone's going crazy, sort of like getting, getting away with, with everything. Regulators take their time, they observe, they come in, but then they, they bring the smackdown. And, and they choose someone that they make an example of. And, you know, in my opinion, based on when, when I went and I read the, the memo about the AG, it, it's pretty intense. I mean, there are, I think that they're out for blood. And I think that they're going to make an example of Tether, just because there is, you know, easily identifiable criminal activity there. And, you know, the thing that scares me is like, I'm not just saying this as a competitor, because the thing that I worry about is like, there's a lot of

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  people that stand to, you know, lose their hat. And it's by far the most liquid stablecoin in the world, like far more so than ours. And there's 3 billion in circulation. Like, that, that's going to have an incredible effect on the ecosystem at large. But I think, you know, in general, this is, this is how it goes, right? Like, the regulators will come in, make an example of someone, scare the shit out of everybody else. And then the big boys who, who already, let's say, I mean, most people don't know this, but like Google, Facebook, these guys all have actually all the licenses you could ever need. They already have MTLs in every state. They've got e-money, they've got, you know, MSBs, they're registered everywhere, right? It was a couple million dollars, took a year or two, no big deal, right? They already did it. So I think a lot of the big boys then are going to be able to step in and sort of clean

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  up what's left over and, and, you know, announce and launch their own solutions. But I just, the, the key here is, we need to make sure that we survive this period. And, and with this kind of reshuffling of who's at the table, and then come out stronger.

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  Makes, makes sense to me. Before I finish up, rapid fire, what do you think is the most important company in crypto? Can't say yourself.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, definitely not us. I would say most wow, most important company in crypto. I'll say the Ethereum Foundation.

• 1:19:56Speaker 00

  Why?

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Uh, I think that they are running a, uh, what is a quasi like techno religion? And it's really easy to fuck up a religion like we all of, actually, I would say something that get a lot of people to hate me. So let's just say there's, there's, there's many sects of Christianity.

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  People.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  There's many sects of Christianity and not all of them turned out so well. So let's just say like, in this case, like, I'm really hoping for the best.

• 1:20:20Speaker 00

  What do you think is the most controversial thought you have in crypto? Like, what do you believe that everyone else disagrees with?

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  In crypto? Oh, man.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  I think that, uh, virtually every altcoin is gonna get, this isn't even, I guess this isn't controversial. Virtually every altcoin is gonna go to zero. I think like, you know,

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  Bitcoin's gonna be here to say this isn't controversial at all.

• 1:20:43Speaker 00

  Not in this room.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  Not at all. I'm trying to think what, what could possibly controversial, I think like, uh, I actually, I guess this is controversial to a lot of crypto people and it's given what we're doing. But I think, uh, that there's a real need for regulated projects in the space. And I think like ones that play nice with regulators and are willing to, um, you know, are willing to take measures to sort of, you know, open the kimono and, and, and I think not everything can be a crypto anarchist paradise. But I think there's room for both.

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

  Yep, I think it's fair.

• 1:21:19Speaker 00

  What would you say is the one regulation you would change or improve if you could?

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  Definitely, I, I, there's a, there was a legislation, um, that, that was, what's, what needs to change is capital formation. So I think, um, when you look at like a lot of the, the current securities regulations, like Reg D, Reg A plus, you know, Reg S. I think those need to be wildly improved. I think it's doing everyone a disservice that only accredited investors can participate in most of these types of, you know, alternative fundraises. And I think, um, it only hurts, uh, you know, the mom and pop investors that they can't participate. Again, they still need to be educated. There still needs to be protections. Don't get me wrong. I think it's a step in the right direction, but I think we need to really improve our, our securities laws.

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  Makes sense. Most important book you've ever read?

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  That's really difficult. Most important book, I would actually have to say The Mind Illuminated.

• 1:22:19Speaker 00

  What is that?

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  It is one of the, I mean, it's the most incredible book I've ever read. No, it's, no, it's, it's, it's, it's like, you know how they're in every subject on earth, like, most people will maybe go to level one, level two.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  And then there's those people who go, you know, become obsessed, and these are people I love, but that go to level 10, right, or level nine, right, as close to level 10 as you can get. And the, in this book, it's basically, you're being taken on a journey in, towards brain science and meditation, kind of the intersection of the two, to level nine. And I think it's only, this, it's a, it's a relatively recent book, and I think it's only because there just hasn't been people from the Western world with the knowledge and background that they have, who also have knowledge of the Eastern world and the translations of like, a lot of this multi, you know, millennial old knowledge, to kind of combine the two and then actually put it into a book in a consumable manner, and then they accomplish that, and I think it is.

• 1:23:16Speaker 00

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna read this tonight.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  Dude, it's awesome. It's awesome.

• 1:23:20Speaker 00

  Sold.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:21Speaker 00

  All right, aliens, real, not real, believer?

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Definitely real.

• 1:23:26Speaker 00

  Why?

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  No question.

• 1:23:27Speaker 00

  Why?

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's, it's Fermi's paradox. I mean, it's like, look, I think.

• 1:23:32Speaker 00

  I'm gonna ban Fermi's paradox as an answer on this podcast.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  No, no, no, here's fine, here's my answer, all right, here's my answer. I think it would be the most, you know, self-centered, egocentric, human bullshit to say, you know, we are the only sentient, or not even sentient, just life forms in the universe. Now, I do think that there's a timing problem. I don't, I can't say if there's aliens right now, but like, are there aliens?

• 1:23:57Speaker 00

  Ever.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, ever, or in the future, like, or in the past? Yeah, yes, I think, no question.

• 1:24:03Speaker 00

  Do you think that there's weirder stuff in space or in the ocean?

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  Space.

• 1:24:08Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  I mean, I hope so, because that's, that'd be way cooler.

• 1:24:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what I think. I actually think it's the ocean.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  Well, you know, space.

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  Like, there's definitely life in the ocean. We know that for sure.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  There's some crazy shit. I mean, black holes, you know, supernova. I mean, I think there's just, there's some insanely weird shit. Like, if you think about it as just the, you know, the universe's largest experiment, and, you know, let's say, non-anthropomorphized god is just out there fucking shit up. You know, if we think that here on our little earth that we've got weirder shit at the bottom of the ocean, I think that's the same mistake we would make in saying like, there aren't aliens.

• 1:24:46Speaker 00

  I'm gonna make my mission to go find some weird stuff in the ocean and bring it back.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Please do.

• 1:24:50Speaker 00

  All right, you could ask me one question to finish up. What, uh, what do you got?

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  All right, um, I wanna hear, uh, if, if you could take on, you know, one quality of a person who you hate, you absolutely hate. But this quality, like, the quality that you admire the most in them, what would that be? And who's the person, if you'll share that?

• 1:25:15Speaker 00

  It's a whole group of people.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  Let's hear it.

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  It is the, uh...

• 1:25:22Speaker 00

  What's the best way to categorize this group?

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Are you about to say no coiners?

• 1:25:26Speaker 00

  It is the, it is the people who, uh, have a false sense of reality in that they believe things that are just so incredibly unlikely that, uh, they take as fact. I'm specifically talking about certain groups that most people in crypto, I think, would just say, "You guys are just trolling." What I've come to find is they're not actually trolling, but they do believe that that shitcoin is gonna, like, take over Bitcoin, right?

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  But what quality do you admire of theirs?

• 1:25:59Speaker 00

  So, so their ability to completely detach from reality is, uh... Well, it's not even faith, right? It's because they actually, like, it's not like, uh, "Hey, I believe," like, they, in their mind, they know, right? And it's like, yeah, like, they, like, they have a level of, uh, confidence. And, you know, if you look at some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world, they have a very similar ability to detach from reality. The difference is, um, they are not, uh...

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  Participants or like fans that detach from reality, right? Like it's one thing to like, hey, like if you're a New York Knicks fan, you can detach from reality and think that they're gonna win the NBA championship. That's probably not gonna happen for a long time, right? But like, so you can be a fan.

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  It's different when you are the entrepreneur drive, like, you know, Elon's probably the best example of just like.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  Conviction.

• 1:26:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, just like I'm going, I believe that X can happen. I'm gonna go do it, right? And, and what X is, is so detached from reality that everyone else is like, you're nuts. It does take a special type of person to fund that, right? So, you know, a lot of venture capitalists from the business doing it. But the ability to detach from reality and also have like the propensity for action to like, I'm gonna go build it. I think it's just very, very unique. There are very few people in the world who can do it.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  So true.

• 1:27:32Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm thinking there's probably less than a thousand.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36Speaker 00

  You know, out of seven plus billion people in the world.

• 1:27:38Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:27:39Speaker 00

  That can actually detach from reality and then have a propensity for action. Now, caveat all this with like, the crypto people detached from reality have no propensity for action. Like, they're just buying shit and just, you know, crossing their fingers. But, but I do, I do empathize a little bit in that that is a very unique ability.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  I, I would love for you to watch this video.

• 1:28:04Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  It's a recent video, George Hots.

• 1:28:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  H O T Z.

• 1:28:08Speaker 00

  H O T Z.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  He was the original guy to like jailbreak the iPhone. He's like a really renowned hacker. Brilliant dude, but he gave a talk at South by and it's about, you know, I, I don't want to give away too much about what it's about, but it's about like, you know, are we, the whole idea of like, are we in a simulation? But I think when you hear this guy talk, he's on the level of Elon or, or, you know, fill in the blank, you know, Steve Jobs, et cetera, where he's just thinking on a level that most people won't go to or would be afraid to take, like, take some stances publicly. And not only is he taking the stance, but he is the person you are describing. Like, he is putting money and time and effort where his mouth is.

• 1:28:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Towards like what. Sounds like the craziest thing you've ever heard, but he's

• 1:28:55Speaker 00

  It's only crazy until it happens.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  Watch the video. The last thing I'm going to let you you plug here is before we got started, you turned me on to Hunter S. Thompson.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:06Speaker 00

  And we started watching videos. We watched everything from him shooting at his neighbors on television to his daily routine. Maybe just give a quick two minutes on what your fascination there is and why he's he's so interesting.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  I mean, it's funny. It's almost like you kind of gave the perfect segue because all these people are kind of unabashedly unique, you know, and and they're they're they to the outside, to the majority, to the mainstream, they're the total wackos, they're the weirdos, they're the outcasts. And yet they are some of the most prolific creators, you know, and I think it's really hard. It's, I mean, he, you know, I actually want to take a moment to make a shout out that, like, he killed himself.

• 1:29:51Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 1:29:52Speaker 01

  And so, and the reason I want to bring this up is suicide prevention. Like, no, like, let's take a serious moment here. We're like, if you're one of those people where you feel like, oh, man, the whole world is against me. Everyone is is, you know, no one, everyone's calling me crazy. Everyone is calling me crazy. They're making fun of me. They're like, you know, whether they're trolling you on the internet, whatever. You know, that that has a very, very real impact. And I think it is not easy. It is not easy to to hold a conviction and to just be different. And I think like, we need to have a better dialogue around like, it's OK. And you're gonna get shit and you're gonna take flak. But you don't let that take you to that dark little place. Don't ever let yourself go to that place. There's you can get help. And I know, sorry, this is like a somber moment where it was gonna make it funny, but

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  he, he, you know, he's an incredible individual and it makes me so sad that we lost him. I just I loved his writing. I loved the person that he was. I loved the independent thinker that he was. So I highly recommend people read some of his books or some of his short stories. Amazing guy.

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  And and watch the YouTube videos.

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  And watch, you will crack up. Watch the YouTube videos, whether it's Conan, Letterman, Day in the Life, you could go down a crazy Hunter S. Thompson rabbit hole. I guarantee you will. He also makes an appearance in Electric Loid Acid Test.

• 1:31:03Speaker 00

  I'm gonna read Mine Illuminated. I'm gonna go watch Hunter S. Thompson. And you guys may never hear from me ever again.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:31:08Speaker 00

  That's right. All right, Tori, I appreciate you you take the time to do this. It's a ton of fun and I'll have to do it again in the future.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

• 1:31:17Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:32:00Anthony Pompliano?

  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.