#196 with Dan Held - Who Really Created Bitcoin & Other Crypto Startup Ideas

Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@theSamParr) are joined in this episode by serial Bitcoin entrepreneur Dan Held (@DanHeld). They talk about the Genesis block of Bitcoin, who Satoshi Nakamoto might really be, and the controversy around Tether. They end the episode talking about business ideas in the Crypto space and how to make money in the creator economy. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (:47) Intro to Dan Held * (3:01) How Dan got his first Bitcoin * (4:17) Will the real Satoshi please stand up * (9:31) Dan's Early Bitcoin days * (15:00) Ideas for the Bitcoin & Crypto space * (21:35) A new kind of private wealth manager * (24:43) The controversy around Tether * (31:28) Bitcoin security and multi-signature wallets * (36:31) Growth hacks to build your audience * (40:41) Monetizing in the creator economy * (46:44) Laser eyes and memes

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  If you told me that it makes him personally $30 million spread evenly over the next 10 years, I wouldn't be surprised.

• 0:19Shaan Puri?

  All right. What up? Sean here. We got Sam and then we got special guest Dan Held, the Dan Held from the Bitcoin space. And on Twitter, you probably seen him around. I told my brother in law that you were on the pod today. He was very excited. I've told him about every guest so far, and you got one of the biggest reactions. He was a, I think he's a paid subscriber to your newsletter or something like that. So he's, he's very into you. And on the other hand, I think Sam has no fucking clue who you are. So I think it's a perfect mix. I know some stuff about you. Sam knows nothing about you. And I think it'll be fun.

• 0:51Sam Parr?

  I only know that Sean says that you're cool and you're in Bitcoin. I know nothing about you.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  We got an hour to figure it out.

• 1:00Shaan Puri?

  Whenever, whenever one of us proposes a guest, it's like you put that guest, it's like you have to go take the stand and have an oath that this person's gonna be good. And then you better be able to lawyer up and defend why this person's a guest. And so he'll every anytime he mentions the names to me, I'm like, why the fuck are we having that person on? And then he'll like defend it. And then same here. I was like, no, no, no, this is gonna be, gonna be interesting. Because couple, I think a couple of reasons. We should talk about crypto. And then we should talk about, I think, like, kind of like, building your personal brand, because you've done a really good job of that. And so we'll do both of those during this, during this convo. But I want to start with, like, give people the like, what's the one minute story of who the heck you are? And yeah, I don't know, like, give us the one minute story of Dan Held.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, the elevator pitch. Yeah, so I from Texas originally, I grew up in Dallas, 25 years in Dallas. I studied finance in undergrad, stumbled and bumbled my way into tech. I didn't know what I was doing when I first built my, my first software product in the space. It was successful. From there, learned how to formalize some of my skills around product management and marketing. Worked at a couple of different early stage crypto companies. So I was at some of the first crypto companies I worked at, like blockchain.com. I've had two exits in the crypto space. So I've sold two of my products. And then I've also worked at Uber where I was on writer growth led by Andrew Chen. So it was one of his directs and the growth marketing team. So I've had big company, classic tech experience, but also a lot of kind of that startup hustle

• 2:26Speaker 02

  in early stage crypto, which early stage crypto is kind of Wild West. Which I guess fits my Texas attitude. So.

• 2:33Shaan Puri?

  And so tell people the story. You got into crypto Bitcoin, Bitcoin specifically. You're a Bitcoin guy. I shouldn't keep saying crypto too much. Bitcoin back in, I think 2012 or so Bitcoin was maybe 10 bucks back then. What you know, what caught your interest? How did you hear about it? What's the origin story for you?

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I got back in 2012. My buddy paid me back for a beer with something called a Casatius coin. The Casatius coin are those gold coins that you see in all those news articles where they talk about Bitcoin. They were physical Bitcoins essentially. And that was a good time. And in that 2012 era Bitcoin is so new and weird and different that that was like a good bridge from the physical fiat paper money world to the to the digital Bitcoin world. From there, my background is in finance. I really dug the 21 million hard cap as a solution to bad central banking policies. I mean, I was in undergrad during the 2008 financial crisis studying finance and I'm like, my professors don't know shit. Neither do the people on TV and neither do these books that I'm reading. And that's what kind of shook my foundational

• 3:38Speaker 02

  trust and belief in the existing financial system. And that's when Bitcoin came around. When I saw that, I was like, this is a good new way to be rebuild the financial system without having to trust these institutions.

• 3:49Shaan Puri?

  And Sam, I don't know if you know this. Sam, do you know when Satoshi signed the first block? He put a message in there. Do you have ever heard what this is?

• 3:58Sam Parr?

  No, but I love that guy's stories. I mean, the myth or if it's real, I don't know what the truth is, but I love the story behind it.

• 4:05Shaan Puri?

  And Ben, I don't know if you know it off the top of your head, but do you know what it is?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Satoshi was a really crazy character in terms of his expertise. I mean, he understood like human games. He understood game theory, encryption, all sorts of different other topics and wove this all together to build Bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't just software. It wraps itself around understanding human levers to press like greed of how the price cycles as the price goes up. People become more aware of it and by an expectation of the price going higher. So Satoshi, you know, really understood humans intimately. And part of this that he woven into the first block was the Genesis block message. And it said, UK Chancellor on the verge of second bailout for banks. So that was the only message that Satoshi ever put into the Bitcoin blockchain. And so it's a very clear signal that Bitcoin wasn't here

• 4:49Speaker 02

  to disrupt Visa or PayPal. Bitcoin is here to disrupt the existing financial system and central banking.

• 4:55Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so there's like, the mission, the mission was sort of like, I don't know, cleverly baked in, which I just, I just love. I'm like you, Sam, where I'm like, the more I learn about the origins, the more this shit seems like it's out of a movie. It doesn't seem like real life. It's like, oh, this anonymous creator. It's like, how's anything anonymous nowadays, right? Like, there's, there's like way, you know, like the way they caught the Silk Road guy was like his, the way he was typing or whatever matched some review he left on a movie message board or something. You know, there's always something like that. There's always a breadcrumb trail.

• 5:27Sam Parr?

  Is it actually, is it still anonymous? I mean, obviously no one's, could it have been the, the guy who had ALS and died? I mean, what, what, what do you, what do smart people?

• 5:36Shaan Puri?

  What's Dan's, what's Dan's theory?

• 5:38Speaker 02

  The, everyone's got their own favorite Satoshi tale. I'll give you two. So one is Hal Finney, the one that you just described. He had ALS and died, I think in 2012 or 2013. Hal Finney is a classic favorite because he ghost wrote PGP encryption and Bitcoin's proof of work system is based on his early reusable proof of work system that he created earlier. Bitcoin wasn't a new innovation. It just kind of Frankensteined all these other innovations together. And that's how Satoshi built Bitcoin. Hal Finney has the demeanor of Bitcoin. He was also the first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction, or he was sending it to himself.

• 6:10Shaan Puri?

  Right. Which is what, by the way, if you ever work with developers, that's what they do. They, when they're testing shit out, the first thing they do is they send it to my account, A, to my account, to Sean, Sean sends a Sean test.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  But the ghost writing PGP encryption, back in that era with Phil Zimmerman, PGP encryption was considered a weapon by the defense, by, by the Department of Defense. So when he goes for a PGP, he knew that he was potentially going to be convicted for like illegal arms trafficking.

• 6:35Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  So he understood what it meant to take on a government at this scale. And so he, and when he, when I say ghost wrote, He goes toward it because his name isn't officially on it. So same with Bitcoin. He was one of the few people to that would have built Bitcoin in that fashion, you know, hiding behind the pseudonym of Satoshi and using that because that was critical that the project had no face to it, had no central weak point. Because if you could find Satoshi and he's sort of a weak point in the governance structure and in the ownership structure, that could undermine the long-term success of the protocol. So yeah, Hal's a classic favorite.

• 7:08Shaan Puri?

  And died around the same time that Satoshi stopped doing anything. We haven't seen a mess, a flare from Satoshi since, right?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  That's right. Satoshi hasn't signed a message with his private key, which would concretely determine that that is Satoshi or give us a strong determination that that is Satoshi.

• 7:24Shaan Puri?

  Right. So that timeline makes sense. That's theory one. What's theory two?

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Theory two is the NSA. So theory two is that it's the NSA because the NSA builds weapons. And Bitcoin is a financial weapon. It could destabilize countries and destabilize their currencies. And so this is just a more fun. I mean, totally off the walls for thinking, but so let's say a group of cryptographers, which some of the best in the world work at the NSA, come up with Bitcoin because they're tasked with building a weapon. And after they build it, they go, wait a second, maybe we should just release this into the wild because we do believe that this is good for humankind.

• 7:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  And they release it as kind of like, it's like a Frankenstein experiment led out of the lab. So I think that one's kind of fun. I mean, there's no, there's no facts behind that at all.

• 8:08Shaan Puri?

  Where would you bet? Lab leak hypothesis for, for the pandemic, basically. That's, that's what you're saying.

• 8:13Sam Parr?

  I think one's more realistic than the other, maybe. What, uh, would you bet your money on one of those, Dan?

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Probably more the health, anyone. I, I feel that it's an individual. So that's always the question too. Is it an individual or a group of people? I skew more individual. Designed by committee is really hard to do with something as niche and like incredible, like an incredible breakthrough like Bitcoin.

• 8:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  So I think that one person just had that genius to, to take all these elements and put them together to create Bitcoin versus a group of developers trying to figure out how to build this thing.

• 8:41Shaan Puri?

  And, and there's also the other thing, which is like, it's just somebody else. So if you were going to apply your percentages, what percent is Hal Finney NSA or other?

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Uh, this is super tough, but maybe like 50% Hal Finney, uh, 30% Nick Zabo and 20% NSA.

• 8:59Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 9:02Shaan Puri?

  All right. I like that. Okay. So you discover Bitcoin because some guy gives you a coin and you don't, you're not just like, dude, what is this? Like, can I have my 10 bucks, please? And, and so you go, you read about it. What happens that night? So you go and you, you read the white paper, you join the forums, you just start reading about it online. And then like, I guess like, take us through the thought process of you going from where you were then to like where you are now, where Bitcoin is like, you know, a pretty major part of your life.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I can kind of weave in my early entrepreneurship, like in tech part of that too, because it's all kind of intertwined together. So I start to read about it, the 21 million hard got the monetary policy. I see this as a huge breakthrough because if you remove the subjectivity of choosing what an appropriate rate of inflation is, you've solved the problem of monetary theory. So like Satoshi solved the problem of like going, hey, we shouldn't constantly figure out what the rate of inflation should be. We should fix it and the economy can reorient around that genius breakthrough. So that got me really hooked. I worked at a small investment firm in Dallas. Nothing anyone would know. It's a really tiny one. Wasn't prestigious or anything like that. They relocated me to San Francisco to open up their West Coast portfolio. Out in San Francisco,

• 10:13Speaker 02

  I during the, it was the April Bitcoin run up from $10 to 260, back down to 100. I was going to the Bitcoin meetups in San Francisco. This was where like Brian and Fred from Coinbase were hanging out. And same with Jared Kennas from Trade Hill and Jesse Powell from Kraken, the company I work at now. I mean, there's only like

• 10:31Shaan Puri?

  And what were those like? Because we were just in Miami when the Bitcoin conference was happening. And it was kind of like a, like a bunch of fools acting the fool, I thought. I didn't attend, but just through what you, what was coming out on social media, I guess. And everything, every community changes from like when it's the outsiders and, you know, just the true believers to like, you know, 10 years later, 11 years later, what it, what it looks like is very, very different. Every community changes.

• 10:56Sam Parr?

  All of my friends, my roommate was buying, I was mining in 11 and 12 and they were just hardcore devs and nerds.

• 11:03Shaan Puri?

  So what were those meetups like?

• 11:05Speaker 02

  So I remember I was still working at a small investment firm. So I'm rolling up in fucking business casual to a developer, to a

• 11:12Shaan Puri?

  Bitcoin meetup.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  And they're like, what the hell are you doing? There's only a dozen of us. I mean, it was tiny. And actually, I've put pictures on Twitter where you can see pictures from the old meetup. I mean, it's just a cooler of PBRs and a bunch of people kind of geeking out on this thing called Bitcoin.

• 11:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Now, March, April 2013 hit, price goes to 260. Boom, you've got like VCs slanging out business cards. Everyone's excited. There's 150 people that come to the meetup. You know, there's this energy, this palpable energy. And then the May 2013 conference happens, the Winklevii announced they've been, they've bought Bitcoin. They're involved. The conference had like a few hundred people, which was kind of wild. If you see Coinbase's booth from videos from back then, they printed out like an eight and a half by 11. It just had Coinbase on it, like they just printed it off their computer in the office or their printer in the office and taped it on their booth. And Brian and Fred were the guys manning the booth. So like, that's how early it was. Super, super early in the space. And during that moment, that's when I found a problem.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  A problem that needed to be solved, which was finding the real time price of Bitcoin on your mobile device. At that time, there was no app in the App Store that gave you real time market data, which is crazy because Bitcoin fluctuates a lot. And people, you know, were constantly opening up their phone to check the price of Bitcoin. All the other developers before then just refreshed the price every 15 minutes or so. So me and a buddy put it together. Now, I didn't know what I was doing. I was a finance guy. You know, trying to figure out how to make a product. And so I just became really obsessed with solving this problem. And so I knew enough in Photoshop to where I could design the app. So I just looked at apps that I liked. Took elements from that to design Zero Block, which was this product.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  And designed it and we designed it really, really simply because I couldn't design anything more complex back in that day. Skewmorphism was the popular design aesthetic.

• 12:59Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  And we did flat UI because I couldn't design bevels and stuff. So I just became obsessed with solving this problem for myself. Turns out, a lot of other people had that problem too. And that's where I kind of like stumbled my way into some product fundamentals of like, it's all about solving a problem for your customer. And then I got into a tinge of growth marketing where I found how to hack my way to the number two spot for the word Bitcoin in the App Store. So we got most of our installs, you know.

• 13:25Shaan Puri?

  How'd you do that? What was the hack?

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Apple, at the time, when they really originally built the App Store, they forked it from iTunes. And so there's an old character limit that they had for titles of songs, which is 255 characters, but they also allowed that character limit for app titles. It was truncated after 60 words, basically.

• 13:44Shaan Puri?

  But it's filled with a shit ton of shit and words in the top, in the core title.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Old school keyword stuffing. Yeah, I learned old school growth, I can technically just keyword stuffing, but it worked. Now, it was sort of a crap shoot to see if the App Store reviewers would approve it, but one out of five would. And if you did, you could clinch that spot.

• 14:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  So that kind of started my fascination with both products and with growth marketing, kind of on the more hacky side of things. And yeah, that was my, that was my initial foray into tech. And then we sold Zero Block at the end of the year to blockchain.com. Blockchain.com is still around today. It's a really popular wallet. I was the first product manager there. And so kind of, that's what I mean by stumbled and bumbled my way into tech is.

• 14:22Shaan Puri?

  I like.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't have any formal background. I just kind of was really empathetic with solving a problem for my customer, wanted to propagate the, the message of my products. And that's how I learned those two skills.

• 14:32Sam Parr?

  All right, let's talk about some ideas, Sean, shall we?

• 14:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So Dan, I don't know if you know, but this is the ideas podcast where we basically say, okay, that like, I'm interested in the past, but to the extent that I learned cool things. And then I'm like, all right, let's get to the future. What's the future look like? So, so ideas. So I think there's really like, I guess, like, let's start in the Bitcoin crypto space. What problems do you see today that you think somebody needs to solve? Like back then, there was no real time price data. That was a problem that needed solving. What are you seeing today as a problem that needs solving?

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's one idea that's particularly fascinating, but it's not very sexy. Now, there's a lot of really good intersections there where you find value and like, there's no idea because not a lot of people are looking at it. It's around private wealth management for crypto holders. Imagine a current crypto billionaire walks into a family office, multifamily office, and they're like, hey, I'd like you to help manage my portfolio. And they sit down five suits in front of this guy with a hoodie. And they say, hey, well, uh, first of all, we'd like to take, you know, a 2% management fee of all your holdings. And they're like, well, I self custody my coin.

• 15:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  And they'd be like, I don't even know what that means.

• 15:34Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  You know, and then they would go, well, how much, how much of your net worth is in crypto? And they would say 90%. And then the first thing they would say is diversify.

• 15:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  The existing private wealth managers and multifamily offices have no idea of how to service crypto, wealthy crypto folks.

• 15:50Sam Parr?

  I mean, you can't even, you can, I, I told my guy at the bank today, let's buy some Ethereum. And they were like, oh, we, we can't.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  It's ridiculous. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous. It's so antiquated. They just don't talk, don't even talk the same language as all these crypto folks, right? Like, I'm a more Bitcoin guy. But if you go down like the Ethereum rabbit hole, there's a whole, I mean, there's so much complexity and how those DeFi and smart contracts work. It's where you need like a full tax team to solve that problem, too. But these, I mean, I've been in this space for almost nine years. I know more billionaires on this planet than probably anyone else because of, because of crypto, because crypto has created so many, not institutions, but individuals who have billions to where

• 16:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's true. Bitcoin is probably, Bitcoin plus Ethereum has probably created more individual billionaires than any other project, right?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 16:44Shaan Puri?

  I think that's gotta be true, which is kind of insane, like more than Microsoft, more than Amazon, more than any of those projects.

• 16:49Sam Parr?

  How many crypto billionaires do you know? How many billionaires do you know?

• 16:54Speaker 02

  I would say off the top of my head, at least, at least 10.

• 16:58Sam Parr?

  10. How many, how about 100 million on up?

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Oh, man. I mean, I would assume I at least know 100 or so folks that probably have that much. Look, Bitcoin people don't tell you how much they have, but you can kind of assume based on how long they've been in this space and what companies they worked at and how much their net worth was back then and probably, yeah, I mean, it's a general assumption, but.

• 17:20Sam Parr?

  How much of your personal money were you putting into this before your Bitcoin started, like, making sense? Like, were you putting like 100 grand into this in 2012 when it was like, who the fuck knows if this is gonna work? Because 100 grand to you at your.

• 17:32Shaan Puri?

  He's like, I wish.

• 17:33Sam Parr?

  Well, because you were really young. That would have been a lot of money.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't have that much money, man. I mean, look, I was like 25, 26, just out of, and I was in, you know, my first job was in Dallas. I was making 45K a year. It wasn't like a ton of money. And then I got into tech eventually, and of course, that went up quite a bit. But that was in 2013, 2014. Now, my average cost basis was $10 to 100, but there's a bunch of coins I got from in the hundreds to thousands, right? So I think a lot of people look at like crypto OGs like myself and they assume we had like a million dollars sitting around that we all dumped in at $5 a Bitcoin. And also, I wasn't a perfect toddler. I day traded. I traded Litecoin. I traded a bunch of other stuff just for fun. I even mined Prime Coin. So I'm not, you know, on my Bitcoin journey, I've touched a bunch of other coins as well.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  So no one's a perfect hodler.

• 18:24Shaan Puri?

  Psychologically, are you able to buy the dip when the dip is like 30,000? And it's like, well, my cost basis is 192 and you know, or like whatever it's five, even even if it's 3,000, even my cost basis is 3,000, buying at 30,000, it's like buy the dip. Great. So are you able to psychologically do that? Or are you just like, hey, my position is set. I hope the rest of you suckers buy the dip so that, you know, we keep this upward momentum.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So technically I'm over 100% of my net worth in Bitcoin because I took a small levered position back when Bitcoin was $7,000 at the bottom of the cycle. Because I believe that Bitcoin, you know, in a bull run, obviously appreciates. So I technically over 100% of my net worth is in Bitcoin. Also, I do something where I lend out my Bitcoin to earn a yield. That yield is like kind of a day to day stacking mechanism to add more stats, to add more Bitcoin.

• 19:13Shaan Puri?

  And you're using what like Kraken, BlockFi, who, what are you using? So Kraken doesn't, you're at Kraken now, so I put them first, but I don't think they offer this as a service.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Appreciate the shout out, but no, we don't offer that yet. Yeah. So we've got like BlockFi, Letin and Genesis Trading. Genesis Trading, you have to have like a minimum of 20 Bitcoin to be a customer.

• 19:30Shaan Puri?

  So by the way, I bought some secondary in Kraken, so I'm with you on the Kraken train. We'll go all the way to the top.

• 19:36Sam Parr?

  Dude, how the hell, when you, so Kraken, how many people at Kraken do you think have more than $15 million?

• 19:42Shaan Puri?

  How do you employ people when they're all fucking rich?

• 19:44Sam Parr?

  That's what I want to know. Like, how often do they tell you like, you know what, Dan? Go fuck yourself. I'm out. And then like next week, it's like, Dan, I'm bored. Got a spot for me?

• 19:56Speaker 02

  You know, it's a particular challenge for crypto. I mean, crypto, it's the hardest industry to build a business in. Think about it this way, too. Like you've got monsoonsies in the bull run and you want to capture all of that revenue potential. But if you start to spend and deploy capital through hiring and building offices and whatnot, by the time that The bull runs over, like, when do you turn off the spigot? Like, when do you turn off all that cash flow going out? And then how much do you cut back? And I think that's really, really tricky. Like, how do you predict these cycles? No one knows. If we did, we'd all be trillionaires. And so I think like, that's the most difficult part of this is like, how do you build a business with those fluctuations in demand? And how do you match expenses to meet that? But yeah, I mean, you know, in terms of, in terms of employee churn, it's super tricky. I actually put in my job descriptions for my growth marketing team,

• 20:41Speaker 02

  no crypto experience required. I first find it really refreshing when folks come in and challenge language that we use in our ads, homepage, App Store page, et cetera, on how we describe crypto, because I'm, I've been in too long. It's hard for me to zoom all the way out and see what it looks like from a newbie.

• 20:58Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  And so, one, I like that perspective. And two, to the motivational issue. I think, you know, folks who are new to crypto are much hungrier than ones who haven't been there.

• 21:08Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so let's do this private wealth manager. So what would you actually build here? Would it be a services company? Would it be a software company? What would be the, how would you attack this problem?

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a services company and you can't take bips on AUM. That's like an old way to do it. You'd have to figure out some sort of new model that's maybe more subscription or something like that. The first and foremost problems you're tackling, taxes. Taxes are incredibly complicated for crypto trades, especially if you're into DeFi things.

• 21:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  One would be taxes, two. So taxes not only cover trades, but also covers future tax minimization strategies. For example, there's a trust called a GRAT. A GRAT is a great way to pass on your crypto to your son, daughter, et cetera, a partner, without any taxable event occurring. So there's all sorts of very advanced structures that exist for very wealthy folks that most crypto people have no idea. You know, there, this wasn't institutional wealth. They didn't, they didn't work at Goldman. They were in their basement mining Bitcoin or mining Ethereum, you know, like. It's a whole different world, right?

• 22:05Shaan Puri?

  Right. And they're going to trust different things. In fact, I think what you did where you built your brand and you're like, oh, build a big audience. I think you have a few hundred thousand followers on Twitter for Bitcoin. I think that's what you would do if you come out and you're like, hey, I'm the Bitcoin tax guy and I'm going to talk every day about how to like, deal with the tax problem of Bitcoin and wealth management for wealthy Bitcoiners. And I'm going to, my sales is all going to happen through content and then whoever, and then you'll probably get billionaires coming inbound saying, hey, will you manage my stuff? That's how you would do this.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  I've known these billionaires personally for eight years. So I actually DM'd a bunch of them and asked them if they used multifamily offices and none did.

• 22:41Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  I already know that it's a problem that they're not currently solving. They went, they went to some traditional financial folks and they talked to me about their experiences and I was like, wow, that sounds terrible.

• 22:51Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  So for me, I'm very happy at Kraken. I love the team I'm working with. I love the team I've built. Also, they acquired my company, so I'm very incentivized to stick around, but I couldn't be more excited. In terms of a rocket ship in the space, Kraken's a great spot to be at and I'm a growth guy. So it's all about that like hyper growth and Kraken's like a perfect, perfect spot. But this is more for fun on the side of thinking like what, we're all, we're all tinker, tinker with stuff and think through stuff. And this is kind of my recent fascination.

• 23:17Shaan Puri?

  So Sam, do you know about the like, the tether question mark? Have you heard this, Sam?

• 23:23Sam Parr?

  No.

• 23:24Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so I'll ask Dan to kind of explain this. So Dan, I'm going to ask you to do two things. One is explain what people are, what some people are afraid of with tether and why that might be like, you know, people call it, oh, is this the black swan that's going to crash all of crypto, et cetera, et cetera. And then how you sleep at night being a hundred percent of your net worth in Bitcoin, knowing that this potential question mark exists with tether. So, so explain the potential problem and then how you think about it.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Sure. So tether is called a stablecoin. A stablecoin is a representation of a fiat currency. So tether represents US dollars and it's called USDT. So USDT is created by companies wiring money in to a Cayman Island entity and they wire it in there and then tethers are minted and created and those are put on blockchains. Tether has existed on the Bitcoin blockchain, Ethereum blockchain and Tron blockchain. Amongst others, I think, as well. So what Tether represents is a one-to-one backing of a dollar. Now, the company that issues these, which is like Tether United, like Tether Limited plus Bitfinex, which is an exchange, there were concerns over if they were truly backed one-to-one.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  And there were moments when it wasn't, but they've recently reached a settlement where they believe the New York District Attorney, I think, is who they, I forget exactly who they settled with.

• 24:42Shaan Puri?

  Attorney General, New York Attorney General, I think.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  There's so many regulators, I forget who settled with who. But yeah, they essentially settled and agreed to do audit, to perform audits and come out with exactly how much they had in reserve. So the controversy and the worry is that Tethers are, so there's a couple of worries. One is that Tethers, you know, first and foremost, aren't backed. And that could lead to a kind of like a classic run-on-the-bank situation where more people try to redeem Tethers and there's not enough dollars in the bank to be able to redeem, to be able to be redeemed. And that would cause structural problems at the crypto ecosystem. Number two, I think, is like the idea that USDT is being used in smart contracts and DeFi. And it's completely centralized because USDT, like USDC, these stable coins that are centrally

• 25:29Speaker 02

  issued by companies like Tether and Circle, they can be reversed or frozen or paused. And that truly decentralized. And a lot of the space, a lot of the DeFi space, I think, a lot of the contracts, for example, like MakerDAO. So MakerDAO is like an algorithmic stablecoin. Well, almost 50% of its collateral is centralized stablecoins. So it represents a systemic risk to DeFi and centralized finance, AKA the exchange space.

• 25:56Shaan Puri?

  So the fear is basically if the Tether people are not being on the up and up, so you have to trust people, which is like kind of the anti-crypto way.

• 26:06Shaan Puri?

  If they're, they could just be printing Tethers or be holding not one-to-one dollar assets. So they could be like a bank fractionally reserving, saying, oh, for every dollar we have, we have five Tethers. And basically using that to buy, and then that's being used to buy Bitcoin. So it's like artificially, it's not that Bitcoin has any issue with it, but that's what's driving up run-ups in price is there's a huge amount of Bitcoin that's bought with Tether.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  And that's the question. That's the concern. Now, how legitimate is the concern? So if we dig into it, and I wrote about this in the Help Report, my newsletter. If you dig into this, it isn't as bad as people say. There's all sorts of moments when tether wasn't fully collateralized, as in there wasn't enough tether to be redeemed to dollars. And the industry was fine. Also, we're talking about exchanges don't hold tethers. The users hold tethers. So tether is just like any other crypto asset. So there's been tons of times when multi-billion dollar crypto assets have gone to zero. And the structural problems in the space have been okay. We've also suffered much more egregious moments in the crypto space like Mt. Gox. Mt. Gox represented 90% of trading volume.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  This would be like Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken all going down at the same time. You know, these are hugely stressful moments for the marketplace. And so Bitcoin has been through a lot worse. Bitcoin inherently doesn't need tether. Tether is being used to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but for example, like different other government fiat currencies are used to buy Bitcoin, but that doesn't mean that Bitcoin is dependent on the dollar. It's not dependent on USDT. And then I think, you know, another concern that I forgot to bring up earlier. People hypothesize like tether is being used to pump Bitcoin. I think that's completely unfounded. It was based on a University of Texas research report, which I don't even know if you could call it fucking research, but it was like a research report where they basically said that correlation is causation.

• 27:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Which is absurd. It's like saying that like, you know, umbrellas cause rain. Because they're correlated. So it was really ridiculous. That's where the core root of some of the concerns that like, oh, tether is being used to pump Bitcoin come from. Completely unfounded. There's no data that supports that. And also there's moments when tethers are printed when Bitcoin goes down. But of course, the people who buy into this theory ignore those moments.

• 28:21Shaan Puri?

  Right. And, okay, so that's a great answer. So you, I want to switch to basically talking about other Bitcoin or other, let's say crypto ideas that you see that the average person is either not knowing about, you know, it's an interesting idea that you're not, that that's not as well known yet, or you see the opportunity for somebody to go build. Do you see any other opportunities besides the private wealth management space?

• 28:47Speaker 02

  The private wealth management one for me is one that's just really sticky. That one's like super interesting. Other ones that would be good as well. I just think simplicity is the ultimate way to go build product. It means that folks find value in your product much more quickly. You can convey the value prop. People discover the value prop that could activate it at a higher rate. So I think like simplest, a very, very simple, very, very simple mobile experience for wallets. I think is still like very underappreciated. I think the wallet space is still has horrid user experience. Like, for example, let's say when you send a Bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin transactions have two states, unconfirmed and confirmed. And to a layperson, like, what does that even mean? Yeah. You know, and all wallets default to this language.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  And I would disagree that they should even default to that language. I mean, you should add a layer in the layer above that in the GUI of something much more understandable. Wallets are kind of fundamental to core ethos of the system. And there's a lot of things you can do now where you layer in trading capabilities built in there, et cetera. So I think the space still doesn't have great, great to use wallets. I think like Exodus Wallet is really good. But other than them, I haven't seen like an experience around the core experience of holding your crypto. That was just mind-blowingly amazing.

• 30:02Sam Parr?

  Do you have a security team, like a physical security team?

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Do we? Like bodyguards and shit. No, you. Well, I'm in Texas, so obviously I own a few guns. So it's a come and take it sort of attitude. At conferences, I do have security.

• 30:17Sam Parr?

  Who do you hire?

• 30:20Speaker 02

  It's, it's, you know, provided to me by, through the company.

• 30:24Sam Parr?

  How much do they spend each year on, on these, on security guards?

• 30:29Speaker 02

  I'm not sure, but, but Kraken is constantly focused about security. They're, they're kind of nuts when it comes to security at Kraken. It's in terms of like how you control like where your laptop is and everything else. They're an exchange, right? Kraken's been around for 10 years and has never been hacked. So for us, like they're constantly paranoid about that. And the human attack vector is the weak points in any tech system. So they're very conscious about like different executives and high profile individuals, like where they are. You know, if they're at events with a lot of people, they got to think about physical security. So it's something that they think, they think about all the time. I have no idea how much that costs though.

• 31:04Sam Parr?

  I would be curious to hear about that because whenever I see, I mean, I don't have. I'm in a different friend group as you. Maybe I've got a few friends that have tens of millions of Bitcoin, but I am always curious as to how like the the actual security, because I would think that when it comes to hacking, I would think it would be just like stealing, like kidnapping someone, stealing, stealing the person as opposed to trying to like break into the thing.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Totally. Yeah. And that's actually classically called the wrench attack in the Bitcoin world is that someone could come to you and just smack you over the head with a wrench, right? Now, at the same time, you know, Sam, you've done very well, and same as Sean, like you guys have both done very well. And we see you guys know billionaires that walk around the streets of San Francisco. And they're not getting mugged and kidnapped for ransom. So in with Bitcoin, yeah, Bitcoin is easily transferable. But let's say that let's say this person is not into Bitcoin at all. They can easily take their liquid assets, buy Bitcoin, and then transfer it to the kidnapper. So whether or not you hold Bitcoin, if that makes you more or less susceptible to getting attacked, I don't think it does.

• 32:07Sam Parr?

  Well, that doesn't necessarily seem fair. Like, but that said, I'm not I'm not entirely educated on it. So I'm not sticking by this quite hardly, or I'm not sticking to this entirely. But like, when I when I have money in a variety of different places, there's a pretty large amount of checks and balances that go into transferring it. So I just tried to transfer money to a another bank today, and there was like a hard cutoff. Whereas with a lot of crypto stuff, you can literally have it in a in like a store, like some type of store, like

• 32:44Shaan Puri?

  I could fat finger the number I'm putting in, and I could transfer, you know, instead of five, I could transfer 5,000.

• 32:51Shaan Puri?

  And there's no getting it back.

• 32:52Sam Parr?

  And like credit cards do a pretty good job of doing fraud protection.

• 32:58Sam Parr?

  Usually, is it what's it called? What's the the $250,000 of checking accounts are are insured FDIs?

• 33:06Shaan Puri?

  There's also a big problem of like death, right? So so I think there's a startup opportunity here, too, which is what happens to your Bitcoin when you die? And and how do you how do you manage that? So on one hand, you can leave instructions to your spouse or whatever, which is like, hey, to get all to get access to all of our private keys, here's what you do. But now you have instructions to get all your private keys. That's You know, somewhere, uh, so you have to protect that. And so you have to have like multiple layers.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  You're starting to go down the rabbit hole. You're starting to, yeah, you kind of get in the circular logic loop of like, well, I can't trust anyone else with my money. So I need to manage my private key. And it's like, well, if I want to pass it on, I have to trust with them.

• 33:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. And then, and then you also have the like, I do the problem of like, actually, like property, uh, you know, property transfer when you die is like, it goes through either probate or you have a will. And I just think that there's probably a lot there that if you, if you look at this group of crypto wealthy as just a new customer that exists, and they're gonna, it's, I have this framework, this two by two, which is like, you know, um, is it, is it an old problem or a new problem? And then is there an old solution or new solution? Right? And so this is a case where it's, it's a bunch of old problems, but we need a new solution because it's a new type of customer.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Goes back to the private wealth management idea.

• 34:17Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  There's actually a way to solve this too. It's called multi-signature.

• 34:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Which means that your Bitcoin isn't controlled by one key that opens up the vault. There's three keys and you need two out of three keys to open up the vault. And there's all sorts of like, there's three out of five key structures. So those would be how you do this through time is you give like your, your CPA one, your wife, wife or husband one.

• 34:36Shaan Puri?

  You have the other.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then you give the other two to whomever else, or you keep three on your own. So there's a lot of elegant ways to do that. Multi-sig, I think, is the only way that's like, but the thing is now you have to educate your, there's no CPA in the world that knows private key management well.

• 34:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  That's where this entity would, for example, be one of the key holders. They would know very good private key management practices and only sign as for under certain, certain conditions, which would also help against the kidnapping vector.

• 35:02Shaan Puri?

  And

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Where they would have like a velocity limit.

• 35:04Shaan Puri?

  You've DM me before about stuff that's in the creator, kind of like audience space. I don't know where you want to go with that. I'll, I'll kind of leave it open, but, uh, you seem to have like a theory or a framework of like where the puck is going when it comes to this creator thing, or like, I don't know, you've successfully built your personal brand. And, you know, like, I don't know how many years ago, nobody knew who the fuck Dan Held is. And today you're known by a bunch of, you know, crypto nerds. So like, what is the, what is, you, you give me your thought process around e- either one of those two, like generally where it's going, or for you specifically, how you think about it?

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm like, I'm a growth product, growth marketing guy. So when I find like a vein of gold where I find like engagement or I find user acquisition, it just fascinates me. Right? So the creator economy is about, you know, for the, or most folks on the show, I'd say up to speed with creator economy stuff. Okay, cool. So, you know, I built an audience in the crypto space, in the Bitcoin space. My main message is just Bitcoin though. So I'm straight to the Bitcoin ethos. I've been in a long time. So, and my last name is a pun on the favorite meme, Hoddle.

• 36:06Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  So, my last name actually is real, though. My last name truly is hell. It's actually a German last name. Which, and so with that, I decided to lean into that. And I just started to write. I wrote long form articles. I started to tweet. And those got traction. And I found, over time, that there's a certain way that these gain traction. It's not, it's not by random circumstance. There are ways to understand the engagement algorithm, and use that to propagate your message. For me, I really love Bitcoin.

• 36:36Shaan Puri?

  What's an example? What's an example of something you saw that was working?

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, you can do Twitter advanced search and search for the most popular tweets from any account. Filter though, but filter those by the most popular, and then actually take a format of what they've tweeted, and just take an iteration of that.

• 36:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  You already know it's probably going to work. And you just take a small tweet, and that's, that almost always works.

• 36:57Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  You could also do a quote tweet, where like, let's say, let's say like a Naval tweet. You can just copy paste Naval's quote with quotes and tag Naval, and you'll get almost as much engagement as Naval does. Yeah. Even if you're a really tiny account. So little, little things like that. There's a whole bunch of those that I discovered. Because yeah, again, I'm a growth marketing guy. So I'm digging in, and I'm like, oh, man, this, this engagement tactic really worked. I've done some things like, if you see auto plane videos, you can build those in the media center in Twitter, which you have to have an ads account to do those. But they're not an ad. It's organic. So little, little tips and tricks like that. Consistency, I think, is the number one thing that people forget.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  I have not missed tweeting a day in three years. If you do, you lose your spot in the relevancy engine with Twitter. So Twitter, every day, there's, there's like 90% of consumers and 10% of us creators. Well, the creators create content for the board consumers, the consumer session in the product. And Twitter needs to figure out how to hook them immediately. And so Twitter goes to all their previous engaged content, and they go, well, who do they engage with every day? And if they've built up an habit of engaging with myself, then they're like, well, let's give them a Dan Held tweet. But if I don't tweet that day, then there may be like, oh, let's give them a Chris tweet or someone else's tweet because they need to go hook them immediately. And then if that engagement loop gets built with them over time, then I'll slowly start

• 38:19Speaker 02

  to lose relevancy with them. So consistency is absolutely the most important thing on Twitter and most of these channels. I think that was like the really big breakthroughs for me. It's not quality, it's quantity. It's about always having content there for them to consume and building that habit. And then you, over time, you focus on quality, where I think I've gotten a little bit more high quality over time, especially like I stood up a YouTube channel, I've got 25,000 subs in six months. And I just shoot one continuous shot. I don't, I don't even edit it. I just do one continuous shot, even if I like sneeze or something, I just kind of like keep going because I don't have enough time to spend in post-production and doing cuts. You guys have great video content. I just don't have time to go do that. How the do we? It was all about like, does my audience, does my audience like, will they engage with the content?

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Well, it's an MVP, right? It's an MVP. If people like it, then you go spend time, you pay for an editor or something to go help out. But yeah, it's been, it's been an incredible journey going down this rabbit hole. And then, you know, monetization wise too, just seeing all the different ways that folks, you know, tipping on Twitch, you've got like tipping on Twitter now, you've got subscription products, you've got swag.

• 39:26Shaan Puri?

  So let's fast forward three years from now, audience keeps growing and the monetization things get more baked out for you. How much do you think an individual creator in your niche, like how much you think you can make three years from now, just on the personal brand side of things? Forget the job and investing and other stuff.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Have you guys talked to Pomp yet?

• 39:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  We've had Pomp on a couple of times, yeah.

• 39:48Sam Parr?

  And we both know him well. I don't, we.

• 39:50Shaan Puri?

  I'm asking that, but that question.

• 39:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but if I, if I, we, I can, but we can guess. I would guess.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  Before, how about we all guess?

• 39:57Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I'll not, let's not include investment revenue, which I think investment revenue in the next.

• 40:03Shaan Puri?

  So we're talking about like paid newsletter, sponsorships.

• 40:07Sam Parr?

  Recurring revenue.

• 40:08Shaan Puri?

  The job board, I think we should throw in there because that's kind of like part of the personal brand stuff.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  You've got courses now.

• 40:13Shaan Puri?

  Courses.

• 40:14Sam Parr?

  But I'd like to say though, his, his investment revenue, if you told me that it makes him personally $30 million spread evenly over the next 10 years, I wouldn't be surprised. Is that crazy, Sean?

• 40:26Shaan Puri?

  Thirty year or you're talking about thirty total?

• 40:28Sam Parr?

  Sorry, thirty total spread out evenly over ten years.

• 40:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know how big his fund is, so I'm just gonna take that out for a second. I think just a personal brand side, which is a little

• 40:35Sam Parr?

  Two and a half.

• 40:36Shaan Puri?

  I would say three and a half. What would you have guessed, Dan?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Two to four million is my best guess as to how much revenue he's making, and that's based on like my best knowledge.

• 40:45Sam Parr?

  Maybe five people on staff, so maybe half a million in costs.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, very, very little overhead, so very high margins.

• 40:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  These are all value accretive, too. Like, if someone gets a job through Pomp, they might be really inclined to sign up to his newsletter.

• 40:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  These aren't like mutually exclusive sales, right? But by far, I think like, so he's got, so Pomp is the biggest. Pomp is, so this is our upper bound limit, and that's why I chose Pomp, right?

• 41:10Sam Parr?

  Is Pomp the biggest? What about?

• 41:12Shaan Puri?

  In the Bitcoin, in the crypto space you're talking about.

• 41:14Sam Parr?

  What about my guy, Raoul Powell? Or is that his name Raoul Powell?

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, Raoul Powell. He's more of like macro.

• 41:22Shaan Puri?

  Finance.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  I mean, I guess we could call him crypto now, because he's

• 41:24Sam Parr?

  But like, there are these, even though, like, let's say like a guy who's kind of a troll, even though I love him, like a James Alt, like a James Altucher, I bet you makes thirty million dollars a year in crypto newsletters.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  Dude, I don't, I don't think. James Altucher, that guy's from like 2017 era.

• 41:40Sam Parr?

  He's a friend of mine, dude. He sold his newsletter, his crypto newsletter for sixty million dollars.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  Wow. Wow.

• 41:46Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Holy shit, I didn't even know that.

• 41:48Sam Parr?

  Do you know Motley Fool?

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:51Sam Parr?

  Motley Fool does close to a hundred million a month in revenue. So I think that Pomp is the popular poppy one, but I think there, I bet you, I guarantee you, there's guys who have newsletters that they charge twenty thousand a year.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Well, you guys have, you guys did the breakdown of Agora, right? That like crazy newsletter thing?

• 42:10Sam Parr?

  They bought James.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, I got the, I got the, you know, after you guys did the breakdown of it, I actually talked to someone who worked there.

• 42:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  I got the breakdown. So like, that backend newsletter, the one that's a really high markup, like a thousand dollars a month, that's where they make all the money.

• 42:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  It's like you got your twenty, thirty dollar a month upfront one, and you get the thousand dollar backend one. I couldn't personally do it. I just feel kind of weird doing it personally.

• 42:34Sam Parr?

  Were we wrong, by the way? Were we wrong on our guesses for Agora?

• 42:39Speaker 02

  In terms of like revenue, I didn't do any revenue back at the envelope revenue stuff. I just want to know tactically, like how do they think about?

• 42:46Shaan Puri?

  I'm with you, Dan. There is something to that, like, oh, this like weird slippery slope where you end up with these like, you know, this small 1% of these like whales who you've just milked their whole life savings because they think they're getting this. No, no, thanks.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  I'd rather build longer term value to like deliver something that I think is truly worth that amount of money. That's where I've experimented with courses. So I've got my newsletter. I've got my newsletter. I've got ads.

• 43:09Shaan Puri?

  Which one is the best? The best combination of like effort, fun and money? Like if you combine those, right? You want a low effort, high fun, high money. Like what is the best one so far you've experimented as a creator of these tools in your tool belt?

• 43:22Speaker 02

  Probably YouTube because it's kind of fun showing a product that you really like. So I only represent products that I personally use. And it's an ethical standard that I have for myself. So, which means that I have eliminated a lot of the potential advertisers that would pay me a lot more.

• 43:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  For me, it's the only way that I feel like it'd be appropriate for me to, you know, represent this product. And YouTube is fun because I get to like have like a little skit with it where like I bring it up, I talk about it, I represent it. The newsletter, it's a lot of work. That, I mean, writing an article a week doesn't sound like a lot. It's a lot.

• 43:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's a lot.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  It's a ton of work and you take pride in it.

• 43:57Shaan Puri?

  Especially when it's paid, there's a bar of these people paid for this information. So the information that better be different and unique and awesome every week.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  I know I'm a, I'm a, you know, classic growth guy. So I have a survey at the end of each one to get like a raw MPS score. I get feedback on what the next article they want written. That way I write the best, most relevant content, which means that they're satisfied. But it's tough, you know, like it's really hard to where I don't know how pumped as a daily.

• 44:23Sam Parr?

  I think he's got a guy. I would bet that he's got about two young guys.

• 44:26Shaan Puri?

  He says he does. He says he sits down, he writes it in one take.

• 44:30Sam Parr?

  Well, I went out to me and my wife and him and his wife all went out to lunch one day and just hung out and Paulina, his wife was teasing him like, I like, she was like, it takes me forever to write my weekly thing. He just sits down and he does it in 15 minutes and he's done.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  I mean, I've had some that have like cruised through like a straight like stream of consciousness, but it's tough. Some of them I do a lot of research for, like I wrote one on Bitcoin DeFi. And that was a ton of like, actually, I tried to try out a couple of different apps. It was a lot of work. So fun and ROI would be YouTube channel where like I do these pre-roll, mid-roll ads. They're kind of fun to do. I can visually show off the product in a more fun, compelling way, like the products I'm representing versus like the newsletter, which I have to sit down, really think through hard. And it's something that, you know, I want to make sure I represent really, really well.

• 45:18Shaan Puri?

  By the way, you're a growth guy. I've said that this Bitcoin laser eyes thing is one of the most genius, kind of like decentralized marketing tactics I've ever seen. What is the origin story? Is there an origin story?

• 45:30Speaker 02

  You invented that?

• 45:32Shaan Puri?

  No, no, I don't know if he invented. I'm saying, do you know? He knows more people than I do. Where did this come from? And who are the geniuses that came up with this?

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I wrote about Bitcoin's decentralized marketing team before, where like Bitcoin has no central marketing org. There's no propaganda arm of Bitcoin. It's like me and Pomp and everyone else who talks about Bitcoin. I don't know who originated it. It's like the origin of memes. I mean, sometimes you can find where a meme came from, but sometimes it just kind of like it came from nowhere. I'm not sure who the first person was, and no one I know has claimed it.

• 46:01Shaan Puri?

  Which is insane because somebody should and, and you could, you could be the first person who did this, right? That's not like, that's not like a wild thing. And, but it's genius. It is like Bitcoin in so many ways is a religion. And, and this is just yet another like, you know, religious mark. Basically, you know, this is the yarmulke. This is, this is the thing you wear that that says, hey, I'm a part of this religion. And, you know, putting it in the profile picture, having it be slightly mysterious. So people don't know what it's for. And then they ask, and then making it memeable where we can all do it. I think is, it was just brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, this basis, I mean memes are such an incredible part of how stuff is communicated nowadays, right? Like, I mean, we saw like elections, people can be elected based on memes. Like memes aren't just these funny things on like 4chan or Reddit anymore. Like memes are, memes are like the main trend, like my mom uses memes. Now, she does it on like Facebook, but you know, it's crazy. Like it's narrative compression at its finest. It's taking a whole narrative and compressing it into one image. And I think that's why it's so powerful as a transmission method.

• 47:06Shaan Puri?

  It's the most shareable viral thing you can do, right? On the internet. And so it's like, what, you know, memes are the packaging for ideas. If you want to most efficiently package an idea, a meme is the best way. So I've joked about, we saw this thing called, I think it was called like meme university or LOL university or something like that. And basically they took the website of Lambda School and they just remade it for a school that would teach you how to do memes.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  That's the best.

• 47:33Shaan Puri?

  It was a joke website. It's not like a real course behind it. But I was like, you know, if there really should be a course that somebody should take, this is it. People, if you could learn this, it's learning, you know, the native tongue of the internet. And, and you know, it's pretty important to be fluent in internet nowadays. And so I think, I think that's one where I'm like, if somebody really should create this. I have this Slack channel that me and Ben do where we basically put out a challenge where we said, every day for 50 days, we're going to make a new meme. Because, you know, it's easy to spread these, but it's, the act of actually making one is hard. It's telling, you know, telling a story, telling a joke in the most efficient form. And it's been so challenging to just do this every day for 50 days.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Well, what's kind of fun is my buddies over at eToro, Brad Mitchelson, really, really smart marketing guy, him and I are buddies. And what they did is they started to create GIFs on, so on Giphy. And Giphy, like that, that's, that gets pulled into like Facebook Messenger.

• 48:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the search engine.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Twitter GIFs. So I started to make, I saw their strategy for eToro and I made that for myself. So I took like the most popular Bitcoin memes and then wrapped it in my own black and white design to where you could search like Dan Held and you'd see a bunch of black and white GIFs and have my, my logo watermarked on there. So like, you can kind of create meme factories is what I learned from that. Like you can create like a meme factory to use that to propagate content. And Giphy was a really great way of doing it because it's plugged into so many different platforms. Versus like, if you, you know, each one individually, like trying to create like an emoji with each social platform would be tough. But like Giphy, you get to pull into all of them.

• 49:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's smart. I like that.

• 49:05Sam Parr?

  All right, we're about at the top of the hour. Do we want to go over one more idea or what, Sean?

• 49:10Shaan Puri?

  Um, I don't know. If you have, if you have one that's burning, you could do it. Otherwise, I think we should wrap it up.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Cool. Well, yeah, I mean, just my, I think like closing thought on like the creator economy stuff. I've been in Bitcoin for nine years and that has been a huge fascination for me. I would say the creator economy is not an equal fascination, but quickly becoming something very interesting. I think about it as like the monetization of all human information, right? Like creators are just taking whatever knowledge they have locally, putting that on the internet, distributing it and then monetizing that. And what is the value of all of that combined? I mean, it's tens of trillions, a hundred trillion. I don't know what it's worth, but like for me, I just kind of see this huge, I mean, there's so many niche things that someone could write about. Like there's a million things and it's very low, a very low effort to find your MVP.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  Versus before you had to go buy a warehouse and start producing things, you just produce content. And if that content resonates and people click and want to figure out what products you'd recommend for them, then you can go build your own products. So I see kind of like a whole economy kind of reorienting around content marketing. And that being the top of funnel and, and like idea generation for all future products.

• 50:21Sam Parr?

  Great. Well, what do you think, Sean?

• 50:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, let's wrap it up. I like that one. That's, uh, I like the way you explained that because I think it, it aligns with something I believe, which is when. When there's never been more information, it's all about who actually has attention. And the person who's going to have attention is whoever is putting out great content consistently. So great content once will get your attention once, and then great content consistently will build trust, which just says, look, it's too noisy. I'm just going to go to my sources I like. And then those people then hold the keys. And you know, up till now, that's been captured by the platform. So that's been true, but YouTube still captured way more value and Twitch captured way more value and Twitter captured way more value than the people on it. And that seems to be flipping where either new platforms are going to come out where

• 51:09Shaan Puri?

  the creators own it, or the value is going to accrue off platform in a bigger way than it did originally, when it was like, I think the value accrued like 99.1, 99% to the platform, 1% to the creators. And I think that's, that's going to flip closer to 50/50 over time.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  I think Twitter has recognized this, right? With the super follows, where you can have like subscription followers, where people subscribe to like a premium set of tweets you have. I mean, Twitter, I think sees this coming. They see the exodus of folks building an audience on Twitter, and then the exodus of all that monetization going to Substack. They're trying to bring that back in.

• 51:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think that's sort of just trading one master for another, though, in a way where it's like, as long as Twitter will put super follows there, and then they'll take the cut they want, and then as long as they're the button to pay for stuff, they 'll just inch that cut from 10% to 15% to 20% to 50% over time. And, and so I think, you know, the real answer here is, is how do you build this independently? And I think basically, that's the part of crypto I'm most excited about is people who are building, you know, a social network that is open source, that if it can get adoption, and this is why I was interested in BitClout, is if it can get adoption, then that ratio will flip. The, all the value will accrue to the creators and not to the core platform or protocol underneath.

• 52:26Shaan Puri?

  So, so that's what I'm excited about is like, that's the real disruption there.

• 52:30Sam Parr?

  Well, we appreciate you coming on, Dan. It's, I've been following you on Twitter now for a couple of weeks since Sean's been talking about you, and he's been saying that you were the guy to speak to, and we appreciate it.

• 52:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so go, go give him a follow. He's at Dan Held on Twitter. And yeah, all right, we'll see you, we'll see you later.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.