322: Amir Haleem on Building the World's First Peer-to-Peer Wireless Network

Amir Haleem is the co-founder and CEO of Helium, a technology company that built the Helium Hotspot. The Helium Hotspot has created an innovative way to decentralize and democratize ownership of wireless networks. In this conversation, we talked about Amir's time as one of the top gamers in the world, why he thinks we have to decentralize wireless networks, how the Helium Hotspot works, and what it means to build the people's network. =============================== Blockset by BRD is your hosted blockchain infrastructure. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near real-time portfolio management solutions, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much more: https://www.blockset.com =============================== Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Amir Halim is the co-founder and CEO of Helium, a technology company that built the Helium Hotspot. The Helium Hotspot has created an innovative way to decentralize and democratize ownership of wireless networks. In this conversation, we talked about Amir's time as one of the top gamers in the world, why he thinks we have to decentralize wireless networks, how the Helium Hotspot works, and what it means to build the people's network. I really enjoyed this conversation with Amir, and I hope you guys do as well. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  The first is Blockset by BRD. If you remember, BRD had one of the first Bitcoin wallets in the App Store back in 2014. So Blockset's a new product they've built that your hosted blockchain infrastructure. Think about Amazon AWS, Blockset's built the same thing for the blockchain industry. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost. Using the service provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate near-real-time portfolio management, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much more. Head on over to blockset.com, again, blockset.com, and get your hosted blockchain infrastructure today.

• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Our next sponsor is crypto.com. They got a dope URL, crypto.com, doesn't get better than that. It's an all-in-one platform that allows you to buy, sell, store, earn, loan, and invest crypto, all from one place. You can join over 1 million users currently using their mobile app, the crypto.com app. So go and download it and you can earn $50 using my code POMP2020 when you sign up today. Crypto.com, the place where mass adoption is occurring. Lastly, I write a daily letter. That's right, I wake my ass up and I write a letter every morning to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. Go subscribe. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language, and I share my opinion on various aspects of each industry.

• 2:11Anthony Pompliano?

  You can subscribe at pompletter.com, again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Amir. I hope you guys really enjoy this one.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, everyone, I am here with Amir. Super excited to be doing this. How are you, sir?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  I'm good. How are you?

• 2:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I got no complaints, man.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, likewise.

• 3:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I, uh, I, I literally can't, uh, can't complain at all. We'll give it a few, uh, few seconds to get, uh, get some people in here. But, uh, I'm excited to do this. Um, and, uh, I think people generally have heard of, uh, helium, the hotspots, and they want to know more. So I figured this would be a, uh, a good way to do it.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's awesome to be on. Thanks for, uh, thanks for having us and, uh, yeah, can't wait to talk about some hotspots and helium in general.

• 3:29Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. So maybe let's just get started with, uh, with your background. Um, for those that don't know who you are, uh, what do you, what did you do kind of before helium?

• 3:40Speaker 02

  So a long time ago, I was a, uh, in, in college, I think I was one of the first Western pro esports players that existed. So I, I, I did nothing in college other than play Quake, which was the first like real internet, you know, TCP IP game. Got really good at it. I was, you know, like the best player in the world for, for a while. Uh, same with Quake 3. So I did that for a long time and I met a lot of people through that community that, that led me to my eventual career, which was, uh, building video games. So I worked at a company called Dice. We built Battlefield 1942, uh, became like a huge deal and a much bigger franchise than I think we ever expected. Uh, I spent most of my career in the video game industry.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  And then, you know, six or seven years ago, I had met Sean Fanning, who's a Napster co-founder during my video game travels. And we started talking about, let's build a, we should, there should be a wireless network for sensors, right? Like, there's not, there's not a wireless network designed for low-power things, whether it's like tracking devices, or air quality monitors, or, you know, all sorts of applications, like, there isn't a network for that. And so, we just started scheming on that, probably 2012 at this point. And I moved up to San Francisco from LA, where I was living, and we started Helium in 2013. But before that, I was fully, like, deeply in the video game universe.

• 5:05Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. And I guess, as you were transitioning out of that industry, more into this stuff, like, what were the main takeaways, now that you've seen esports and kind of gaming blow up? Like, was it obvious back then that we'd get to this point? Or are you kind of surprised by the rise of esports?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Both, really. I mean, in some ways, it was obvious, because we had, like, some, we could look into the future a little bit by looking at Korea. You know, so in South Korea, like, you have pro esports athletes, mostly StarCraft at the time, that were on, like, cereal boxes, you know, these guys were full celebrities. And the StarCraft results were on the evening news, right alongside, like, soccer and baseball. And so, you could kind of see that there was a way that that would happen, right? And Korea was like, South Korea was like the blueprint for that. I'm still surprised, though. I mean, to see, like, a packed, like, Staples Center, or like, you know, it, that blows my mind, continues to blow my mind. And like, a lot of the people I played video games with in those days are

• 6:06Speaker 02

  now, like, the organizers and owners of those, you know, events, and, and teams and stuff. And it's just, you know, I'm, I'm amazed at what they've done, and the sort of universe that they've built. In some ways, it's like, we sort of expected it to happen, it should have happened. And in other ways, I'm still, like, shocked. I mean, when we played Quake, like, if there was 50 people watching, you know, finals or something like that, we felt pretty, we felt like celebrities or something. But now, now it's, you know, a full, a full stadium full of people, and the prize monies in the millions, and... So I think it's awesome. It's it's it's cool to see it. I think, you know, back then it was really only college kids and like professionals that had access to the Internet that way. You know, you needed a T1

• 6:48Speaker 02

  or some sort of DSL connection if you were going to be serious. And so that, you know, shrunk this sort of playing field and, you know, there's only so many people who were who fit in that camp. But yeah, I'm like I said, I'm amazed. I can't believe it. Every time I see it, I'm like way too old and slow and bad now to like even think about playing, but it would be fun.

• 7:07Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And so let's talk a little bit about after you transitioned from gaming to kind of this wireless network and hotspot world. There's already existing infrastructure. There's tons of incumbents around the telcos and they've pretty much dominated this space for a very, very long time. So I want to start there. Just maybe give us like a map of the industry. So kind of what does the legacy infrastructure look like? And then what does that ownership structure look like in terms of the telcos and any market share or anything like that?

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's, you know, I think most people are probably pretty familiar with all the bits just because they touch consumer applications a lot, right? So you've got, on the one hand, you've got cellular networks, right? It's a big outdoor networks that are run by AT&T and Verizon and Vodafone and RR engine, you know, pick your carrier depending what country you're in. And that stuff was really designed for, you know, let's call it voice and above, right? Like it started out as a as a voice network and it's now sort of morphed into a data network. And you've got LTE and you've got 5G and you've got, you know, high bandwidth, like high power protocols that are really good for streaming video, voice over IP, Facebook, whatever. On the other end, like in the home,

• 8:21Speaker 02

  you've obviously got Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which I expect everyone is super familiar with. But there isn't sort of a like a way of thinking about it is like there isn't a sort of Bluetooth like thing that lives outdoors. You know, so there are low power cellular protocols that that the carriers have tried to introduce, you know, so they're called NB-IOT and category M1. They have terrible names, which is perhaps why they like haven't seen it anyway. But but those are in Attempt to build like a low power wireless protocol on top of the existing LTE networks. Right. And so it's like if we wanted, and the best example I could give was like, imagine something like Tile. Right. So I think everyone familiar with like the Tile Bluetooth tracker. Like imagine that that just worked anywhere you went and it didn't have to be tethered to a phone and it didn't have to be like near, near anything.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  So the same way an iPhone works. That's sort of what N B O T and M one were trying to do, right? They're trying to build like a low power version of a cellular network. And for a whole bunch of reasons, like a lot of them technical, some of them economic. It is very difficult to make that work, right? It's difficult to spend the money on the CapEx and the OpEx to like build these big expensive networks. And then put a sensor on it that wants to pay you like a dollar a year or, you know, a few cents a month or something like that. Like there's no ROI there. It doesn't make any sense. And then there's, you know, technical challenges because they're running an LTE spectrum. Like they have to be very smart about avoiding all this voice and data. And that makes the protocol more expensive, more complicated, which makes the silicon more expensive.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Like there's just so, it's like a, like a layer cake of problems. Uh, and so that's sort of the incumbent universe. And like, as you all know, it's like cellular is owned very much by the big telcos. The spectrum is licensed, like there's absolutely no chance for a small company like Helium or any startup to participate in that universe, like the spectrum gets auctioned for like billions of dollars. And so it's a very much like a boys' club, like an old, an old school club of people that you just can't get into. Um, and so helium is sort of an alternative to that. It's like, what is a way of building a low power network? That sort of tries to service that same use case, like that sort of wandering tile or like a radiation monitoring sensor or precision ag sensor.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  You know, whatever it may be, uh, but operates in unlicensed spectrum that everyone can use. And it's built in a completely different way. It's built by people and not, you know, a central entity. And so that, that's, that's sort of the playing field and, and that's roughly how we think about the solution.

• 10:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's interesting because I think it was Chris Sacca. I can't remember where I heard this, but when he was working at Google early on, they made a bid for a spectrum and they were actually going to lock up data centers, kind of all the infrastructure type stuff. And if I remember the story correctly, there was a point where they decided to go against, maybe it was AT&T or T-Mobile or Verizon, whoever it was. And they literally were like sitting there and the bids that they were talking about were, you know, a billion, $2 billion, whatever. And it was just an all out, like, almost like liar's poker type situation, right? Of like, who basically is willing to bet the most in order to win without walking away at the end saying like, wow, I paid way too much.

• 11:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's pretty crazy how that kind of auction type system works.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  It's crazy. I mean, it sort of reminds me of like the US security laws a little bit, right? Where, where normal people just like cannot participate in like tech companies pre-IPO in like any reasonable way, right? It's like, it's a very locked down universe. There is a 0% chance of helium or any startup, including Google,

• 11:58Speaker 02

  at the time, like being able to just participate in that world. It's just too expensive, you know? It's an absurdly expensive universe. And the way it works is, I mean, just in case everyone isn't familiar with licensed and unlicensed spectrum, it's, you know, the FCC, that's sort of the governing body of wireless stuff in America, auctions off these blocks, you know? So like these areas of frequencies, so like 650 megahertz, for example. You know, they auction it and people like Verizon and Google and whoever else bid on it, and once they win, they like own that spectrum and they can operate, you know, in that spectrum and no one else can. The alternative there is something called unlicensed spectrum. And so most countries have like a block of frequencies that are unlicensed. Like everyone can use them, everyone can share them.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  And that's great. It's awesome. Like there's a great, that's great that we have a thing to use. The downside is the rules around how you operate in those spectrums are kind of strict, right? Because you're sharing it with like potentially anyone in the country, right? And so. You can't do a lot of things in those spectrums that the cell operators can do in their own licensed spectrum. And that makes life harder and means that you have to innovate in slightly different ways because you can't just send that maximum power and you can't do all the stuff that the guys that own the spectrum can. But that's roughly how it's broken down is that the FCC just decides which spectrum they're going to sell and then people bid on it. And then they own it and then they operate their cell service or whatever inside that spectrum.

• 13:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So I can't imagine that everyone plays by the rules 100% of the time, especially in that bidding process, given how much value creation can happen. Help us understand just like, what's the, I don't want to say like the dirty side, but maybe just like the darker side of that industry. Is it literally just all of the big players who have big pocketbooks? They basically kind of box everybody else out because they have money? Or is there some lobbying that goes on? What happens there?

• 13:52Speaker 02

  I don't know. We can't get in. We're locked out of that world. I don't know. I mean, it seems highly suspicious and strange the way that that world works. I got to imagine there's some early access to all of this spectrum lobbying and auctioning that no one else knows about. And it's always the same players, right? And that must strike you as a little bit odd at some point. But like I said, to me, it feels like it is the same as the US securities laws. Like I'm constantly frustrated by the fact that everyday people can't invest in pre-IPO companies because we're just too dumb to do that. I find that insulting and annoying. And this reminds me of that where it's like this club that no one can get into.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  And so when we thought about starting helium, it was like, well, shit, how do we have any chance of competing in that universe? And it turns out, I think the answer is like improvements in technologies, improvements in thinking about how to deploy infrastructure. And you sort of have to approach it from that point of view because you're never going to win in the other game. Like you can't win that game.

• 14:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and this really brings us to helium. So I first heard of you guys, I think, when multi-coin Kyle Simon and those guys were getting pretty excited about it. Obviously, you guys have become advertisers on the podcast and I now have my helium hotspot right here. I was joking with you before, when I do this, I feel like I'm a Van Al White from Wheel of Fortune or something. But tell me more about kind of like, what was the impetus for starting the company? Kind of when you guys first set out to do this?

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was that. I mean, we wanted to build a like, we wanted, we imagined some naively at the start, because we didn't really didn't know what the hell we were doing at the start, if I'm honest. We didn't know anything about hardware or wireless or all the stuff I'm telling you is learned over the last several years. Like, I didn't know any of this. And, you know, we wanted there to be something that looked like a public infrastructure for wireless things, you know, predominantly low-power things, right? Stuff that we don't really have today, stuff that runs on batteries, that pays just a few cents a month or something to send and receive data that can go anywhere, that works. And we thought that just that should just exist somehow. And we, I don't think we knew exactly what the right way to do that was, either from

• 16:14Speaker 02

  a technology point of view, like, what's the right way to sort of build that wireless protocol, or what's the right technology? Like, we had no idea. And then also, what's the right incentive model, or like, what's the right structure to like, help build that? Because I think if you build it yourself, you end up just sort of like a low-grade version of AT&T, right? Like, you're like, you're trying to do the same thing they are, you just have way less money and way less resources to do it. And so we sort of recognized that there had to be an alternate approach for like, how you, how you built the network. Several years ago, we, you know, I think the combination of wireless technologies and sort of pervasive knowledge of Bitcoin and blockchain networks, or crypto networks

• 16:55Speaker 02

  in general, led us to think that maybe there was a way of incentivizing people to like, build a network like this with us, you know, if they shared in a piece of the economics, right? Like, if there was sort of a crypto incentive model there, maybe that would work. But we weren't certain, like, you know, we had no idea. Like, we weren't certain. It seemed like a ridiculous idea at the time. There was many like whiskey fuel discussions about whether this was a good or bad idea. And you know, we eventually we decided that this was an interesting approach and that the public sort of perception of cryptocurrencies was at that time such that it might like it had a chance of working. I don't think if you tried to do this in 2013 or 2014, you could have pulled it off because I don't think anyone knew what Bitcoin was beyond sort of very hardcore group.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  I don't think anyone knew what Ethereum was, you know, the whole concept of a crypto network or cryptocurrency was like very much in its infancy. And those guys were, you know, anyone doing it at that time is like an incredible pioneer for like seeing that that was possible. And so that's, you know, a few years ago, probably three years ago now, we decided that trying to build this network in this sort of decentralized way, you know, we call it the people's network and that's because it really is built by the people, like people buy the hotspot that you were just holding up. And by doing that, they are participating in creating this network and they participate in mining cryptocurrency and participate in like being an earning when people use the network. And so, you know, we took a vastly different approach to like how we would build this. And so far, it seems to be working.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  I think we sold over 10,000 of these hotspots now. There are probably over a million square miles of network coverage being created. Something like 12 million packets a month gets moved over the network already. So it, you know, it seems to be working, like it's sort of resonating and as a, as a concept, both on the supply side, so the, you know, the building of the network, but also on the, the device side. And that's everything from, you know, individual tinkerers all the way up to like large corporations that are, are starting to use the network.

• 18:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And so would it be fair to call kind of the, the architecture, structure, something similar to like a mesh network? That that's essentially what you're trying to do with each one of these devices being a node in that network? Or is that something that's a little bit different?

• 19:07Speaker 02

  I think mesh is a very overloaded term in like low-power wireless. Like, I think people come to call low-power wireless networks mesh networks by default because they don't really have a better name, which is fine. I mean, it is, you know, it's not wildly incorrect. In our network, like, the mesh is really like a peer-to-peer network that is not wireless, right? The mesh or the peer-to-peer part is really the blockchain network that we built. And unfortunately, we built that all from scratch. Like, we didn't use an existing codebase like Bitcoin, or it's not in ERC20, or it's not any of those things. So every one of these hotspots is actually operating like a full node on this blockchain network. And so that's the peer-to-peer, like, mesh part, you know? Like, the communication between the hotspots, the maintenance of blocks, you know?

• 19:52Speaker 02

  All of that is sort of the peer-to-peer part. The wireless part is very, very much like a Wi-Fi network. It's like a hub-and-spoke kind of network. Like, the hub is, you know, the central point, and all of the devices talking, like, talk to that hub. Like, there's no meshing. And in a mesh network, the difference is that the devices talk through each other to get back to a hub, you know? So you can have, like, a device which sort of serves as a hop for another device. And our network doesn't work that way, you know, mostly for battery life reasons. Like, if everyone has to sort of, like, hop through everyone else, then battery life can, I think, become a little bit of an issue. But fundamentally, like, it's a pretty simple, you know, hub-and-spoke network, but the complexity is really on the blockchain side and the sort of peer-to-peer network that lives underneath.

• 20:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so let's start with this thing, which is the helium hotspot. It looks very similar to other sort of networking devices that I've used or even have here at the house. And so help me understand, like, what is this and how does this work specifically?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you can think of the hotspot as like a, almost like a bridge, right? So you connect it to your existing internet, right? So that's how it connects back to the internet and it connects to the blockchain network. And then on the other side, it is also creating a very long-range network using a wireless protocol called LongFi. And that is... When I say long range, I'm talking on the order of like miles or potentially even tens of miles away from your hotspot, right? So if you were to take that and stick it in your window, um, the range that a sensor could, could communicate with that hotspot could be up to like thirty, forty, fifty miles away, right? In the worst case, you know, somewhere like Manhattan where there's a lot of tall buildings and you know, it's like, you know, radio waves don't travel very well through buildings.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Maybe you get a mile, maybe you get a square mile or something like that away from your hotspot. In the best case, when you're like up high and there's like not a lot of obstructions like we've seen tens of miles away. And so, and the kinds of devices we're talking about, like I have like, I have like position this thing, like we have this thing, which is like a device that we call tabs. It's a wireless like tracking device. And so this is the kind of sensor that we're talking about that would communicate with the hotspot and it sends infrequent, you know, location information. So like once every thirty seconds, once every minute, that kind of thing. Uh, and that's what talks to your hotspot. Your hotspot delivers that to the internet. Um, and that's sort of roughly the way the system works is that your hotspot is effectively like a bridge between the long file network and the internet.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  And the long file network is like a very, very long range, very low power thing where you can have sensors that live for, you know, ten years on a double A battery, for example, rather than, you know, what we have today on a cellular network where you might have to charge the thing, you know, every two or three days or something like that.

• 22:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So before I forget, if people watching want to go buy this thing, you can go to helium.com slash store and, uh, the folks at helium have been super kind. And if you use code POM, you get fifty bucks off. So I have no clue, how much are you guys selling this thing for?

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Uh, I actually don't know right now. I think it was, it was four ninety-five. I'm not sure where it's at now. It's, it's, it's, but it's around that.

• 22:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So fifty dollars off if you use code POM. So I don't forget that. Alright, so this device, I had it hooked up earlier. I took it out of the box. You'll love this story. So I literally got the box. I hadn't opened the box yet, and I carved out an hour on my calendar. And I said to myself, wow, I'm gonna have to go do like Bob the Builder type stuff, right? It's like putting together like a table when it shows up. And then I opened the box and I realized all I had to do is basically just screw in this antenna and plug it in the wall and then connect it to Wi-Fi. It took me like five minutes. And so my, my, my wife was laughing at me. She's like, wow, you really, you're real handy.

• 23:40Anthony Pompliano?

  But what I, what I found interesting is like, so the hardware is one piece, right? It's super easy to put together. But then you guys have the mobile app. And as I was going through that, what struck me was there was kind of two components. One is dead set, like literally if I could figure out how to put, set it up in five minutes, like literally anyone can do this. But two was you, you kept explaining kind of the different components of what it's doing and why it works, which just made it super slick. And so help me understand, like, when you look at what you guys have built with both the hotspot and then the tab, like, what are the use cases that you're hoping people use this for? Or you're seeing people already start to use this stuff for?

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so certainly first on your first point, like on the UX kind of UI stuff, like I just think that that's a super important, like, missing piece of the crypto space right now. Like, it's, you know, a lot of the stuff is, I know, see, I coined mine on a while ago. And I think there's like some similarity in terms of like what we're trying to accomplish, which is like, how do you make it easy for like everyday people to do this, right? It can't just be like DeFi where it's like a never ending stack of like acronyms and you know, you just have no idea what the hell you're doing. And CLIs are involved and you know, it's just, it's too complicated for the average user, right? Like the skill I think is in like obscuring that stuff and making it easy to use.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  And so we spent a lot of time on that. Like, the whole reason we built the hotspot in the first place was exactly that reason. Like, how do we make it straightforward? How do we make it easy? So glad that, I guess a long way, so I'm glad that worked. On the, the use case side, yeah, it's like, it's all over the place. I mean, some of them are what I would call, like from a consumer point of view. Sort of boring-ish use cases. So we're talking about leak detection, right? Like, this is a massive, like, a huge insurance problem, right? Like, knowing when things leak, whether it's in industrial buildings or whether it's in homes. So we're seeing a lot of insurance companies, for example, deploying sensors on the network that are trying to effectively, like, change the way that they underwrite insurance policies by knowing more

• 25:45Speaker 02

  about what is going on in the thing that they're insuring, right? So if pipes crack, or boilers break, or if toilets leak, they want to know about that, rather than it leaks and it takes out the house and then they have to write a $250,000 check or something, right? And so that's kind of like one end of the spectrum. We've seen a lot of stuff like cold chain and logistics, you know, so wanting to know whether food has been cold for its entire journey, like, all the way from, you know, the duck or the fish, the fisherman's wharf, or wherever it's coming from, all the way to wherever it's going, you know, was it kept at the right temperature? You know, like, again, relatively like simple applications that you think would have been well solved by existing technology that just aren't. Stuff like logistics or package tracking, like, you know,

• 26:29Speaker 02

  would be pretty cool if you knew a much more granular view of like where packages were being delivered, both as a consumer and an industrial level. And then consumer applications, you know, so stuff like tabs, which we built as a sort of an example of a consumer tracking application, but you could imagine, you know, something like a future duration of tile, or you could, you know, you could imagine consumer applications that took advantage of a low-power network where you didn't have to be close to a phone. We've worked with companies like Lime for tracking lost scooters. You know, it's just all over the place. It's like literally anything where the cost needs to be low and the battery knife needs to be long, and there isn't a way to do that today. Those become sort of potentially viable applications, and it's really like all across the board.

• 27:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And so a lot of those users that you just described sound like a mix between what I'll call individual or kind of retail users or customers, and also more corporate-type customers, like insurance companies or the Limes of the world, et cetera. How does it work when you're working with the corporate customers? Are they kind of putting the hotspot throughout an entire city? Is there just good enough coverage with a couple of them? Like, how does that work in terms of if you are one of those corporate clients?

• 27:44Speaker 02

  So it's a little bit of a mixture. So to start with, we're in over a thousand cities now. So that's amazing. So there's some amount of helium coverage in over a thousand cities. And because the range of the hotspots is pretty large, sometimes you don't need that many in certain cities, like smaller cities, rural cities, you know, like maybe you need a handful, maybe you need dozens, you know, something like that. And so in a lot of cases, companies that are looking to deploy sensors just deploy the sensor, like they don't even have to think about the hotspot. And the network infrastructure feels like cellular network infrastructure or something, right? Like you just turn it on and it works in the same way that you turn on your iPhone and that works. And so that's the, that's the sort of dream, right? In the end, like no one deploying a sensor would even have to think about the network infrastructure.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  We've seen some really cool like hybrid situations where we have a program called the patron program, which sort of is for hotspot customers that have bought 15 or more hotspots. And recently we had a company called Conserve that's building,

• 28:44Speaker 02

  they do wireless monitoring of fine art and collectibles for museums and like wealthy individuals. And it's a combination of location and environmental and, you know, some other stuff. And what happened was a bunch of patrons got together and effectively built wireless network coverage for Conserve, who had the actual like application use case, right? And so that combination of like people building wireless network coverage for like customers and applications, I think is super powerful. And so we expect to see more of that over time. And then in the short term, you might end up in some situation where companies still need to deploy hotspots on their own for now, right? Like, of course, the helium coverage isn't everywhere yet. And so for now, you know, it's relatively inexpensive for customers to deploy hotspots

• 29:29Speaker 02

  to create their own network coverage. And then, you know, there's also other compatible hardware on the market, you know, that we use a wireless protocol under the hood called LoRaWAN. There are a lot of LoRaWAN gateways on the market. And it's feasible for a company to like use their existing gateways or buy gateways from someone else, but we don't want to be the central dependency for hardware. We only made the hotspots so that we'd make it easy for consumers. But if you're an enterprise, there might be more cost effective ways to do that. And we're starting to see that happen too, where, you know, customers already had deployments and they're starting to like switch over to our network.

• 30:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's super interesting. And then help me understand, there's the ability, basically, if you're running the network in a number of different ways to actually earn funds, right, or crypto to, in exchange for running that network. And so there's everything from kind of proof of coverage, actually running things through the network. Maybe walk me through those different use cases as kind of the the mobile app, as I was onboarding, kind of explained a couple of them. But what do they fall into from a bucket standpoint?

• 30:35Speaker 02

  So the hotspot hosts earn earn helium token. So we have a currency called helium. It's HNT. There's the hotspot again. You know, so you earn HNT in two ways. So one is through mining. So our mining is not the same as Bitcoin's mining, right? So Bitcoin's mining, as you know, is like very power intensive, like hashing, SHA 256 computation. Yeah, I would say that we were a little bit inspired by Filecoin here, who was trying to build a a proof that was related to the thing that they were doing, right? So in their case, there's all about storing files. And so their proof is about where you actually storing the

• 31:15Speaker 02

  file, right? And our proof is, are you actually creating network coverage or not, right? And that's the thing that we try and prove. And the reason that that's difficult is that, you know, when you cross this divide between like the blockchain and software and the hardware and the real world, it's difficult, right? Like, it's complicated to like, you know, prove things are actually happening in the real world. So we created proof of coverage as a way for hotspots to, among themselves, try and prove to each other that they are really, that they're really hotspots. Like, you're not a virtual machine, like you're actually a hotspot creating network coverage that devices that, you know, talk the long file protocol can communicate with. And

• 31:56Speaker 02

  So that was the mission, is like, can we make a useful proof? Like, so it's not proof of work, it's not proof of state, it's not, you know, some existing thing, but it's proof of coverage that is specific to our network that is really trying to prove the fact that you're creating coverage. And so you don't have to do a whole lot, you know, you connect the device, you power it on, you put it in a good place, you put it in a window, and then the rest of the process is effectively automated through the software. But the more you participate in those proofs, so the more you can actually prove that you're creating network coverage, the more HNT you earn. So that's the mining side, and then the other side is device traffic, right? So if you are in an area where there's a lot of Liam scooters, or there's a lot of tabs, or there's a lot of, you know, XYZ applications, those sensors are going to be sending and

• 32:41Speaker 02

  receiving data through your hotspot, and they're going to be paying you for that, right? Like, they have to pay you in order to, like, use your hotspot to get to the internet. And so that's, you know, the other side of the network, is that as utility grows and as, you know, consumption grows, you, I mean, you can think of yourself like as a cell tower operator, effectively, right? Like, you were a miniature cell tower operator, and people have taken it to that level where they have, like, large outdoor antennas, and they have, you know, they've gone serious about it. But that's how I would think about it, is that you operate sort of a mini slice of a wireless network, and anything that comes in your sort of territory is effectively paying you in order to get access to the internet.

• 33:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and so what are the, like, privacy and security concerns, or things that people should be aware of, right? Because when you start talking about the fact that, you know, here in New York City, I've got a wireless device, I pretty much am the only person who knows the password to it, I'm the only person who uses it other than my wife, and other than that, nobody can touch it. But with this device, there's kind of people that are sending traffic through it that I don't know, in many cases. I don't know what the use case for it is, in terms of, I'm kind of not discriminating from what I understand based on what they're trying to do. And so how do I think about privacy and security for this device compared to the device that I would have for the kind of the more traditional wireless internet?

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, you know, we, this was a thing that we, we took very seriously and put a lot of thought into. And so one of the, like, one of the requirements of, like, customers using the network, right, so if you sort of align, right, like, they, they can't have a situation where you, as a hotspot operator, really have any idea about what it is that you're sending. Right, like, you, you can't know that it's a location reading or a temperature read, like, you, you can't know anything about it. You shouldn't even know who owns it. You, the, the only thing you should know about the data is where you're supposed to deliver it. Right, and, and so what we implemented is, sort of, throughout the system, everything is encrypted.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  And so the, the way that the sort of device to internet communication works is there's, you know, AES 128 encryption on the devices. The device sends data. Your hotspot, by looking in the blockchain, can figure out who owns that data. I shouldn't say who owns it. You can figure out where to deliver it, right, like, you, you don't actually know whose it is. And so you'll receive a packet, and you'll be like, okay, I'm supposed to deliver this packet to, like, this IP address or this peer-to-peer address. And you do that, and that peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer address says, yeah, that looks like one of my packets, I'm gonna pay you for that. And so there's a little bit of, like, a handshake that goes on there, and then you get paid effectively for, for delivering that packet. But you have no idea about what it is. You don't know anything about the contents of it, you can't decrypt it.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  All you can do is deliver it to its intended destination, and the only way you know its intended destination is through the, the sort of shared knowledge of the blockchain. And so we, we use the blockchain both in a sort of traditional cryptocurrency sense, but also as a routing, it's sort of like DNS almost, right, right, for, for sensors. Like, that's how we also use the blockchain, is, you know, I get a packet from a sensor, and I need to figure out what to do with it, and that's, you know, part of what the blockchain does. On the blockchain side, you know, we use a lot of strong cryptography, and there's a lot of novel and interesting techniques in there, and we use, like, distributed key generation, and like, a lot of, what I would say are cutting-edge tactics in the blockchain world to try and both keep the thing secure, but also keep it anonymous and private, and, and sort of obscure as much information as we can.

• 36:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So if I, as the owner of the device, don't know the information that's going through, or the owner of that information, is it fair to also say then if somebody was to quote-unquote "get control of my device," right, if other people can connect to it, you know, coming from a very non-technical person, if they were able to get actual access to the device, they also wouldn't be able to tell what information's going through it, who the owner is, kind of, you know, there have just as many limitations as me as the owner of the device?

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's actually not a whole lot you can do if you compromise someone's device. Like, someone came and stole it from you, you know, there's actually not really anything they can do with it, right, because the ownership of the hotspot to you is actually an on-chain thing, right, so on the blockchain, it is recorded that you pomp with this wallet own this hotspot, and no one can change that, right, without you signing that change. So if someone steals it, the worst thing they could probably do is just turn it off, right, so that you wouldn't be earning H&T and you wouldn't be mining anymore, but they have no ability to, like, take the earnings from it, they have no ability to, like, inspect the data coming through it, like, nothing is compromised from that sense, like, the worst, like, literally the worst outcome that we can think of right now on the hardware

• 37:26Speaker 02

  is that you are no longer earning H&T because someone stole it and turned it off. Like, that's, that's sort of the worst, the worst case. So I think it's well-designed from that point of view, and, and this was, you know, a thing that we put a lot of thought into that we knew both hotspot hosts would be concerned about, but also users of the networks or large corporations like Nestle and Lime and, like, guys like that would be highly concerned about, right, and so there's, I think a lot of thought went into this, and I think we ended up with a pretty good design that makes it still relatively easy to use, but also safe.

• 37:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it, that, that makes a lot of sense. And then help me understand, kind of, where you're going, right, so we've got the one hotspot, you've got tabs, like, what do you think kind of comes next, or how does this evolve to go from 1,000 cities to, you know, 3,000 cities and, and kind of many more users and much more data going through the system?

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, you know, we're, we're, we're on the mission, right? So that we recently, last week, we announced the sale of hotspots into Europe and Asia. So we think that's important. Previously, they'd only been available in North America. We're working as quickly as we can to allow non-helium devices to become miners and hosts on the network. Right, so you'll be able to buy any LoRa gateway, whether it was manufactured by us or, or any of the other manufacturers in the space. There's at least dozens of other companies building these. So we're working as quickly as we can to, to make that possible so that we're not the single source and that we're not a bottleneck of any kind. You know, and then, you know, from there, really, the focus is on applications.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Like, how do we enable more and more use cases and applications to join the network and take advantage of it? I think there's a little bit of lag because there hasn't been a network that looks like this up until now. You know, there aren't products natively that sort of take advantage of this kind of network, right? So if you thought of, like, again, back to sort of the tile example, you know, if you're a startup, you're not going to build tile if there's no network to use it on, right? And, and so there's a little bit of a, there's a little bit of lag there where, like, now people understand that the network exists, that they're starting to build things that take advantage of it. There's a sort of growing ecosystem of third-party tools for the network that's building. And so overall, pretty happy with how that's going. We have aspirations and dreams for building other types of wireless network this way.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  So it is entirely feasible that you could build an LTE network this way or a 5G network this way. There are all sorts of licensing implications, like similar to what we talked about at the start, so you've got to sort of figure out how you, how you navigate those. But I think what we, if anything happened, like, in the long run, like, what I hope we will accomplish is that this becomes the blueprint for how wireless infrastructure gets built, right? It's no longer a central entity, you know, with massive capital outlay that owns all the stuff, that is actually sort of a decentralized people's approach to, like, building infrastructure. And that the sort of helium way of doing it becomes like just the standard way of doing things in the same way that sort of Uber has sort of taken over what ride-sharing looks like and Airbnb has taken over what hotels look like.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  It just seems obvious to me that if you have real estate and power and internet backhaul, you are sort of not taking full advantage of it if you're not also able to, like, monetize that as a, as a, as a wireless base station effectively.

• 40:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and so I guess as you look at other types of networks as well, really this all falls under kind of this idea of the people's network, right? And I love that just because one of the reoccurring themes for me is it's just democratizing access to things that like the old boys' club has had control over, right? So we've seen this in everything in kind of very watered down examples of like the Robin Hoods and Etoros of the world absolutely busted up the kind of the the trading world, right? And they went zero fees and fractional shares and all that kind of stuff. Then, you know, you see that kind of across finance happening. Really what you guys are trying to do is democratize the ownership of these wireless networks. If successful in a material way, what's the ramifications? Like, what do the incumbents do? Can they do anything to react or stop you?

• 41:28Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think are those ripple effects in the industry?

• 41:33Speaker 02

  I mean, I would like to say that it has to happen eventually. You know, there's like so many privacy invasions and, you know, like the whole way the consumer internet is funded is effectively through like an invasion of privacy, right? It's like, I know everything that you do, and therefore I'm going to sell you some stuff as a result of the fact that I know everything about you. And that's the way the consumer internet works.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  I'm not sure it's great in the in the long run. You know, like we see sort of overreach in every every aspect of the internet today. It would be nice if there was a way for the internet to exist in a way that sort of didn't depend on that infrastructure. And so there are other projects out there like Orchid that have taken the sort of decentralized VPN approach to the problem. It's it's hard, like I'm not going to lie, like it's complicated and hard. I mean, the the spectrum ownership problem is real. You know, the fact that even if we could build an LTE or a 5G version, like the only way to practically deploy would be to partner with a telecom, right? Because you you want people to have iPhones and Android devices and, you know, you want to sort of reach those existing customers and not not require them to like move to some new service, which would be almost, you know,

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Would just be sort of too hard of a switch. And so you're still a little bit stuck, right? Like, we don't have a perfect answer to like all the pieces. But it's sort of, you know, there are there are glimmers of hope, right? There's a thing called the Citizens Band radio. Turns out the iPhone supports that. Turns out all the Android devices support that. It's another public frequency that that can be used in the same way as the frequency that we're using today. So there are ways that it can happen, but there are certainly motivated incumbents that will prevent it from happening as much as possible. So we have, you know, we have hope for for the fact that you can sort of improve some of that. But today, the most obvious place to like insert a solution is in the low power wireless area.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  It's the least well served area of telecoms because it makes the least economic sense for incumbents. You know, there are unlicensed spectrums that we can use. And so we're very much focused there for the time being. But we do see this as like, this is a blueprint for like how you should build networks in general. And in hindsight, we would hope that sort of the existing model just seems silly eventually because it's, you know, there's another way to do this.

• 43:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then help me understand, like, is there a world where the telecoms would be open to working with you? Or like, do you think that that's something that is more a, hey, helium would like to work with them? But they kind of thumb their nose as most old boy clubs do?

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it just sort of depends, right? It's, you know, if you thought, so 5G is a good example, right? Like, so if if everyone isn't aware, like, the real 5G is sort of this promise of like these ultra high bandwidth, like ultra low latency like links, right? Where you could stream 4K video and you could play video games with like low latency and like you do all this stuff, right? And the only way to really accomplish what people are talking about there is to use like a technology that I call millimeter wave, right? It's it's these very high frequency.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Like this is very high frequency like spectrum that is both licensed and unlicensed. The downside of it is that the range is extremely short, right? So things like like glass, buildings, humidity, like everything like affects this, you know, transmissions in that frequency. And so if you thought of it from that point of view, like you're going to need like hundreds of thousands or like millions of like 5G base stations to like cover a city as an example, right? And so if you thought of it from that point of view, like the only way to like practically build a 5G network, like a real 5G network is going to be something like this, right? Where you get a lot of help in deploying the infrastructure in the form of people,

• 45:23Speaker 02

  uh, in the form of like businesses, like, you know, you have to sort of democratize the deployments because it's going to be too expensive for anyone to do it on their own. Like no one is going to be able to like absorb the cost of bill of deploying a million 5G base stations in a city like New York. It's just not going to be possible, right? And so, you know, 5G is sort of an interesting case where the only real way to deploy it depends on a model like this. And so you've already seen like AT&T and some of these other guys like playing games with with the thing like on my AT&T iPhone, it already says like 5GE in the in the corner. Like it's not 5G, it's like LTE with like a, you know, a different, a different icon. And so that's what's going to happen is sort of similar to what happened with LTE and 4G back in those days. And because it's it's just going to be too expensive to deploy a real 5G network.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Like I think companies are going to start playing games with what it means. Um, so that's an interesting opportunity. Like I think as we work and as we talk to telcos, it's almost like, well, why not try that? You know, like, why, why is that not an interesting approach? Because there's not a whole lot of downside for them experimenting with that approach.

• 46:25Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And and then, um, what aspects of this are open source, open source versus closed source? Like, can I go in and modify either the hotspot or or do other things with the with the network? Uh, or is everything pretty much closed off and and not as uh, as kind of open and valuable as an open source thing would be?

• 46:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we've opened everything. Like, I don't think there's, I don't think there's a component of our stack that is is not open source that that I'm aware of. And I think that's important, you know, that's important for any kind of adoption at any scale.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Is that all of these components are open, that anyone can use them, anyone can host them. I don't think there's any dependency on helium ink to operate the network today that I'm aware of. Of course, there are future looking things that we'd love to build, but we don't need them, right? Like the network as it as it's designed exists and works today. Anyone can operate their own servers, everyone can operate every piece of this. And for some companies desirable, right? Like they don't want data to be flowing through some third party entity or a startup or whatever. They want to operate their own servers. And so we think that that's an important like consideration and like this, something like this growing is that it's very open and different.

• 47:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it, that that makes a lot of sense. And then in terms of the actual

• 47:44Anthony Pompliano?

  product itself, are you guys building this? Are you partnering with people like? And then how will that evolve over time in terms of the the physical hardware and supply chain and all that?

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, today we're building it ourselves. As I said, like, there's nothing about it that really requires us to build it ourselves, other than the fact that we wanted a good user experience. And so there are lots of other like Laura gateway manufacturers in the world. And it is our desire over time that, you know, the majority of the devices on the network are not ours. You know, we made the hotspot because we wanted to make it easy to use so that everyone could, you know, everyone could grab it and you didn't have to be an IOT enthusiast. You didn't have to be a crypto sort of specialist, you know, literally anyone could could get this and use it. And that is our motivation for creating the hotspot rather than trying to create a sort of unique piece of IP.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  And so over time, and we're sort of working as quick as we can towards this. You know, we would like it to be that we weren't any kind of bottleneck or any kind of dependency for the network to exist. And we think that over the next, you know, weeks and months that we will, you know, accomplish that goal. And that we'll start to see more and more hardware and applications come on the network that are sort of unrelated to us.

• 48:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And one of my last questions for you is like, is there a world where you guys work to get this into retail? So rather than people going online, they can literally go to like the local Best Buy or some sort of electronics store? Or is that something that that doesn't seem to make sense and is outside the strategy?

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's tough. I mean, like, building hardware and dealing with logistics and manufacturing is like, it's a tough business. It's, you know, when you do things in volumes like this, it is very, very difficult to make it to make it to make any sense.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  It only starts to make sense when you get into the millions and tens of millions, and then you can actually sort of start to get some scale there, or some sort of economies of scale. So I don't know, I don't want to say no, because, you know, who knows, but today, like, our approach is to just sort of sell direct, sell online. And then a sort of long-term, a long-term mission would be, or a long-term hope would be that more and more other entities that create compatible hardware could sort of step in and fill that gap, right? Like, I think the challenge today has been that I O T products have been targeted at a very, I don't know what to describe it as, other than,

• 50:10Speaker 02

  you know, I O T, I T, sort of, you know, nerdish kind of group, right, where you have to have, like, a pretty high level of proficiency and operating Linux and computers, and, you know, you have to, like, know what you're doing in order to deploy any of these things. And then on the crypto side, it's sort of in a similar, a similar universe, right? Like, I think companies like Coinbase, to some extent, what Coinmine is doing, and like, all of these guys have really tried to, like, make it easier for, like, everyday people to participate in crypto. And I've been a hotspot in sort of the same place, right? It's like, it's trying to make it easier for people to join the helium network and participate in helium, but it's not,

• 50:51Speaker 02

  it's not a must. And so we hope that the hotspot is just sort of an example to people of, like, hey, you could, if you built a device that's reached a larger audience than just this sort of highly technical audience, then, you know, there's a different way to do this, and, you know, you might be able to build some, something like a big decentralized network that way. And so now that we've shown that to be true, we're starting to work with more and more of these partners. I think when we approached them, like, three, four years ago, they just thought we were idiots. And now that we have, I think, already operating the largest low-power wireless network in the country, they are starting to sort of reevaluate whether, whether we actually are idiots, or whether we should actually, whether we should, whether they should partner with us and, like, try and do something. So we'd love to sort of democratize that and, and grow that universe

• 51:36Speaker 02

  such that we're not the only provider of, of easy-to-use, you know, I O T hardware.

• 51:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the one thing I'll say before we we go to the the lightning round to wrap up is uh, people know that I don't really bullshit that much, but uh, literally it took me about four minutes to take it out of the box, put the antenna in, plug it in the wall, go through the mobile app. It was super, super slick. And I think that generally people who are interested in this stuff and want to participate are going to find it pretty compelling, both from user experience standpoint. And then also, I think for me on the hardware side, you could have made it way more complex, right? It's one of those things where like, when it's super easy, people don't remember how hard some other things are. So I guess put

• 52:22Anthony Pompliano?

  a pretty cool thing here. Before I wrap up, I always ask two questions. The first is, what is the most important book that you have ever read?

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Oh, God. I was not expecting that question. I tend to find myself reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz a lot more than I would have expected. Like if I'm on a flight, not that that happens in COVID times, but pre- pre-COVID, if I was on a flight, there's nearly always some paragraph or chapter of that book that that resonated very deeply with me. And so I think even if you're not a founder or looking to start a business, like there's just a lot of wisdom there. And I always thought that the, you know, when you read it, you could, you felt the sort of pain and the struggle in his, in his, in his writing. And I don't know if you've read that book, but it was, it was, I've always

• 53:18Speaker 02

  found that to be the most useful book that I read. And, and every time I read it, I usually find something else that was applicable to like whatever I'm dealing with right now.

• 53:27Anthony Pompliano?

  That book is fantastic. I don't think I've ever said this publicly, but in the book, if you remember the part where they essentially bought a company and the CFO gets, I think it was cancer, right? And they essentially make the right decisions in terms of taking care of the family, etc. As I was reading the book for the first time, I saw the name. And I was like, what, what the hell? And then I realized I actually went to high school with that family's kit.

• 53:55Anthony Pompliano?

  So the CFO's son, and obviously when we were, you know, in school together, we knew that their father had passed away and, you know, got sick and all stuff. Nobody had any clue, you know, kind of all of the other components of it. And so reading it in the book, it was just, you know, nuts to kind of just see, one, two worlds collide, kind of, you know, your childhood and all that, but also with Ben and all the stuff there. But also two, just seeing like, you never really know what the true story to things are. Right? So it's kind of just really, really cool to see in a scenario where Ben and his executive team didn't need to, or were kind of legally required to do something. I feel like it was the right thing to do, which was, which was pretty cool.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a great book. I mean, there's all sorts of wisdom in there. And I think the sort of honesty that he has about the fact that a lot of it was luck. And if it wasn't for like certain people's advice and, you know, certain interventions at sort of certain moments, that it would all have sort of come crashing down catastrophically. I think is just sort of important for everyone to hear and, and know that it's not always perfectly designed. You know, Google tried to sell to Yahoo for $4 million. You know, like it's just, you know, it's just, it's not, it's not a grand plan. And probably no one is smarter than you are. And so it's, it's, I always find that book very, very, very eye opening. And I feel like I reread it more often than I probably should.

• 55:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. I love it. For those that are just listening to the podcast and not able to watch it on YouTube, Amir has a, an absolute epic background on Zoom, which is a bunch of helium balloons rising up above Manhattan in New York. But speaking of things floating around in the space, second question, which is a little bit more fun, is aliens believer or non-believer?

• 55:46Speaker 02

  I mean, they have to exist.

• 55:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, it so I, I, I don't know if this is correct, but I feel like it's correct that there's something like 300 billion known stars. Right? And so each and each star has its own, you know, system, right? With its own planets and everything else inside. I mean, it just feels like the law of like, large numbers has to be true there. Like, if there's that many potential planets, there has to be some like, I refuse to believe that like, we're the only intelligent life form in that size of a universe. I just can't, I can't accept that that's true. It's even, it's more, it's more likely that Elon Musk is right that we're in a simulation. If that's true, you know, it just can't be right. You know, it just doesn't make any sense. But I don't, do you believe in aliens? I don't know if that's.

• 56:30Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. I'm with you. It, it's just a mathematical probability. So, and people have heard me now talk about this way too many times, uh, for this and every episode. But basically, uh, my big question is on the time, uh, element. So aliens existing somewhere is pretty much a foregone conclusion in my mind. It's just like, do the human race match up in the billions of years of the, you know, galaxy at the same time? Uh, that's one question. And then I don't know if you saw, I saw it last night. Um, there's a video, I have no clue if this is real, uh, but there's a guy who said his friend sent him a video from Miami, uh, last night that's going viral on Twitter today. And it's basically these like five lights in the sky and they, uh, kind of expand, they

• 57:13Anthony Pompliano?

  contract, and then they all split off in different directions. And it's one of these things where like, look, in today's day and age, like, literally could be a deep fake or could be aliens in 2020. I have no clue. But when you just see stuff like that, you're like, look, I think that over time, more and more people will become convinced, whether rightfully so, or they're just being, you know, kind of mentally manipulated, that there's something else out there. Um, and when you see us, you know, launching humans into space from American soil after, you know, a decade of, of not doing that and things like that, I think people just, they want to believe to some degree, right? Like, they want the greater thing out there.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  I think the time point is a good one, though. It's like, you know, maybe we don't, maybe we don't overlap by, you know, hundreds of billions of years. It's totally like dinosaurs or something, right? I know some people still believe humans and dinosaurs live together, which. Is a, I don't understand that, but, but you can sort of imagine that sort of, you know, overlapping timelines, but yeah, it has to happen like it. It was cool to see the SpaceX stuff I think is meaningful. It's like cool to see people pay that close attention to that. I often think that like if we look back in time, the lack of funding for like space travel will probably seem like our biggest error. You know, over, over, over like humanities time, but I don't know. Maybe we're getting like miles of, miles of track here, but

• 58:32Speaker 02

  that was cool. I was, I was, I was watching the SpaceX launch with my kids and I, I, I thought that was awesome.

• 58:37Anthony Pompliano?

  There's supposedly Blue Origin, I think is the one. It's either Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic. I can't remember, but I thought it was Blue Origin. I, I may have that wrong or no, no, actually I think it is Virgin Galactic. Somebody will correct me for sure on Twitter. But basically what they want to do is they want to set up a space hotel. Similar, you know, kind of around the ISS, on the ISS, something like that I was reading. And you get to that and you're like, look, the whole like, let's go to Mars. There's a finality, it feels like, right? For a while where people that go won't be able to come back. And so that seems more like, hey, you're going to be a scientist. You're going to be a explorer, you know, an innovator, something like that.

• 59:17Anthony Pompliano?

  The idea of like, hey, you can go for two weeks and then come back is probably a little bit more appealing to, to a wider audience. And so it just, it's this balance between like, how much of space should be focused on like the hardcore science and innovation? Versus you can almost like drive more funding by simply just like letting people go to space. Right? Just let the average person get there and then all of a sudden everyone wants to fund it so that it's cooler and cooler. Yeah. It's probably a balance somewhere in there.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm sure once the first hotel opens, it'll be like hours until there's a Trump version of it with like a big, you know, like the big logo like they have on the front of all of these things.

• 59:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't, don't give him any ideas, man. Don't. He's already got Space Force. Don't give him a Trump space hotel.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  I'm sure the Space Force is already way, way ahead of me on this one.

• 1:00:09Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. To wrap up, you get to ask me one question. What, what one question do you have for me?

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  God, that's a, that's a tough one.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Do you think Bitcoin has a chance of replacing fiat currency in our lifetime?

• 1:00:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it for sure is a foregone conclusion that Bitcoin will be the global reserve currency at some point in the future. Your question specifically on timeline, I think is is the big question. So for me, I think I'm probably a little bit younger than you. I'm 32, so let's call it that I've got 45 to 50 years left. Based on kind of life expectancy. So 50 year timeframe, I would put the probability today that in the next 50 years Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency. 20, 25% which to me is higher than it was three to five years ago. And 10 years from now, maybe it's trending more towards like the 40 to 50% range.

• 1:01:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Where like it's still more likely than not that this is like an incredible technical feat that that kind of gets adopted. And two, you also survive all of the, I'll just kind of wrap it up as like bullshit, right? In terms of state action attacks and, you know, legislation and all that stuff.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Anthony Pompliano?

  But 20, 25% chance.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Like that's reasonable.

• 1:01:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll take that, right? Because if it happens to, if you think about the value creation, right? And then all of the impact of like the things that Bitcoin potentially could solve in terms of just like improving money. 20, 25% is like a pretty good, you know, number for me actually kind of makes me excited, right? But but it's still more likely than not it doesn't happen just because of how hard and how incredible the feat that would be.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just, I mean, I'm sure you saw, but like there was some leaked and not leaked, but some information came out in this John Bolton situation with Trump that that he had diverted a significant amount of attention to like killing Bitcoin. And I think that's probably like the bigger concern is like regulation. And certainly, at least for for us at Helium, like the the complexity of operating in the cryptocurrency space in the United States is like no joke. You know, like it's it is. Hundreds of thousands or more on legal bills and you know, you know, it's just really, it's a really complicated place to be.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  But yeah, I mean, by the time, you know, in our lifetime, the money, money supply, the USD money supply probably quadrupled, five, six more times for probably in that, in that span of time. So there's a, there's a chance. I think 25% is probably good.

• 1:02:48Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the, the way that I think about this question too, is what you're essentially asking, kind of in a roundabout way also is like, what's the probability that the dollar fails in our lifetime? Right? And, and so to me, like, that's a much higher probability, right? You know, you can probably put that at like a 50 plus percent than at least the question of like, is Bitcoin the replacement or is it something else? And, and I think that when you also get to, um, you know, if the US was to do something on the regulatory front, uh, that would be like highly detrimental to, uh, probably not Bitcoin itself, but it would be like the ownership of Bitcoin by American citizens or, you know, something in that realm.

• 1:03:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I think that there's just a lot of countries that are considered economic, you know, foes in many ways, uh, that want to see the dollar system go away, right? That they, they realize that, that they're kind of on the, on the short end of that stick. And so I do think that the game theory is, um, is probably much more real, uh, given that these other countries are large. They would love for the dollar to go away. Uh, and while they wish that their national currency would be the gold reserve, the next best thing is to not have the US have it, right? So basically using something that's not manipulated, um, is, uh, it's, it's, it's just fun to think about, right?

• 1:04:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think that's part of why a lot of people, you know, pay attention to it. It's just that there's so much that goes into it from geopolitics to computer science, to economics, et cetera.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  That's a fascinating, I mean, it's like, I, I'll admit, I didn't know a whole lot about Bitcoin, you know, up until probably four years ago.

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  And it's just fascinating. It's like been fascinating to watch and, and. You know, watching some of the SEC statements and some of the sort of regulation around this space and, you know, like basically people have, you know, elected officials have just sort of come and flat out said that it would be highly risky for us to not be able to use USD as a weapon, right? Like that's effectively what they've said. I think it's all fascinating. And I, I don't know what will happen, but I think Bitcoin is probably the best shot at it from a, from a monetary point of view. It's an incredible invention. And then, you know, I hope that the kind of thing that we're doing, whether it is helium or some future iteration of helium, or, you know, something else becomes just the way

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  that people think about building other parts, other types of things in a similar way, right? Like it's not, it doesn't have to just be owned by AT&T or Vodafone or Orange or whatever. It can be actually distributed and decentralized among people. And I think as, you know, as people believe that and as like people like, as companies like us and projects like ours take, this sort of become more real, I think that will become more tangible and people will start to sort of evaluate whether there are other ways to do things.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  And so Orchid has always been promising to me, you know, the idea of this sort of like incentivized VPN model. I, I just, you know, I, I just, I wish for more privacy and more, you know, security on the internet in general and, and I hope, I hope all this stuff works.

• 1:05:50Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Absolutely. So listen, people, if you want to participate in the decentralization, democratization of the wireless networks and the telcos, go grab you a helium hotspot, helium.com/store, I believe it is. And Amir and the team have been kind enough, if you use code POMP, you get 50 bucks off. So Amir, listen, I appreciate you taking the time to do this. I think what you guys are building is super, super cool. So, so keep going and then we'll have to do this again in the future.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us. I appreciate it.