283: Adam Traidman on the Future of Crypto in Asia

Adam Traidman is currently CEO and co-founder of BRD, one of the first Bitcoin wallets in the app store. He is also currently the CEO of Ripple Asia and the CEO of SBI Mining Chip Company. In this conversation, we discussed the founding story of BRD, how the company has evolved over the last few years, what the current environment for crypto in Japan is, how the chip manufacturing business has changed due to coronavirus, and what Adam thinks of China's digital currency efforts. =============================== 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: blockset.com =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 45,000 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 pomp.substack.com

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  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. Adam Trademan is currently CEO and co-founder of BRD, one of the first Bitcoin wallets in the App Store. He is also currently the CEO of Ripple Asia and the CEO of SBI Mining Chip Co. In this conversation, we discuss the founding story of BRD, how the company has evolved over the last few years, what the current environment for crypto in Japan is, how the chip manufacturing business has changed due to coronavirus, and what Adam thinks of China's digital currency efforts. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. But before we get

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  into this episode, I want to talk about our sponsors. 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. You could think of them kind of as an AWS for blockchain infrastructure. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near-real-time portfolio management solutions, and auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much more. Head on over to blockset.com to sign up for an account today and check them out. Again, blockset.com. Don't forget also, I write a

• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

  daily letter to over 45,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing my personal opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pomp.substack.com or go to the description of this episode and click the link. Again, pomp.substack.com. Alright, let's get into this episode with Adam. I think you guys will really enjoy this one. 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

• 2:12Anthony Pompliano?

  or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:22Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. We've got Adam here with me all the way from Tokyo. Thanks for doing this, man.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Hey, yeah, no worries. Thank you for having me on.

• 2:32Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. You've got a really unique story, I think, and have your hands in a number of different aspects of the Bitcoin and blockchain economy, if you will. Maybe let's just start with, kind of, what'd you do before you found Bitcoin or crypto?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Good question. So I started off my career, actually, as a computer chip designer. I was down in LA at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and was doing some work at Caltech. And then I moved up to Silicon Valley in the late 90s during the, you know, early internet days and did chip design for companies like PI and worked on some chips for Cisco and AT&T, all their early internet infrastructure products. And like most engineers in the Valley, I got bitten by the startup bug and decided to go from the big to the small. Exciting companies, had a few small exits that happened there. I was just, you know, normal Joe. And then eventually moved over to the dark side. And what I mean by that is I transitioned over

• 3:27Speaker 02

  from engineering into, you know, more marketing, project, product management, and then into sales. And what I learned, pump, is that as much as I was a geek and I'd love to, you know, get my hands dirty in engineering, Silicon Valley's full of some damn smart engineers. And I made a bigger contribution in other areas than in engineering. So I moved into software, sales. This is mainly in the areas like electronics, software, CAD tools. It was all sort of centered around the chip area, right? And, you know, it was a tough transition time to move from pure engineering into sales, but it worked out well. And I eventually had a few exits that worked out reasonably well in that space, then became

• 4:11Speaker 02

  a serial entrepreneur. I became the founding CEO of four companies, also mainly in the electronic software space, one in the wearable hardware space, and raised venture capital to the tune of over a couple hundred million, built great teams, great products, and sold those companies off and exited them. You know, some worked out well and, you know, some were reasonable. And during one of those transitions, a company called Chip Estimate, I sold it to, at the time it was a $5 billion electronics software company called Cadence Design down in San Jose, in the middle of the valley. They're now an even bigger company. I was a GM there for about five years, and I had the privilege of flying all over the world, doing kind

• 4:53Speaker 02

  of executive sales and relationship building, with a real focus on Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea. Also spent a bunch of time in Europe. And it was around that time that I really started to build connections kind of deep into Japan. You know, in Asia especially, it's kind of how the US used to be. It's more about long-term relationships, it's about circle of trust. And it takes a long time to get in, but when you're in, you're in. And for some reason, that just sort of resonates with me in terms of how I like to do business. So I eventually left the big company, wanted to do startups again. And this is, you know, before the time of the Apple Watch and the Samsung Gear, I was contacted by some professors I used to work with, and doctors down at UCLA. And we put

• 5:37Speaker 02

  together a company doing a nutrition-monitoring wearable device, which really kind of changed my perspective on my career path, because I was down at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center down in LA, and we were doing a clinical trial. And this thing was designed, it wasn't like a wearable, like, you know, watch, it actually went around your neck, and it monitored your eating habits. It was to help people, you know, lose weight, right? And actually, like, obesity is a really big problem in the world. And I saw these patients crying while using this device, because it was actually helping them. And I thought, son of a gun, you know? It feels great to be the geek in me to create a faster iPhone, but, man, when you can really impact somebody's life with technology, that really is game-changing.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  And it showed me kind of a new aspect of what I could achieve in my career. So we sold that company to a medical devices company, actually, over here in Japan. And it was right around that time, though, when I was raising money for that company. And, you know, I've been in the valley for like 20 years, right? So I'm on Sand Hill Road, doing the whole Silicon Valley, you know, kind of thing, talking to, you know, the Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen. I was in Andreessen Horowitz, arguably, might be the best VCs in the valley. And I was pitching my wearable company before we sold it. And I literally heard these guys in the hallways talking about Bitcoin. And I thought, huh, that's funny, because about a year before that, one of my old employees,

• 7:00Speaker 02

  a guy by the name of Aaron Voisin, you know, grabbed me, took me to a bar down in the valley, reached across the table on a very uncharacteristic thing for him, not a touchy-feely guy, and he said, Adam, you have to work on Bitcoin with me. It's the most important thing going on in your lifetime. And I looked at him and I said, well, Bitcoin's used to buy, you know, drugs and guns and various activities. So I was like, you know, I don't have any political opinions on any of that, but you know, that kind of stuff just never goes mainstream, right? And I told him inside his mind, I didn't talk to him for a year, but, okay, that's pretty stupid, right? But when I was at Andreessen, you know, and I heard him talking about it, I thought, well, crap, these are some of the smartest guys in the valley. If they're, they're doing it, that was when they were funding Coinbase in 2021. There's got to be something to this.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  So I, after I sold the wearable company, then I called back Aaron, who is later would be my co-founder of Red Wallet, now BRD. And he told me about this open source project that he made, and it was a pure decentralized Bitcoin wallet. And he said, let's build a company around it. And I said, why'd you make it? And he said, because I believe that Bitcoin is going to be the new form of money. And if it is going to be widely adopted, right, it's got to be as easy to use. I'm looking for my wallet as the cash in my wallet, because Grandma uses cash too, right? And he, in his whole career, has all focused on UX. And so he just created a very, very plain and simple wallet.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  And he had good street cred, like he had the number two app in the App Store in 2009, a clone of the game Minesweeper and stuff, so you know what he was doing. And, and, and the issue is that when you've got a decentralized wallet like that, the question is, oh, you give it away for free? How are you going to make money? So I put a business model around it eventually. And in 2015, we created the company. We raised venture capital. We did a token sale in, in 2017, December, kind of got in, right, right before sort of the fun there ended. And now we've got about over four million customers in 170 countries. The app's got upwards of half a million monthly active users, right? So a lot of engaged and loyal folks out there.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  And it's mainly targeted at individuals from 20 to 50 years old, who are investing casually usually in crypto, very much like your sort of millennial with discretionary income, you know, that kind of a thing. And so I think that was really the genesis of BRD. For me, though, what really, the epiphany moment for me was when I was chatting with Aaron in the early days, and he kept getting really pissed at me because I just wasn't getting it, he said. Because I'm questioning all this. I'm a, I don't, I think technology's awesome. I'm a geek in my gut, right? But, you know, it's gotta do something for people in order for them to adopt it. It's not a if you build it, they will come, right?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  I mean, look at, even for Steve Jobs, look at the new gen, right? But when Aaron said to me, he goes, "Adam, if you really want to understand Bitcoin, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to forget everything you know about money and everything you know about the financial system. And build up your knowledge base again from the beginning, like the way it should be." And the real epiphany moment, though, was when I, when I realized that money isn't just half of every transaction for goods or services in the world, right? It is what people and companies and governments use to control literally every aspect of our society, right? And people in my generation, we all thought that the internet was going to be the most impactful revolution or invention of our lifetime. What the hell could be more important than disrupting communication, like we're doing right now, right?

• 10:43Speaker 02

  But the one thing that could be, and I'm sorry to say it, it's not politically correct, but money is the most important thing in the world, right? And the one thing that could be bigger than disrupting communication is disrupting that glue, that fabric that keeps society together. And that's why I think guys like Andreessen were pouring money into it. And that's why I got excited about creating BRD with Aaron.

• 11:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so one of the questions I always get is, what does BRD stand for? Or where did that name come from?

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Well, you want to know the truth? So originally, right, the name of the app was Bread Wallet because bread is slang in English, of course, for money, right? And, you know, there's practical considerations too. It's a single, one-syllable name like a lot of young finance companies at the time like Square, Stripe, right? It's memorable, domain names available, you know, practical stuff like that, right? And over time, what we, as we added more and more functionality and expanded our scope to be like digital asset, like decentralized bank, we got rid of the wallet, which is, you know, kind of a similar thing that like Coinbase did and all these other things back in the early days. And then when we did the token sale, we had to come up with a ticker, so we created BRD, right, like bread.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  And then during that time, we got a lot of press. The company was getting out there a lot, we're getting distribution all over the world, right? And we had some trademark issues with some other companies in the general finance space, totally unrelated to crypto, who were using bread, no one could check. And it really wasn't like a direct trademark violation. They were in like a totally peripheral area, but because of the chokehold that Apple and Google have on distribution for mobile app companies, meaning the App Store, as soon as there's a trademark violation, they pause downloads, right, until you resolve it. And that's just, you know, doesn't, doesn't work well with a mobile company's business model. So instead of going through a protracted sort of like, you know, discussion and legal

• 12:39Speaker 02

  stuff, we just decided to change the name of the company to BRD, the token, which is also, the token name still stands for bread, not bird. And we've been marketing it as BRD ever since.

• 12:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so today, when a user goes in and actually download the BRD wallet, like, what is the functionality that's in there and what can they, what they do?

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Yep, absolutely. That's exactly the right way to think about it, like, what are the practical use cases? So it's always been known for simplicity and security. And, you know, it's an implementation of Bitcoin in a more pure sense, so it comes with all the other benefits of Bitcoin. It's really an on-ramp. It's the easiest way to get started. So when you launch the app, it's, what I really, the reason why we grew really fast...

• 13:25Speaker 02

  And the reason why I think I guys like Roger Vare, who invested in blockchain.info, but probably is the individual responsible for the single most installs of BRD on customer devices. The reason is because there's no onboarding, right? It's not like going to a bank or, you know, an exchange and creating an account. You literally download the app, you hit new wallet, boom, you can start sending and receiving crypto, right? So I could just send you, scan your QR code, send you some Bitcoin right now. That's a really great way when you meet someone in a restaurant or a family member at dinner or in a bar and you go, they say, where do you work? I work in crypto. I've heard about that. What is that? You download, you know, an exchange app. The guy's there for 30 minutes taking

• 14:08Speaker 02

  selfies, trying to establish, that's not a great crypto experience, right? That's not what Bitcoin's supposed to be. That's a think account, right? You download the BRD app, boom, within five seconds, you know, I can send you some Bitcoin. Oh, that's how it works. That's pretty cool, right? So the onboarding gets them in, it makes it easy. And ultimately, what you can do is you can buy and sell crypto and you can trade. And it's really targeted more at the, like I said, Robin Hood sort of audience, casual investor, not the high frequency, you know, traders doing day trading who are sitting on exchanges constantly, right? That's the trade off that you get. As we focus on the UX, we want to help, you know, sort of the, the average individual global citizen get

• 14:51Speaker 02

  onto the crypto bandwagon. And, you know, that's the sort of the, the rule we play. It's kind of like your Robin Hood customer versus like your Charles Schwab customer.

• 15:01Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And then you guys also have come out with BlockSet by BRD, which is even an advertiser here on, on the podcast. And maybe talk a little bit about kind of what the idea or the genesis was for, for that body of work and then kind of what you guys have built so far.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Okay, sure. Thanks, Bob. So we were really hard to build a, a brand around BRD. And I think a big reason that the crypto folks are really on Really helped accelerate the growth of the company and the app is because they trusted us, it's open source, right? So there's no funny business with, you know, all your money's gonna disappear someday. And we've never had any money hacked from any BRD app, actually, right? Because it's decentralized, there's like no honeycomb, right? And so we took that brand, that trust and that sort of, you know, technology, right? And it actually, it happened as a result, to be honest with you, of our relationship with SBI. So remember I said that I started to really get into the Japanese sort of relationships and business?

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Well, when we created BRD, I came back to Japan and we actually raised a lot of money from here. And then later in the company's evolution, SBI contacted us and they said, hey, we'd really like to include the BRD consumer app in our new crypto banking flow. By the way, we'd like to invest some money in your company. And at the time, we weren't even raising money. We told them, I said we weren't so interested. But eventually, we ended up, you know, taking the strategic investment from them. And as part of that investment, we sat down with their technology teams, they've got some really smart people pop here in Tokyo. And, and what they said was, well, okay, now we understand how your architecture works. You ought to take the backend of your consumer app, okay? Which is, you know, sort of like the server side, right?

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Talks to all these different blockchains. And maybe we could use that too. And so our CTO and I and the management team sat down and we thought, you know what? There's a really big opportunity here. So we took the backend of the consumer app, talks to all the different blockchains, we productized it, we turned that into Blocksa. A setup building blocks to basically help companies build software for blockchain access quicker, right? And at lower cost. And don't have to run nodes, lower infrastructure costs. And I think really importantly, it's out there in production with four million customers for the BRD app, so you can trust it. Right, plus the core of it's open source as well. So we productized it with help from SBI. SBI became our first customer of BlockSet.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  They launched in production within a few weeks ago, actually, for their crypto banking platform. And now it's a product that we're selling in our enterprise sort of division of the company. And we're having great success just in the last few months since it launched. And, you know, we appreciate all the folks out there helping us with that, getting the word out like you are. And we've got major accounting firms now signed. We're working with big cross-border payment companies. I can't really say the names, but they're the big companies that you would know. And, you know, it's just about them looking at this. It's like the early days of, say, like, cloud hosting. Like AWS and Azure got started. And initially, it's like, well, we do all that in-house. And they're like, well, wait a minute. Builders is fine.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  It's a lot cheaper to do it that way. I can trust that one a lot more and I can actually grow my business faster. But I need a solution that is really scalable, not just this little, you know, sort of API to access a few blockchains that works once in a while. I need something that can scale to the size of, you know, a Fortune 100 companies needs. That's what BlockSet is. That's what we do. And so it's like an infrastructure, you know, APIs to access blockchains, infrastructure for like next generation banking.

• 18:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so is the whole idea there that, similar to how AWS provides really that infrastructure layer? People can tap into it and kind of do all these things cheaper, faster, more scaly. You guys are doing that and not only helping them build their products, but also then giving them access to the various blockchains as well?

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Right, that's right. So it's not, so AWS is more like, you know, hosting compute resources, right? And so when you're, when you want to build blockchain apps, right? Certainly, one of the big issues is like running your own, say, Bitcoin node or Ripple node or Ethereum node. Actually, that costs a lot of money. But just running nodes, that's just one piece of value that we add, right? The real value, I think, is we have one API. Okay, that means there's one set of functions to call by the developer, by an engineer, to access any blockchain. That actually is pretty powerful because today if I'm sitting at a bank and I want to offer, say, crypto bank accounts to my customers, I've got to write code to talk to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, you know, all these other blockchains. Then there's forks and

• 19:42Speaker 02

  there's all these changes and there's bugs and, man, it's a lot of work. Not to mention that I got to have a legion of engineers who understand the nuances of each blockchain. What BlockSet does is it puts a layer on top of all those individual blockchains, whether they're private or public, and it basically, it takes all the data from them, has this sort of metadata layer because we can analyze the blockchain data as well, and then there's one API on the top. So your engineers only have to code to one step. And if we add more blockchains in the BlockSet sort of, you know, SaaS environment, then those blockchains just immediately become available, you know, to our customer who's building blockchain software with BlockSet, and they don't have to do any real incremental

• 20:27Speaker 02

  coding or anything, right? Plus, we handle all the infrastructure issues, running the servers, to the forks, to the maintenance, you know, and all those things as well. And then we've got partners that do things like AML and transaction checking, right, and custody as well. So you could build, you know, custodial banking apps with BlockSet, like SBI did, right? And you could just, you know, myriad sort of applications. You want to add cryptocurrency or virtual currency to a video game, you could do it with BlockSet as well. So, anything in that space.

• 21:00Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And I guess, maybe help us understand, like, this infrastructure came out of what was built for the BRD wallet and kind of that whole ecosystem. Like, maybe share some data in terms of like, how many users or how much assets, you know, whatever you're comfortable sharing, but can just give us a sense of like, it's not like this is a mobile application that's used by, you know, a couple hundred people, right? I mean, there's millions of people.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. Yeah, that's right, man. So the BRD consumer app, like four million users in 170 countries, right? And, you know, upwards of a half a million or more sort of unique users that are sitting in the app, you know, every day, every week, going through and looking at their money, you know, their holders or they're doing trading and whatnot. We estimate, most recently, that the assets under protection, we call it, we don't use AUM because we don't hold our customers' money. Right, being decentralized bank, right? We use AUP, assets under protection, is over 6 billion USD. 6 billion, you know, USD worth of crypto that users are holding in the app.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Last time, we did a, had the ability to do sort of an anonymous sort of averaging on different aspects of the money being protected in BRD. Our users held on average around 5 to 6 times more crypto than, say, your average Coinbase user. And I don't think that necessarily is, you know, means that BRD or Coinbase is better or worse, but what it means is our users are more engaged, right? And they're, they're investing seriously through the app, not just casually buying 10 bucks worth of Bitcoin or something of that sort.

• 22:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it, it's super interesting. And then I guess from the geography standpoint, you're in 170 countries, but is there any one geography where majority of the users come from? Is it more US, more Asia-based?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  I think it's pretty much the same for the, the whole industry. It, it's definitely spread, but I'd say, you know, at any given time, North America is still the predominant market share. It can be 40%, it can be 50%, it just depends. There are interesting, you see like flare-ups, you'll see like, wow, Taiwan, you know, you know, in one month, you know, added a 10x the number of users than normal or transactions. We've got this really sophisticated, like a dashboard, web dashboard that the team built, so that we can actually see even against like a geographies, you know, where activity is for our users, where the downloads are. We could see like support tickets and, you know, in different regions, people might be having different issues, you know, and, and things of that sort.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  So we stay on top of the users and, and all sort of the, the demographics and everything to make sure we're addressing everybody's needs. But yeah, definitely North America mostly. We do get a lot of, we've always been really popular in Asia and in Japan here as well. Simplicity, you know, sort of resonates in, in certain geographies too.

• 23:50Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Speaking of Japan, SBI is, I think, for many people, they don't know that much about SBI, but realize that they're a big organization and they're into crypto and Bitcoin. Maybe talk a little bit about the environment there in Japan for digital assets, and then we can get into SBI mining as well.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Okay, sure, sure, Pup. So, SBI, actually, is a 20-year-old company. It's a large investment bank. It's a, you know, Tokyo Stock Exchange public company, originally SoftBank Investments. So it's actually a spin-off of SoftBank 20 years ago. And, you know, it's a, it's a very big company, 5, 6,000 people, $10 billion, you know, that kind of a thing, right? And they provide, like many Japanese companies, there's like a conglomerate, right? There's like 200 subsidiaries. They do everything from, and I think got their name from like an e-trade-like consumer, you know, trading service over the internet. They have a net-based bank. SBI has a huge business in Japan. They're also big in South Korea, Southeast Asia,

• 24:52Speaker 02

  even Russia. Not a lot going on in the US in terms of their traditional banking business. But I think the reason why people know SBI is, I think SBI is probably the most active investor in the overall crypto and blockchain space by number of companies that they've invested in. The company operates several multi-billion dollar funds, not just for crypto investing, but, you know, with a really strong focus on that. And that's because Kitousei, the CEO of SBI, he's, he's, he's more akin to a guy like Maso-san at SoftBank, progressive, you know, more sort of embracing global thinking, rather than sort of the more traditional, sometimes myopic, you know, kind of Japanese conservative mindset. And

• 25:36Speaker 02

  so he looked at what happened between the record companies and Apple, and he didn't want that to happen to him, being a bank. And while a lot of other banks are dabbling a little bit in crypto perhaps, or sort of, you know, closing their eyes to it, Katsuson is going all in. And that's what really attracted us at BRD to work with SBI. And in a traditional Japanese way, they're not just going in and saying, hey, we're going to launch and operate an exchange in Japan, which they do. They're going like sort of vertical integration style, right? Remember when Sony used to build the chips, the boards, the TVs? Then they operated the retail store? Damn, that's some vertical integration, right? Now with SBI, you know, they're operating exchanges. And then they said, well, how do we get liquidity and fresh coins in the exchanges?

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Well, we could buy miners or we could build the best miners in the world, right? And so that's what they decided to do. That's not enough even. How do we get the cheap electricity? They're investing in a variety of clean energy and energy aggregation companies, buying interests in land and in, you know, power companies, utilities, sub stations all over the world to kind of secure sort of the vertical stack necessary to go from sort of literally hole-in-the-ground power, right? Up to mining, right? Or to chips, then up to the miners, then up to the exchanges, then the consumer banking app, then the institutional banking apps on top. And Katsuson is just a really firm believer that digital asset-based economy is going to take over the world

• 27:07Speaker 02

  and totally disrupt the global financial system. He's going to be right there driving that to make it happen. And companies making very active steps to do that at SBI. So what happened was when they called us in for BRD, I started to spend a bunch of time with the CEO here. And I was in a meeting, kind of like one of his staff meetings. And to be honest, you know, maybe I should have just shut the hell up. But, you know, being an American in Japan, sometimes it's hard not to. And I, you know, I heard about their plans in getting into chips and mining. And I thought, Man, banks have no business making chips. It's pretty damn hard, like I know. So foolishly, I raised my hand in a very Japanese environment and I said, hey, this is sure that's the greatest idea in the world.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  And to be fair, there were some other big Japanese companies here at the time, like GMO, launching mining strategies, right? So there's some, you know, competitive sort of vibes, right? And they were like, well, who the hell are you to comment on something like that? And I was like, well, actually, let me tell you. I've been doing chip design for a long time. And actually, one of my companies did one of the first Bitcoin mining chips, actually, even though I wasn't associated with Bitcoin at the time. And they said, oh, really? All right, well, you know, then what would you do? And I told them what I would do. And the next thing I knew, you know, I was CEO of a new company with, you know, nine figures in funding. And honestly, I said, no, I already have a day job. Thanks very much. Very much appreciate the opportunity.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  But, you know, it's a long-term relationships here in Japan. It's about getting in the circle of trust. And, you know, SBI had just invested $15 million in BRD. And, you know, I thought it was important to have reciprocity there and gratitude. And so I told them that I would help with the mining business. And so today I'm also the CEO of SBI Mining Chip. And then in October of last year, they also asked me to become the CEO of SBI and Ripple's joint venture called SBI Ripple Asia. So you can imagine running three companies. I have nothing but spare time on my hands.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  But I find myself going back and forth between Tokyo and San Francisco quite a bit. But it's interesting to have that visibility across these different businesses, right? And I'll tell you, you know, they say in the semiconductor space, all roads lead to Taiwan because of all the chip manufacturing there. I feel like increasingly, and I'm partial, but you know, all roads lead to Tokyo in crypto. Japan has always had this weird magnetism pumped to Bitcoin. Think about it. You know, why was Karmful this year? Why was Mt. Gox in Japan of all places, right? Roger Ver was running around Japan a lot. Japanese government, most conservative in the world about money, decides to become the first one to declare Bitcoin or crypto as money? That's so bizarre.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  And then you've got SBI, and you've got Katason, and you've got all of that. So there's this natural sort of affinity to things here, right? And now that there's a lot of capital coming out of Japan, from SBI and others, in crypto as well, you know, there is this sort of magnetism that I feel as well. And so I feel happy and honored to be a part of it, and at the center of it, at least from this perspective.

• 30:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and why do you think there is that kind of interest so much, right? Is it just because they're used to digital assets, and they've used non-crypto digital assets in other applications? Is it something to do from the money that they deal with on a daily basis? What's driving that interest?

• 30:38Speaker 02

  I wish I could tell you there's one thing, that's an obvious answer, that it just sort of makes sense, right? I mean, to be honest with you, did you see Jiro Dreams of Sushi? Remember that documentary, right?

• 30:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I actually had never seen it, and I just saw it for the first time.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  You?

• 30:54Anthony Pompliano?

  On the way.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  So I went there like, a year before that thing came out. Cash only, bro. Cash only, are you kidding me? It's like $1,200 dinner, and they warn you ahead of time, like, you better hit the ATM. Ironically, it turns out you can take up to like 10 grand in cash from an ATM machine in Japan. I don't even get to start about that one, all right? But, actually, Japan's a cashless society, or it hasn't. So that sort of, oh, you know, they embody digital assets and stuff. Not so much, actually. Now that's changing. Now with PayPay and Line Pay, just like WeChat Pay and Alipay. It's just starting to change. And you guys in New York just adopted the same standard that Japan's been using for 15 years for the subway, right? With the transit carts.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Really cool to do from your iPhone, right? So they have been using that kind of stuff here. So they're comfortable with it. No, you know what, actually it is, if I go down the street right now here in Tokyo, and not just in 2020, actually like four or five years ago, you know what, I see huge billboards for FX trading, currency trading, targeted at consumers? That doesn't even make sense in America, right? Huge here. By the way, those same boards that used to be FX trading, now they're all Bitcoin. I swear to God, and maybe you saw it when you were here too. So consumer sort of level trading and sophistication of investors seems to be, you know, something that is a bit of an anomaly here that helps drive this.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Here's another thing, to be honest, a lot of money on the sidelines in Japan. And Japan, just because of the culture and lack of proximity to places like Silicon Valley in New York, Shanghai, right? There's a lot of money here that is waiting to be invested in various things. And so this is why people do trading. This is why people, you know, doing currency trading. And it's a big part of why they got involved in crypto as well, I think. Also because of amazing efforts from local crypto communities here, whether it was, you know, in the early days with the Bitcoin meetups and Roger and all this. There were more places here practically, like restaurants and stuff that took Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash, you know, than anywhere else in the world. So people would see it a lot. There were signs everywhere, you know, that kind of a thing, right?

• 33:08Speaker 02

  And, you know, because of Mt. Gox, here's the crazy part. Because of that, eight out of 10 Japanese people have heard of Bitcoin. And I think that's the highest rate like per capita, probably from any country in the world. Not always a good thing though, because they heard about it because of the scandal, right? With Mt. Gox. But it was enough to get the message out there. And then, you know, as is the human psychology, the negativity falls away, right? And then you start to hear the positive things about the games. And that just seeded the whole sort of culture with this sort of notion of Bitcoin. You know, and put that seed on a foundation of everyone's into investing and trading. And you've got, you know, Japan's response to crypto.

• 33:54Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And as you guys run on the mining side with SBI Mining Chip, how has COVID-19 really impacted that, right? Obviously you have kind of more of a manufacturing type bent. And so has there been impact there?

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good question. There has been some in the early days of the virus when China was on lockdown, right? Our ODMs, manufacturers, you know, the factories, literally, right? Couldn't operate due to government restrictions. So at that time, we were really just ramping up production, right? And so there was a few delays, probably no more than about three weeks' time. Our team did a really good job and our partners to sort of, you know, get things back on track and to accelerate things after. Now China's back to normal in large, right? And since the chips, you know, weren't made in China, you know, and we were in volume at that time as well, there really wasn't as much of an impact, you know, on the chip side. So things were okay there.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  And now, you know, there's been some, you hear like, oh, Apple's iPhone shipments and all this stuff are going down, right? But nevertheless, man, like, there's a six-month lag with chips and electronics. Like, the chips being made now were ordered six months ago before the virus. So, man, the factories are just really full right now and are operating just at rate next speed. So, you know, we'll see sort of lagging indicators on COVID-19 in like the electronics space, you know what I mean? And in mining as well. So, you know, later on this year, there's going to be tightness in inventory and stuff.

• 35:27Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And I guess as part of this, like, how do you think, given your expertise in chip design and manufacturing and the work that you're doing at SBM Mining Chip, how does the halving play out here for miners? Like, any thoughts on, uh, on kind of that Bitcoin halving and the effect on miners?

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll tell you one thing. Everybody's got an opinion on it. No one knows what's going to happen. And I'm not gonna, you know, be so arrogant as to tell you that I know what's going to happen, because I don't. But what I will tell you is just, you know, we look at the historical data. We expect that a lot of the miners operating in farms where the electricity prices were above around six cents per kilowatt hour, all-in kind of costs, right, aren't going to be profitable anymore, right? Some of these old ones. And so you expect the total network half rate to typically go down afterwards, right? And you also expect mining orders to go down because there's a psychology to this whole thing. It's like, ah, the mining rewards less. Well, that doesn't seem like a good business to go into anymore.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Now ironically, right, one of the first things I learned in mining is that the mining reward size and the halving doesn't really necessarily impact the economics of mining companies. How the hell could that be? That doesn't even make sense when I say it out loud, does it, man? Because the revenues go down, right? But the idea is that because it takes out a lot of the old hardware, right? What happens is it's a winner take all kind of a situation. The whole way to win in mining is to have the lowest electricity costs, the highest power, most power efficient miners, so that when the halvings happen, or when the price of vicuyline goes down, you can still be profitable, or at least break even, while everyone else,

• 37:13Speaker 02

  or a lot of the others, have to shut down, because literally every second they operate, they're losing more money, right? And then if you can hang on, the total network cash rate goes down, because, and then the difficulty goes down, and then your percentage of blocks that you mine goes up, and you can actually make even more money than before the halving, potentially, if enough people get out. So that's why the strategy is desk hardware, right? And then there's all this complication to go find cheap power, right? And, you know, when I first got into it, you hear, oh, you know, it's this Kazakhstan or this Stan, right? Or it's this, you know, new thing in Africa, right? And these like geopolitically unstable areas where, eh, okay, but it's cheap power.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  You know where the biggest source of cheap power actually turned out to be in the world? Right in the United States, in arguably, I don't know, true, right? You know, one of the most geopolitically stable places, at least from the perspective of like the power not going out, right? Unless you're not maybe rolling blackouts in California. But anyway, and so there's a lot going on in places like Texas, in New York State, upstate from where you are, Pacific Northwest as well. Turns out there's a hell of a lot of excess energy in America. And you know, it's just not that the marketplace was really not there to connect some of these mining companies in.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  And so that's, you know, in a nutshell, what I've learned about the mining company, mining industry. So after the halving, I expect the network cash rate to come down. I also, though, I feel there's a huge psychology aspect to it. People hate to show up miners, especially if they just bought them because they feel like they screwed up. And so they often hang on longer than they should and they just increase the size of the crater they're creating for themselves. So you see lagging indicator on that too, but eventually, you know, they can't do it anymore. It's just like this, I buy like Apple stock, right? It goes down, what does every person want to do there? I'm not gonna sell until it goes back up, you know, because I don't want to feel like I was an idiot, right? But you know what's the right thing to do is right? As soon as it goes down, you get rid of that dog.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  And then you invest it in something that has a higher likelihood of going up based on, you know, research that you can do and whatever, right? Unfortunately though, you know, we can't change how all humans think. So you'll see a lagging indicator on the, on the network cash rate is basically what I'm saying. Then you'll start a recycle, refresh phase where people will go and have raised capital to replace all those old miners. If they had cheap enough power, if they didn't have cheap enough power, they'll close up shop and that's okay. That's part of how, you know, Satoshi sort of designed this thing. Because those miners that are going to operate have to mine more blocks if they're gonna run a business of the same size or bigger than they had before the halving. Because the mining reward did come down.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  And then ultimately we'll see this transition to fees going up, right? So that that natural balance between mining companies getting revenue from transaction fees grows. As the, you know, mining reward revenue kind of continues to go down through subsequent halvings.

• 40:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and it feels also like, you know, in the past halvings, there's been some level of interest, right? Mostly from the crypto community, but outsiders to the crypto community really weren't kind of paying attention. Now, after that big 2017 run, it really feels like you've got a lot of people paying attention. And I saw a chart today of Google searches for Bitcoin and Bitcoin halving and things like that. Has absolutely exploded over the last like two weeks.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  And I, my personal feeling on that, and I feel strongly about this one, though it's purely speculation. I mean, people wanna, is it gonna go up again? Should I buy now? Man, the number one question you probably get, the number one question I get, should I buy Bitcoin? When should I buy Bitcoin? And I always say the same thing. I say, I'm not giving any advice because every time I did before and people asked me and I was like, man, 400 bucks? It's like an all time high from when I got in. I never buy it in two week highs. Boom, two weeks later, 800 bucks. Should I buy now, Adam? 800 bucks, 52 weeks? It's a light, you know, I, I wouldn't, okay. I stopped giving you advice.

• 41:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, it also comes down to the kind of time preference too, right? You know, there's some people who, you know, especially the, the people who wanna get in and get rich immediately. They kind of.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  And I never, I tell, I never tell people to invest in Bitcoin, to be honest. What I tell them is, if you are interested, make sure it's discretionary money that you can afford to, to not get emotional about, right? I, I don't think it's gonna go to zero, but that's how you should have the psychology of investing, not just in Bitcoin. You know, look at oil, right? Or gold, right? You know, so, you know, for me, it's kind of like, if you think about it like what it really is, which is sort of like professionalized gambling, which is what the stock market is as well, right? Or any sort of investing, right? And, and keep sort of rationality in your head about it, right?

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Then, and you know, don't invest more than you can afford to, then, you know, then I think you can kind of weather those crazy volatile gyrations that we have. But, you know, for the, for people who today are going on to Google and typing Bitcoin halving after listening to your show, they're thinking, oh, maybe I can make a quick buck around this thing, right? Hey, you know, you got just as much, you know, potential chance going and probably playing blackjack or, you know, playing roulette over in Vegas, right? So, you know, I, I can't say I think that's a great idea.

• 42:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's uh, it's pretty crazy. Um, there's a lot of people in uh, in, in North America, in the United States especially, that uh, they know that crypto and Bitcoin is really big in um, in, in Japan and China and kind of all throughout Asia. Is there any one or two things that uh, you think is important for them to know uh, about the region? That uh, maybe they don't know or, or wouldn't think to uh, uh, that, that would be important?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Yes, there is actually, and it's all about China. I, I don't think the world really understands this very important cryptocurrency right now. Nothing to do with coronavirus, okay? So, you know, I have been traveling to China for business for ten years, call it, right? And um, for um, for the mining company, I was in Shanghai about nine months ago or so. And um, yeah, late last year. And I, I went to a store, you know, a, a normal store that I've been to several times before, kind of like a convenience store. And I, I grabbed some stuff, I ripped out, whipped out my RMB, you know, my, my Chinese yuan, "Hey, cash." "Sorry, we don't accept cash." By the way, I speak some Chinese, so like, you know, I, I, I knew exactly what the guy was saying.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  I said, "Don't accept cash? How the hell can you not accept cash, right? I, I mean, this, it's like in a mall. Okay, this isn't like some little modern pop shop, okay? And so I was like, okay, I'm thinking, I've been here before, oh, here's my Visa. "We don't accept Visa or Mastercard." It's like, "You used to. We don't accept Visa or Mastercard anymore." Thinking, "The hell do you accept, man?" Right? And of course, it's WeChat Bank or Alipay. Now, here's the killer. Until recently, you couldn't even load WeChat with money if you didn't have a Chinese bank account.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  So you think, you figure, "What the hell is the Chinese government doing? They're restricting capital coming into the country, they're making it difficult for foreigners to transact. Why would they do that? And then why aren't they getting on the bandwagon? You know, why don't they re-authorize crypto exchanges? Why don't they put rules down? So that companies like VZ China and stuff can operate again. Why haven't they bought into, you know, um, new sort of financial technologies and all this stuff? Why are they just using like WeChat Pay and Alipay and all this, right? Well, the reason is because, and give a crap about anything else. They know that they have the biggest economy in the world, and they get to call the shots. Remember who called the shots in the early days of the global economy? It was the United States government. We created SWIFT.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  We created the entire global banking system. And if people wanted to do business with America, which was and continues to be this big economy, they had to play by the rules of the US Department of Treasury. They had to be on the wire transfer network. They had to let the banks conform to all the US rules, even though the banks are in other countries. It's crazy, but it makes sense because everyone else in the world wanted to do business with America. Guess what's happening right now? Nobody seems to get this. In five years, if you don't support the digital RMB, you can't do business with China. I don't mean the government. I mean any Chinese company, as is evidenced by the fact that I can't even use their own goddamn cash in their own country anymore, you know? Now fortunately, the hotels still take Visa and stuff, okay? And nowadays, it's easier for foreigners to load money onto things like WeChat.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  It's still damn difficult, right? And the reason that they don't care is because they know that everyone's gonna play by their rules. So for example, you know, innovations and technologies to help cross-border payments, like what I see in my role with Ripple. And the Ripple joint venture, right? Which is a much better solution to cross-border payments than old technologies like SWIFT. And you think, well, why wouldn't China jump at something like this, right? Especially it's, you know, relatively controllable, you know, doesn't have to be like decentralized like Bitcoin and stuff. And, and the reason is, is because they don't need to care. They're creating the digital RMB. They're gonna impose it upon the world, just like the US did with the dollar in the early days.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  And they know that because they are the most people, you know, of anywhere that, or well, you know, maybe India, China, right? This kind of thing, right? But anyway, the point is, if you wanna do business with them, you're gonna have to support it. No one's working on that right now, okay? So that's why at least the way I can help, I hope, with BRD is BlockSet, we're looking at having digital asset support for the digital RMB. So that companies, like every bank in the world, every company in the world's gonna need to do business with China. They're gonna need software to basically, you know, handle the digital RMB. To me, this is the biggest, you know, potential sort of massive issue in the, in the, in the economic, global economic situation that people just don't seem to see coming. And, you know, I say, I like to say, you know,

• 47:22Speaker 02

  modern warfare is fought with money and information.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  And I think China's got a really great strategy. And I think people need to, you know, stop and notice it and plan for how to work with them and how to make sure that it's not, you know, necessarily going to be used to, you know, for anything other than hopefully efficiency sake and improving the global economy. But, you know, I can't say that we always understand everybody else's motivations. So definitely needs to be taken very seriously.

• 47:51Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And I guess, how do you think of like the digital dollar or other digital national currencies from the other superpowers? Do you think those are likely to happen relatively soon as far they're out?

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Oh, they're definitely going to happen. I don't, I don't think they're going to happen soon. Just because of practical issues, man, it's really hard. Look at what happened when the US decided to get rid of gold. I mean, that was a real bear and it didn't even last anyway, right? But if you look at what happened in India where they're getting rid of currencies, high dollar, you know, then they're, they're going to cashless. And I think China is doing that as well, right? That's why you see cash not being accepted in those stores anymore, right? And by the way, why didn't that store take cash? They got a financial incentive from the government not to accept it anymore. They got a financial incentive from the government not to accept the government's own damn currency. That's crazy, right? But that's what I'm talking about, right? So I think there are clear indicators that governments are going to move to their own

• 48:46Speaker 02

  digital sort of, you know, currencies. I'm not sure they're going to be blockchain based. I'm not, I'm not sure there're going to be any currency that you know of or you've heard of right now, meaning like a crypto asset like Bitcoin or something, right? However, I think they're coming, but I think practically speaking, it takes time. I don't think you start to see those things really out in the wild. I would say normally for another five years, 10 years, really. However, because of coronavirus, if these stimulus bills pull back some of that digital USD, digital wallet language back into the, into legislation and that stuff goes through to avoid, you know, contact during payments and stuff, it could be a catalyst to help accelerate it, but I don't think it overcomes all the practical issues.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  We have other contactless payment methods right now, right? You know, we don't need the digital dollar to solve COVID-19, you know? It's not going to completely solve that problem.

• 49:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's super fascinating. I think when you start looking at like the geopolitical competition that can occur here, and if every currency ends up being digital, the competition really is at the monetary policy level, right? It's not at the technology level, which I think is a whole can of worms.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Maybe it already is at the, you know, sort of central government level. You know, I mean, I would argue that in large part, even though our baking industry is privatized, you know, it's got a lot of ties back into the Fed and the central government, right? Especially when you see these bailouts and stuff like this, right? That's the government's sort of way to influence economies through those banking relationships and interest rates and the lending and all that stuff that happens there. So I actually think that is where the main bulk of sort of the economic, you know, warring is going on from a global superpower perspective. Where the technology comes in is much lower down, where it's at

• 50:38Speaker 02

  your level and my level, right? I'm using Venmo, right? Or I'm, you know, Facebook, Libra things over here to be more of a global version of like PayPal and Venmo, all that kind of stuff, right? That's where like technology can make a big difference at the consumer level. At the government level, technology is sort of less important, and I argue that because like ACH is still settled by hand a lot in the US, on dot matrix printers and mainframes, right? So clearly like brand new technology is not necessarily, you know, critically important to central bank sort of, you know, policy and stuff like that. And they sort of fight by numbers with other countries, right? Like trade, right? Numbers,

• 51:21Speaker 02

  tariffs and all this kind of stuff, not by like employing new technology which makes the digital USD better, right? We could have the most amazing digital dollar in the world, but it's not going to change the fact that China's not going to be excited about that because they want to be the new United States when it comes to, you know, global economics.

• 51:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Listen, I could talk about this all day. It's so fascinating.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  Sorry, me too, man.

• 51:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think that there's no right answer, right? That's part of the beauty of all of this. Before I wrap up, I always ask people two questions. First is, what is the most important book you've ever read?

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm a huge fan of military science fiction. And for me, you know, I don't, I'm, it's hard for me to pick a specific book. But what I will say is this, I will say, in my own life, a big part of my job running companies is to take care of and find the best team members and to take care of the team. The team is the company, and the team is the value, right? And so leadership is something that I'm constantly trying to become better at and to be a combination of empathetic and inspiring to people, but also to drive them and also to be able to enable them to achieve new things

• 52:39Speaker 02

  that they couldn't have otherwise achieved, you know, without some structure and without guidance and without vision and without encouragement. But, you know, not, you know, it's not just all about pure encouragement. It's also about discipline, right? And so I read a lot of fiction in order to allow my mind to relax a little bit. But my sort of nonfiction aspect of all the fiction I read is that military discipline and leadership that I really, really like. And so for that reason, you know, there's, there's a lot of books that I've read in that space, you know, a series of books. And it's always, you know, I like sci-fi and all this kind of stuff. So, you know, but that's the underlying theme.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  And I think that's, you know, what I, if I look back on my career, man, you know, I started being an engineer, I thought I'd really be good at tinkering with chips and stuff like that. But in the end, what I think really worked out best is to be able to lead and to inspire, probably a lot like yourself.

• 53:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I love that. Speaking of sci-fi, aliens, believer or non-believer? You think they're real?

• 53:45Speaker 02

  I so want to believe in them. I used to be one of those nuts who would be sitting there Google searching like 10 years ago for, I mean, I want to believe that stuff. I love science fiction and all that stuff. But the reason why, like, okay, the Navy isn't going to release UFO, unidentified flying object, doesn't mean alien, like, let's make sure we get that right, right? They're not going to release videos of that if there's, you know, dudes, you know, little green dudes running around the earth, right? Because, because, you know, then that, that, that, you can't do that in a non-controlled way. You have to very much control information flow that way to not incite, you know, global panic, right? Hell, we've had a pretty good example of what a small version of global panic can do recently, right? No, man, I want to believe that they're like, these,

• 54:30Speaker 02

  these videos and stuff are alien-based. I don't think so. The reason is, I feel like if there was, there were aliens and this kind of thing, we would know, we'd have to know. You couldn't contain it, right? Now, one step back, though, the other side of that is, we're just in our little myopic view of Earth here. As Carl Sagan used to say, "The universe is a very big place, and if we're alone here, it seems like an awful waste of space."

• 54:55Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy to think about in this vast, vast universe, right? What could, what could possibly be out there? You get to ask me one question to, to finish up here. What one question do you have for me?

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. My question for you is, I want to know what makes you get up every morning and do what you do? What is at the core of the inspiration for all the great stuff that you've helped the industry with?

• 55:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm having a blast. It's, at the end of the day, you know, I usually am joking when I say this, but there's a hint of truth in it that, you know, one day I'm probably going to wake up and be like, "All right, guys, see ya. That was, that was an epic run, but I'm just not having fun anymore," right? And, you know, today, when I wake up, I... Write the email every morning. I record, you know, usually at least one podcast each day and get all that out there. And then obviously, we've got all the investing activities that we do. But really, it's just fun for me. And I enjoy doing it. It's one of these things where like, I would spend my time reading and tweeting and doing all this stuff anyways. So why not make an overlap between the things you're personally interested in

• 56:05Anthony Pompliano?

  and the work that you do kind of on the professional level. And so I just really, really enjoy it. If that ever changes, though, like I, you know, no, no secret here, I literally will wake up and send out an email and be like, I'm done. I'm not writing anymore. And if that ever happens, like, I'm not one of these people who can go from, you know, writing or recording these conversations every single day to like, oh, I'm gonna pare it down. I'm only gonna do two a week, right? It's all or nothing. So it's like, either I do it every day, or I'm done.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  I fully agree with you, man. It's either all in or go. Right? There is no in-between. We don't want to do anything half-assed.

• 56:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Totally. For sure. Where do you want people to go? Where can we send them if they're concerned more about you or BRD, SBI, mining? Like, where do you want to send them?

• 56:56Speaker 02

  I think probably the easiest place is just BRD.com. And, you know, I tell everybody, like I tell my teams too, it's like, I'm happy to interact with people. I love to help people. I love to educate, like yourself. And I love to mentor. And so, you know, people should feel free to reach out to me anytime. My email's [email protected]. And, you know, I'm always happy to interact on any of these things, or even at a personal level. So, yeah, that website isn't going to tell you a lot about SBI or all these other things. But it's less about, you know, me and these different companies and all that stuff. And it's more about helping the industry. So, you know, let me know if you'd like to chat.

• 57:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to do this. I think people learn a lot from this. And we'll have to do it again in the future.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  All right. Sounds good. Thanks, Bob. Have a good one. Appreciate the opportunity. Pleasure to get to know you.