The $110 Billion Dollar Man - Binance Founder Opens Up | PBD #797

Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao joins Patrick Bet-David to discuss Bitcoin, AI, crypto regulation, the Biden administration’s crackdown on crypto, Trump’s pardon, FTX, global business migration, and why the UAE became his home base for innovation and security. ------- 📕 CHANGPENG ZHAO'S "FREEDOM OF MONEY": https://bit.ly/4fb62Lq 🦁 THE VAULT 2026: AUG 31ST TO SEPT 1ST: ⁠https://bit.ly/4mZdLhD⁠ https://bit.ly/4mZdLhD Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4kSVkso ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4kSVkso Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP 👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj 🇰 KALSHI: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://kalshi.com/pbd⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ http://kalshi.com/pbd⁠ 💬 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time!

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  President Trump gave me a pardon.

• 0:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Who cares about getting a pardon?

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I'm labeled as a felon.

• 0:03Speaker 02

  Binance founder sentenced to four months in prison.

• 0:06Patrick Bet-David?

  You could tell they were interested in targeting a guy like you.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  The timing is coincidental. Today, US is pro crypto.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  The White House pledged to make America the crypto capital of the world.

• 0:14Patrick Bet-David?

  You're not making friends with the Democratic Party.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 0:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Your tweet was one of the reasons that caused them to go out.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  I don't think those were my exact words.

• 0:23Patrick Bet-David?

  There it is. That's the tweet. He was the biggest guy giving money to them. You just took that money away.

• 0:28Speaker 03

  Sam Minimado arrested.

• 0:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto. Do you think there's a chance that it's him?

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Uh.

• 0:35Patrick Bet-David?

  In their eyes, would China look at you as they made you?

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Because I look Chinese, I'm part of the CCP or anything like that? That's completely false.

• 0:43Patrick Bet-David?

  You make it seem like anybody can start a company and get to 100 billion.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  I'm a normal guy.

• 0:46Patrick Bet-David?

  You're not a normal guy.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  I don't think I've ever sat in a Lambo yet.

• 0:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Stop it.

• 0:53Speaker 04

  Guys worth 100 billion dollars, give or take. Never been in a Lambo. Enjoyed today's conversation with the one and only Cece.

• 1:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Cece, great to have you on the podcast.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 1:04Patrick Bet-David?

  I told my guys, I said, listen, I noticed everybody was going on the cigar lounge to meet you. I said, you better not ask him for a loan. You better not go and see you want a donation or a loan from this guy. Because the first thing they found, what's his net worth? Is he really worth 110 billion dollars? That's the first thing people want to find out. And you're like, yeah, you know, he's a pretty rich guy. But it's funny, I got all these things I want to go through with you, with your story. I was telling you earlier how your story is a movie. They could turn it into a movie at any time. And I hope it turns into a movie because you've lived an interesting life. But you, did you fly in from UAE?

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay. Is it true that you guys just got attacked or you got bombed yesterday by Iran at a couple of oil facilities?

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Uh, I don't know where they attacked, but as we were leaving, they were missile alerts. And the flight was on, off, on, off.

• 1:49Patrick Bet-David?

  When you were leaving?

• 1:50Speaker 00

  When we were leaving. Yeah, so just on my way to the airport, like, no, the flight was off. And then 20 minutes later, the missile warning was cancelled, well, was resolved. It was on again, and then it was off again and on again. And then, yeah, so that's how we fly. And we, we wait, so just before we were supposed to take off, there was off again. We said, well, let. Let's just wait for twenty minutes. It was, it was, uh, yeah, so and then we, we had a twenty minute window.

• 2:15Patrick Bet-David?

  What did the pilots say? The pilots say, hey, we don't know. Are they giving a safety protocol or no? Hey, we're gonna take off. It's gonna be fine. It's gonna be a long flight. We're gonna be okay. There's gonna be a little bit of turbulence. What warning did the pilot give?

• 2:26Speaker 00

  So the, the pilot's just waiting for the, like, the pilot's just following instructions. So whenever there's a warning, they huddle everything into this, into a safe room. That's like in the middle of the airport. Uh, away from glasses, windows and stuff like that. And whenever the, the warning's off, you say, well, you can board the plane and then you fly off. And it was actually no turbulence. Uh, it was come day. It was come day.

• 2:47Patrick Bet-David?

  Turbulence. Did you, did you, were you worried while you're taking off or no?

• 2:51Speaker 00

  No, I wasn't worried.

• 2:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Not worried, okay.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  So like ninety-nine percent interception rate, uh, and super safe. Um, yeah, it, it, it is worrying because that missile flying in, uh, but it's super safe.

• 3:02Patrick Bet-David?

  So it, it, it, uh, living there yourself, you feel safe living in UAE, Abu Dhabi, you do?

• 3:07Speaker 00

  Very safe.

• 3:08Patrick Bet-David?

  It, it, when you think about all the things that you can't, you can buy with money, you can go to a restaurant. Customer doesn't, you know, the waitress doesn't give you good service. You can buy the restaurant and say, you're no longer here. You have that kind of money. You can, you can go to a sports game. You don't like the team's management. You can make a massive offer the next day and buy an NBA team or an NFL team. But when it comes on to security, living at a place, what, what made you pick UAE out of all the places to live in?

• 3:35Speaker 00

  I mean, it, it is the safest, uh, country, well, safest country in the world.

• 3:40Patrick Bet-David?

  You believe that?

• 3:40Speaker 00

  By far, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Tell me why.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Um, you can, if you drop your wallet on the street, um, and it has like, I don't know, three thousand bucks in there, you walk, you come back in a week, it's still there. Uh, you'll find it. Uh, and people who find it will return it with the cash in there. Uh, there's zero, uh, basically all zero crime. Uh, there's no petty crime, no big crimes, et cetera. Uh, and the fiscal security on the street translates into financial security, fintech, it's just very well run. And also, the leadership of the country is very pro-business, very, very smart, very, very calibrated, extremely visionary. So it's one of the best places to be.

• 4:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think about the importance of like, what level of importance do you put on where to raise your family, on the strength of the military of that country in today's turbulent times that we have? Do you say, man, I wish UAE had a stronger military or no?

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Well, I think I was actually surprised at how strong the military of UAE is. I didn't know until there were missiles flying in and they were intercepting it. I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. And I didn't like, you have to think about it, right? How much do you have to prepare that in advance to be able to intercept that many missiles coming in? And it takes years and years of preparation. So that's this foresight there, that's really hard to match. I think UAE does rely very heavily on US support from military equipments.

• 5:04Patrick Bet-David?

  You rely on us for that?

• 5:05Speaker 00

  I think so, yeah. So they're a very strong partner for the US. So I think they do quite well there. And then, but other than that, I think that just the countries were very well governed. If you have sensible leaders, you have like smart leaders that are fair and that wants the country to grow instead of growing their own pockets, then you have a pretty good country, yeah.

• 5:26Patrick Bet-David?

  I saw a stat the other day and I wonder how you answer this one. In the seventies, in the S and P 500, it showed that, you know, eighty-five to ninety-three percent of the wealth was tied to tangible assets in 1970.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:40Patrick Bet-David?

  So if somebody was a billionaire and they lived in a state, they ran a business, they couldn't move to another state or they couldn't move to another country because it's tangible asset wealth that they have. Today, we've gone from eighty-five, yeah, eighty-five to ninety-three percent back in the days to now it's the other way around. Ninety-two percent is an intangible assets. Patents, you know, brands, you know, Bitcoin, crypto, AI, all this stuff that they're building. Moving forward, do you think this is gonna be a threat to countries that don't know how to handle small business owners or big businesses? That person can say, great, I'm gonna go move in UAE, I'm gonna go to Singapore. How do you view that with how much of the wealth today is tangible instead of intangible?

• 6:25Speaker 00

  I think that's a great point. I think I agree with you 100%, which is right now, if you look at the wealth today, it's IP, it's technology, it's crypto. They have no borders. Even with like IP and technology, there's some country limitations, right? So if you run a AI, you're running in US or you're running in China, you're still kind of confined to those countries. Whereas in blockchain, in our industry, crypto, there's no borders. Your Bitcoin is yours, no matter where you are. You fly to a different country, you don't have to even make a transfer. That crypto stays with you, right? And also technology startups, we're seeing a lot of technology companies amassing very high valuations. And those are the big drivers for this economies of countries in the world.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  They can be based anywhere. So, and this is good and bad. So now, countries with favorable regulations, with good leadership, good regulations, good environments will attract this top talents. And talents are very mobile now, right? You get educated in one country, you can move to a different country very easily. And you learn your skill, you know, you can also work remotely. For like, you know, Binance has remote work, 5,000 people working remotely. So all of this is a plus now.

• 7:39Patrick Bet-David?

  In how many countries, the 5,000?

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Oof, I don't really know for sure, but more than 100 countries, I would say.

• 7:44Patrick Bet-David?

  You have 5,000 employees working for Binance.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  They're all remote.

• 7:47Patrick Bet-David?

  In 100-plus countries, everyone's remote?

• 7:49Speaker 00

  Pretty much, everyone's remote.

• 7:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  So I don't run Binance anymore, but no, this is, this status is pretty public.

• 7:56Patrick Bet-David?

  You still own 90% of it, though?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  No, actually, I'm a large shareholder, but not 90%. So quite a bit less than that.

• 8:03Patrick Bet-David?

  But you still have majority control, though, you're above 50.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  I have, I'm, I'm the, I'm the, I'm the single largest shareholder, so.

• 8:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Majority?

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 8:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, got it. So even though after all this, which we'll get into, even though all that stuff happened, they said you couldn't be CEO, still as a majority shareholder, you still carry a lot of influence?

• 8:24Speaker 00

  I think influence, yes, but I don't run the company. I don't, I don't try to, I don't give them instructions. But you know, my shareholder rights are intact, so I'm a shareholder, so I get shareholder information.

• 8:36Patrick Bet-David?

  That's pretty wild. So 5,000 employees, 100 plus countries. You know, you're a thinker. When I watch you in interviews and things you say, I've watched you with Peter Schiff debate on the way you brought the kilo of gold. You're like, here, here, let's split it. You're trying to kind of make the point of the difference between traveling, airport. Why, why live in UAE? Why not live in America? Why not? You know, from the outside yourself, because America's always been known as the land of all opportunities, you know, the place to be for entrepreneurs. Do you, as an outsider, you're not an insider, do you view America as the greatest country to live in? Today, moving forward as an entrepreneur?

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Okay, I'll give you a very blunt answer.

• 9:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Please.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  I think since the last one year and a half, I think America is probably back to the best country to, one of the best countries to, to live in. But during the Biden administration, it was one of the worst places to live in, I think. I basically just tried to stay as far away from US as possible during that time. They were very hostile on crypto. They're very hostile on our industry, so I just wanted to stay as far away as possible. So it was, it was not possible to run a crypto business in, in America before. I think now it's, it's more possible. So I think in the last year and a half, we're seeing the, we're seeing 180 degree reversal, which is great for the US economy, I think.

• 9:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Now, would you consider ever coming down here and living here, or no, you're happy in UAE?

• 9:59Speaker 00

  I think right now, my lifestyle is pretty set up and I, it's not, not easy getting US passports, et cetera. So I, I'm pretty content where, where I am, but I think we will definitely want to do more business and invest more in the US.

• 10:13Patrick Bet-David?

  So if I'm, if I'm a friend of yours, I know, and I, I know you do some mentoring as well for some of the founders that you work with. And if I ask you, I said, look, I got a bunch of different places to live in, in crypto space. Should I go build my hub out of America or should I build it outside of America? What advice would you give me?

• 10:30Speaker 00

  I think today, I would, I would say, definitely, do you have a presence in America? But you may want multiple presences because the crypto regulations today are country specific. U.S. regulations doesn't service the rest of the whole world, actually. I think UAE is actually one of the very few places that offer global crypto licenses for crypto exchanges, right? So, and that's fairly new as well. So, we're, we're still at the early stages of this regulatory frameworks in different countries. And U.S. I think is progressing extremely well, extremely quickly. I think there was some progress on Clarity Act even last night. And so, but I think, yeah, U.S. is definitely one of the places to be.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  But I wouldn't say, I always have a global view on business. I wouldn't focus on only one country. I think we're living, as we said before, we're living in a world where the country borders are much fuzzier in terms of technology, in terms of digital assets. So, have a global view instead of a, we no longer need to do business in one country and then expand to another country, then expand to another country. We can, no, you can, you can, you can, you can do parallel progress.

• 11:40Patrick Bet-David?

  So even if you did get a passport to come down here, you would still choose U.S. UAE today?

• 11:45Speaker 00

  I think today, my life is pretty set up in the UAE right now. I would probably just stay there. Yeah.

• 11:50Patrick Bet-David?

  I want, again, the whole point with me is, do countries realize what's going to happen to the future of these wealthy entrepreneurs who their assets are intangible, that they can no longer bully them with regulation because they got 200 other countries that would love to have them? Maybe not all 200, let's just say 100 of them, they can go to have a decent life and then 10 countries that are very competitive for business, say UAE, Singapore, some of these countries you can go to. I wonder if, as bad as it is today, we see reports of people leaving California with the whole wealth tax. I don't know if you're following that closely or not. And we see what they're talking about in New York and a trillion dollars left New York and California during COVID.

• 12:31Patrick Bet-David?

  California just lost another trillion dollars and their net migration rate report came out that they're even losing more people now and they want to offer this 5% tax, billionaire tax, on the couple 100 people that they have there. I wonder? If they're gonna realize how horrible of a move this is long term, because you can go anywhere today. I wonder if they'll figure that part out. What do you think?

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Uh, well, what I hear is a lot, a lot of companies moving into taxes in the U.S., right? I don't know the details, but generally at a high level, I think high taxes, um, doesn't work that well. Uh, when you can, when you impose high taxes or high transaction fees, or just generally high cost for doing business, a business move away. Um, basically, you're, you're, you're taxing a much smaller volume. Uh, you actually get less net tax, I think, uh, or less net fees or income or revenue, however, whatever you call it. Um, the concept is about the same. And as you said, um, the now, now there are two hundred countries. They are kind of actually competing for favorable regulations for businesses, favorable environments for businesses. Um, so, yeah, I do think that, that, that, uh, that place, that, uh, that, that, that consideration is definitely in play.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Uh, so it's not, it's not like, you know, the business won't move and you could just tax the hell out, hell out of them. When you increase tax from like, I don't know, from one percent to, to ten percent. Yeah, you, you might, you might have less tax, tax income. Yeah, it's, it's not that straightforward.

• 13:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Uh, it being close to Iran, what is your opinion on what's going on with Iran?

• 13:57Speaker 00

  Well, I didn't follow geopolitics that closely before. I'm just like a business guy doing crypto, uh, et cetera. Uh, but after the, after the war started, um, I'm really not, well, I live in a country that was attacked by Iran. Uh, UAE did not initiate any attacks. And we even, and UAE was the most missile attacks from Iran out of all countries. I think it's just because of the physical proximity, because they're just across the water. Um, but even being attacked, being the most attacked, they didn't retaliate, right? So UAE held back. They probably could, but they didn't. This, this goes to the wisdom of the country leadership. But living there, seeing missiles flying overhead. Can't make me support Iran. So, um, yeah, so I I'm I'm against all wars.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Um, I and also I based on my limited understanding, the fact that Iran hit every country in the Gulf is a bit crazy. Um, I wish the war would stop soon. Um, I wish people come to the to to their senses. Uh, so, um, um, and also I based on what I'm reading, it's just like there's no leadership there. All right, there's no leadership in Iran. Um, it's very chaotic. Um, I really wish, you know, we can help put or like somebody puts order in there and then um, people can move on to to build businesses.

• 15:09Patrick Bet-David?

  You think it's unify the Gulf states like against Iran?

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Uh, I'm not too sure. Uh, I'm not an expert on this topic, but it doesn't seem to be super unified. I think everyone has different opinions, right? We see UAE like now withdraw from OPAC, uh, uh, which is pretty significant and also which is pretty strategic. Um, so there are some diff- I wouldn't say everything is aligned. Um, you have multiple countries, you have multiple personalities, you have multiple people involved.

• 15:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Um, it's a dynamic environment. Again, I'm not an expert on this kind of.

• 15:39Patrick Bet-David?

  No, I I asked it because if you're also not a regular guy, though, you you know, you have a lot of money, you have a lot of influence. You built one of the fastest growing companies to billion dollars at the time it was the fastest. The total amount of money transactions that's been done in Binance, I saw a hundred and twenty five trillion dollars. I think I saw a number like that. So it's not like you, you know, you founded a just a regular company. It's a big company with a lot of influence and compliance. Uh, and I know you when you're saying not all the Gulf states UAE Saudi Saudi dictates prices for oil. So it's probably not happy that UAE left and Qatar left in twenty nineteen.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:11Patrick Bet-David?

  I was just wondering what your opinion would be on that because safety matters. Uh, at this phase, so going back to it, your story, fascinating story. You know, before everybody learned about you with Binance, at the time, I think you guys went from zero to billion, the fastest out of any other company that we had. And then reports came out, you on Twitter, you have a massive following. When it comes on to Bitcoin, the comments you've made, the stories of you selling your house for nine hundred thousand dollars, all of that. But for some of the audience that maybe doesn't know before you became the business tycoon that you are today. Uh, how does the story begin?

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• 18:41Speaker 02

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• 19:06Speaker 00

  To moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist. Oh, well, we traced back, right? I was born in a fairly rural village in China. I grew up there, moved to a city when I was ten, and then moved to Canada when I was twelve. And then I did high school there. I did high school in Vancouver and then started college in Montreal, in McGill. Didn't graduate there. I did four years and then my intern boss gave me a job. Then I delayed and delayed and I never went back to McGill. I started working.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  And then I worked in Tokyo, New York, Shanghai, and then where else? Singapore.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  So I started as an IT guy and then turned into entrepreneur. I worked at New York, in New York, in Bloomberg in New York.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  And so I was always in the sort of think financial tech, fintech field. So then I started a company. I was a junior partner of an IT company. I started a company with six other older guys in Shanghai in two thousand and five. Did that for eight years and then I came across Bitcoin in two thousand and thirteen. And then I was like, this is the, this is the, this is the future technology. So at that time, it was actually pretty interesting because I think there's three big technologies in my life. There's internet, there's blockchain, and at the time I didn't know what was next, right? At the time, I thought the next one was going to be like ten, fifteen years later. Now we know it's AI. So I think this is the three big technologies in my life. When the internet was happening, I was too young to really do anything meaningful with it.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  In the blockchain, when blockchain is happening, we got lucky. We founded a platform that's impactful, that's useful. And then, so yeah, that's kind of how I came to be.

• 20:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, if I was in high school with you, say you're fourteen, fifteen years old, who were you in high school? We're in a class together. Who's easy?

• 21:03Speaker 00

  I was a normal kid. I was a bit geeky. I played a lot of sports. And I was like, you know, Asian kid in Canada that played volleyball, that, just normal kid. Nothing, I wasn't super smart. I wasn't super, I wasn't the best in any academics. I was pretty decent in math and science, a bit weaker on the literature, like no English, French. I was very bad in French. Yeah, so, but I was a normal kid, yeah.

• 21:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Did, did, did people, like, did you know you're gonna do something special? Like, was there something where, like, one day, were you a driven kid, or?

• 21:41Speaker 00

  No, no, no, it was, it was not, it was, no, it was, like, there was no indications I was anything special. Um, I was just a normal kid. Yeah, uh, uh, I, there was never any indications, oh, this guy's gonna build a, you know, billion-dollar company even.

• 21:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Were you a dreamer? Would you dream about one day, you know, I'm gonna do this, make my family proud? Was there any thoughts like that with you?

• 22:02Speaker 00

  No, I didn't have any of the, uh, I wanted to be successful. Uh, I wanted to do, I wanted to do well, but I never dreamed of being a billionaire, or like, you know, run a largest crypto exchange. Like, that's just never, like, you know, um, I, I just wanted to, like, no, have a, no, I want to be financially, uh, successful. I want to have a successful career. I want to build a good life. Uh, I wanna, uh, I always worked hard. Um, so, but it was, it was, like, I wasn't dreaming, like, no, I wanna be the worst, I don't know, whatever ranking, that just, that's not.

• 22:31Patrick Bet-David?

  That wasn't you.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:32Patrick Bet-David?

  So, you, you, I don't know if you read the book Accidental Millionaire. Uh, uh, it was a book written about, uh, Apple, uh, about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It was, I think it's a former employee that wrote, it's a little bit of a disgruntled guy that was saying bad things about him. Uh, there's a different copy of it, if you go to Accidental Millionaire and you put Apple, just go to images, you'll see which one it is. Apple, that's the one right there. Um, then they wrote a book called The Accidental Bill, yeah, if you notice, it's only got eleven reviews. This came out in eighty-seven, it's actually a very good book, for somebody in the space. Lee Butcher was actually a very good book I read. Then the book came out called An Accidental Billionaire. And that was written, I think, about, uh, uh, Mark Zuckerberg, who, you know, he became a billionaire. And you, you, I don't know what they call it, what's a hundred is what, centi?

• 23:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Is a hecta is ten?

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Centi.

• 23:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Centi, right? So, acci, so you're an accidental centi billionaire?

• 23:22Speaker 00

  I'm not sure, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure I'm centi, to be honest. Um, I think the Forbes estimates are a bit off, they, they're too high.

• 23:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, uh, but yeah, um, kind of accidental, yeah.

• 23:33Patrick Bet-David?

  And how did it happen? When you, cause I know the story, when you sold your property, if you wanna share that story, when you sold the property?

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:39Patrick Bet-David?

  And you bought all Bitcoin, what got you to the point of saying, I have to, I have to be able to get into Bitcoin?

• 23:45Speaker 00

  I started learning about Bitcoin in 2013, right? And at the time, I was like, what, thirty-six, thirty-seven? And then I was like, okay, this is this is the future technology. This is bigger than the Internet. And when the Internet was happening, I was too young. So I was at thirty-six, thirty-seven-ish. I wasn't gonna let this opportunity pass by. So I said, look, I just gotta get involved in this in this in this new technology field. I don't know what I'm gonna do first. I don't know what I'm gonna do yet, but I'm gonna buy Bitcoins first. So I sold my house, sold my apartment and bought Bitcoin. So that was like pretty clear to me. That was a very long-term conviction.

• 24:25Patrick Bet-David?

  What did you say? Is this a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar apartment?

• 24:27Speaker 00

  Yes, this is a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar apartment.

• 24:29Patrick Bet-David?

  And when you bought it at the time, what was the average price of Bitcoin?

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Average price I got in was about six hundred. I bought it. I got payments in installments, right? So I bought it at eight hundred, six hundred, four hundred. So we've averaged twelve.

• 24:40Patrick Bet-David?

  So if we do six, we do nine-hundred-thousand divided by six-hundred times eighty-one-thousand, you're looking at a hundred and twenty-one million dollars, give or take.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Something, yeah, just, yeah, about a hundred million.

• 24:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Selling a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar apartment turned into a hundred and twenty-one million dollars?

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:57Patrick Bet-David?

  The average person listening to this thinks that's crazy. But what made you say this is what I'm gonna be doing? That's a pretty bold decision to make. That's a big risk to make.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Well, number one is I saw the clear future of the technology. I don't know what it's gonna be like exactly, but I know it's gonna grow.

• 25:13Patrick Bet-David?

  What made you say that? What made you? Is it a paper? Is it a white paper you read? Is it someone's paper you read or?

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Back then, there was much less materials about it. There was white paper that I read. There was a forum called BitcoinTalk.org that I spent a lot of time on. And then going to conferences, meeting, meeting the people, the community, made a huge difference. And also doing the first transaction with Bitcoin, when you install your own Bitcoin wallet and you realize, oh, wait a second, this, this is a network. I can send money to anyone, a full control. There's no bank involved. There's no, no other fees involved. It's instantaneous. So once you realize that, it's like this is a technology for the future. Not only did I just sell the apartment. Actually quit my job to look for a new job in this industry, right? So most people will say like, no, those two combined are pretty high risk.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  But I think as I, no, as I, as I detailed in the book, risk is, uh, risk is not based on the action. Uh, it's based on your individual circumstance. For me, my risk tolerances at the time was high because I know I can, I can get a job. If like Bitcoin went to zero, I can get a job in a bank.

• 26:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Hmm, got it.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  I can, I can get, I can get a job on Wall Street again.

• 26:21Patrick Bet-David?

  That confidence came from what? You're just pure skill set and knowledge?

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I like, no, by the time I, I, I learned about Bitcoin in two thousand thirteen, it, it didn't two thousand, it didn't two thousand one, two thousand five, I was working Bloomberg in, in New York. Um, and so I was being entrepreneurship for eight years afterwards. I thought my, you know, experience and everything else have increased, uh, my value should have increased.

• 26:41Patrick Bet-David?

  At the time when you sold your apartment and you quit your job, how much did you have in liquid cash? Uh, did you have some money or?

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Not very much because I put most of my cash into the company that was like, that, that was, uh, working before and the rest, the cash was in the apartment.

• 26:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Less than a half a million bucks?

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Oh, way less, uh, actually probably much less. Uh, the, the apartment money was pretty much all I had.

• 27:00Patrick Bet-David?

  The reason why I say this is it's not like that was a, you made the decision because you had a couple million dollars in a bank from a previous exit.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 27:07Patrick Bet-David?

  You're not rich at this time.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  No, no, no, yeah.

• 27:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so.

• 27:09Patrick Bet-David?

  That's a, that's a risky decision, right? But you trusted your ability on the way to work and the skill set that you had and the knowledge that you had.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I didn't need the nine hundred thousand to maintain my lifestyle.

• 27:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  I, I can work for income that will maintain, maintain my life.

• 27:24Patrick Bet-David?

  And you're a minimalist even at that time.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wouldn't call myself a minimalist, I'm just pretty basic, right? So, um, I wouldn't like, you know, if you look at my table, it's got all kind of camera gadgets. I wouldn't like minimal, like very clean. That's, that's how I like think of minimalist. I'm just a normal, basic guy.

• 27:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it, okay.

• 27:42Speaker 00

  I don't do anything fancy.

• 27:43Patrick Bet-David?

  So when you found out Bitcoin, was it like a three o'clock in the morning aha moment? You're calling your friend, wake up, John, I gotta tell you something, we're gonna do something special. Did you have a, did you have a moment like that or was it gradual?

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Uh, well, a friend told me, uh, a friend, uh, Ron Tao told me about Bitcoin, uh, over a poker game. Uh, it was a very friendly poker game and then, um. Afterwards, I spoke to another friend who uh who's his name is Bobby Lee. Uh he was just about to join.

• 28:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Bobby Lee?

• 28:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was just about to join BTC China, which is at the time.

• 28:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Not the comedian Bobby Lee?

• 28:16Speaker 00

  No, a different, different.

• 28:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay. When I think about Bobby Lee, all I think about is Bobby.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Not this guy, not this guy, yeah, yeah. Uh but yeah, so um there was a couple of friends who were like who were around me. Uh they were getting pretty serious into Bitcoin. I was like, okay, let me let me learn about this a little bit more, yeah.

• 28:34Patrick Bet-David?

  And so from there, is it, you know, inviting friends over? Guys, we're gonna go do this, we're gonna go do that? Or no, it was more, I gotta go find a company to work for?

• 28:44Speaker 00

  At the time, uh uh first, I spoke to a bunch of guys. Uh we tried to do a few different businesses, like so like basically like let's do this and that. We we I talked to a couple of friends in Taiwan who used to work for TSMC, the Taiwan semiconductor.

• 28:59Patrick Bet-David?

  Manufacturer?

• 28:59Speaker 00

  Manufacturer, yeah.

• 29:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Right.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Basically, all the Nvidia chips, all the AI chips, eighty percent of the world's chips are manufactured there. Uh we wanted to do a Bitcoin mining chip uh or a mining machine, uh but that didn't materialize. Uh it involves a lot of logistics, which are not my specialty.

• 29:14Patrick Bet-David?

  How close did you guys get to executing that?

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Uh not very close. We discussed business concepts. We had like ma- maybe even a business plan, but we didn't pull the trigger. Um I did a couple like robot, like uh uh Bitcoin ATM machines. I actually sold a couple uh and but that also didn't um grow. Um and then I said, okay, well, instead of trying to do a startup, let me try to work for a company first. And I bumped into a few guys at Blockchain Info, uh and then I joined them for a few months.

• 29:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Big company, small company, startup?

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Very small company. I jo- I joined as a third person there.

• 29:49Patrick Bet-David?

  And who would have, were they players? The other two guys, were they players in the Bitcoin space?

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Uh well, the founder, the yeah, yeah, the founder is a twenty year old kid who wrote a website that attracted twenty million uh uh users.

• 30:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow, at the time, he was twenty?

• 30:05Speaker 00

  At the time, he was twenty one, twenty two, yeah.

• 30:07Patrick Bet-David?

  And how old were you at the time?

• 30:08Speaker 00

  I was like thirty, I was thirty six, thirty seven.

• 30:11Patrick Bet-David?

  So thirty six, thirty seven year old goes, works for a twenty Build a website with twenty million users.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  Uh, well, he already built the website. I was just helping him, really. Uh, yeah, so I, uh, yeah, so, uh.

• 30:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you go in as an equity position player or no? Just a, uh, a regular person?

• 30:27Speaker 00

  No, I joined without much equity. Uh, I was, I ha- I have an earn out for, to earn the equity, but I didn't stay there long. Uh, I only sta- I didn't stay more than a year, so I didn't have.

• 30:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Did he end up becoming a major player? Like, is he a known guy in Bitcoin today?

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Uh, no.

• 30:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Become very successful or?

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Uh, no, he, um, his name is Ben Reeves. Uh, he's the founder of the company, but he sold his shares later on. Uh, um, for a few, at least a few million, uh, probably double-digit millions. And, but then he, he's a very low-key introvert. So, uh, he, he stayed out of sight. Yeah.

• 30:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. Ben Reeves?

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:59Patrick Bet-David?

  Is that part of blockchain.com or?

• 31:01Speaker 00

  They, I think they later, they later renamed to blockchain.com. Um, yeah, uh, this page doesn't talk about Ben Reeves. But Ben Reeves, Ben Reeves is a fund- is a, is a, is a true founder. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So.

• 31:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Benjamin Reeves, Peter Smith and Benjamin Reeves. Got it. So what did you learn from what he did? So now you're working there. What, what did Ben do? Cause you're not there for too long.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:20Patrick Bet-David?

  How, how long were you there?

• 31:21Speaker 00

  I was there for eight months.

• 31:23Patrick Bet-David?

  And during that eight months, was it an accelerated learning curve of finding out everything with Bitcoin?

• 31:29Speaker 00

  I, I learned a lot, actually. Uh, number one is, um, the community is very dynamic. Um, so this guy, Ben Reeves, uh, he, his only marketing was based on one thread. On Bitcoin Talk.org, which is a bulletin for, uh, like a virtual bulletin, uh, form.

• 31:43Patrick Bet-David?

  That's what brought twenty million people?

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then, um, and then, um, also, uh, blockchain info at the time didn't have a company. Uh, they don't use bank accounts. They don't have an office. They pay everybody in, in Bitcoin. They pay all the, you know, uh, when we grew to like eighteen people, we just, the company just paid every month, send some Bitcoin to all the employees. And it's up to them to how, how they handle that Bitcoin, those Bitcoins. They didn't have an office. Um, uh, they didn't even have a company back then. Uh, so it's just like eighteen people working together. Well, and they're still growing. So I learned a lot of different stuff, uh, about blockchain or about crypto during that time. Yeah.

• 32:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So the whole, I, did your idea of not having a headquarters kind of come from the experience here that you don't need it?

• 32:26Speaker 00

  That definitely contributed to, to, like, when, early on in Binance, I said, look, um, we don't need a headquarters. Uh, we, uh, we can pay everybody in crypto. Yeah.

• 32:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So then from there, eight months later, what do you do next?

• 32:40Speaker 00

  I actually joined a Bitcoin exchange in China, OKCOIN at the time. And then I learned a bit about like how exchanges operate. Exchanges are actually much closer to what I know best. I've been dealing with trading systems quite a lot. So, yeah, so actually He Yi hired me into OKCOIN, yeah.

• 33:02Patrick Bet-David?

  So that's OKX, and then how long were you there with them?

• 33:05Speaker 00

  I was there also just under a year.

• 33:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Under a year?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, yeah.

• 33:09Patrick Bet-David?

  So this turned into a big company. They got 5,000 plus employees. This is San Jose Cali. How big of a company is this?

• 33:15Speaker 00

  I think they're about 2,000 to 3,000 people, maybe 5,000, I don't know. I haven't, but they're, they're still around. They're, they're a decent size exchange. They're probably about, I would imagine like about 10 times smaller than Binance.

• 33:30Patrick Bet-David?

  10 times smaller than Binance? Yeah, even Coinbase, I saw the numbers, even Coinbase is what, a third of your size?

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Depending on how you calculate, by trading volume, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're much, much less than, than that. But by Bitcoin reserves, they're probably about a, I actually don't know the numbers off the top of my head anymore. By Bitcoin reserves, they start, Coinbase has a, has a decent Bitcoin reserves. They started early.

• 33:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So from, from that company you go to from China, how much longer after that do you start Binance?

• 34:01Speaker 00

  So I left that company, that took, took me another, I left that company in 2015. And it was two years later, in 2017, I launched Binance.

• 34:10Patrick Bet-David?

  So at this point, when you're leaving and you're working at these different companies, what, what is? Are you sitting there saying, I'm eventually gonna start something? I'm eventually gonna start something? Or that's not even on your mind right now?

• 34:22Speaker 00

  So in 2015, I said, look, I'm gonna do my own startup, right? So I, and I actually wanted to do a Bitcoin exchange, basically very similar to what Binance is. But then the team I assembled, we only had tech guys, and we don't have a marketing team, we don't have a, and I wanted to do the Bitcoin exchange in Japan. And none of us speak, spoke Japanese. So we, I tried to raise money from VC investors, and they said like, no, there's no way you can do this Bitcoin exchange thing. But you can provide the technology for Bitcoin exchanges. So we pivoted to a technology company, providing exchange systems to other exchanges. And we did that for two years. And then it was 2017, we said, well, there might be a chance that we can pivot to running a Bitcoin exchange ourselves.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  So 2015, we tried to do, we tried to do a Bitcoin exchange, but we were not quite ready.

• 35:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Pre seventeen, are you a known player in the crypto world and the Bitcoin world?

• 35:14Speaker 00

  I think I had a bit of a reputation by two thousand, uh, twenty seventeen because back then.

• 35:20Patrick Bet-David?

  What would people say about you? Who was CZ pre-starting Binance? Like if somebody came up like right now, we talk about Ben Reeves.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:27Patrick Bet-David?

  If somebody said, hey CZ in twenty seventeen pre-Binance, what would they say about CZ?

• 35:31Speaker 00

  They would probably say like CZ is a technology guy, um, uh, been involved in the crypto industry relatively early. Um, and, um, uh, worked, you know, been a, probably, you know, a senior position in a wallet company, senior position in a, in, in exchange company and then build a, build his own business as a technology, exchange service systems, technology company. Um, that's probably what people would say, yeah.

• 35:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, and so from there, now you have a reputation. Are you at a point that if you start something, people want to work with you?

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Uh, generally, yes. Yes.

• 36:02Patrick Bet-David?

  So now you start Binance.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:04Patrick Bet-David?

  When you start Binance, what, what were some of the big early meetings you guys had? Like, if, do you, is, do you, you know, you think about the meeting that everybody has seen with Jack Ma, when he's doing Alibaba and he's there with, you know, five, six, seven guys. I'm sure you've seen this video. It's not black and white, but it's old video where you can tell it's not a... Uh, did, did you have a meeting like that where you said, guys, here's what we're building?

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, we, we, we had a meeting like that. Um, we said, look, we're gonna, uh, let's build this thing called a crypto, crypto exchange, right? Uh, and, uh, put the guys into a room and says, this is what we're gonna, what we're, what we're gonna build. And I told him, look, uh, I've been, for the last, I don't know, seventeen years in my career, I've always been working on exchange systems and now I think this is the time to build it. If I don't do this, uh, I'm gonna keep thinking about this for the rest of my life, right? So, uh, if I don't do, do this today, I might try again two years, five years, ten years later. So it's something that we'll have to do sooner or later. And now might, might, might just be the right time to give it a shot. Uh, none of the other, uh, people objected. Everyone's like, yeah, let's, let's go.

• 37:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Was everybody in?

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Everybody was like.

• 37:09Patrick Bet-David?

  So nobody's like, I don't know, CZ, whether you're gonna be able to pull this off? Nobody doubted you?

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Uh, on my team, nobody doubted. Everyone was just, okay, um, sounds good. Let's go for it. And, uh, but when I tried to, when I tried to raise money from VCs, no one's, no one invested. Like, everyone's like, no, no, the exchange space is too crowded. Um, there's too many exchanges out there already. You can't do it. So that's the VC investors. And then we did an ICO, initial coin offer.

• 37:36Patrick Bet-David?

  I saw that.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  Uh, and then everyone wants to buy the ICO.

• 37:39Patrick Bet-David?

  This is the fifteen million dollars or something?

• 37:41Speaker 00

  This is the fifteen million dollar ICO. It was like, so it was like, it was like a stark contrast. So.

• 37:47Patrick Bet-David?

  And it's fifteen million dollars. I, I, I, am I correct when I say it gave forty one hundred X return?

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, uh, yeah, pretty much, yeah, yeah, so.

• 37:57Patrick Bet-David?

  So if somebody would have put a dollar, it's worth forty three hundred. If somebody would have put a thousand dollars into it, forty one hundred X would be what? Forty thousand, four hundred thousand, four point one million dollars?

• 38:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Just from a thousand dollars?

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even more, like, depending on, on a B and B and price, price at different times. Yeah, yeah. But it was, but at the time was just crazy because we had a white paper and people were, were willing to give us fifteen million dollars for about half of the total supply of the coins.

• 38:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Did anybody give money that was a player where you're like, oh, wow, that guy's willing to give us money? Was there any players that got in?

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Who were some of the big names?

• 38:36Speaker 00

  Uh, well, they're all crypto guys, right? So, um, this guy, this guy, he, his name is Sheng Bo. Uh, he runs, um, uh, what's his company name? Evictus? Uh, that, he, he, he did a couple of different companies, I think.

• 38:47Patrick Bet-David?

  China or Japan?

• 38:50Speaker 00

  He was in China at the time.

• 38:51Patrick Bet-David?

  He was in China, okay, got it.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  And, um, so he, when I, when I, when I asked him, he just told me, he just told me that, no, uh, CZ, I'll give you this much money. This is before he read the paper. He, this is before he read anything. He just said, oh, CZ, you're gonna do a project, I'm gonna support you. I think he sent me. I want to say like a hundred ETH. And the time was, I don't know, I forgot the price. But you know, he gave me like a couple hundred thousand dollars.

• 39:21Patrick Bet-David?

  That's pretty wild. So, so you, people have your back. People are believing what you're going to be doing. They're sitting there, you know, they're, they're believers of what CZ is going to be doing. At what point was it when you're like, guys, this thing's off to the races? We built something special. When did that happen?

• 39:35Speaker 00

  I think it was about a month after launch. So we launched in July 14th, 2017. A month after launch, we were like, we were growing.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  The first three weeks, the BNB price was actually underwater, was below the ICO price. That was like high pressure period. And then about a month late, a, a, but a week, the, the next week, BNB price went 29X. Right? This is like 29, 2900 times.

• 39:59Patrick Bet-David?

  In one month?

• 40:00Speaker 00

  2900% in, in one week.

• 40:02Patrick Bet-David?

  In one week?

• 40:03Speaker 00

  In one, in, in, in the fourth week. And then that's when I, okay, this thing might work if it stays. And also are, we, we looked at our user growth on the platform. The users were growing like this. So there were real users with real trading. And then it was about, I, I forgot. It was like maybe two months, three months in, I asked our finance, like, you know, how are we doing financially? The guy said, well, we're making a couple hundred Bitcoins. Like, like I thought that number was wrong. I was like, there's no way we're making that kind of fees.

• 40:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Couple hundred Bitcoins?

• 40:32Speaker 00

  But back then Bitcoins were maybe like $3,000. It was not like $100,000 today. Well, not, not like 70, 80,000 dollars today.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  But like, but yeah, it was like a couple hundred Bitcoins on, on, on, on, on revenue. I was like, there's no way that's correct. And so we double checked the numbers. We're like, okay, then we got this correct. But then we got a, we probably got a viable business.

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• 43:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow, 200 Bitcoins a day?

• 43:22Speaker 00

  No, not a day, like over a period of time.

• 43:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Over that few weeks that you're talking about?

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Over like maybe one or two months, I don't, yeah.

• 43:29Patrick Bet-David?

  And you know, in your mind, that's a lot at that point, like things are starting to pick up for us. Six hundred thousand dollars, right? 200 Bitcoins at 300, at 3,000 dollars. Am I saying it correctly? 600,000 dollars, yeah.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:40Patrick Bet-David?

  I think so. So things started growing. And then how long did it take you guys until you got the billion dollar valuation?

• 43:46Speaker 00

  I took, so we, I don't know when the valuations, but we're probably one, we are one of the fastest companies to reach 1 billion dollars in profits. I think that took about a year.

• 43:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Profits took one year?

• 43:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Not rev?

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Not rev, not rev. So it's profits, uh, yeah. Well, at the time, profits and rev is pretty similar.

• 44:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Because your margins are so...

• 44:06Speaker 00

  Uh, because our team is small, uh, our cost is low, um, at that time, our team is very small. And, uh, so, yeah, so that's when, yeah, that's about a year, a year, yeah.

• 44:16Patrick Bet-David?

  So at that time, who are the major, who are the top five biggest players in crypto Bitcoin in 2017, 2018?

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was a Polonex, which was the biggest, and then later on, B-Track's become the biggest by the time we launched. Um, who else? Uh, Coinbase was up there, but not the biggest. Um, there was a BitFlyer in Japan, who was like, you know, pretty big, uh, the biggest, uh, for a while. Um, a Bitfinex was, was the biggest for a while too. Uh, who else? Like those were kind of like the three or four players.

• 44:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So a billion dollars in profits. Did you yet sense that you're making enemies? Or no, everybody is good with you guys, you're not getting weird phone calls, people are not upset at you, other people are not experiencing envy? Or did you start experiencing enemies?

• 45:00Speaker 00

  Uh, we started experiencing jealousy even from day one, uh, even before, like just from day one we launched. Um, people were like, people were like competitors, other exchanges were somewhat hostile. Uh, but that's just competition, right? So that's just business competition.

• 45:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Nothing dirty?

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Some of them are a little bit borderline, right? So there's a lot of smear articles that are sponsored by our competitors, which is great for us, which is great for us because we're a new platform. We couldn't afford the advertising money and they were talking about us.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that has been like, you know, attacks, what we call FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt, basically false news, even from day one. But that's, I thought that was just business competition. The regulatory scrutiny came much later. The regulatory scrutiny came like 2020, like three, four years later.

• 45:50Patrick Bet-David?

  The year one, where you're going zero to billion in profits and you guys are getting, oh my God, we got 200 Bitcoins. What are you talking about? That, what does your schedule look like year one?

• 46:00Speaker 00

  Oh, that was, the year one was crazy.

• 46:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Give me the schedule. What does it look like? What are you doing?

• 46:04Speaker 00

  I basically will go home to sleep from like 2 AM to about 6 AM. Like that's returning home and leaving home, right? So that's shower and sleep in between. And then I will probably take a nap in the office like around 2 to 3 PM, somewhere around there, like depending on who's in, what meetings we have. And the team probably did the same, very similar stuff for like basically a year.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  The whole team was in the office the whole time. The office is very high, like very loud. It's just buzzing with energy. It's just people yelling over each other. It's like a flea market. So yeah, that was like the first year. And it was just constant issues, constant, constant stuff happening.

• 46:45Patrick Bet-David?

  You miss that?

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Actually, some of, some part of me do.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  There's a, there's a feeling that people really miss. It's like fighting with, fighting the trenches with your comrades, with your teammates. That, that's a very rewarding feeling. It's a very strong social connection. But honestly, I don't think my body can handle it now, right?

• 47:08Patrick Bet-David?

  When you tell the story and you go through a phase like that, the average person, they won't believe it when you tell them the story.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Most people cannot imagine how hard we work.

• 47:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Were you ever hospitalized for anxiety, for exhaustion? Were you ever experiencing like dehydration? Where you had to go and, you know, get yourself IV?

• 47:23Speaker 00

  No, I have not, but other people on our team have.

• 47:26Patrick Bet-David?

  On your team?

• 47:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Other people on our team. So I, like, I tell people like entrepreneurship is a physical demanding activity. It's not just mental, it's a physically demanding activity. Our CTO still use eye drops from today. From those days, he got an eye infection. He had to use eye drops. He still uses that.

• 47:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Till today.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  Till today.

• 47:46Patrick Bet-David?

  So he's still there?

• 47:47Speaker 00

  He's still, he's no longer CTO now. He, but he's still there. He's one of the co-founders.

• 47:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Who, the original people that were there? Is it fair to say they're all financially successful beyond the wildest imagination?

• 47:57Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 47:57Patrick Bet-David?

  They all are successful, they're all, and you guys are all friends still. You guys have relationships together. That's a beautiful thing about building something like that.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  And eighty percent of them, eighty, eighty percent of the co-founders still with the company. I'm actually one of the person that stepped back.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  And, yeah, and also even the people who left were friends. So my co-founders made money. So there's a saying like in the Chinese, especially in the Chinese communities that, you know, I have been a pretty good leader that, you know, I treated my people well.

• 48:25Patrick Bet-David?

  That's good. And, and by the way, would you consider yourself Chinese? Like if somebody asks you nationality, would you say I'm Chinese?

• 48:32Speaker 00

  No, I think I'm definitely like so. I'm ethnicity wise, I'm Chinese, right? By blood, but my thinking, my way of doing business, my mental process is much, much more Canadian, US even.

• 48:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Canadian, US.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, like I think my, I think my English accent is more US centric, even though like may not be perfect. But the way I think and I do business is much more US capitalist.

• 48:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Western ideology.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  Western ideology, freedom, freedom driven, et cetera. Yeah.

• 49:02Patrick Bet-David?

  So let's go back to Binance. So you're at a billion, you're starting to get some articles being written about you. You're getting some enemies coming to you. At this point, has Sam Bankman-Fried started anything or nothing yet?

• 49:14Speaker 00

  No, no, no. He started way later. He started two thousand, earliest I met him was January two thousand nineteen.

• 49:20Patrick Bet-David?

  So, so you start seventeen, you don't meet him till nineteen?

• 49:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:24Patrick Bet-David?

  And does he have a name in the market? Like, do people know who he is or nothing yet?

• 49:27Speaker 00

  No, when I met him, I didn't know who he was. Our, our client, our client manager tells me Alameda was a pretty decent trader or a pretty big trader on Binance. Like, okay, who's Alameda? Okay, I'll go shake his hand.

• 49:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. And that was, Alameda was him?

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay. Okay, so in the market now by twenty twenty, who is, who is Binance by twenty twenty?

• 49:50Speaker 00

  By 2020, Binance, well, by 2020, Binance has been the biggest crypto exchange for more than three years. So people just view Binance as the largest crypto exchange.

• 50:00Patrick Bet-David?

  But at that point, back to back to back, you're the king kong of the space.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  I wouldn't say king kong. Well, we have the largest, or Binance was the largest centralized exchange. But there's like decentralized, there's blockchains, there's other things, the stable coins, there's other businesses in the ecosystem.

• 50:15Patrick Bet-David?

  The criticism that some people give is, and I wonder, of course, this is a strategy, when it's the zero fee strategy that you had. How did you guys, what was your thinking behind that? What prompted you to say, we're not going to charge a fee, here's how our approach is going to be, and, you know, the market's going to react to it? How did that idea come about?

• 50:35Speaker 00

  I think it's a very simple business idea where you want to put, you want to provide, you know, a large amount of value and you only want to realize a small portion of it. So you want to provide a value of 10, and hopefully only, only take five for yourself. If you can do that consistently, people will do a lot of business with you. The people, your customers will come to you and you will grow quickly.

• 50:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Why didn't others do it? If it's such a simple thing, why didn't, why didn't the other guys do it?

• 50:59Speaker 00

  I think a lot of people have in their heads that they want to maximize their cut on each transaction. What you want to do is actually you want to minimize your cap, cut on each transaction and you want to increase the number of transactions. So you, you multiply the, the, the scale. Many people just don't, can't handle it. Many people just want to, like, you know, I want to take the maximum that's possible, that's, that's harsh. But if, but for example, if you, if you look at some of the largest businesses, Google, Google makes fees on advertising, but they provide a lot of free infrastructure in, in the internet space. The time clock that we use is probably synced by, with a Google time server, and that's completely free. The DNS services that, you know, is completely, completely free. So they provide a lot of infrastructure to run the internet completely

• 51:42Speaker 00

  free. They just make money from advertising, like from some ads. And now the ads is coverage is more, a spread across different products. But for years, they only advertised on search, like Gmail was no ads, Google Maps was no ads, for years, right? So, but they were able to make enough money to sustain themselves. We had the same, we were in a very lucky, for the same fortunate problem, a situation where Our revenues from a small amount of business, from a few businesses, were able to sustain us to provide more free services to everyone. So we can grow the industry, we can grow the crypto industry. And so if you can, if you provide a value of 10 and you charge only two and you can sustain yourself and you can scale, your business will grow really fast.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  So many people don't realize that you actually want to charge the minimum fee that you, minimum cut until you are sustainable. And hopefully you can scale. If you can do that, you'll make way more money than you charge eight or nine.

• 52:38Patrick Bet-David?

  So where's the real money made with Binance?

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Trading fees, actually.

• 52:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Trading fees?

• 52:42Speaker 00

  Just trading fees. Like when people trade, we charge a small commission or Binance charges a small commission. That's, yeah.

• 52:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Comparable to others, how much lower are you compared to others?

• 52:53Speaker 00

  I think compared to some, especially some of the US players, we're probably 20x lower. So.

• 52:58Patrick Bet-David?

  20x lower?

• 52:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So in some places. So, yeah, so we like, we provide, we provide the, we provide the lowest fees in the non-US markets. We don't have access to, like, that fee, we don't have access to the US markets yet. Yeah.

• 53:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So 20 times less than competitors. So that got the world to come to you. So then you have volume. Did other people try to replicate that model as well?

• 53:28Speaker 00

  People do. People, people try, yeah.

• 53:30Patrick Bet-David?

  To make it a zero fee, like a very low fee?

• 53:32Speaker 00

  People try. People even try to recompensate, like, pay users to trade on them. People try all kind of different models.

• 53:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Has anybody succeeded as wildly as you guys did coming out?

• 53:45Speaker 00

  No, I would say no. This, fees is important. Fees is one part. There's other parts like, no, how you protect users, how good is customer service? How well you do things overall, how good is your technology? There's multiple things in play, but fees is important, I think.

• 54:02Patrick Bet-David?

  So can you give me some numbers? Because when I, when I look at the numbers that I pulled up with what you guys have done, some of these numbers are, are wild when you look at the stats. So lifetime trading volume, 125 trillion dollars. Total users, registered users globally, 280 to 300 million registered users. At peak, you held 70% of market share during zero fee promotions. Closest competitor, buy bid, only 8% of market share. Revenue estimate, 16 billion to 20 billion in 2024, 2025, 20, 2 and a half times Coinbase. I mean, I can go through a lot of these numbers. It's insane what some of the things at peak promotions, eighty-five percent of total weekly volume was zero fee.

• 54:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Market share skyrocketed from fifty to seventy percent when you announced the zero fee Bitcoin trading on July of twenty twenty-two. Some of these numbers are staggering. At what point were you? When did the company's valuation hit a hundred billion?

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Oh, actually, I don't even know what I I'm not sure if that happened yet.

• 55:05Patrick Bet-David?

  What was the biggest milestone you guys celebrated? What was something where you even you were shocked by it?

• 55:10Speaker 00

  I think we, well, Binance generally count this number of users. That's probably the easiest milestone. Trading volume is pretty easy to count as well. Valuation, Binance is a private company. I don't think Binance has ever done a deal had a raise or had a.

• 55:26Patrick Bet-David?

  The numbers you will hear about is a hundred to three hundred billion dollars. But to you, it's a private company, so you don't even know what it's worth.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  There's no transaction at those valuations. So those are estimates by third parties, but the company has never raised money at those valuations. So, yeah, but the thing we, for me personally, as a shareholder, not not not running the company anymore, I just I just look at the user numbers. I just said, look, then they put they they publish that publicly. So, you know, three hundred million, three hundred fifteen million, those are good numbers to to to serve to service you.

• 55:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Pretty wild.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  To to service users.

• 55:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Where do you think it can go in the future? I know you're not running it. What do you think it can turn into?

• 56:02Speaker 00

  I think, well, the CEO He Yi just announced that the target is three billion.

• 56:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Users?

• 56:07Speaker 00

  Users, so the next target, but I don't I don't think that's the ultimate target. That's just the next target.

• 56:12Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you think would be the ultimate target?

• 56:14Speaker 00

  I think, well, everybody on the planet should use money and that's that's humans. And then there are AI agents. And that's going to be all of us should be should have thousands, each person should have thousands of AI agents. So in the future, we may count humans plus agents. I don't know.

• 56:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Each of us should have thousands of AI agents?

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Working for us, yeah.

• 56:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Working for us?

• 56:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, so, you know, they can edit this podcast video for you, they can buy your coffee, they can, I don't know, book your trips, hotels, flights, yeah.

• 56:44Patrick Bet-David?

  You just fired fifteen people here, Cece. These are nice people here. You're talking to them.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  No, no, they're they're they're going to use their agents to do the work for them and then they're going to you're going to have more podcasts.

• 56:53Patrick Bet-David?

  So if you have five thousand employees, not you, but you're the majority chef, Binance has five thousand employees today in a hundred-plus countries, how many AI agents do you guys have?

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Actually, I don't know how many agents they use. One number I just heard very recently is, this just came from anecdotal conversation. I think, I, I think, I heard they pay like ten million, ten million dollars per month on AI fees.

• 57:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Per month?

• 57:19Speaker 00

  Per month.

• 57:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Binance is paying ten million dollars a month in AI fees?

• 57:22Speaker 00

  It's just like, you know, tokens, AI tokens. That's what I heard. I, I have, I, this is what I heard, like a second, third hand information. I didn't verify it.

• 57:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Very interesting. And what do they use that to, what do they do with that?

• 57:32Speaker 00

  I don't know for sure, but I would, I would suspect, I would think that is probably a majority on developer, like coding. And I don't know if they use cloud code or some other AI code, probably just coding is a big part. Customer support is a big part because customer support is also language interactions. Yeah, I think those probably are the bigger two. I, I do encourage them to like, you know, use more AI for risk monitoring, risk control, compliance. All of those areas can use AI, but I'm not sure if the models are very mature.

• 58:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Yet?

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Yet, in those areas. I don't think there's a lot of training, a lot of data, etc.

• 58:10Patrick Bet-David?

  What, what do you think maturity looks like in five to 10 years? Like, you, you know, when language learning model, ChatGPT came out like this, life changed for everybody. Teachers didn't know how to react. Universities like, wait a minute, this is a perfect paper. What are these spaces for? Who wrote this paper, right? Everything was a disruption, right? What is life gonna look like where companies in five, 10 years have tens of thousands of AI agents? What do you think is gonna happen?

• 58:34Speaker 00

  I think we're gonna see a lot more, a lot of, a lot more faster progress. And so I always believe that technology is a tool that increases productivity and that leads to faster, faster progress of our civilization. Hopefully, we don't get overrun by AI, you know, that become sovereign, etc. But I think before that, we're gonna see a, a, a, like a dramatic increase in the, in productivity and progress. So we should be able to discover drugs much quicker, cure diseases. We should be able to discover new materials that are lighter and harder and stronger and we can go explore space. We should solve many of the problems we can't solve today. Both economics and, you know, I think we'll just progress faster.

• 59:19Speaker 00

  We can build, we can build applications much faster. We can write software much faster already. So we, we, we are seeing much better apps, much more apps. So yeah, so I think our productivity is just going to increase.

• 59:32Patrick Bet-David?

  What, what, when you do a SWOT analysis and you're talking about, you know, AI and AI agents, what's the T, what's the threat long term with AI?

• 59:40Speaker 00

  Well, obviously, if AI becomes like, no, self-conscious and they want to compete or, or they don't even, they don't even, they don't even have to compete with us. If they just pursue a goal that we guys in the way and they just want to, you know, move us aside, then that's the risk, right? So we just need to figure out how to build AI safely, which is difficult, I think, because of the competition right now.

• 1:00:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, how do you do that? Because if, if we, if we as a society run as a higher regulated environment where maybe China's not running in a high regulated environment and they kind of lose control of the AI, what could happen if some people get a little too aggressive? Will there be, you know, a moment where there'll be world AI regulation that everybody will deal with?

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  I have a, I have a slightly, I'm not sure if regulation is the cure. I think it's one of the solutions that will help. I think the industry itself has to self-regulate, well, self-regulate. I think by the time regulators figure out what's going on, the problems already occur.

• 1:00:41Patrick Bet-David?

  That's right.

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  Right, so.

• 1:00:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Their speed is too slow.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Regulators are always reactive, right? So they, they, they see a problem, then they try to fix it and they're very, they're very slow. They, whereas the interest, industry players, they, they're, they're competing. This is, this is a multi-hundred billion dollar company is competing for business, right? China, US, maybe other countries as well. They have significant drivers to push, push progress to the max. So, but at the same time, I, long term, I do hope the positive forces will win. So it could be like you have a bad AI, then you have to make a good AI to combat it, potentially. Who knows?

• 1:01:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So to you're gonna have the bad AIs, which will naturally happen, the evil, the villain, the enemy, and it will produce more good to take over the bad and fight against it.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  I think so. I think in any industry, there's always gonna be some players that are unethical, bad. There's always gonna be a few bad apples.

• 1:01:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  But by and large, I think the our society overall, we are around because we are overly, we have more positive forces. So that's, that's, I have a pretty optimistic view on humans, our civilization.

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• 1:02:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you remember that conversation between Jack Ma and Elon Musk, where Jack Ma is like, you know, humans, you know, AI can't do anything that we're doing, and they're kind of, do you remember that exchange between the two of them?

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Rob, can you find that? It's a short clip between two of them. Is this the one, Jack Ma, humans or computers are smarter? Yeah, maybe start a little bit. Let's just see how quickly it gets into Elon Musk. Let's, let's see if we can get any of it. Press play when, go ahead.

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

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• 1:05:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Is there a reaction from Jack Ma to Elon? See if there's a part where he reacts.

• 1:05:50Speaker 04

  So we used to think, like, for example, being good at chess was an example of a smart human. I mean, right now, your cellphone could crush the world champion at chess, literally.

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  My view is that computer may be clever, but human being are much smarter.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely not.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  Clever is very academic, is knowledge driven. Smarter is experience driven.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Computer is clever, but it's human being. We invented the computer.

• 1:06:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, if you can pause it right there, who do you agree with?

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  I'm not too sure, to be honest. I don't take binary views on this type of things. I take a more gradient, balanced view. I think there's somewhere, there's multiple aspects to it. I think as we will see...

• 1:06:43Patrick Bet-David?

  This is a tough spot to be in, because Jack Ma, you know, where he's at and Elon. I'm actually curious your thoughts on this.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  I think we will see increasing intelligence capabilities from AI, right? They can solve more and more problems and they can compute. The computational power is going to increase. They can do more and more complex things. I'm not sure about the emotional or what do you call it? The human, the sympathy, what? The sort of, what do you call, emotional aspects of it. I think AI so far is not sentient. They don't have consciousness. They're probably not sympathetic to a lot of the human emotions, etc. They may be able to, we may even be able to mimic that. AI may even be able to mimic that, but I don't think they come, they're the true human feelings. And I think humans can use AI with this increased intelligence.

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  Humans are very adaptable, right? So also, based on business success. Business success doesn't come from intelligence alone, right? Smarter people don't build large businesses. There's a lot of fairness, ethicalness, EQ, a lot of other things that...

• 1:07:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Interesting.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  Right, so just being smart doesn't mean you be you have you have more money.

• 1:07:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Right.

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  That's just doesn't it it the word doesn't work.

• 1:07:59Patrick Bet-David?

  So the point there is just because AI is smarter than human doesn't mean their EQ and empathy is gonna help them retain people. So somebody may argue that and say they don't need people, they don't need to have EQ because they're talking to other AI agents that. You don't need to tell them how amazing they are, you don't need to ask them how their wife and husband and kids are doing. Cause they don't need that validation, so makes drama a little bit easier, you don't lose efficiency because somebody's in a bad mood because you didn't give them a. High five that morning, so that argument may be made against humans, no?

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  It can be, it it certainly can be, uh so AI may be more efficient, uh and less dramatic and less troublesome to manage, etc. So, uh that is possible, but I don't think they replace humans uh in in that.

• 1:08:41Patrick Bet-David?

  You don't think so?

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  I don't think so in the short term, uh and I also think that uh we will find we'll we'll find the proper safety guardrails.

• 1:08:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Against it.

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  Uh against it, so uh there might be some no accidents, there might be some damages, there might be some problems, but I think over the over the long run, we will find the guardrails.

• 1:08:57Patrick Bet-David?

  So future looks bright in your eyes?

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  I think so, I I I'm I'm always.

• 1:09:00Patrick Bet-David?

  I like I like it, by the way, if you were twenty years, if the the the thirty five year old uh uh CZ. Who was working crazy hours those twelve, you know, the twelve months that you guys went zero to billion in profits. If he's the thirty five year old today, in today's market, what industry are you entering, what are you doing, how are you? You know, what software are you using, what technology are you using, what would you get into today?

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  Well, I think for me, I would still get into the same same industry, I think you gotta, you can't just chase every hot industry, you have to you have to do what you do best. Or you have to do what you're good at, what interests you and what's valuable for others, you gotta find the intersection of those three things. And those three things doesn't change overnight, um for a young person, you know, you can learn about blockchain or you can learn about AI, I both are good. Um so I wouldn't change what I what I would do, uh but I would change the way I would I would do it a little bit, I would be I would be much more focused. Uh much less distractions and not just with hindsight, right, you will know like, okay, you got I I can be so much more focused instead of getting. Distracting me a lot of different places, etc.

• 1:10:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So Internet was first, blockchain was second, AI is third. What do you think is going to be fourth?

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  I don't know. That's very hard to predict. Like, for example, before ChatGPT came out, you know, like Alpha Zero, Alpha Go was there, right? That wasn't a big industry. But then ChatGPT came, that was suddenly, okay, all this AI thing is happening. But before that, you know, Sam may know, but I didn't know. So I have to wait for it to happen to see what's next. And what's next is probably going to be another, I don't know, another 10 years away.

• 1:10:36Patrick Bet-David?

  You think the next is going to be another 10 years away?

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  No, I don't know for sure. I'm just saying that roughly, right? I don't know for sure.

• 1:10:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Because at any point, we could wake up and something new is, you know, like, wait a minute, what is the quantum, you know, computing? And, you know, it's going to take this long to build it, and all of a sudden, what if they do it faster? Could that turn into, so who knows what's going to be taking place?

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  It could happen tomorrow. So, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, true, it can happen. So it's a safer answer to say it could happen tomorrow. But so let's go back to Binance. We're talking about SBF when the conversation came up, Sam Altman freed with FTX. So at one point, you guys did have a relationship together, right? The two of you?

• 1:11:15Speaker 00

  Well, we had an investment into FTX. So there was a business.

• 1:11:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Was there ever a relationship or no?

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  No, I wouldn't, well, we met each other, we had each other's contact. And, but I wouldn't call it a very close relationship. I probably talked to him less than 10 times in total.

• 1:11:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you guys ever break bread, just the two of you?

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  We had, we had, yeah, we had some, we had one meal together.

• 1:11:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Just the two of you?

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  Just the two of us.

• 1:11:38Patrick Bet-David?

  What was that like?

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  This is when he was seeking investment from Binance, right? So, and we just chatted, no, we're just trying to get to know each other a little bit better, etc. We had one meal together, just the two of us.

• 1:11:51Patrick Bet-David?

  When you walked away, what was the feeling you got from him?

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  The feeling I got is he was very high EQ.

• 1:11:57Patrick Bet-David?

  High EQ?

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's very.

• 1:11:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Really?

• 1:11:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he knows what to say, to, he knows to, this is the impression I got for him. He knows what to say, when to say it, in front of whom, in what circumstances, he will say the right stuff. He was very respectful to me. He was saying all the right stuff, like, we're going to collaborate, we're going to build this, we're going to help to grow the crypto industry, we're going to solve, we're going to help the regulatory evolution. He was saying all the right stuff, that, you know, yeah.

• 1:12:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you walk away saying, I like this guy, I trust this guy, sounds like a good player?

• 1:12:31Speaker 00

  We were, actually, after that meal, we actually declined to invest. I think that was in summer 2019.

• 1:12:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Where was it at? Were you guys in the States?

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  Actually, I forgot. It was somewhere in Asia, I think.

• 1:12:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 1:12:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, I think Singapore somewhere, but we actually turned, like, he wanted the investment from us, we actually turned it down. And then he came back in November to our CFO at the time, Wei, and he made a much improved offer, and then we invested, yeah.

• 1:13:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Why did you take the meeting the first time he came? Was he already a player? Was he somebody that was a known guy?

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  At that time, he was one of the larger traders, he was a VIP trader. Alameda was a VIP trader on Binance.

• 1:13:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it.

• 1:13:17Speaker 00

  So, like, the VIP manager's like, well, I'll give him a meeting, right? I usually don't meet with VIPs, but he has a specific proposal where he wants to build a future exchange, he wants to build FTX, he wants us to invest.

• 1:13:27Patrick Bet-David?

  And this is where you guys put $2 billion into it?

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, we're putting much less money into it. I think we, if I'm mistaken, not mistaken, we probably put a couple hundred, well, no, sorry, a couple million dollars into it.

• 1:13:41Patrick Bet-David?

  This is way early on?

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  This is early on.

• 1:13:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  I think we got close to $2 billion out of the deal when we exited at the time. And then we held them in FTT tokens, part of it was in FTT tokens, which went to zero now.

• 1:13:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, and that's why they're suing Binance, right? I think 1.76 billion or whatever the number is, right?

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  There is an ongoing litigation, so.

• 1:14:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Between them, though, you're not involved in that litigation?

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  I'm not too sure. I don't think I'm.

• 1:14:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, but you haven't gone to court, so.

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  My lawyers are handling it, I actually, but my lawyers did advise me not to talk about ongoing litigations, yeah.

• 1:14:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, if I remember correctly, your tweet or the decision was one of the reasons a lot of people said that caused them to go out, because you came out and you said, "We're out, we're not doing anything." You were speaking to Sorkin, if I'm not mistaken, in a, right, from, you got on, Aaron Sorkin, you guys are on MSNBC or CNBC, and then you said, "No, I don't feel good about it." You made some comments, "We're out," and then from there, everybody said, "If CZ doesn't feel good about it, there may be something going on here." The crypto billionaire who helped expose SPF's insolvency calls him "one of the greatest fraudsters in history" and accuses media and thought leaders of being manipulated. It's a pretty strong words right there. Who said that, by the way, Rob? Is that the...

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  I don't think those were my exact words.

• 1:15:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Can you go a little bit lower on Fortune? Uh, meltdown. SPF is one of the greatest fraudsters in history. He is a master manipulator when it comes down to media and key opinion leaders. He wrote in a tweet, SPF perpetuated a narrative painting, "Me and other people as bad guys." It was critical in maintaining the fantasy that he was a hero.

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  Can you click on that Tuesday tweet link to see if... I don't think I would call him that. I don't think I said all of those words.

• 1:15:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Good for you that you know whether you said that or not.

• 1:15:40Speaker 00

  It's just, it's just not, not...

• 1:15:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Why would Fortune write something like that? Go, right there, keep going lower, Rob? "It's critical maintaining that SPF is one of the greatest fraudsters in history." Oh, there it is. That's the tweet. "He's a master manipulator when it comes down to media and key opinion leaders." Is that your Twitter account or no?

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  That looks, okay, this is the actual Twitter page, right? Okay, that, okay, that does look, okay, that doesn't look like it.

• 1:16:05Patrick Bet-David?

  So you don't, you don't, you don't remember it? You were pissed off that day?

• 1:16:09Speaker 00

  I normally would not use that kind of language, so that was a...

• 1:16:12Patrick Bet-David?

  That was pretty strong, so...

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  That was strong, that was strong.

• 1:16:14Patrick Bet-David?

  What, what got you to the point of saying something like that about him?

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  Uh, okay, I think, can you scroll back on top of that tweet a little bit more? Uh, because it would be good to get some context here. I think this is probably a tweet I was responding to accusations of, uh... Yeah, so this is a list of wrong narratives I've seen recently.

• 1:16:33Patrick Bet-David?

  So a list of wrong narratives I've seen recently. One, CZ wants to be the savior of crypto. Crypto doesn't need saving, crypto is fine. So FTX was killed by XYZ. No, FTX killed themselves because they stole billions of dollars of user funds, period. SPF has good intentions, but just made mistakes. Lying is never good intentions. Go a little bit lower, Rob. CZ's tweet destroyed FTX. No healthy business can be destroyed by a tweet. However, there was a tweet that may have, Caroline's tweet 16 minutes after mine on November 6th shows data that it was real cause for people to dump FTX. Caroline said, "But if you're looking to minimize the market impact on FTT sales, Alameda will happily buy it all from you at $22." Go a little bit lower, Rob. She gave her floor price away.

• 1:17:15Patrick Bet-David?

  SPF perpetuated a narrative painting me as other people. It was critical maintaining the fantasy that he was a hero. SPF is one of the greatest fraudsters. Okay, so that's where you said that.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  Ah, okay, okay, okay.

• 1:17:26Patrick Bet-David?

  All right.

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah. So, yeah, I guess that was pretty strong language. I normally would not say that, but, uh...

• 1:17:34Patrick Bet-David?

  You don't remember this.

• 1:17:35Speaker 00

  Well, I don't remember the whole thread, right? So, like, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of details in that thread. It's not like one, one, one single message.

• 1:17:44Patrick Bet-David?

  And this is 2022, so it's not like ChatGPT wrote that tweet. That's you writing that tweet.

• 1:17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this, this, this account is operated by me. So, yeah.

• 1:17:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 1:17:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so, well, why, why such aggressive language towards him?

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  I think at the time, I guess a lot of people were saying that, you know, my tweet somehow killed FTX, right? Which I said, "Look, that's not, that's not true." As I said here, like a tweet...

• 1:18:09Patrick Bet-David?

  I actually really like the answer. Tweet cannot destroy great business.

• 1:18:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so I think there was a sequence of events here, right? So there was a CoinDesk reporting, and then there was, that was on, like, early November, November 3rd or something?

• 1:18:25Speaker 00

  And then our finance people ask me like CZ, like we still have hold the FTT tokens. Should we sell? So I write a tweet. I said, yes, we should sell. And then our finance team moved the tokens on the blockchain. And then people saw it and people were asking questions. And then our finance team says, maybe you want to put a tweet out there saying like, look, you want to clarify that we're we're selling. So yeah, so this is a tweet that, you know, I wrote. We said, and I said, we're going to sell our FTT tokens. And this is the place where we got them and people can track it on the blockchain. I said, we're going to sell them over many months, right? We're going to sell them slowly, not to have market impact. So and many people blame me for causing the FTT.

• 1:19:07Patrick Bet-David?

  You don't think you had any influence over it? Your voice carries a lot of weight, especially at that time.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, but this also, I think my weight, my voice carries weight. But also there's a balance between being transparent and just do this quietly. Like we just sell our FTT tokens quietly without letting the market know.

• 1:19:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, I actually really know. I like the approach you took. Okay, here's what we're doing. It's being honest with the market. Your customers are seeing what you're doing. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have a negative impact on FTX.

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  It probably does have some market impact. But again, I think many people have tried to sell BNB tokens, which is our token. Which is the token that, you know, we're building. But again, if anyone's selling can kill, can kill, can kill your business. You don't have a business, really, right?

• 1:19:52Patrick Bet-David?

  No, that's a good point. So now let me ask you. So this makes me think about something else. So at that time, reports came out. One report said that he gave 40 million to the Democratic Party. Then another report said he gave 70 million. Then a federal prosecutor came out and said, it was 100 million dollars that he gave up to a bunch of different people. By the way, on both sides of the aisle, so it wasn't like it was only one side. Were you, yeah, right, the federal prosecutor's ledger that Sam Bankman Fried used over 100 million dollars and stolen FTX customers to make political donations ahead of 2022 midterm elections? Were you doing anything like this at the time yourself?

• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  No, we couldn't donate. We're like, no, we're, I'm not a US citizen. So political donations are not possible for me. Right.

• 1:20:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Political donation. So so did anybody from the Biden administration come up to you and say, hey, if you give this much money, we'll let this go. Did you? Did you get anybody knocking on your door? Saying, can you support our political campaign by sending some Bitcoin, by sending some this?

• 1:20:51Speaker 00

  Uh, not that I'm not that I know. Uh, I don't think that I have. I don't know any of that.

• 1:20:56Patrick Bet-David?

  You don't know any of that.

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  Didn't happen with me.

• 1:20:59Patrick Bet-David?

  Didn't happen with you?

• 1:21:00Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:21:00Patrick Bet-David?

  So you don't remember a phone call? You don't remember an email or a text or anybody coming to you?

• 1:21:04Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, no one asked. No one asked us for donations.

• 1:21:07Patrick Bet-David?

  So.

• 1:21:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you? Do you sit in the back of your mind? And because right afterwards, how much after this did the government start knocking on your door to start saying, hey, we noticed Binance is doing X, Y, Z? How soon after this did they come after you?

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  Uh, I I think this, I think was like the timing wise is very coincidental. Uh, right. So, uh, but yeah, I mean, we were outside of the US. I didn't make a trip to what to Washington DC at all. Uh, Sam Bankman was making all those trips. So no one asked us to even donate. We're also foreign. I'm I'm not a US citizen. I'm a Canadian. Right? So, um, um, yeah, so we didn't get asked, uh, but I think that's definitely. I don't know if they need correlation, but you definitely, the timing is coincidental. Uh, we got a lot more scrutiny. Uh, from the US ICC, from the other US agencies on us.

• 1:21:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Of course, you just took away one of their biggest, he was the biggest guy giving money to them. You just took that money away. You're not gonna making friends by doing that.

• 1:22:04Speaker 00

  Again, I don't think I took them away. Um, his business crashed.

• 1:22:07Patrick Bet-David?

  I get what you're saying. No, but in their eyes, they don't look at it that way. In their eyes is what are you doing? This guy's giving us money. It's knock out, you know, knock it off. And so they probably immediately wanted to target you because you put their biggest backer out. So you're not, you're not making friends with the Democratic Party.

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, well, this happened end of 2022. By early 2023, uh, uh, uh, BUSD, but what we call the Binance USD, the stablecoin was shut down. Uh, and then June, I think, US ICC sued Binance, Binance US, myself.

• 1:22:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Twenty-three.

• 1:22:38Speaker 00

  Twenty-three. So six months after this.

• 1:22:40Patrick Bet-David?

  So six. So then there you go. So then that makes sense. So so six months after this, they come after you and they come after Binance.

• 1:22:48Speaker 00

  Pretty much, yeah.

• 1:22:49Patrick Bet-David?

  And and this was around the hundred thousand, what is it, the the transactions with Hamas, with Hezbollah, with, you know, with, who is it, Al Qaeda? No, I'm sorry, ISIS? Is that is that what caused it?

• 1:23:01Speaker 00

  I actually don't even know what those transactions are, but yeah, there was there was negative articles about those things.

• 1:23:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, because there was something that I think I saw Chief Compliance Officer saying in an email threat that, hey, these guys are making such little transactions, they can't even afford to buy an AK-47, something like that. Uh, in an email exchange with a compliance office. They showed the picture. It's public right now. So it's not like I'm reading anything that's not public.

• 1:23:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Patrick Bet-David?

  So at when they when they first approached you, at what point did you know this is real? Because I'm sure when you're big, like, you know, we're we're we run small. I've been running an insurance company for 20 years. We get lawsuit stuff that comes up and like, okay, yeah, we have, let's call this. But sometimes you get something like this is serious. When did you know this was serious?

• 1:23:44Speaker 00

  Early 2023. So I think it was January, February 2023. My legal team says, look, the DOJ wants to, the DOJ has a case and they're pretty serious and they want to they they want to they want to get to it. Well, they want to get to a deal. So that's 2023 was when the negotiation.

• 1:24:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Garland.

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  This is Garland. This is under Garland. Yeah.

• 1:24:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, this is Garland. And so he is his team is reaching out to your team.

• 1:24:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think he like people like probably three or four levels below him.

• 1:24:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Did they at all reach out to you in 2022?

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  I think there were some communications with the with the with with our teams in 2022. But I think the my involvement with the US DOJ negotiations started kind of in 2023.

• 1:24:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so and then, you know, so when that comes in, you're starting to see their team, you know, three, four layers down, they're coming to you. Is it CZ? Man, this is this is urgent, man. We got this could be very nasty, very ugly. At this point, is it getting is it public already? Is the entire market reacting to it? Is the market writing about it or not yet?

• 1:24:49Speaker 00

  Not yet. It was most of the negotiations were done privately. The market didn't know about it. And yeah, it was done privately.

• 1:24:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you do you feel the negotiation? With them and your legal team was fair, did you feel that there was some animosity? Did you feel some things that was unfair? How did you process it when their team was working with you?

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  Fair or not, I think is very subjective, right? So on the receiving end, you always feel a bit unfair. But they were extremely aggressive. And the comment I heard most from my lawyers were like, no, they've never seen a case where a government takes a BSA, Banking Secrecy Act violation this aggressively. Yeah, so.

• 1:25:32Patrick Bet-David?

  And what was it about? What was the main premise of the case?

• 1:25:36Speaker 00

  At the beginning, my personal thought is, well, they said, well, Binance violated the BSA Act, which I don't dispute, right? We had US users in the first two years of our operations when we started in Asia. It were like a technology platform. So that part is fine, you know? They really tried to say, look, Binance facilitated terrorist financing or facilitated, actively facilitated illicit transactions. Binance never does that. I never does that. I never do that. It's not, it's not my business. It's not, it's not in my interest. I'm not here, I don't even facilitate good transactions myself. It doesn't scale, right? So I don't handle like, no, VIP one wants to do that on a $10 million buy, I handle it myself. We have a platform that people use.

• 1:26:20Speaker 00

  So, so those allegations were, I think, was quite extremely unreasonable. And to some extent, I think they were just hostile towards crypto and we are the largest player in crypto. Yeah.

• 1:26:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So facilitating was the issue. And I think if I saw the number, it was $8 billion is what they said, the total number was. And if we say $8 billion, 8 billion on 135, 125 trillion dollars of money being moved, 8 billion may sound like a lot of money, but 8 billion on 125 is not a lot of money. It's not like it's going to impact your revenue in a major way. So, you know, one could speculate and say, all right, they were targeting. That shouldn't have happened because, you know, whenever you're dealing with Hamas and Hezbollah and, you know, whatever, Al Qaeda and ISIS, you probably shouldn't be looking the other way and compliance should look at it. Did you, did you eventually after that create some controls that now triggers when something like that happens?

• 1:27:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Like, will you be able to tell or can somebody still be able to create transactions without you guys catching it?

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• 1:29:48Speaker 00

  Well, I think I'm no longer running by this anymore. But I think they have a very, very strong compliance program. The compliance program is probably stronger than any bank in the world. The thing is, though, as strong as that is, no compliance program can be 100%, right? So compliance programs rely on third-party tools like, you know, chain analysis, elliptic, to do the blockchain analysis to detect the transactions. And sometimes they're slow. Sometimes, like, you know, when you call them today, when the transaction is happening, they say it's not a problem. And then 10 days later, when that address interacts with other addresses, then the label that address is bad, right? So you can be slow. You can be like a days later that, you know, the label.

• 1:30:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Banks deal with this all the time. Chase deals with this all the time as well. So no matter how good of a compliance you create, you're going to go through it.

• 1:30:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So, so as you said, like, no, there's no way to block it 100%. But if you look at the percentages of what we call bad or illicit transactions, it's much lower in crypto. In crypto, like, I think chain analysis is own report. Chain analysis is a third-party blockchain analyst compliance tool that all the US agencies use, right? So they own reports that only 0.41% of the transactions in crypto may be illicit. Whereas in traditional finance, like, you know, this 2 to 5%. So this is like two orders of magnitude difference, right? So, yeah, so the percentage of transactions in crypto are much, much less in terms of illicit transactions. Yeah.

• 1:31:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, and then, and I saw this. That's very good to know because the market, to be able to say on what some of the banking are doing, you guys are more secure than them. I'm sure it also brought more highlight on getting compliance tighter, but.

• 1:31:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Garland comes out in a press conference and he's bragging about the fact that you're paying the biggest corporate fee or fine for 4.3 billion dollars and then you think the company paid 4.3 and I think you paid 50 million or so and then you did four months where you went away, right? This whole thing. Rob, do you have that clip of Merrick Garland when he's announcing this? Did you ever meet Merrick Garland or no? You guys have never had any interaction?

• 1:31:54Speaker 00

  No, never.

• 1:31:54Patrick Bet-David?

  So you're not in texting mode? You guys don't text each other?

• 1:31:56Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:31:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah. Yeah, it was interesting when he did this to brag about it. So when this is going on, is it having a negative impact on Binance's business itself?

• 1:32:07Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:32:07Patrick Bet-David?

  It is?

• 1:32:08Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 1:32:08Patrick Bet-David?

  So you're seeing customers going away to a different place when this is going on?

• 1:32:12Speaker 00

  For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay. And how big was the impact?

• 1:32:16Speaker 00

  I would say, well, Binance is hard to measure, but we, Binance lost most of the banking rails, both globally and Binance US losses, all the banking rails in the US. So Binance US actually became a crypto to crypto only business. It doesn't have US dollars.

• 1:32:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Put that to numbers, like the audience knows. How much revenue did you lose? How much dollars business was lost?

• 1:32:39Speaker 00

  Binance US lost probably 99% of the revenue.

• 1:32:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Ninety? And how much is that? How much is that revenue?

• 1:32:43Speaker 00

  I think, well, I don't know. I don't have the revenue numbers off the top of my head. Binance US raised around in 2021 at a 4.5 billion valuation. They probably lost 99% of that value at one point.

• 1:32:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow. Okay. So it was a real impact to the company?

• 1:33:00Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. This is real dollars.

• 1:33:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. And so, you know, and so when that happens, Rob, do you have the part when he says it? Or no? Because it's like a, you know, it's a, you know, when he, the way he says it, you can tell he is celebrating that he hurt somebody. He's celebrating that he hurt somebody. But you're saying in, because earlier on the podcast when we started, I asked you about living in America versus living in UAE. You said, if I, if you ask me this in 2022, no, US wasn't a place to live. Now, the last 18 months, America is a much better place to live than it was, you know, a few years ago, three years ago. Why? Why would you say it's different today than then?

• 1:33:40Speaker 00

  I mean, today, US is pro crypto, and President Trump gave me a pardon. So it's 180 degrees different from like, you know, 2021, 2022. We were, we were like, you know, dealing with negotiations with a very hostile DOJ. And US was clearly, and not just us, right? SEC sued a bunch of other crypto companies. There's probably more than like two dozen lawsuits from SEC. And some of the US, but many of them are US companies too. So, yeah, so the environment is just a very different environment. Yeah, hopefully, like, you know, I think, but to credit the US, you, the US Constitution, I didn't realize this before. I thought like, you know, for the next 20 years, I'm just not going to settle in the US. But here I am.

• 1:34:24Speaker 00

  So the US Constitution baked in a self-correcting mechanism, right? So every four years, there's a, there's a, there's an election. And you can be very wrong for the four years. And then there's a point where people can vote. So, yeah, this amazed me, actually.

• 1:34:37Patrick Bet-David?

  The Constitution here in the States?

• 1:34:39Speaker 00

  The Constitution.

• 1:34:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Interesting.

• 1:34:40Speaker 00

  I think the Constitution of the United States is a very, very strong piece of paper. And that's probably strong, even stronger than the Bitcoin paper.

• 1:34:47Patrick Bet-David?

  That's powerful. So, so then, but, but to get the context of dates right. So when do you go away? When do you get the pardon?

• 1:34:55Speaker 00

  So I, I arrived in US November 21st, 2023. And then I was supposed to be sentenced, going through the court. I was sentenced on April 30th, 2024. I went to, I think, I self-surrendered to prison on May 20, May 30th, 2024. I got out of prison on September 20, September 27th, 2024. So did four months there. And then I think in October 21st, 2025, I got the presidential pardon. So, yeah.

• 1:35:29Patrick Bet-David?

  So a year later.

• 1:35:30Speaker 00

  A year later.

• 1:35:31Patrick Bet-David?

  And what, but what is the big deal about getting a pardon, though? A year later? Like, what does it do? What benefit? You're not a US citizen, you don't live here. Who cares about getting a pardon? Why was that such a big deal?

• 1:35:40Speaker 00

  It's a big deal. It's a big deal. Without a pardon, I'm labeled as a felon. So I have a criminal record, right? And then especially in my industry where we deal with finances, where we get financial licenses, my ability to, what they call the fit and proper as a UBO, ultimate beneficiary owner is significantly impacted. That means I cannot be a shareholder of many of our businesses. And or we will limit our ability to get licenses. This is not just in the US. This is global. And in the US even more. After the pardon, you know, this goes away. It's a full unconditional pardon. And yeah, so the pardon is the big deal. With a pardon, I don't get, we don't get the fines back,

• 1:36:23Speaker 00

  but that's still, it's a big deal that we get our name cleared.

• 1:36:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So it helps you out for licensing and the way US qualifies you, the rest of the world will pay attention to it. So it kind of opens the market up for you that if you choose to get back into business, you can.

• 1:36:39Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 1:36:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay. Can, but you have to step down as the CEO of Binance.

• 1:36:45Speaker 00

  Yes, when I step, yeah, yes, that's true.

• 1:36:48Patrick Bet-David?

  What can you do? What can you not do with Binance?

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  I actually have a legal opinion from my lawyers, but basically my largely my shareholder rights are intact. But now, given the pardon, I believe like I have a lot more freedom, but I still don't run Binance. So yeah, so and also the company still have two monitors on them, etc. So there's still some limitations, but largely I now nowadays, I don't, I don't, I don't, I actually don't really want to run Binance either.

• 1:37:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Could you like if they if after getting the pardon, could you now go back and be the CEO of Binance or you couldn't do it legally?

• 1:37:27Speaker 00

  I think there's still some restrictions around that.

• 1:37:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Is it permanent or is there a time on it?

• 1:37:31Speaker 00

  It's, I actually need to check with the lawyers. Nothing is really permanent in my opinion, but but I believe that there's still some restrictions today.

• 1:37:43Patrick Bet-David?

  So in five years, would it be a, would it be a? Possible thing that we get news that says CZ makes a comeback and is the CEO of Binance. Is there a possibility that that could happen?

• 1:37:55Speaker 00

  A very small possibility. I think even if I-

• 1:37:57Patrick Bet-David?

  You don't have the itch to come back at all.

• 1:37:59Speaker 00

  Even if I could, I prob- like Binance are very strong leaders now. They run the company much better than, you know, than if I were to go back. I view myself as more of a zero to one kind of guy, where from like one to a hundred, there are other people who are-

• 1:38:12Patrick Bet-David?

  To say that, that's not easy to say. Most people don't have the, that's why you're not an ego guy though. For you to be able to say that, the average guy can't say something like that.

• 1:38:19Speaker 00

  I'm not a ego, I'm a normal guy. Like, I'm not, yeah.

• 1:38:22Patrick Bet-David?

  You're not a normal guy, but you know, to say, you know, zero to one, you know, and you're not a one to hundred. Very few founders can say that.

• 1:38:31Speaker 00

  I think it's my personality, right? I like create things, whereas running things, you know, you have to be structured. You have a lot of, you know, there's a lot of structure, a lot of bureaucracy. When I see, like, you know, even, even sometimes I hear about what's happening in Binance and there's bureaucracy, that drive me nuts.

• 1:38:47Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, yeah, I can, I can only imagine that, but it's probably, it's probably got to be also a little bit relieved to not have to make any decisions. You're free. They have to do it, you're free, you're doing your own thing and, you know, they're gonna have to run the company and you still are majority shareholders. So if the company goes to half a trillion, you're, you're, you're gonna be benefiting from it. So that's a good place to be. So, okay, so this happens, you're off. By the way, did you ever meet with the president? Have you and the president ever met or no?

• 1:39:15Speaker 00

  No, the, I saw him in person in Davos where he was on stage and I was in the audience. We didn't, we didn't say hi, we didn't, I didn't get to-

• 1:39:22Patrick Bet-David?

  When year was this?

• 1:39:23Speaker 00

  This is, this is last year. This is Davos last year.

• 1:39:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, this is Davos last year?

• 1:39:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This year, actually, it was in January, right?

• 1:39:29Patrick Bet-David?

  This is the one where Newsom was standing on the side and didn't let him give one of the talks?

• 1:39:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:39:33Patrick Bet-David?

  The controversy there. Did you see Newsom?

• 1:39:36Speaker 00

  No, I didn't, I didn't see Newsom.

• 1:39:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Did any of the Democratic guys approach you and recognize you? Did they come up to you?

• 1:39:42Speaker 00

  No, I, at least they didn't talk, they didn't come and talk to me. I was only there for one day. I was only there for like, you know-

• 1:39:47Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you speak or was it just a networking dinner conversations?

• 1:39:51Speaker 00

  I was there for a dinner and I spoke on stage for, I was on a panel and then, and then I had the Andrew Hawkins interview- With CNBC. So I did those three things. I flew out.

• 1:40:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Is this it? This is Free Man Binance or not? He was a?

• 1:40:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those were the outside. So the sun, the sun, like my glasses.

• 1:40:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Glasses look good on you, buddy. I gotta tell you, you look good with those glasses on.

• 1:40:12Speaker 00

  It's the same glasses.

• 1:40:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Is it? Except that one.

• 1:40:14Speaker 00

  It's the same. In the sun, it turns darker.

• 1:40:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, the dark look is a good look. You got a James Bond looking, you know, look going on there for you. But by the way, you want to play that Merrick Garland clip? I just love the way he says it. Like, he is celebrating your fall, right? Is this it, Rob? I believe so. Okay, go for it.

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  Binance has agreed to plead guilty to willfully violating the Bank Secrecy Act, knowingly failing to register as a money transmitting business.

• 1:40:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Go to the part about the biggest spine. It was a seven-second clip. It's a lot of billions of dollars. No, I wanted to get to the clip. Okay, you don't have the clip. It's okay. We don't have to show it. So he's not a very much liked guy. He did a lot of weird things when he had power and he was one of those guys that wanted to use his power to take down different guys. And if you weren't willing to help them out and you took their biggest donor, I wouldn't be surprised if he got a call from somebody to say, let's target CZ. Not saying the stuff that you guys did, you know, didn't, probably didn't break a couple laws that we have because of the transfers that was taking place. But still, you could tell they were interested in targeting a guy like you.

• 1:41:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:23Patrick Bet-David?

  Till the last minute, they wanted to protect SPF.

• 1:41:27Speaker 00

  Sorry?

• 1:41:27Patrick Bet-David?

  You were gonna say something.

• 1:41:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, no. They even attacked President Trump, right?

• 1:41:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:31Speaker 00

  President Trump got charges, criminal charges for bringing a document to his bathroom.

• 1:41:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, no, they tried it. They tried to, they tried to destroy the president. And the good thing about the market is, like you said, the Constitution. It's interesting for you to say how powerful the Constitution is to go from there to where it's at today. Relationship with Trump, there's a conversation about the fact that you helped them with a technology that they have. What is the relationship with you and the family?

• 1:41:58Speaker 00

  There's basically no relationship. So there's no business relationship. There's no commercial relationship.

• 1:42:05Patrick Bet-David?

  What is that company's name? There's a company name that they talk about, something Liberty, right?

• 1:42:09Speaker 00

  Oh, World Liberty Finance.

• 1:42:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, what's the relationship with you and World Liberty?

• 1:42:12Speaker 00

  We don't have, we don't have any.

• 1:42:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Nothing.

• 1:42:14Speaker 00

  We don't have any relationships. Yeah, I think they, when they said, so World Liberty Finance issues a stablecoin called USD1. And USD1 is deployed on BNB Chain, which is a public blockchain that anyone can deploy a smart contract. The smart contract is open source and BNB Chain's developers publicly give them like a sample code, which is, you know, pretty much publicly available. So that's probably what they were referring to, making up a story saying, and this is nothing to do with Binance, nothing to do with me personally. So we don't have any stake in USD1 or World Liberty Finance. They don't have a stake in us. There were reports about, you know, there was a deal about, you know, giving some equity of Binance or Binance US to get a pardon.

• 1:42:57Speaker 00

  There's no such transactions. They don't own any equity in any of those entities.

• 1:43:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, that's a story that you'll see all over the place. The fact that, hey, this was a back deal, you helped them out. This was their way in exchange for the pardon that you got, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:43:14Patrick Bet-David?

  But let me ask you the next question here. In regards to Satoshi Nakamoto, okay? Article comes out recently. Okay, I don't know if you, I'm sure you saw that. Where it says, Adam Back, is it Adam?

• 1:43:25Speaker 00

  Adam Back, yeah.

• 1:43:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Adam Back. Adam Back is Satoshi Nakamoto. Now, he comes out and he says that's not true. But by the way, people have been saying this about him for 15 years. So it's not like it's a new thing. The typical name is, he's one of them. And then they'll talk about Hal Finney as another one, and there's a couple of the guys. Do you care to know who it is?

• 1:43:42Speaker 00

  I prefer not to know.

• 1:43:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so you're part of the camp that says I prefer not to know?

• 1:43:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's better if we don't know who he is. And he doesn't come back, you know, he doesn't come back and become active again.

• 1:43:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think there's a chance that it's him?

• 1:43:53Speaker 00

  There's always a chance. There's always a chance that it's Hal Finney. I think Hal Finney probably have a higher chance.

• 1:43:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Than Adam Back, really?

• 1:43:59Speaker 00

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:44:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. Hal Finney would make a lot of, will make a lot of sense because he, I think he passed away in 2013 or 2014. Yeah, early, right? And his background matches and he went away, basically, right? So all of that matches what we're seeing.

• 1:44:20Speaker 00

  If it's Adam Back, then he's very good at hiding his trail digitally, which is extremely difficult in today's world. But Adam is a big contributor in the crypto ecosystem. So there's a chance it could be him that he just does a very good job of concealing it. It would be fantastic, but yeah, there could be a few other potential people too.

• 1:44:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Your number one pick is, it could be Hal Finney.

• 1:44:44Speaker 00

  If I were to pick one person, that would be Hal Finney. But it could be a group of people. You could even be software from the future. Who knows?

• 1:44:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I saw you saying that software from the future came back, AI, you know, agent, and kind of wrote the thing to create this forum.

• 1:45:00Patrick Bet-David?

  In regards to Adam Back and Hal Finney, when you hear the stories with who could be behind it, you know, they said it was 10 people that exchanged emails. It's about 10 people that could know it.

• 1:45:13Patrick Bet-David?

  These 10 people, can you imagine getting 10 people that none of them want to go tell the market that they know exactly who it is? You got to respect these 10 people.

• 1:45:22Speaker 00

  I think it was 10 people who have email exchanges with Satoshi, but they don't even know though.

• 1:45:27Patrick Bet-David?

  So even the 10 don't know who it is?

• 1:45:29Speaker 00

  I don't think so.

• 1:45:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Because he used a pseudonym, so nobody would know.

• 1:45:31Speaker 00

  They just receive an email, they can respond, but they never met him. They don't know anything about him.

• 1:45:35Patrick Bet-David?

  You can't like track it, where it's coming from, to see who it is. I mean, you know, so, okay. So you have enough money right now to do a lot of weird things, but you choose not to, right? You don't have Ferraris.

• 1:45:47Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:45:47Patrick Bet-David?

  You don't have Lambos.

• 1:45:48Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:45:48Patrick Bet-David?

  You don't have crazy watches.

• 1:45:50Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:45:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you have crazy art collection?

• 1:45:52Speaker 00

  No, I don't.

• 1:45:52Patrick Bet-David?

  You don't?

• 1:45:53Speaker 00

  I don't.

• 1:45:53Patrick Bet-David?

  So what, is there anything that you'd want to own physically, you know, with the money that you have, that you'd say, I wouldn't mind owning such and such? Is there any interest in anything physical?

• 1:46:04Speaker 00

  I own functional things. I like, no, I like enjoy outdoor sports. I feel like, no, I can still enjoy them for maybe one or two decades, and then I'll get too old. So I might as well enjoy them. Like I like skiing, snowboarding, windsurfing, kite surfing. And just, other than that, just no. I have a very small home gym, like much smaller than this studio, and I just do some weights. And then the rest of the time, I just enjoy hanging out with the family. So I don't have any crazy obsessions. But I do, I'm not, as I said earlier, I'm not a pure minimalist. I spend, I have a bunch of junk in my, in my home, but they're not that expensive.

• 1:46:42Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you drive?

• 1:46:43Speaker 00

  I have a Toyota van. I actually have a Lexus van now.

• 1:46:48Patrick Bet-David?

  You upgraded.

• 1:46:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:49Patrick Bet-David?

  I wish you splurged. You bought a Lexus van?

• 1:46:53Speaker 00

  The Lexus van is a new one. Yeah, this one.

• 1:46:55Patrick Bet-David?

  You drive a Lexus van?

• 1:46:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I usually sit in the back. I'm a driver, so that's another luxury. But this van has a seat that goes flat. That's my requirement for a car. Because I have a back. My back is not so good, so I like to, like, when I, especially on longer trips. If I drive from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, etc., like, for an hour, I like to lay down flat. That's my requirement, but I'm happy with a van. I actually, like, until very recently, I'm never, I don't think I've ever sat in a Lambo yet.

• 1:47:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Stop it.

• 1:47:26Speaker 00

  I don't think I've, I've sat in a Ferrari a couple of times, with my friend's Ferrari.

• 1:47:30Patrick Bet-David?

  You've never sat in a Lambo or Ferrari, a Lambo yet?

• 1:47:32Speaker 00

  I don't think I've ever sat in a Lambo.

• 1:47:33Patrick Bet-David?

  No interest.

• 1:47:35Speaker 00

  My friend, well, another friend of mine has a Porsche. I sit in it. It's like, very uncomfortable. It's like, you gotta, it's, it's just...

• 1:47:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, these crazy people that drive Porsches, right? They've lost their minds.

• 1:47:45Speaker 00

  And they drive super fast. It's scary.

• 1:47:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Who wants to drive fast? Like, who wants, yeah, you got your license suspended, reckless driving.

• 1:47:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Get your act together, right, people?

• 1:47:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's like, for me, I enjoy, even when I enjoy auto sports, like, high surfing, I don't go very fast. I'm scared, like, hitting the water, like, now, really hard. I just chill, right? I'm, I'm here.

• 1:48:02Patrick Bet-David?

  How big is the house you live in?

• 1:48:03Speaker 00

  The house is decent. It's like, I don't know how to convert...

• 1:48:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Twenty thousand square foot house, is it like?

• 1:48:10Speaker 00

  It's about twenty thousand square foot.

• 1:48:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so it's a good house you got. So at least you got a nice house.

• 1:48:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, but the house is like fifteen years old, and the water leaks. In my, in my living room, like, right beside the table, there's like two, like, stains on the floor of the water leak.

• 1:48:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:24Speaker 00

  From the second floor.

• 1:48:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Doesn't bother you?

• 1:48:26Speaker 00

  I would wish that it doesn't leak all the time, but it happens. But it's functional. I got, I got, I got a lot of rooms. I got like eight or nine rooms, so just good for a large family.

• 1:48:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Family, everybody.

• 1:48:37Speaker 00

  But it's not a fancy, like, it's not a fancy house.

• 1:48:39Patrick Bet-David?

  So you, you, you don't sit there and say, hey, you know, like, these guys, I'm gonna go buy one of the last thirty-eight remaining T-Rex skeletons that are going between twenty-five to, that's not you.

• 1:48:49Speaker 00

  No, that's not...

• 1:48:49Patrick Bet-David?

  You're not gonna go buy a copy of the Constitution that is, you know, it's been...

• 1:48:53Speaker 00

  I don't collect art. I don't collect anything. I don't collect stuff. And, like, no, even, yeah, so I don't, yeah, I'm just not a collector. Yeah.

• 1:49:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow. What's the craziest thing you splurged on? Anything?

• 1:49:05Speaker 00

  Not, nothing too crazy. Nothing too cra, yeah. I, yeah, nothing too crazy.

• 1:49:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, wow. Uh, uh, uh, so it's kind of weird because, you know, for, for the average person like, you know what? If I, if I win the lottery, I'm gonna buy this, I'm gonna buy that, I'm gonna buy that.

• 1:49:20Speaker 00

  Oh, I guess, you know, if you ask that, that detailed question, um, I do fly private, right? Which is quite expensive, uh, so, but I, I don't want to go through the airport. I get recognized and then people want to talk to you on the airplane the whole way.

• 1:49:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:33Speaker 00

  Uh, so for the privacy and the se- security, I, I do.

• 1:49:36Patrick Bet-David?

  That's good.

• 1:49:36Speaker 00

  I, I do fly private, so that.

• 1:49:38Patrick Bet-David?

  You fly it or you bought, you bought a jet?

• 1:49:40Speaker 00

  Uh, I had, I think I have a long lead, I actually, my, I have a long lease on a jet or something.

• 1:49:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, got it.

• 1:49:45Speaker 00

  Through a company, yeah.

• 1:49:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, so it, and you've said something where, you know, uh, of, of your wealth at the end, you're gonna give ninety-nine percent of it away.

• 1:49:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Why would you give it away?

• 1:49:54Speaker 00

  I don't think I can spend more than one percent myself, uh, so, uh, and I want to use money for, I think money is, money is a enabler, uh, for you to, well, take care of yourself and then do impactful stuff. I think we get a lot of intrinsic reward when we can do positive stuff for our society. Basically, well, we can, we contributed and then we leave. So I, yeah, so, uh, I think, you know, um, I should try to make the money to, uh, do, to work. It's actually very hard work to.

• 1:50:23Patrick Bet-David?

  Give it away.

• 1:50:24Speaker 00

  To make money, to do positive things, uh, to make the maximum positive impact.

• 1:50:28Patrick Bet-David?

  I read this book on, uh, uh, legacy planning, estate planning. And it said, one of the worst things you can do at the end of your life is give the money to charity because what ends up happening is the charity, you may, you know, the people at the time you may support, but the boards change and the values change and then eventually they could be putting money into causes that you never supported, like Henry Ford started a charity back in the days. And he, because I think in the late thirties, early forties, I think Roosevelt announced that they want to take seventy percent of your estate when you die and, you know, because they needed the money, all the stuff that was going on, so he's like, we gotta make some adjustments. They started a charity.

• 1:51:11Patrick Bet-David?

  And then he goes from three people, him and his, you know, they're making the main decisions. And then he decides to add a board of nine. And then all of a sudden, he starts noticing the money they're putting into it. I never supported stuff like this. We no longer have control over it. So the book's entire premise is never, ever leave your money in the hands of charity. Because when leaders change, the types of people that work for charity typically don't share common values. But it created with a guy like you. So you're gonna have a hard time. You're young right now, so your money is gonna be a lot of money. You're probably by the time you're done, you're gonna be a trillionaire. So where that money's gonna go to? It's a scary thought, giving to charity and they put the money in places you may not agree with.

• 1:51:50Speaker 00

  Actually, I agree with you that I actually hope to give that money away while I'm alive.

• 1:51:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, because you know who they are.

• 1:51:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:51:57Patrick Bet-David?

  That's great. Yeah, I'm with that because maybe building a museum, schools, you know, universities, some things like. Uh, you ever been to, uh, what is that museum in L A off the four or five freeway? The Getty Center? You ever been to the Getty Center?

• 1:52:11Speaker 00

  I think I have been there twenty years ago.

• 1:52:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, me too. I've been there twenty years ago. I've been there. And this guy, J. Paul Getty, when he died, he created the museum that people can go to for free with the most amazing collection there. And I think the dividends or whatever he makes off the money pays for it. So at least that is a cause, right? But unfortunately, if you had a museum, it would be an empty museum because you don't collect things.

• 1:52:33Speaker 00

  No, I don't.

• 1:52:34Patrick Bet-David?

  So if we created a car museum, there would be no cars in it. There'd be a Lexus van in there. They would say, this is C Z's van from Lexus. Last question for you. So you, you, you got all these things and I'm curious to know how you're gonna answer this. You got all these things in the world that people want to know about, you know? You have money to be able to get answers to a question. If you could use your resources to find out one thing that is not public to the world, what would it be?

• 1:53:00Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a, that's an interesting one.

• 1:53:29Speaker 06

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• 1:55:32Speaker 00

  That's that's already known by other people.

• 1:55:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Not known.

• 1:55:35Speaker 00

  Not known.

• 1:55:35Patrick Bet-David?

  But people know, like governments know, societies know, but it's not to the public. Could be assassinations, could be events that took place, could be, you know, you you obviously said earlier you're not interested in knowing Satoshi. You could know anything, one fact, moon, anything, what would it be?

• 1:55:52Speaker 00

  I think I will probably want to know how the golden standard, the go, the nineteen seventy one, when we switch off the gold standard.

• 1:55:59Patrick Bet-David?

  Nixon?

• 1:55:59Speaker 00

  What was, yeah, Nixon, what what happened kind of behind the things there? What was these discussions?

• 1:56:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Out of everything, that's what you would want to know?

• 1:56:06Speaker 00

  Uh, oh, this is a pretty, I've only like had like five seconds to think about.

• 1:56:10Patrick Bet-David?

  That's pretty massive. That's one of the things we talk about a lot.

• 1:56:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, because.

• 1:56:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Why that?

• 1:56:14Speaker 00

  Well, it's very relevant to our industry. I wanna, I wanna know like what were the factors forcing, uh, sort of the decision to move away from the gold standard? I actually kind of know the background, but I kind of wanna know like what were the real discussions? Uh, the background is, you know, uh, gold, uh, no one has enough gold, right? So they wanna move it off and the government can print fiat money. Um, but I wanna know like the sort of what the conversations were, etc., just to get the back, but they like, you know, the the real, like, I wish somebody wrote a book like my book. Like, authentic discussions that happened at the time, yeah.

• 1:56:48Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, it would be, and do you think it was a good move or a bad move? Or a necessary move, like you didn't have a choice?

• 1:56:54Speaker 00

  It's a bit of both, to be honest. I think, um, uh, this person comes for that move, uh, but I think, uh, it just staying on the gold standard probably will limit the economic economic development. I think some quantitative easing, some inflation is okay, is good, is also maybe necessary. But the problem is inflation always goes too high, too quickly. And then, uh, um, so this is a, is a, is a, is a balance. I'm not saying like, you know, zero inflation is the best. Uh, uh, usually when this kind of things first happen, very similar to the, to the sort of trust of foundations or charity that you're talking about. When this thing first start, they always with good intentions. But with time, like, you know, the board changes and the mission moves, and then people get get more greedy, and then it's just poorly managed.

• 1:57:37Speaker 00

  Um, so that's just, that's just human nature, that, you know, things evolve, you, things evolve and often degrade over time. So I don't think it's a bad move at the time particularly, uh, but, uh, it's hard to maintain that over time.

• 1:57:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, like you say, you're limited, right, on how much you can lend? Because the limited supply, so we almost had to get off of it, but once we got off of it. Fiat, what is it backed by a promise?

• 1:58:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:04Patrick Bet-David?

  And this goes at a Peter Schiff arguments, right? This is why gold, this is why gold, this is why gold and.

• 1:58:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, but gold has a lot of limits, right? So like, you know, you don't know whether it's real or not, it's not divisible, it's not transportable.

• 1:58:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Funny, when you handed it to him, he's like, I don't even know if this is real, because I don't know who minted it. Remember when he said that to you? You didn't even trust, I don't even know if this is real gold.

• 1:58:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:24Patrick Bet-David?

  And like, no, I bought, you paid a hundred thirty thousand dollars for it at the time, whatever the price was, forty two hundred dollars.

• 1:58:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:29Patrick Bet-David?

  You're right, so, and by the way, even with Nixon, with the whole China deal at the time, because China was weak.

• 1:58:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:35Patrick Bet-David?

  You know, it was number eight, nine, ten in GDP, and Russia was at the top, and they were worried about USSR and communism or whatever. So let's strengthen these guys. And I look at China now.

• 1:58:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you? Do you go back to China often or no?

• 1:58:50Speaker 00

  Very, like, I haven't been to China for the last seven years or longer.

• 1:58:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Any reason or no reason?

• 1:58:56Speaker 00

  Um, well, China's not, uh, China have not, well, China actually is explicitly said that they don't allow cryptocurrency exchange businesses. Right, so China's banned crypto exchanges. And if I go back, uh, people will know I'm back, people want to have meetings with me, people want to have chats. I don't want to be that seen, I guess, like, you know, promoting.

• 1:59:15Patrick Bet-David?

  You're not worried about safety, like, if you go and they'll keep you there, that's not your concern?

• 1:59:18Speaker 00

  Uh, I'm not sure, to be, to be very frank.

• 1:59:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Probably not a risk worth taking.

• 1:59:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, uh, yeah, so like, look, I, I, I don't try to cause problems for people. I don't try to go where, like, I'm not welcome, potentially, like, I think I'm welcome to go, like, I think, as, as, as, just as a traveler, etc. But people will want, want, want to meet with me, they will want to talk about crypto, they will want me to go on stage, do a talk, and I, I.

• 1:59:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:45Patrick Bet-David?

  You talk to Jack Ma at all or no?

• 1:59:47Speaker 00

  No, I've never talked to Jack Ma. Uh, I talked to other people, very senior at Alibaba, um, yeah, so, but I never talked to Jack Ma.

• 1:59:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Really?

• 1:59:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:56Patrick Bet-David?

  I thought you guys would have talked for sure.

• 1:59:57Speaker 00

  There was a couple, there was a couple of potential chances, you know, he visits, uh, uh, Masayoshi-san in, in Japan. We missed each other by a day. Uh, we, like, finance Japan.

• 2:00:08Patrick Bet-David?

  That'd be an interesting sit-down.

• 2:00:10Speaker 00

  That'd be a very interesting sit-down, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:12Patrick Bet-David?

  If you did an event like in Singapore. You know, uh, uh, and for him to fly out, that would be an interesting. I think the world would show up to entertain that conversation.

• 2:00:23Speaker 00

  For sure, but I think Jack Ma has also became much more low key.

• 2:00:26Patrick Bet-David?

  He has.

• 2:00:27Speaker 00

  So he's.

• 2:00:28Patrick Bet-David?

  What happens when you talk a little bit and you say stuff about the government, they they may silence you.

• 2:00:32Speaker 00

  Uh, for whatever reason, he's not not much more low key, so I don't think he's gonna do too. It seems that he's not doing too many public talks, etc.

• 2:00:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think there was a conversation behind closed doors, hey, you better relax and not criticize us?

• 2:00:44Speaker 00

  Most likely.

• 2:00:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Most likely.

• 2:00:46Speaker 00

  You never know for sure.

• 2:00:47Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, because he was everywhere. There was a time that he was one of the main entrepreneur voices.

• 2:00:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:00:53Patrick Bet-David?

  And his stuff would go viral all the time.

• 2:00:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:00:55Patrick Bet-David?

  And he was a likable guy. He was a guy that you, he had a sense of humor, you know, personality, so.

• 2:01:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:00Patrick Bet-David?

  It's interesting, he's been a little bit quiet. Uh, uh, would would China look at you as they made you in their eyes because you were born there? Is it kind of like, hey, we made you, we taught you our values and principles. Without the way of our living, you wouldn't be where you are right now. Is that kind of how they would view it?

• 2:01:17Speaker 00

  I don't think so. I left at twelve, so.

• 2:01:20Patrick Bet-David?

  You don't think that's the pride? Because the temperament you have is a very good temperament.

• 2:01:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I, well, when people ask me, you know, like, no, uh, do you identify, as you asked, right? Do I identify as Chinese or not? Like ethnicity, I'm definitely Chinese, but like education, culture, like, no. The way you think about, uh, your value system are really built when you're teenager years. So I spent that in Canada. And then after work, I was like mostly outside of China, right? So, uh, most of my work, uh, styles are, uh, uh, thinking is more capitalist, capitalism, um, etc. So my way of doing business is more, much more American than Chinese, I would say. Um, so, um, uh, yeah, so, but I, no, I have many, many Chinese friends.

• 2:02:05Speaker 00

  Um, but, oh, there was also another, like, no, come attack that people tried to attack me with is, uh, because I look Chinese, I'm part of the CCP or anything like that. That's completely false. It's just.

• 2:02:17Patrick Bet-David?

  You're part of the CCP.

• 2:02:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just completely false. Yeah, I've been away from China for thirty something years. Our business couldn't operate in China. I'm a business guy. I'm I'm never political. Uh, yeah, so that's, that's also, yeah, so, um, I don't think China will try to view me as a Chinese business. I think we, we, like, we, we, we, we, we just don't have those touch points.

• 2:02:35Patrick Bet-David?

  But the likelihood of you taking a trip to Chi- China next five to ten years is probably slim to.

• 2:02:40Speaker 00

  I'm open to it.

• 2:02:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, alright.

• 2:02:42Speaker 00

  Like, for example, if I get invited, I will go. But I probably wouldn't go unsolicited.

• 2:02:47Patrick Bet-David?

  So if Xi invited you, say, hey, we would like to have a meeting, you'd go?

• 2:02:50Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, of course. So if anybody that senior invites me, I'll go.

• 2:02:55Patrick Bet-David?

  So then that means your fear isn't a real high fear that you think if you go there, they may not let you leave?

• 2:03:01Speaker 00

  Oh, no, no, I'm not feeling that. But I don't, I visit the countries who are pro crypto. So if China says, look, come in, teach, help us with the crypto regulation, I'd be happy to go.

• 2:03:11Patrick Bet-David?

  And that's why you're in UAE? You feel safe being there because they're pro crypto? That makes you feel safe?

• 2:03:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I feel safe in many countries, but I don't spend time in non-pro crypto countries. Because if they're against crypto, what am I doing there? I'm just a sore in the eye.

• 2:03:23Patrick Bet-David?

  CZ, relationship wise, because I'm trying to see the profile that you have with your personality. Are, do you have close friends who are very, very well-known people in business? You know, who are major influencers, like relationship with Musk, relationship with guys like that? Are they, would you consider some of those guys your friends?

• 2:03:42Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, so I have friends, mentors, coaches. So I view those guys as more of my mentors. So, you know, I have a relationship with Ray Dalio. I met with Larry Fink, both of them wrote quotes for my book. And many, many, many, many guys like that, Masa from, from Japan. So many, many guys like that. Even Eric Schmidt, etc.

• 2:04:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Eric Schmidt's phenomenal.

• 2:04:08Speaker 00

  He is a great guy. And he also, he's a, he knows all the problems, like, he went through all the problems we've faced.

• 2:04:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, he's brilliant. Like, when, when you hear him speak for, you know, if I, if you get two, three hours of content, you're gonna get smarter on what he. Ray is phenomenal, we've had him on as well.

• 2:04:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:22Patrick Bet-David?

  But there's something different about Schmidt, the way he explains, explains operating a business.

• 2:04:29Speaker 00

  Eric is much more on operations of a business, especially like a platform. I think Ray is much more macroeconomics, countries, debts, national bond, bond curves, etc. So he's much more, like, even politics, geopolitics, station, war, money, etc.

• 2:04:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, he made a video, he made like a 25-minute video on YouTube. That's got 40 million views. Rob, can you go to Ray Dalio's YouTube channel?

• 2:04:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's.

• 2:04:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Am I saying it correctly?

• 2:04:56Speaker 00

  It's a great, it's a.

• 2:04:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, it's like, it's very rare to make a video that long that gets that many views.

• 2:05:02Speaker 00

  The cycles?

• 2:05:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, the cycles. Go to videos and then go to most popular. Holy shit, look at that. Well, it's the second one I was talking about. Does that say 297 million views?

• 2:05:13Speaker 00

  Yes, sir.

• 2:05:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, go to the second one. Look at the second one. That's the one everybody should watch. How long is the video? Forty-three minutes? Forty-three minutes. A hundred and sixty-five million views. Principles for Dealing with Changing World Order by Ray Dalio.

• 2:05:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, the book is really good, too.

• 2:05:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, it is.

• 2:05:32Patrick Bet-David?

  We had every one of our executives read Principle when it first came out. Phenomenal book. So, okay, so Ray Dalio,

• 2:05:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Eric Schmidt, and Larry Fink from BlackRock, any relationship with Warren Buffett? Have you guys had interactions or no?

• 2:05:47Speaker 00

  No, zero interactions.

• 2:05:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Zero.

• 2:05:50Speaker 00

  Again, he's not that hot on crypto. I don't, I don't, I don't try to, I actually don't try to go to people who are against crypto, or like anti-crypto, or skeptical about crypto, and try to convince them. I don't, I don't, I don't try to convince people. I go to people who are willing to learn about crypto, who wants to learn, and I go interact with them.

• 2:06:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Makes sense. Makes sense. And then Musk, because you, you put a half a million, a half a billion dollars into Twitter when he was going through acquiring it.

• 2:06:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:13Patrick Bet-David?

  He won the top three, four investors, I think, in Twitter. I think Ellison called him, there's a call that Ellison says, hey, I'll put some money into it, you know, billion dollars, and I think Ellison said, yeah, Elon said, you should put two billion, not a billion. It's like, okay, I'll put two billion dollars into it. It was a funny conversation. So why Musk? Why, why supportive of Musk and what he's doing?

• 2:06:33Speaker 00

  Oh, I think, well, free speech, well, we want to, the book, the title of my book is Freedom of Money, right? So we want to increase the freedom of money, for people all around the world. To do that, you have to have freedom of speech. Right? So, and to have freedom of speech, you have to have freedom from slavery first. You have to have physical freedom first. And then you have freedom of speech, and then you have freedom of information, and then you have freedom of money. So supporting freedom of speech is really important. I think US has very good freedom of speech laws, principles, foundations, etc. And but Twitter, or now X, is the platform that where everyone, quite a lot of the tons, global town square discussions happen.

• 2:07:15Speaker 00

  So I thought, you know, that's a fairly minimal, a meaningful cause for a crypto business to support. Um, yeah, so that's pretty much it, yeah.

• 2:07:23Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, if that doesn't happen, you know, the world's a different place.

• 2:07:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Because Twitter forced everybody else to be more open to opening up. You know, Facebook, YouTube, everybody. If Elon doesn't do what he does, we're, we're in a very different climate today. Very different climate today. People forget how quickly, it was just a few years ago. The President of the United States was suspended from all social media.

• 2:07:47Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 2:07:47Patrick Bet-David?

  How the hell like the, when history books write about this, you know, they're gonna be like, wait, they suspended who? The US President, really? Yes. So, uh, uh, it was a big deal when that took place. So the book, you wanna share with us what some things are gonna be in the book? Are we gonna get some, uh, is there, is there, is your car collection in the book in the middle with pages when you open it up?

• 2:08:09Speaker 00

  No, I don't have a car collection, right? So, yeah, but the book is like a small, small snippets of my life. Uh, and how my perspective, how I saw things, um, over the last, I don't know, over the last forty, fifty years almost. So, uh, it's, it's really honestly how I saw things and how I experienced things. So it's most snippets. I'm not a great writer, so it's a very basic, simple English. Um, and, uh, but it's very authentic, I think. Um, it's what I saw. Um, so I hope people learn about my, myself, my journey, Binance's journey, and also crypto's journey, um, through, through this book, yeah.

• 2:08:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I, you're super likable and you're simple, humble, brilliant, even though you don't, you know, you don't, you don't, uh, uh, you make it seem like anybody can start a company and get to a hundred billion. You're obviously very brilliant for what you've done and to overcome all the fires that have come your way. So we're gonna put the link below for the audience to be able to go support the book, Freedom of Money. And I was telling you before, you know, the story's a crazy story that maybe one day they'll make a movie about you and we'll be sitting in the theater, seeing all the different stories in it. Uh, and if that ever happens, whatever happens, I wanna see the Lexus van in there. I think the Lexus van has to be in there. People have to know, and that'll be a big sponsorship from Lexus. Lexus is gonna get nice product placement, is what they call it, right, in it.

• 2:09:29Patrick Bet-David?

  CZ, appreciate you for coming down here, truly an honor speaking to you. What a great story.

• 2:09:34Speaker 00

  Thank you, Patrick. Thank you for having me. It was a great conversation.

• 2:09:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Anytime, anytime. Thank you.

• 2:09:38Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:09:39Patrick Bet-David?

  You know, this whole thing with Vagtim and PBD Podcast started with a phone me and Mario. That's it. And it grew today to, you know, 15 million subscribers almost and 164 full-time employees. And that relationship, are you watching us and supporting us, wouldn't happen without you. But did you know 51% of you that watch the content are not subscribed to the channel? And it would mean the world to us if you could press that subscribe button and notification. Why? It allows us to grow, hire more, do bigger interviews, have a bigger team and deliver a better product to you. So if you haven't yet, if you don't mind, press that subscribe button. It would mean the world to us. Thank you so much.

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