E138: President of Solana: How Bitcoin and Solana Are the Future of Banking

31:28And how do you settle into a certain median consensus to begin with? And that is, to an extent, that is, religions do that very well. I guess in the business world, we call that marketing and call that being able to create and implant various narratives and create excitement around those narratives. and some of the, I don't pretend, I'm still asking why, some of the things that have occurred to me over time is there are certain aspirational values that are universal, that speak to people across

32:11nationality, religions that are sort of kind of core built into human nature. And one of those is that people want to be a part of something, people want to feel something aspirational. They want to feel a part of something larger than themselves. And that is, I think, inherent in the way that products get branded. I think that's inherent in the way we do things in crypto, quite honestly. Why is it that in crypto you have this open source GitHub repo that's kind of around money, tech, something, and people are so loyal to it really doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it. And so where does that phenomenon come from?

32:51Well, it's because with Bitcoin originally, there is what it represents, which is this greater aspiration around freedom, that you can make something out of yourself, that you have a chance. And anyone has a chance if you're on the internet. That's like at the core of why Bitcoin, I think, attracted so many people. And it's, you know, people have different, there's different constituencies, even the very early days, even the earliest Bitcoin community. But I think that is why it spawned this such a rabid, religious, fanatical, loyal number of people that kind of came into the crypto space, because there's something which is deeply aspirational about that.

33:33So people want to be a part of something aspirational. They want to belong to something. That is a big part of it. But then there's also, I think, a flip side of that, which is that people want to hold to their convictions. And this is where this whole belief that people are rational, I think, totally breaks down. Okay? Because you want to be some part of something aspirational. And you also want to feel good about yourself. No one wants to wake up every day looking in the mirror and be like, I'm wrong. I suck. I'm stupid. I am worthless. And I got it all wrong, right? Very few people are going to look at themselves in the mirror every day and be like, I got it all wrong.

34:17And actually, many people are completely unwilling to have anything close to that experience. So they want like an up only feeling about self. So they want to be about, they want to be part of something which is aspirational and they all want to feel like they're at the top of that wave. So try convincing a lot of people that you just don't get it and you are inherently wrong. It's just not going to work out, you know? And so the only way, once you have a critical mass of people that have sort of median consensus around some idea and some examples of those ideas that are really popular these days are in the US recently, this huge thing about identity politics.

34:58And okay, so what was that? What was or is the aspirational nature of that? Is there a seed of truth in the things that people sort of over articulated in discrimination, racism, historically, even the present day? Of course, there's a seed of truth. But then people sort of feel that if they're part of that movement, they're part of something which is bigger than themselves. I'm helping the downtrodden. Always a big one, right? Helping the underdog. And also there's the safety of consensus that a lot of people around me are validating my belief that this is a noble thing to be working on. And so there is that comfort of the crowd around this noble cause that you have taken on.

35:39And with some seed of truth, but the phenomenon has moved way beyond whatever that seed of truth is. And that is, that's what, once you have that, that inertia is basically just like a, you know, a tethered rock at the bottom, at the bottom of the ocean. And you can try as you will, and I've talked to so many people that have this belief that, well, you, I'm going to stay and stick it out and we're going to, we're going to turn it back. Okay, good luck guys. Right. But because, you know, I think a number of people will look at that type of governance situation and think, now this is the fallacy, it's only a minority of people that vote that way.

36:20And so therefore, if we can move that extreme minority off, then it's easy. You just need to shift, you know, it's only 33 % of Germany that votes with the Green Party. That's only a minority. It's not a minority, guys, because it only takes 10 % of influential folks to completely change the game. And so you're actually over three and a half X of what it takes of the sort of the wrong perspective, if you will. And so you're actually way deep in it. You can't think about it as a minority of people have this view. It is three X as required to have shifted the median into a very sticky place. And that is the fallacy that when people say it's a minority.

37:04I don't see it that way at all. I see it as you've taken the pendulum, you've shifted it permanently to one part of the curve, and it's dangling like this and going to this pendulum thing over here, but you've fundamentally shifted the media, which is also why in a country that has relatively, more recently, relatively free media like the US, it took 50 million people watching Joe Biden at the same time for people to finally admit that the guy is senile. This was already obvious for years, okay? It was already obvious for years because you think that everyone has an experience with a grandparent or something interacting with someone who is in some form of mental and physical decline.

37:48We all know what that looks like and saw it every single day at every press conference, every gaffe, every, you know, limited speech that was made. And it was just so obvious. Falling off the bike, it was like a pretty much daily or weekly occurrence. And yet, people could not say that out in the open until 50 million people saw it at the same time on a debate. And then finally, the overhead window could shift. So after experiencing something like that, how can you say that people are rational? and I would I would add that even if they could say it because they were seeing it at the same time it might not have been enough without Elon without x without kind of more transparency it would be so even right like you can kind of know something you can kind of say a lot but nothing changes right and nothing and it took so much just to at scale admit the obvious that had been obvious for years Okay.

38:52And obvious to so many people in private and just constant flow of data points. So digging into that, it's a really interesting social phenomenon. What does that say? And it also says there's a lot of people who would prefer to avoid that issue because once it has these social norms develop around it, which is you're not supposed to say that. You know, you're not, you're just supposed to, you know, just, it's okay. You can listen to this other very elite status of news and information who is telling you that it's actually okay. And then, so then people would default to that's the more comfortable position to take.

39:32So the part that I think is really interesting to dig into is whether it's that emotional sort of compliance, lack of courage, whatever it might be, where people then really just want to be a part of that narrative because it's just kind of easier to do that. You got so much stuff going on with your life. You don't want to like piss off the people around you. You don't want to get in arguments with your colleagues, your friends, or kind of stick out for having an unusual, unsanctioned opinion. So, you're just kind of like, it's okay, man. Like, I got other things to do. Creates an unpleasant conversation.

40:09So, why do it? And even now, okay, even now, a year later, there's still a part of me that feels like, oh, should I really be talking about this because someone might get mad at me? Even though it's crazy. So I think observing a phenomenon like that in this day and age, in supposedly one of the more free thinking, relatively rational economies, polities, whatever you want to call it in the world, if that's how it is in the US, which is known for best place to do business, right? Most open conversation, most directly communicating market, so on and so forth. If that's actually our relative gold standard, what else is going on?

40:56Everything, okay? Everything everywhere is some form of median targeted status quo inertia. Yeah. And I think there's kind of like a double phenomenon. One is most people don't really want to say things that other people don't like, right? But other thing was a lot of these people who were very Democrat, right? Or pro-Obama. And then they kind of have to admit that on the top of not really wanting to say something. They kind of were wrong all that time, right? And like, who wants to say that I was wrong? Most people don't want to. Yeah, no one wants to say that. I will say I voted the wrong way my entire life.

41:39And I am accountable for that. You know, I didn't look deeply into it. And yes, I also coasted off of social, kind of like the social norms community I kind of grew up in and what my friends were doing and what you're just kind of supposed to do. And it happens to a lot of us. Absolutely. What's the received conventional wisdom that we should challenge in the topic of money? In the topic of money, that money, that we are all somewhat atomistic participants in the market of money. Meaning we are, money is exogenous to all of us. And when in fact, money is a social construct. And the value of money is not the only thing, but the core value of money is that you are willing to accept this thing.

42:34It could be gold. It could be a bill. It could be that you're willing to recognize that gold has value. You're willing to recognize that this one-franc coin is actually worth one-franc. And it is a social construct. And this is why so many people still look at crypto and think that must be a scam because this thing that has no value went up in value. Oftentimes it came down by 99 % after that, to be honest. But a number of people look at this space and think that can't be legitimate because, and they're both right and wrong at the same time, right? They're both right in that these are not sustainable sources of value in a way just because, in my opinion, it's because the social network around that value is not large enough.

43:23if five and a half billion people in the world all of all of all the people on the internet decided that dogecoin is what they wanted to use as their base currency of life then dogecoin would become gold but dogecoin would become the new dollar uh and it doesn't have to do with the inherent anything inherent in doge itself uh it is that everyone has opted in to using that imbuing it with value to accepting it and we could call it integrations. And that is actually what gives that currency value. And so there is a value underwriting that we as users of the dollar have, which is the productive economic value of the United States economy.

44:12That is like a pretty good GDP to be basing yourself off of the productive capabilities of a large, at some points, well-run economy, productive economy, capital markets, labor markets, all that stuff. So that's a good way to underwrite the value. But then there's between the fundamental value of the dollar, how much of the$1 is that fundamental value and how much is the social belief? Well, that is always the question. And so that is now what I think is bleeding that crypto has been doing for a long time, price versus value. And now that is bleeding into financial markets that have always had this understanding of price and value.

44:58There's some multiple that always gets talked about a lot, multiple, which reflects your belief in future growth of that company, that industry, that whatever. But now crypto has expanded the legitimate, the possible relationship between price and value. And the most extreme of that is meme coins that have no value. So you're dividing by zero. And then that is where everything goes into error mode, right? Yeah. So what you're saying, we're recording this podcast from Switzerland. and I'm Swiss. I think most people in most countries trust governments and central banks and all that stuff, right?

45:35Here, I would say even more, like to the extreme, like we don't question the banks, we don't question the lawyers, we don't question the money. We think, I mean, it's a great, it's an amazing country as well, right? It is. But what you're saying about this conventional wisdom of money is that it's actually not because or only because we have a good central bank and we have a nice economy and we have a nice country that actually the Swiss bank is strong. It's because people believe in it, right? And so what we're seeing with crypto is that you don't need a central bank and you don't necessarily, you don't need a central bank or you don't need a government because you can have a group of people believing in a currency and then basically that's how it...

46:24Yeah, believing in the currency. Here in Switzerland, I love that you brought up Switzerland because Switzerland is such an incredible example. And so here in Switzerland, the institutions here are deserving of the trust that they have. And they continue by and large to earn that trust and maintain that trust over time. Although I will say in 2023, there's a little bit of an exception there with going from two large banks down to one. so that was I don't think that was as intended No but this shows I mean if we think about this case right we had the 2009 I did my maturity high school thesis on the SS3 National Bank and the government saving UBS which is the other bank right and so this is also when Bitcoin was born right So all at the same time.

47:18So if you think about it, we don't question conventional wisdom. We are an amazing country, Twitter and everything works. The Swiss franc is strong. The economy is great. People are trustworthy. Money is good. Great. But 2008, without external help, our banks are strong, right? The banker has a beautiful car, has a great house. He has a nice suit. He comes home. He's so serious, right? He must be having my best interest at heart. Correct. Obviously, right? And so then you realize, oh, actually UBS without help, bust. And then you realize 10 years later, Credit Suisse, basically bust, right? So things don't really work, even in a place that is supposed to be so amazing.

48:07Yeah. And so there's always failure mode, even for the most trusted institutions, because that trust is a, it's, that trust institutions is as a reputation. And that reputation can be earned over time. But that reputation, it's not like everyone is sitting there and, you know, doing a waking up and doing a deep dive on Credit Suisse's loan quality on the loans that they issued yesterday. You know, of course, nobody's doing that. No one was doing that for First Republic Bank either in the run up to March of 2023. And no one was doing that for, well, for Silicon Valley Bank or First Republic Bank, even though it was published on a quarterly basis and is as transparent as anyone has ever asked them to be about their sort of long dated, I forget what the term for it is, but like a specific sort of type of loan that you have to report on that is very illiquid.

49:02And when the interest rates went in the wrong direction, You made all those loans at low interest rates. Now it's a high interest rate environment and you're going to get offsides. And that's exactly what you had with a liquidity situation, right? Because your loan collateral is not liquid. So what are you going to do? And so that's basically what happened. But at least Switzerland was able to resolve that by basically cutting off one arm in order to save the other. So in order to save the person. And so that happened here, which I think was a bit of loss of trust in Switzerland. But still, on a relative basis, Switzerland is the most trustworthy, stable government in Europe.

49:48And I think one of those reasons, as a fan of decentralization, I think one of those reasons is because Switzerland is decentralized. And so Switzerland should not be the most stable, most trustworthy country in Europe. You have these three magnificent cultures and countries on all sides that Switzerland was originally the kind of tale of, right? The Germans, the French, and the Italians. And Switzerland kind of got the odds ends of each three of those and made up this country from that, which is like the French and the Germans and Italians on all sides of these huge mountains. How is that supposed to work out?

50:29So in order to bring all that together, I kind of had to make it very decentralized, extreme fiscal decentralization. So the majority of tax revenue in Switzerland goes to the canton and the canton decides. And that canton can be a canton of 20 ,000 people. At the largest, it can be a canton of one and a half million people in the case of Zurich. and I think it's something only like up to 9 % of personal income tax actually goes to the federal government and between 12 and 30 will be going to the local canton. So you have a lot of local discretion and therefore responsibility and that is I think helps keep people honest because what happens I think in a number of different in most countries actually is the tax revenue goes to the federal coffers.

51:19So it creates an incentive where the most, in a way, fiduciary and physically impactful thing you could do as a representative of your local district or of your state or whatever geography you're representing is to go to the federal government and essentially try to get a slice of that pie to bring home. Look what I brought back to the district. That's the highest EV thing to do. And that's just a lot less profitable to do in a place like Switzerland. So the way to demonstrate your value to the local district is to do things in the local district. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward. So on a pound for pound basis, Switzerland has the highest social outcomes per dollar spent.

52:04That's supposed to be impossible because in order, typically, as we're told, in order to get better social outcomes, you just have to tax more and spend more. But Switzerland is the opposite of that. So it's been, Switzerland has been awesome in that regard. So we talked about trust issues, trust issues, trust issues in government and institutions, obviously not in relationships. This is not a relationship podcast. Maybe it might become, but not yet. It's not the bear market yet. So it's still a crypto podcast. Yeah. Yeah. It's not, it's not the counseling quite yet. We talked about Switzerland and why it works.

52:48First about Bitcoin. Why is Bitcoin so fascinating for someone who questions everything?

52:58Because it is that store value. It's always going to be the same. It's the whole digital gold thesis. And it's something that has this immaculate conception I don't think we're ever going to find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is. I think there's 1 million Bitcoin are always just going to be bricked there. I don't think they're ever going to move. So the effective supply is 20 million. And so it has this immaculate conception. It was the first, and there's always the value in being first. It has proof of work. So there's some sort of underwriting a fundamental value or at least cost of creating bitcoin it is available to everyone is owned by no one and it's already been put through its paces of being kicked out of this country and that country and what we've seen every single time is it got uh extinguished here and it just popped up here the other day and so this idea that uh there's something which is outside of the remit, like gold, outside of the remit of any point in time, any social construct, economic construct, political construct at any point in time is something that actually becomes like an objective benchmark that's available to everyone.

54:22It was pretty awesome. Was the moment that you realized, oh man, I need to spend my life on that, working for this bigger thing? Uh, well, I think that, so in blockchain, there's been these two different narratives around what a blockchain actually is. And, and this was demonstrated in the 2016 block size wars, where there's some folks that thought Bitcoin should be digital gold, the asset store value. And there were other folks that largely came from Silicon Valley that thought, but this is technology. It should be a technology platform. And you could call that block size debate as being sort of an initial schism between people who saw blockchain as fundamentally being an asset and a blockchain being fundamentally infrastructure.

55:08I think it is both. It's just not that any individual chain is not both. A chain is one or the other, but then no one else really gets to be the asset. So everyone can try to be the asset, but only Bitcoin is really going to be the asset. So therefore, everyone else is trying to be the infrastructure. And so there's so much that gets talked about in the micro, the quasi micro, the macro, whatever, the architecture, the token, so much of that gets talked about in crypto. Ultimately, everyone after Bitcoin is trying to be financial infrastructure for the internet. That's just it. There's nothing else to do, but that's a lot to do.

55:46So there's a lot to do in order to try to make that happen. and all of the other kind of constant discussions around this architecture, that architecture, sure. But to what end? And that end, I'm very convinced is there's that one thing to do after digital gold is global financial infrastructure. And that's a really big thing. It's pretty cool. Bitcoin is the asset, so it's the infrastructure. Sure. That's my thesis. That's what I'm working on. So I think that is, I think we're on our way. No guarantees. It's hard to do. It's probably, these things are very unlikely, probably impossible. So you seem the likelihood of success is extremely, extremely small.

56:32But I think it's possible. Do you say that because you really believe that? Or do you say that because you're humble? I think it's just it's hard to do is to imagine the things that actually have to come together uh it's not just having good tech but then you also need the right people and the right point in time and then in so many things that line up together and like anything that's ever been successful there's an element of luck in there now you can always say the harder you work the luckier you get I think that is true uh and all the things to say around that uh but you also just need luck and the right people at the right time.

57:10And I think we're oftentimes conditioned to linear thinking, thinking about linear outcomes, or at least sort of constant multiplier outcomes. And the fact of the matter is you're doing something which is so unlikely like this, there's actually a number of points in time where you have exponential factors that put you on one path versus the other. And it's hard to recognize those things because we're just not programmed to think about exponential factors. We like linear and at most constant factor multipliers. What's one of these key moments in the Solana story that has put Solana in a place to be so important to become one of the key infrastructure?

57:54I think that really what I think is the most important part of what really has resonated with me from the beginning, even now, is I think like the core values and character of many people in the ecosystem. There's a shared belief that we should be building useful products. I know that might sound obvious, but apparently it's not always. And to me, that's always been a given. Of course, we should be using this technology to build useful products. What else would we do with it? I don't know. Okay. So that's one core one, which I thought was, again, I thought it was just obvious, but apparently is considered unique.

58:31Cool. All right. That's a layup. And then I think there's also like a true belief in this belonging to the community and decentralization. And decentralization, yes, in the network, which is the most literal way that people think about decentralization, but also empowering communities. And there's like a core belief in giving things back to the community. And if you see yourself as neutral infrastructure that is going to be supporting financial organizations and applications, spanning what we would call DeFi today to the more tradify institutions, then inherently your infrastructure that needs to serve financial applications and you are serving a whole range of you have to collaborate and you are here to collaborate.

59:21You are here to support liquidity across a wide range of different assets. And you are not a company that is trying to centralize assets onto your balance sheet of whatever, how you want to define that entity or set of core entities. And that is a difference in mindset that I find to be a top level fork amongst different types of people in this ecosystem. The purpose of a company at the end of the day is to centralize as much human and financial resource onto your balance sheet as possible. That is what Google does, that's what Facebook does, that's what Amazon has done, an incredible job at it.

1:00:05Whereas the purpose of a blockchain is not to centralize it into whatever legal entity you might call a core entity, in our case, a foundation. our aspiration is to attract that density of capital and talent into the ecosystem not into one entity and that totally changes the i think the way you work the way you collaborate the way you think about working with partners uh and it's a pretty core mindset difference that i see playing out all of the time before we continue on the more infrastructure side of things you said before there's only one financial asset, Bitcoin. Others are assets too. There's only one big that people trust and that is at the core of everything, right?

1:00:55Center of everything. Yes. So let's close that part out with, I read a tweet today. It's actually almost like a poetry that is getting Bitcoin so well. Holding Bitcoin doesn't make you rich. It makes you awake. At first, it's price, then it's purpose. Fiat lies begin to rot in your mouth. You start rejecting dopamine, planning for decades, and speaking in strange tones like time preference and energy money. You lose the ability to tolerate bullshit. Friends mock you until their currency dies. You realize most people don't want freedom. They want sedation. Yes, that's true. And that's when it hits you.

1:01:34You're not holding Bitcoin anymore. Bitcoin is holding you. Yeah. Well, I think that Bitcoin attracted quite a number of people in the early days that most people don't want to tell their people that they're wrong and don't want to be told that they're wrong. They want to shy away from that. It's unpleasant, it's uncomfortable, maybe there's some social opprobrium around it. And a lot of the people who came into Bitcoin early are kind of the opposite. They're contrarians. And they enjoy being told that they're wrong and being told they're wrong actually energizes them. and so that is a little bit uh who i am like the more i got told that this is drug money and this is money laundering i was like i'm pretty sure that you are wrong and it's going to take not one year three or five it's going to be a number of years but one day we will have this conversation again uh and bitcoin will be a hundred thousand dollars and that's pretty much what happened so it's cool you've been crypto for uh 11 years yes you don't need to work but you're still here hustling hard every day yeah every waking hour of the day if you're awake you're working sometimes sometimes probably at night as well why is crypto so important to you and to the world that you choose to dedicate your life to it uh because i think that like we talked about at the very beginning, I think that having these financial rails accessible to everyone is just so important.

1:03:06Of the things to work on, I think that's one of the most exciting. And that provides, there's five and a half billion people with access to the internet. And those five and a half billion people now can have access to financial markets. And holding an asset that they want to hold and using that asset in ways they want to use it. And even beyond that, participating in a global economy where you can learn something and monetize that skill set. And that's been the core of why I got interested in this space in the beginning. You know, people used to call it micro work. And actually what we did with earn.com also was an applied version of micro work, this idea that you could monetize a couple minutes of your time that anyone can do it.

1:03:52So that got wrapped in 2018 into a certain product type. But that core idea that anyone with access to the internet can do work and get paid for it is pretty amazing. And that is the broadest way of offering economic opportunity. That is like the superset. You said blockchain enables economic access and individual agency. What does that mean? Well, that's the economic access. I can have the option, which is not to say it's going to be 40 hours a week. It's not to say I want you to be 40 hours a week, which is not to say it should be 40 hours a week, that it should be 100 % dominant of the way that any individual does, you know, monetizes their time.

1:04:41But it's the largest economy that's going to exist, which is the economy on the internet. And now anyone can be a participant to that, which is not to say everyone will be an equal participant, but it's at least available to everyone. And I think that's really powerful. And I think that's also very powerful in terms of individual agency, because if everyone has access to the same learning content and the same job opportunities, but then clearly out of, you know, 10 people, they're not all going to do the same quality job. And maybe you only hire one out of those 10 people. But maybe for that one person, this was an opportunity they never would have had access to before.

1:05:21We have so many of these stories in crypto. So many of these stories where an extremely talented, for example, engineer, and we'd actually did a whole documentary on some of these kids, and I really say kids because they are kids, 14 years old, 15 years old, 16 years old, from ordinary families in India were able to actually do really well for themselves in the last cycle and get, you know, jobs around the world working in, for example, blockchain projects, and it's totally transformative. And that's the type of thing that was never possible before the internet and, and even got supercharged with crypto because there's this more direct relationship between time spent and the ability to sort of to monetize that time in crypto.

1:06:12So I think that's just pretty amazing because you know there's uh i i am somewhat idealistic i'm quite idealistic and i think the most optimistic thing that you can uh the the greatest form of optimism is to be optimistic about human potential and the potential for even just one person to do something amazing and uh and if you increase the at-bats that you have have for that then i think we all one from that let's go about solana you're the president of the solana foundation what is solana if you had to explain it to your mom i actually do have to explain to my mom uh and i guess i'm still not very good at this because she's still like i don't understand what you do uh so another attempt today yeah another attempt today i do it in chinese sometimes with chinese content and and then her response is you need to speak more slowly i'm like is just our content or just you know uh thanks always uh always uh well-intentioned unsolicited advice to improve you as a person that's a good good asian mom right there um

1:07:29you know what I'm talking about uh so uh so Solana it's uh a blockchain that allows you to use um money on the internet from anywhere uh with anyone at any time you said bitcoin is the asset to an easy infrastructure Sure. What does this mean? So Bitcoin is the only one where the infrastructure is called the blockchain, which a blockchain is what?

1:08:00It keeps a record of who owns what, when, what and when and how much, right? And it does that in a way where you can't really shut down the network. So that's trustless, permissionless because the nodes can exist anywhere. And if you shut one down, anyone else can go and set up a node, as we've seen when the miners got kicked out of one country and they kind of set up in another one pretty much overnight. Right. And so there's that anti-fragility to it and permissionless nature to it. OK, so that's the infrastructure. And in the case of Bitcoin, that token that gets generated from the mining process is Bitcoin.

1:08:39And that token itself is the thing that people consider to be a store of value. So the asset is the infrastructure and the infrastructure is the asset. And Bitcoin is asset first that the infrastructure supports to give it sufficient utility that it is relatively easy to transfer. Even if block times are slow, it doesn't matter all that much because if you're presumably in a store value environment, you're not doing a ton of transactions anyways. And so transaction cost, efficiency, speed, all those types of things matter a little bit less for the use case. And what matters more is the stability of that store of value, because it's that as a store of value, you've got to know that it's going to be as valuable tomorrow as it is today in perpetuity.

1:09:25And so stability is more important than speed. So that is where it's asset first with infrastructure alongside. Primary asset, secondary infrastructure. Everyone else is, I think, the opposite. Your financial infrastructure that people want to program all these smart contracts, the virtual machines built around them so that people can build applications that use this infrastructure for price discovery and also to an extent settlement, right? Right. And so when developers talk about a single state machine, I think to a capital markets audience, the way to translate that is to say unified liquidity.

1:10:03and uh and so this is where it's infrastructure for a whole variety of different assets to exist uh in an interchangeable world uh that can be recomposed with one another and all the different assets are adjacent and easily exchanged swapped recomposed put into a basket vault vaulted uh and so all of the assets and all the primitives are all in one environment you can do whatever you with whatever and or not do whatever you want if you want to permission things, right? So it's infrastructure for assets, whereas I think Bitcoin is an asset with infrastructure. And I think that's the difference.

1:10:42And everyone after Bitcoin is infrastructure for assets. If Bitcoin is the asset and Solana and everything else is the infrastructure, in that case Solana, then what is Sol? Well, Sol is the token that coordinates all the validators within the Solana network so that you can operate this permissionless infrastructure. And it's important for it to be permissionless because if you were to, let's say you had all of your validators in the most centralized version would be to have one single server. You could just turn the off switch. If you had all of your servers in a single rack, well, you could unplug that rack.

1:11:24In this all same data center, you could cut off either internet or power to the data center. Okay, it crossed five. Now, the coordination problem to shut it down gets exponentially more complex the more you distribute it. But then the whole tradeoff space within crypto has been to say, well, there's such value in being permissionless because that gives you truly global scale of everyone on the internet, all of humanity versus any one company or any one country. So the trade-off is fundamentally UI and speed for the permissionless nature of blockchain. And another way to say that is, if you make it truly permissionless, then you've increased the potential addressable market to be five and a half billion people versus if you were to take the more company view or application specific view on it i'm going to optimize for latency and ui but then your addressable market is you know that probably that scope of a single company and there will be multiple companies in a country uh and so that's essentially the trade-off uh and so uh that's that's kind of the way i see it at least so let's do another thing right to get to the point where the ecosystem is here today what's uh what is so uniquely bad at um i think that what we need to get better at is and i think this is a natural evolution of how an ecosystem grows so first of all i think in the industry there are a number of these dichotomies that people have come to subconsciously accept that you're either one or the other and well even beyond crypto, I think there's false dichotomies all over the place.

1:13:08You want to name one that is ever-present, persistent, I think a totally false dichotomy that has nothing to do with crypto is when people say, this person is a strategic thinker versus this person is a good operator, meaning does things. Why is that a choice? We've all met people who are strategic and can execute. And so how many times have you heard, oh, this is the CEO, a real strategic thinker, And then the COO is the one who does things. You're like, well, wouldn't you be better off if you just had a CEO who was the strategic thinker and could also just do things him or herself? False dichotomy.

1:13:45And so some of the false dichotomy is, but are very just part of reality that we have in crypto is to name two of them is the East versus West part of crypto. And then another one is it's either about the tech or it's about the distribution. And what I think one of the opportunities for Solana is, is that we're not, we're blessed to not have to fit into either of those dichotomies because of just some of the way Solana came to be or just some of the things that exist in the ecosystem. And so on the East versus West dimension, the way it is oftentimes been observed is that the West, these are great generalizations, right?

1:14:34But the West is better at core technology, protocol engineering, like the hardcore tech. and then the east which is typically concentrated in gmt plus eight that's where you just have a lot more people you just have many more people who live there um there's billions of people who live in gmt plus eight it's like probably close to two billion people um plus or minus one times gmt plus eight and it's a very mobile driven and people are just on the phone on their phones on the internet all the time right so okay well that's where distribution is and the tech is in the West and the distribution is over there.

1:15:07Somewhat false dichotomy. And we've managed to bridge both of those. And then another one is, well, it's either about the tech or it's about distribution that aligns a little bit with the East versus the West. But then there's been kind of an assumption that, well, is distribution going to win out or is better tech going to win out? And I think that's also a false dichotomy. You can have both and you should be both if you're going to take that prize, which is the one of the many that gets to be global financial infrastructure. You cannot sit there and I'm either going to be one or the other. You have to be both.

1:15:39And so I think that for Solana as a project that has started off really being about unique technology and that being the core of it, right? The network will continue to improve. The network will continue to get better. And the network will are not afraid to rip and replace really key parts of the network to make it ever better, ever faster, ever more performant for lower and lower latency financial use cases. That's just the roadmap of what you do. 400 milliseconds today, if we're successful with Alpenglow and multiple concurrent leaders, probably bring latency down to 150 milliseconds. Still not at what TradFi does today, which is between 5 and 10 for the most sort of trading S &P futures between New York and Chicago type of stuff.

1:16:24with, you know, we've all read the Flash Boys books of the microwave and then fiber networks being, okay, so not quite to that degree, but that's already a huge improvement. Okay. So the core is the network itself, of course. But then you've got to have three things together to really become that infrastructure for finance, for capital markets. So you've got to have the network, you've got to have the application layer, and then And you also have to have capital density, meaning asset diversity and also diversity of waste uses assets like the capital market side. So I think that there is an order of operations here, which is additive, right?

1:17:05You start off with the tech. There's no network. Then there's nothing for anyone to do. Literally don't exist. And so once you get the network up to a point of stability and also stable improvement, then you've got to build a developer ecosystem. And because if there's no developers, no one's building applications, there's nothing for anyone to use. You've got no Jupiter, there's no cast, right? There's no one to build pudgy penguins. And so they're just sitting there sending sold tokens for me to you and back. And that gets old at a certain point. So that's the second thing. And now I think the thing that we really have to add on to that is embrace what I think is the core purpose of blockchain outside of Bitcoin, which is infrastructure for financial markets, infrastructure for capital markets, and really just embracing that, embracing the capital markets community.

1:17:58And then I think we're doing, I think, a decent job of that, but could always do a better job at that. What keeps you awake at night? not very much keeps me away tonight. I'm a really good sleeper. I sleep like a baby. I do sleep like a baby. What's the end game for Solana? The end game for Solana is we get to dissolve the foundation. For me, ultimate success is I got nothing else to do. I'm done. It's all just, it's like Bitcoin. Bitcoin, there's no Bitcoin foundation. There's no Bitcoin, there's no Bitcoin, none of that infrastructure exists. You know, it's all in the community and I think that's the way ultimately it should be.

1:18:50That's Nirvana. Nirvana, you said, right? Yes, that's enlightenment. That's blockchain enlightenment. Do you think it's possible? I think it is possible, but I think it's harder when as financial infrastructure, you have to keep on doing things. Bitcoin, there's a premium actually on Bitcoin, the protocol, basically either never changing or changing extremely slowly to protect its store value and its stability. So there's actually value to doing nothing. What a beautiful place to be. Whereas if your infrastructure, you have to continuously do new things in order to bring latency in order to create better infrastructure for products.

1:19:32There's endless things to do. So it's an open question, whether that means you can ever get to a Bitcoin state because there's always so much to do. The reason I'm asking why you think it's possible or not, it's because I have this great position where I'm agnostic, unbiased, I talk to everyone, right? Solana, Polkadot, anyone, right? And I observe. And one thing I see in this decentralized ecosystem, the more you're trying to do decentralized stuff, these DAOs, which is kind of like the kind of holy grail, right? You said before, the kind of Bitcoin holy grail, but applied to another ecosystem.

1:20:20What I see is humans are humans. And when an ecosystem is successful, it grows in value. There is a lot more money involved. And what I often see is people who start to think more about themselves than about the greater picture.

1:20:45How do you prevent politics from ruining the culture when there's so much money involved and more and more people might put their interest first instead of the main solar mission? Well, I think that comes back down to core character of the ecosystem. And I think that in this industry, the more we think it's all about the tech, the more it's actually really about the humans. And then what you discover sometime down the line is that the characteristics of an ecosystem five, 10 years even later are still a mirror of the personal characteristics of the founders and the funding team and some of the early kind of like characters involved, right?

1:21:29And I think that there is a sort of a premium and like an ideology around, oh, if everything would be DAO governed, wouldn't that be amazing? And I think that's something I feel like I need to think about quite a bit more. But I wonder if that if that ideology is based on a correct understanding of human nature or not, and therefore how likely or practical that actually is. And so that ideology is that it wouldn't be great if code is law and we could just do away with the human idiosyncrasies that can result in centralization and put too much power in the hands of one person, which can create, like we were talking about at the beginning, a Zimbabwe and a Mugabe type of situation where you have such a dependency and then everything falls apart and creates great death and destruction and misery.

1:22:29And so I think because a number of the people who came into crypto at the very beginning really have sort of core cypherpunk values and see decentralization, checks and balances as being a way to obviate and avoid those types of outcomes. And so naturally, that worldview would lend itself towards seeing something like a DAO as being a very aspirational, desirable type of governance structure. And I think it's very interesting and I think is desirable to a certain extent. But are we overrating DAOs? Because still, I think we just learn over and over and over again, within crypto, outside of crypto, that leadership matters.

1:23:12Absolutely. It does. And this is like the core conundrum. If leadership doesn't matter, you can have DAOs to the end of time. And fantastic, so many things got solved. But if leadership matters, then what is the actual role of DAOs as a primary, secondary, tertiary governance mechanism? And what is its appropriate place for what scope and what function? And so I think sometimes we look at blockchain and think, okay, we're blockchain-ify everything. And then you actually get into implementation. We did this with games. And with games, it went from in-game items to a fully on-chain game. Why? Why do we want a fully on-chain game?

1:23:55No answer to that question. Because you can. Okay, but who wants that? Does it make a game more fun? Or is it just like a cool tech thing that now you can do that? and so similarly you can put everything under a doubt okay you can but does that actually make the community better does it lead to better decisions does it lead to a better outcome in the same way does a fully on-chain game make the game more fun which is the purpose of a game I talked to Gavin Wood a couple of weeks ago okay one of the things he believes is crypto networks should not have charismatic leaders was yours? I think that, I think ideally they wouldn't, but in fact they oftentimes do unless you are Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is the asset.

1:24:54And of course, if you can do things like Bitcoin, you should do that. And, but that is, I think we now have a lot of A-B tests of folks that do not have strong leadership. Charismatic leader, I think that can be defined in different ways, right? Do I think that there should be one person with 10 million followers who people in the community see as having an image of their finger on some sort of button? No. Does leadership matter? Yes. That doesn't have to be standing on the Temple Mount on a daily basis and that type of charismatic leadership. but leadership matters. And in the same ways that leadership matters for so many different things, having clarity of thought, clarity of vision, unified strategy, clarity of purpose.

1:25:56And so sometimes I feel like we take those just basic one-on-one things. And because this industry has a lot of very intellectual individuals in it, then we like could have over amplify like, because we're not talking about charismatic leadership or anything much beyond just having a strategy. That's it. Okay. It's not anything bigger than that. That's leadership matters, not charismatic leaders. Although having a strategy can be very charismatic to people. Talking about leadership, how do you prevent Solana people from becoming lazy because the Solana success has just been too huge on the financial side?

1:26:34uh well um i think we just have a culture where if you're here if you're here you're here to crush it and everyone has their own personal clearing price and their own balance between why they are doing what they're doing for mercenary or missionary reasons that varies completely by individual there's no universal function for that highly individual uh and uh you don't need to know what everyone's mercenary versus missionary function, exactly what that exact point is. But the unified purpose is if you're here, you're here to crush it. And you're here to crush it. You believe in the mission. And while you're here, you're here to create something really new, unique, and you want to do the best work of your careers.

1:27:21And if you don't, that's cool. We can be friends. We can always be friends. We can still be friends. Everyone. Yeah, you can always be friends. What are the worst parts of the Sonana culture? The worst parts is, I think we, like we were talking about earlier, I think we need to add on a capital markets focus. And so what is the right balance between engineering product and then capital markets? It's one way of maybe describing the three different layers. And at what times are we, you know, there are some projects that are hugely overweight capital markets. and basically don't have any unique tech.

1:28:02They're all about distribution. I'm talking to the false miners you were talking about earlier, all about distribution in GMT plus eight, no tech, the whole tech thing is a mirage, okay? And no real product either. Also, like, eh, don't need it. All right, and that's not the way we're built. So I think an ecosystem like that, which is all about capital markets and not about any of the underlying things, that's off balance. And I think we're decently balanced, but I think we constantly need to think about, like, do we have the right balance between these three parts of the ecosystem? You need all three of them.

1:28:37If you only have two out of three, not going to make it for the aspiration that we have in mind, which is to be that global financial infrastructure. And if you are going to be that, you can't look at things as, well, everything's a trilemma. That is giving up before you start and that's not going to get you where you want to go. You mentioned capital markets many times in the last hour and a half. Can you explain the concept of internet capital markets to your Uber driver? Yeah, specifically for Uber. To the Uber driver, I would say specifically, if you were one of the first Uber drivers, like one of the first 100 Uber drivers, you would have gotten rich off of that IPO.

1:29:24Because you contributed to building the network more than the VCs did. Can you give me another example? Why do we call that internet capital markets? Yeah, because, okay, so what is the internet part of that, which is important? And so I think it's this idea that with digitally native and therefore flexible money, the internet part of it, the blockchain part of it makes money digitally native, makes it composable programmable. And then that is like the killer capability that unleashes many, many other things. And so, because that unleashes things that at first seem very perfunctory, like, okay, now you could stream payments.

1:30:12Now you can pay anyone anywhere without having to go through a hornet's nest of different on and off ramps and routing. I can use, give me your address, I can pay you directly, and I could programmatically pay you. I can pay you small amounts, large amounts, total flexibility as to who you pay when and where and with what. And so what that means is that and then that nature of the asset that I can pay you with is also different. Like right now, if I want to pay you on Twint, since we're here in Switzerland, it's I can't pay you in Dogecoin. I can only pay you in CHF, right? Right. Whereas if you've now digitized all money and made everything into a certain token standard, right, the on the back end, the transaction or the message that goes into me paying you with a stable coin versus me paying you with bonk is actually from a technological standpoint, the same.

1:31:04And so it's just the nature of the asset that differs. Okay, so all of that enabling infrastructure capability makes it possible to do things like paying people in a token that represents a community that is being built in its early stages. So in the case of there's a number of projects that really high quality projects and people who participate early get a token that is of a certain value at that point in time when it's a smaller network, earlier network. And then as the network grows, the community grows, the product grows, adoption grows, then not in all cases, but in some cases, the value of that token goes up over time.

1:31:49And so the early participants were essentially able to venture and invest with their labor, if you will, and have access to upside that otherwise right now is being captured primarily in private markets, only available to people who have already converted their time into money, basically are capital rich and time poor. and so this opens up the ability for people who are time rich and capital poor to convert time into labor into capital in ways that are pretty hard to do these days. But the assumption here is we do everything on Solana. We end up doing everything on Solana, right? Everything ends up on Solana, but there's other networks out there.

1:32:35Some call them network states or mini network states or networks. I ask this question to Gavin again. How do you overcome the competition between the different networks or network states such as Solana, Polkadot, Ethereum that are all competing for the same liquidity, for the same users, to get to the next level where people and network work together with one another to grow the pie? money is a network business and so the more of that network you can capture the more value you're going to add to uh the uh the assets in your network and the builders who are building ways to use those assets so it's a building a network effect uh and money is the ultimate network business so you're saying is yeah there is no working with other ecosystems uh it's we want to win the network effect?

1:33:31To be honest, I don't really think about, I don't think about this in relative terms versus other ecosystems. I think about this more in, if I do think about it in relative terms, I think about it as crypto is three and a half trillion dollars and more than half that is Bitcoin. And TradFi is a hundred trillion dollars. And there's also quite a number of different forms of scarcity that are not tokenized and therefore not financialized in the world. And so therefore, the potential size of financial assets on a blockchain is larger than the 100 plus the three and a half. And that to me is what is more interesting.

1:34:07And so I think that's to me really the way I benchmark it. And I just think about to build money as a network business, to build the network effects around money, which is the strongest moat or network effect to borrow language from the tech world, is to bring the greatest utility to those assets. And so, and when we talk about composable money, then the way that you can bring new utility to existing assets is a very simple one. And now people are all about RWA, real world assets. You tokenize money market fund. You could tokenize in the future any fund. And you can now use all of those assets as collateral.

1:34:50And that is already better than what folks who even have the best in class access to financial products today can get. Because I can go on to Charles Schwab, my brokerage, and buy$1,$100 ,000, million dollars of Apple stock. But what I cannot do unless I own like, you know, unless I have a private banker at Goldman Sachs and a lawyer and time to sign lots of paperwork is I cannot take that, let's call it$10 ,000 of Apple stock and collateralize it and borrow$2 ,000 against it or $3 ,000, whatever it might be. Whereas you can do that in crypto. And so what the crypto rills just did is they added utility to literally every RWA asset that exists because of the simple capability of borrowing against assets instantly.

1:35:41And that is where the rules around liquidity pools, collateral limits, things like that become instantly useful. And so that is where this new financial infrastructure immediately adds value to even to essentially every asset out there by imbuing every asset with immediately available collateral value. and that is how you start to build additional utility and therefore usage and network effects around money on a certain set of financial rails is like a very simple example. How much do you focus on competition at Solana? Because you mentioned, you said, I look at the three trillion, right? And a hundred trillion, but as you said before, right?

1:36:28There is one main asset and then there is infrastructure and if you look at other projects out there, they're all kind of competing for a piece of the pie. Yes. How much do you guys at Solana look at competition? Oh, we certainly look at competition. It's not to say that I go pretend that a competition doesn't exist or anything like that. I take it very seriously.

1:36:51But it's not like a highly emotional topic or something like that. Yeah. you try to be focused on the long road ahead. And again, false binaries, having a long-term view does not prevent you from being very proactive in near-term situations as well. What do you see as your current biggest competitor? So I think a number of people today would highlight, you know, every six months it changes. some of the folks that people highlight these days is like in one market they would say like a base in other markets they would say like a hyperliquid and other markets I'd say centralized exchanges or chains associated with centralized exchanges so I think those are the ones that are top of mind for people today let's see six months ago people talked primarily about base I would say three years ago, people talked primarily about Polygon.

1:37:53A year and a half ago, it was largely about L2s, Ethereum L2s, and people would line Solana up with Ethereum L2s. That narrative quickly changed. And I think that from what I'm told, a number of people think that Solana has, well, I think maybe we've been upgraded in the world where a year ago, people thought we were just competing with L2s and now people see us competing with Ethereum L1. So, okay, it changes every six months. I read a tweet the other day that was saying, Sol is LinkedIn, Hype is X. And there's a question from someone who's pretty close to you. Okay. Who asked me to ask you, what is Solana's plan to compete with Hyperliquid, the rising star of the last year?

1:38:43Yeah, Hyperliquid has done a great job. And that is a clear product strategy, excellent execution from folks that really know what they're doing and have deep expertise in the markets and products that they're building. I believe their founder was at HRT, foremost HFT shops, so they know what they're doing. Good founder, founder product fit and product market fit. So that's an incredible job. And I think that with perps, which is essentially sort of a certain implementation of order book, to be really competitive with order book trading, you need to be very low latency. And so, like we were talking about earlier, there is an inherent tradeoff between being fully permissionless and latency.

1:39:32That's the most direct tradeoff. And one is very long-term oriented and the other one is about near-term applications. And this is one of the reasons why perps are primarily on centralized exchanges. So if you look at the open interest in the market today, total open interest across entire industry is probably closer to 100 billion than anything else. And the vast majority of that, 90 % of that is on centralized exchanges. Because on a centralized exchange, you can have very low latency and be able to most competitively, to the limits of existing technology, co-located servers in ways that people typically even just do traditional financial markets, get better performance, therefore better price execution.

1:40:16And so a good bit of this is very latency oriented. And so that is like a direct sort of trade off that people make. Right. And so Solana is working on engineering. It's a pretty big engineering projects in order to reduce latency. But then Solana is not going to be at 10 milliseconds tomorrow. Eventually, you'll get there as hardware improves, software improves, engineering improves, a number of things improve over time. In the meantime, we can optimize for what we can do within the current latency of the network, which is better than any other network out there, but is still within that category of permissionless networks.

1:40:56So we're going to be making some changes on that front, prioritizing cancel orders, a big one, so that you can, because, you know, it's always competition within bid-ask spread in order to get best pricing, right, and be the one that actually executes within that narrowing window of bid-ask spread. And depending on latency, basically, that determines how many orders can be placed and removed within that narrowing window of bid-ask spread in an order book. so we'll be doing various things at protocol level to optimize the ability to do that that's like the more short-term thing and it's it's definitely a priority for us because perps is the most you could call it latency sensitive advanced pro kind of primitive that exists in crypto and it's also crypto specific right bitmex is the one that created the perp construct to begin with and the ability to do that on chain over time is going to be of critical importance, right?

1:41:54So that's like kind of out here on one extreme of the latency sensitivity of how people use the things that people want to do with on-chain finance. And then the other end is, say, the polar opposite is things like a payment, which is not latency sensitive, and typically not execution sensitive. And there's going to be things in the middle, exotic options, linear options that are more sophisticated products that can tolerate higher latency. So I think maybe one way you could look at it is to take the range of primitives and to place them out on sort of a latency sensitivity spectrum and think about, okay, well, you know, if you're building infrastructure for a variety of different financial applications, then one way you could say is like, okay, now as I've reduced latency, here are the incremental things I can do as first class.

1:42:45So yeah, so we're doing a number of things at the protocol level. We're going to be pretty aggressive on making perps on Solana as good as they can be. I want to go about one last thing in crypto before moving on to our last conventional wisdom to challenge of the day, healthcare. The last thing about crypto is stable coins. Stable coins are amazing. I spend my stable coins, you spend your stable coins? Yes, we do. Why would we use these stupid banks that actually blocked me probably three or four times in the last three months because of one of these sponsors was paying me in USD and the bug is like this is a cryptocurrency project we cannot do that I'm like okay cool anyways stablecoins are amazing it's undeniable but there's always a but how would Satoshi Nakamoto or 2013 or 2014 Lily react if she was told that 11 years later we'd be using hyper-centralized stablecoins like USDC at scale?

1:43:56Well, I don't know. I don't know that USDC is dramatically more centralized than other stablecoins. I think you could make that critique of any stablecoin that just by the very nature of it being a tokenized dollar which has got to be sitting in custody, in custody, in treasury somewhere, that they're all more or less centralized in a similar manner. So I think the pragmatic part of it is just that commerce is denominated in fiat currency. Money is a network business, and that denomination of what you're willing to accept, that kind of standardization of the price of commerce, that is proliferated through fiat currency.

1:44:42uh so that's just the way it is and if you're going to engage in uh in commerce then that's just going to have to meet the world where it is today and that's going to be in whatever your local fiat currency is that's just a pragmatic matter as much as we love bitcoin do you think about the price of everyday goods in terms of satoshis no like how much is a coffee in satoshis no idea. And even if you knew, because Bitcoin went this route of store value, you're not supposed to spend your Bitcoin anyways. So to an extent, there's been this bifurcation of the thing that you hold and then the thing that you spend, and you've been told to only hodl and to not spend it.

1:45:24Okay, so what are you going to spend? And I think that's where even a number of the very In fact, he was some of the most OG Bitcoiners that created Tether. And those are sort of the two sides of the Bitcoin ecosystem. And what actually underwrites the primary collateral for Tether is Bitcoin.

1:45:49I just want to talk shortly about healthcare. Mm-hmm. because it's a very important topic, I think. And there's a lot of conventional wisdom to be challenged. Yes. In that sector. You have some very close people to you suffering from chronic conditions. Mm-hmm. But doctors say the classic thing, there's nothing wrong, everything is fine. It's all in your head. It's all in your head. Yes. Why do they say that? because they can't tell you the specific uh they don't have a specific diagnosis for you and so if it's not in my set of specific diagnoses it must not exist how does the how does lily react to that uh lily who doesn't who doesn't believe anything i believe many things but just not all the things that i'm told to believe well i think it's an opportunity to do something differently and do something better you know so i think the core belief system that has to underpin this is uh i think if you are uh if if you believe in human potential and you're an optimistic person you believe that there's always room to do things better and you take delight in that journey and this goes back to what we were talking about earlier where uh there's some folks that they just they find comfort in the status quo that is a core character that is a personality issue or thing, characteristic.

1:47:22Let's call it characteristic. And there's just some people that like to always try to optimize things. And then there are people that just like things the way they are. And that is not a critique. It is an observation. But then it is one personality type versus the other that is going to more likely go and create new opportunities, see new opportunities, and what we broadly call innovate. And that is, there's always those opportunities in finance, in tech, in healthcare, and there's always going to be that frontier of something unanswered, impossible today, but that area of what if.

1:48:06Obviously, we're not giving financial nor medical advice here. We were trying to see a different way to look at things. If a listener is suffering from a life-altering chronic condition and has been spending tons of money over 20 different doctors in the last 10 years without any success, everyone told him or her, it's all in your head. You don't have anything. You're fine. What's another way that they could look at their condition to find a potential solution to their problem? Where do you even start? uh gosh i don't know i mean thankfully i haven't really been in that situation uh but um that is a great question i hope i'm not in that situation where you're at a dead end with no alternatives uh but um but in your in your close person example yeah what did you do what how did you look at things differently that might have helped or that probably helped uh i uh these days I actually ask AI a lot and ask AI different ways.

1:49:12And then I look for, sometimes I'll go to the exact opposite and say like, what is the conspiracy theory around this? What is known to be incorrect? What is the thing that everyone is certain is not the reason? And then you look at that and you judge for yourself, whether it's completely ridiculous conspiracy theory or not. but sometimes conspiracy theories are true you're like oh shoot gosh that's happening more and more these days and and so I think you know you go through the whole breadth of possible possibilities and you know of course if you travel the range there will always be that part of the range which is you know has some sort of like involvement of alien conspiracy theories okay that's probably not true, right?

1:50:00And so you can take some of these things and obviously cut them out. But then there are other kind of different angles and philosophies around these things that might actually have, you know, people talk about alternative medicine. I've experienced a little bit before, and I will say the whole approach to medicine, if you look at sort of like the acupuncture traditions, completely different. And some of it's actually quite effective. Why? Like there's some explanation for that, but it has not been explained as to why it is effective. You just know that in not all circumstances, but some can be very effective.

1:50:37Bizarre, right? How do you explain that? What's the conspiracy theory there? That one is not really a conspiracy theory. What's the craziest? I mean, for acupuncture, for example, I think it's amazing. I go every two weeks, it changed my life. Every time I'm jet lagged or whatever, I was sick, I just go, boom, ribbing, amazing. And they say, even the acupuncture, they say, I don't know why, but it works, right? It's amazing. At least it works on me. And probably on me, there are many other people. What's the craziest conspiracy theory that you found out true or might be true? I mean, all of the stuff around COVID, man.

1:51:14Are we still calling those conspiracy theories right now? Probably not. Probably not, yeah. All of them, there's many.

1:51:23So, on that note... That's a beautiful way to end it.

1:51:32next time we will go to the podcast beautiful five hours oh gosh oh man that's like a deep dark one because once you get into that one and do like the retro on what happened when and what was it's like it's so deep and so dark i think you only come out of that with a feeling of hopelessness and depression, right? Because how quickly certain narratives were able to dominate the entire globe, right? It's pretty bad. Is it not tiring to always question everything? And to go down these rabbit holes that we often say ignorance is bliss? Yeah, well, it is for a lot of folks. I don't think it's tiring, it's really quite fun.

1:52:22They're different. it's really quite fun it doesn't take a lot of energy because it's just like you know if it's conventional it's uh it requires no energy okay because it's already known in fact i sometimes find it takes energy to comply with convention uh and um yeah so it just depends on what people do for fun people do all sorts of different things for fun some people like to go play sports cool people like to go with their friends drink a beer awesome uh and other people have other sources of fun. And so people like to watch Netflix for fun. And so this for me is fun. This for me was fun.

1:53:02It's fun for me as well. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Kevin. That was awesome. Yes. Awesome. As you probably know by now, I host some of the biggest names in Bitcoin and crypto on my podcast, but a lot of the best stuff never makes it on air. The Shift newsletter is where I share that raw behind the scene alpha, the insights, stories and lessons straight from my guests that you won't hear anywhere else. If you want the real insight take on Bitcoin and crypto, join my newsletter, The Shift, in the description down below.