E73: Bitcoin OG: I Discovered Bitcoin Sub 10 dollars!

32:37Yeah. Did you go to investment bank directly? So my story is I went to a school called Waterloo, which just as a footnote I didn't want to go there I mean at the time the ongoing joke was people were calling it the University of Wang and Wu because I kid you not because it's a very engineering math computer science school and and so like that's not the kind of friends and groups that I really hung around with at the time but it was really more a decision that my family was making for me. Based on your skills or based on the reputation he would give you if you get out of that? Correct, yeah, the latter, right?

33:24So I kind of had no choice. I had a choice, but really not, if I'm honest. And the deal that I swung with my mother was, look, I'll go because you want me to, but if it doesn't work out, I'm transferring out. So that was kind of the deal. I went and you know it is true mothers always know what's best so I went and initially it was hard to integrate because it was almost like um I went through reverse cultural shock in a sense that I was an Asian guy who grew up with a lot of like Jewish and white friends playing ice hockey as I mentioned and I go to university like high school as well it was all sort of you know that's why we were hippies we went to grateful dead concerts and then i go to a university where literally the white guy was me because the rest of them are all asians if you know what i mean right and super nerds yeah yeah so i just it was such a mind-blowing experience like what the fuck and uh and so i was like i remember the first month it was september i i was calling my mom going you know you better i know i told you i'm gonna wait one year but i swear to god i'm gonna transfer immediately when we hit June.

34:38And she's like, give it a shot. So I went through and she was right. It was a great school. And it was a great school because when you start, university is the great equalizer. It's the great equalizer because you could come from poverty, but if you're smart enough, you can get there. You can come from the most politically powerful family, but you get there. You all get there. And then it's a matter of what you do with it, right? And that's what I realized was there are some fucking smart people in Waterloo. Actually, one of the guy's classmates of mine was Shamath, the guy who founded Social Capital.

35:19Yeah. He was in your club. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I used to compete with him. I mean, I have a tweet where I tweeted out to him like, hey, do you remember me? He's like, yeah, we used to compete for jobs. He's the reason why I bought my first Bitcoin, Shamath. Exactly. He's a Waterloo guy. So was his ex-wife. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, you start realizing it doesn't matter if you're fucking yellow, white, black, like intelligence is what really motivates, right? And so, yeah, it was a good ride going out to Waterloo for school. What happened afterwards? So Waterloo is the only school in Canada, they have this thing called co-op program.

35:57It's like an internship. So your undergrad degree, which is normally four years everywhere else in the world, it ends up being five. Because what they do is every four months, you're either in school or you're working on a co-op work term. And so this is also the attractive thing for most students to want to come into Waterloo. So I spent a lot of my work terms at the banks on their trading floors, which is why, you know, I came across Shemath because he and I would compete for these trading floor jobs. There weren't that many for students. um man i could tell you like if you think trading floors are rough these days like it's nothing compared to what it was back in the 90s right like they were still allowed to smoke on the trading floor there was i like compliance didn't even exist back then so the number of times like i got called things that you know i probably shouldn't have been uh or put under duress like And the one story I tell people all the time is, if I hire interns that I have in several of my other jobs, I would never go make them get me breakfast because I have nightmares about that.

37:06When I was a co-op intern... I wanted to ask an example of the story that happened. Yeah, when I was working at Citibank on their trading floor in Canada, I was basically running the cash desk. Now, that sounds like preposterous. How could a student, a co-op student, be running their cash desk? I literally was. Like I was funding the Canadian bond desk and I was funding the U.S. bond desk. And I would write up the cash tickets. Of course, I needed to get approval from my desk head, Richard, at the time. But I would force, I'd be forced to do all the cash calculations, what that cost would be like.

37:46And back then there was no, like literally there was no spreadsheets. I had to like do everything by hand, timestamp it. there were three sheets one for the front office one for the middle office and one for the back office and they would reconcile it through those three sheets so you make one mistake and honest to god like you're going to get bullets hitting your head from the traders and they're nasty so you can imagine i'm just setting the picture for what the stage was like every morning i would come in and of course being the intern or co-op student i'd be asked to go get the breakfast right and if they wanted to be mean about it it wasn't just for my desk oh hey joey do you want something as well for your guys okay and then i would have to get all the bagels and coffee for them so by the end of it on a bad day i would have to get bagels and coffee for like 10 people not only that here's where the duress kicks in they would tell me if you don't come back before the market opens you're paying for it all i'm like what the fuck and you know what like back then like 35 bucks is a lot of money, man.

38:52Like, seriously. And I would be waiting in line sometimes if it was like really heavy snow day in Toronto and the lines were long. I would be almost like literally pissing my pants. Like, I can't afford this this week. So it was horrible. It was horrible. I can laugh about it. But very formative. I mean, you know, it toughens you up, I guess. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, as you probably know, we are teaming up with Astar Network on this show. Astar Network is a decentralized blockchain platform that aims to bring billions of people into Web3. And the Astar team has a very specific strategy to make this happen, to partner with the biggest conglomerates in Web2 and help them onboard their customers into our world, the Web3 world.

39:42If you want to check out for yourself, I invite you to watch the candid podcast I recorded with Sota Watanabe, the founder of StarTale Labs and Astar Network. And please, please, please, if you enjoy this show, hit the like button, leave a comment in the comment section and subscribe to this channel. The more subscribers, the better the guests. Thank you so much for your help. And now on to today's episode.

40:07So you did. You were. It was not. It was not traumatic enough to make you leave because you spent 17 or 18 years in investment bank, right? Well, I took a detour. So when I graduated, I had offers to go to several banks. And I said no. I was pretty traumatized, if I'm honest. And I decided that I would do something different. I didn't want to work for a bank anymore. So I actually worked for Canada's biggest insurance company called Manulite Financial. and uh i ended up taking a job it was boring as fuck but i i took a job in their it department insurance companies still use mainframes because they require heavy processing during every month end and every year end right insurance policies they go through something called the month laversary process so every month there's a month laversary process and you have to you have to process a lot of insurance policies and at the end of the year.

41:09So it's heavy processing. And the only thing at the time that could process that much data was mainframe. So mainframes require batch, what they call batch to process. And batch itself required a certain type of computer language to change what to do as a part of the batch processing. It was called JTL job or JCL job control language that my job was literally to write JCL for changes in the batch it was so fucking boring I was like I gotta go back to banks and that's why I went back to banks and you spent 70 years 17 years 17 years there at the banks yeah and then after these 17 years you is it when you discovered bitcoin that you left directly or yeah I was working for Barclays at the time based in Hong Kong and it was 2012 February I remember it like yesterday I was having a beer with a friend of mine who worked for another bank Goldman Sachs and he said to me he was like hey man have you heard of this thing called Bitcoin I was like what the fuck is that um and he mentioned it to me because we used to like we used to spitball and talk about different like technologies that the trading floors were using for executing trades and whatnot because that was my job actually i was head of product at the time on uh at the bar in barclays prime service developing um solutions for the trading desks so we were talking about that and that's what he did at goldman and then he's like you know by the way have you heard of this thing called bitcoin like no what the fuck's that he goes look it's hard to explain why don't you just go home and google it you'll you'll see this thing a guy named satoshi wrote something like just read it it's the coolest shit ever so i went home that night i googled it came up the only thing that came up at the time was a white paper.

43:02I read it. I couldn't sleep that night. I literally could not sleep. And I fell asleep on my desk. And my wife woke me up. And the next day, I went into the office. The first guy I called was a guy named James DeCastro, Spanish friend of mine, who's at the time, he's very, very well known in equity derivatives, very smart guy. He was heading Merrill Lynch's equity trading business in Asia. One of the smartest guys I knew and I said, Hey, James, look, I've been reading this about this thing called Bitcoin. Do you know about it? He goes, no, I don't. But my younger brother is doing something with it in Silicon Valley.

43:41Why don't you reach out to him? I'll put you in touch. I did. It was him and his partner who ended up creating this ASIC chip company in San Francisco that basically did the pre-fund scam, took a ton of Bitcoin from myself and my partners and only delivered about 30 % of the chips. So that's where we circle back to what I was telling you earlier in the podcast. So this is not a great experience, obviously, but you told me that now it's been 12 years, right? You met a lot of key people along the way. I did. And one of them is Matthew Mellon, who was a good friend of yours. Yes. and was a pretty crazy story.

44:27Descendant of the Mellon family, introduced to Bitcoin by the Winklevoss twins, 2012. Correct, yeah. I read, I'm not sure it's correct, but I read that he made 2 million investment in XRP, in Ripple, that made him like hundreds of millions. And then he passed away in 2018. Yep. Because of an addiction to opioids. Well. At least that's what's written online, right? and he left behind about 500 million worth of XRP token that were lost because no one had access to his private keys. So basically this, there's a lot to unpack here. The first thing that I'd like to unpack is probably, you told me you have some amazing stories with Matthew in the early Bitcoin days.

45:10Yeah. So I met Matthew, again, Barclays in Hong Kong. I had gotten, this is shortly after I sold whatever equipment that we did get delivered. And I decided that I would start looking at Ripple because as I mentioned earlier in the podcast, I really saw the value in using blockchain for cross-border payments and to disrupt Swift. And I thought Ripple was the prime technology platform to do that with, the prime blockchain for various different reasons. and so I was going down that path looking at that I started writing like it what ended up being a 50-page document which I used in San Francisco to walk Chris and his team through I was working on that at the time when the New York Times called me and they said you know we'd like to do an interview on you and the reason why like I actually did quite a few interviews from about 2013 to 2015 while I was in Hong Kong, because a lot of these large financial institutions had heard, there was like the senior banker guy walking around the streets of Lan Kwai Fong in Hong Kong, you know, in a suit, handing out Bitcoin stickers and trying to get people to accept Bitcoin and use Bitcoin, which is what I was doing.

46:26And so New York Times economists, like a whole bunch of them interviewed me. But in this particular instance, it was the New York Times. I ended up becoming what I thought would be a small little blurb in the middle of the paper. They ended up putting it on A2. A1 is the front cover of the New York Times. A2 is the back cover, or right behind it. And it was a big spread, like the full page with a big picture of me in the middle. Matthew Mellon lived in New York. He's reading this paper, having breakfast, opens up A2, and he sees this Asian guy in Hong Kong talking about Bitcoin. He reads my article.

47:02He gets someone to somehow find me online. I think it was through LinkedIn. And he contacts me through LinkedIn. And I remember this like yesterday. I'm on the trading floor in Barclays. A friend of mine who was working in the London trading floor was on business in the Hong Kong office sitting beside me. I'm like, dude, take a look at this. There's a guy named Matthew Mellon who wants to kind of see me in Hong Kong. Do you think this is bullshit? He goes, it probably is. but it's not going to hurt if you just reply and go, you know what, dude, why don't you come? I'm in Chung Kong Center. You know I'm at Barclays.

47:35You can look me up. I literally said that because I thought it was bullshit. A week later, reception, main reception in the lobby calls me, says there's a Matthew Mellon here to see you. And at the time, Spencer, who was a guy from London, had already gone back, but I sent him a Bloomberg message going, dude, remember the Matthew Mellon guy? He's like, yeah. I'm like, apparently he's here to see me. He goes, go down. Like you have security everywhere. What's going to happen? So I went down and it was him. That's how it all began. So I'm like, okay, wow, Matthew Mellon, I know who you are. I'm thinking this in my head.

48:09I'm going, you probably want to go to like a fancy five-star hotel and I have a cup of coffee. He goes to me, ah, there's a nice little Starbucks there. Why don't we go there for coffee? And I was like, okay, I think I'm going to like this guy. Very down to earth. And, you know, over the time, over the years that I've gotten to know him, that's exactly who he was. He used to tell me, I was born into wealth. I didn't choose this life. He was such a good guy. So I was the one who convinced him to move away from, like pivot from Bitcoin and to look into other altcoins that were developing and introduced him to Chris Larson and Ripple.

48:49I mean, you know, you can literally go and ask the early founders of Ripple, Arthur Brito, or, you know, or Chris, they'll tell you, I made that introduction to a point where, you know, like Chris and I, we still, he still gives me the time of day if I message him. Right. I left that kind of footprint with them. And Matthew then ended up helping them expand globally. That was in 2014. And here's another really interesting story. After I made the introduction, and here's how, here's how, I will tell you such a detail that no one would know. Only Chris and Matthew would know this. After Matthew flew out to San Francisco from New York to meet Chris, Chris called me and he's like, thanks for that.

49:40Actually, I was supposed to meet Matthew a number of years ago because we have a mutual friend who's the president of Sony USA. And that president's kids were actually going to the same private school as Chris Larson's. So they were supposed to meet a number of years ago. It never worked out. And so, you know, they talked about that when they met. So they met. And then Matthew called me and he said, after we met him, and he goes, you know, David, they're about to close their Series A. I want to invest. I told Chris I wanted to put money in. but Chris is telling me that it's going to be really tight because it's pretty much closed now series a and he said can you do you mind giving reaching out to Chris for me and maybe having a chat with him so I literally sent Chris an email and I say hey Chris look I think it would be fantastic to take even a small amount of money from Matthew and have his profile working with Ripple, given what we just discussed about now you pivoting to go after Swift, right?

50:42So cut to the chase. What happened was Chris actually sold him a part of his equity at the same valuation to get Matthew in.

50:56What happened to Ripple afterwards? And I'm asking that because I've been in crypto since 2017. So what is that? six, seven years. So much less long than you, right? But since I'm in there, I mean, there was this kind of crazy pump of XRP in 2017 bull run. But the narrative of what's going on there is, at least on the very crypto side of people, right? It's more like a coin that newcomers who don't understand anything kind of buy and they join this kind of culture, but there's not much going on behind it, right? A bit like Cardano. It's kind of like this cult where there's supposedly some things in Africa happening, but no one really believes it, at least in the crypto side.

51:47But on the kind of normal people's side, there's a lot of people who follow that, right? Yeah, I would say actually Ripple is doing a lot. It's just, it's doing it in a part of the industry that native crypto guys don't really care about, right? which is the banks and working with regulators and yeah, right? So they're not paying much attention, so they're not going to really know what's going on. But most of the banks, like I can tell you right now, Standard Charter Bank, and I know this from people who are there, they're quietly implementing Ripple. It will be a payment option, not as a token to sell or buy, but in terms of RippleNet and the network.

52:26and using that as an alternative for settling payments, right, for cross-border payments. So there is a lot of work. I think the thing is it's been pretty quiet over the last few years because of the SEC challenges that they've had and the lawsuit. Yeah. So all this work that they had done leading up to banks investing and banks creating POCs for them, they couldn't make a lot of noise around that because the banks, you know, they knew the risk of the legal. If they had, you know, if the legal case goes one way, that's great. If it goes the other way and the banks are pushing this, it's not going to look good.

53:06So there is a lot of stuff being built with the repo infrastructure. Correct. Which is not the case on the Cardano one, right? Yeah. The reason I'm asking that is not to criticize anything. is more to try to pick your mind because you've been in crypto for 12 years, right? Why are newcomers always gravitating towards projects with pretty much nothing happening? And Cardano is kind of like a really big example, right? I think human beings, like, you know, the average person gravitates towards personalities. And let's face it, the whole crypto industry is like a cult of personalities, right? I wouldn't, like engineering-wise, there are some very smart people engineering-wise.

54:03They're not financially the smartest people. They're not politically the smartest people, or at least I would argue, right, based on things that they may do or say or decisions that they may make. but Cardano is one of those where, you know, I'm not sure if Charles Hoskins developed, like I, I'm not sure what the reason was for him to develop it. And if I asked the average crypto person, I'm not sure they would know. So the strategy or the ideology of Cardano is very, neither here nor there. And I think when you don't have an identity as a project, it becomes difficult to really hang your hat on something.

54:52You know, and I spent time with the Tezos Foundation. Like I set up TZA pack here in Asia. We had Arthur Brightman on the podcast. Yeah, did you? Great. We had him. A very interesting experience. Yeah, smart guy, but, you know, my challenge working there was, I'm not sure it was the most open organization for trying different ideas because they were so technically focused. And that's why the product is actually very high quality in terms of what they develop. I'm still a fan of their tech, even though people argue with me like, you know, who the fuck knows Mickelson's smart contract language? Like, who's going to use OCaml except for the academics?

55:44But the theory behind why he did it this way makes sense, right? It's just, I think, taking that product and trying to have trusted people who understand commercial opportunities with that product and enabling them to do what they do best is probably where I was challenged there. I mean, obviously, like any kind of startup or product, like you can have the best tech if you're not good in business or in marketing. It's going to be complicated to be successful, right? If not impossible. I remember working at Morgan Stanley in Tokyo, and my boss at the time, his name was Sean, he said to me, like it was my first week starting, And he goes, look, let me give you the lay of the land on the floor just so you know who's who in the zoo.

56:32I said, okay. He goes, you see those guys in the corner? I'm like, yeah. He goes, those guys are the smartest fucking guys on the whole floor. I'm like, okay, so they do the structuring? He's like, they do the structuring and the execution of it. Super fucking smart. I'm like, okay, great. Maybe I should go talk to him. He goes, no, no. I said, why not? He goes, because they won't talk to you. I'm like, why not? He goes, because nobody fucking likes him. Like, he's an American guy. He was living in Tokyo for 20 years. He's like, nobody fucking likes him. I'm like, Sean, what's the point of, like, okay, what do you tell me here?

57:10Avoid them. Go meet them. I'm not sure. I'm a bit confused my first week here. He's like, my point is, Dave, the smartest people in the fucking room, nobody likes them. So they're actually useless. And I was like, what? And then I thought about it that night. And it made 100 % sense. It's kind of like having a database full of very rich data, super functional, super fast. But if it's not plugged into a network, it's actually useless.

57:42One of the things that's really interesting with you is you're an early Bitcoiner, right? And usually early Bitcoiners, they have pretty strong views on Bitcoin and how the ecosystem evolved and the technology. And often, I mean, I would say now they're kind of forced to open their mind, but for a lot of them, it took a lot of time. Yeah. Whereas for you, you were fairly quickly, you know, oh, Ripple, oh, probably Ethereum, right? Yeah. And one of the things that you spend a lot of time on right now is gaming. Yeah. So much so, you think it makes so much sense that you actually joined ImmutableX?

58:23Correct. Is it head of business development? Head of business development for Asia and EMEA.

58:33How big is gaming in the Web 2 world? Massive. We're talking close to 100 billion. I would say over 50 billion. I don't know the exact number. It's definitely over 50 billion. The market is huge. and it's only getting bigger because I think these game developers or these game companies, especially the AAA larger ones, they're actually, the games are now becoming IP and the IP is then extending into omni-channels for distribution, right? So what was once a game like Assassin's Creed and developing revenue off the back of the game, now you extend that revenue because you're pushing it through to Netflix as a movie.

59:22Or it then can be turned into a comic book, right? So there are these different omni-channels that are being created with these video games because the games are becoming IP. And so that to me, that's where Web3 becomes really interesting because that IP can get uniquely validated and identified on a chain. And also you can create now another omni-channel distribution through collectibles or integration of NFTs as an asset class into your game. And so there's many ways to now split the hair and create more revenue streams. you went as far as saying um that gaming is the future of web3 yeah how would you explain that to your mother yeah why well it's almost as simple as uh people are more and more on their phones people are more and more on the internet like when you think of your own daily schedule like how much time do you actually spend on your phone on the internet like whether it's in your laptop your desktop or on your phone or your ipad you're on the internet constantly and so what's happening is we're training ourselves to be a lot more digital in how we operate and at this moment in time we're still very two-dimensional in how we operate on the internet whether it's sending funds or whether it's buying product on e-commerce or whether it's using apps like if you use an exercise app, it's very two dimensional.

1:01:05I think at some point, we're going to see the interaction between applications and human beings evolve. How that looks right now, I'm not sure, but I can take a guess. And I would imagine that it's going to be more like a ready player, one environment where we're so submersed into a particular app that impacts our day to day life. right what i would what i would say is looking at your emails for instance this is a good example we used to we started out looking at emails as a part of our communication before we had these chat applications right how you interacted with your computer or your mobile at the time looking at emails and sending emails is very different than your behavior which is a lot more immersive on WhatsApp or Telegram.

1:01:59So you got to wonder, that can't be the end game. There's got to be another, and what is that? Who knows? Potentially it could be you as an avatar having an avatar-to-avatar conversation through voice recognition rather than using your thumbs and tapping on your phone. Like, I don't know, I'm guessing, but I'm just saying, I think there's a trajectory here, and we're not done at WhatsApp. So... If you think of it that way, of course, I can explain to my mother, you know, hey, mom, you know what it's like sending emails. Yeah, I do. Well, you don't send as much anymore because you send me messages, right, on WhatsApp?

1:02:38Yeah. What do you think the difference is there in terms of your behavior? Well, I'm feeling like I'm interacting with a live person more because you respond. But sometimes it's not because you don't respond until like 15 minutes later or, you know, half a day later. And I said, yeah, and what if that, those air gaps, what I call pockets of, you know, or air pockets, get filled to keep you believing that you're talking to me until I'm actually there? Because there's an avatar that represents through AI the way that I might answer that question. Because it's been mimicking me for or listening to me for how I've been, you know, behave like my behavior in chats to be able to do that.

1:03:22So again, big guess. And you think gaming helps get there? Gaming helps get there because gaming is one of the most immersive ways of interacting with the digital at this stage. Besides VR, but that's still very outlier, right? I'm talking in terms of standard day-to-day stuff. Gaming is the closest thing for the most immersive digital interaction you'll have. so you're bullish gaming in web 3 but there is a bunch of companies that you could have joined yet you choose to join immutable x why i joined immutable because i'm really aligned with the founders and how they see the market um number one i think that immutable has the right tech uh i think they have the right business model um and they have the right people it's a it's a very very good group like the people team at immutable have the hr team have done a phenomenal job of hiring um and so you know i think if anyone's going to lead gaming it's going to be immutable um and the other reason is because that's all they do right like they don't do defy they don't look at things like social fi they only look at gaming and we have our own studios So we built our own games and have seen quite a bit of success with the games, like Gods Unchained.

1:04:50So it's the closest thing to a real Web3 game company in a sense that they build their own games as well and all they do is games.

1:05:05There's a few other areas in crypto that you're bullish on besides gaming. One is real-world assets in DeFi. Yeah. Why? And what's an example of maybe a team that you think is doing a really good job or a promising job at that? Yeah, Cicada is a team out in, if Christine's listening, hey, Christine. You know, they're based out in California. and they have built an RWA product or platform on Maple Finance. So I'm pretty bullish on what they're doing. Yeah, look, my view of RWA is that, especially now with the Bitcoin ETF being approved, I think institutional interest is only going to grow. The next natural thing for institutions in terms of evolving their interest from here to the next step is going to be about tokenizing other assets.

1:06:13Even Larry Fink was the other day on the TV already talking about that, essentially. Yeah. Saying we're going to tokenize everything, every financial assets, which we're making people very excited about ETH, ETF. Yeah. So that's why I'm bullish. I think it's mainly because of the legitimate institutional interest that's coming, which will follow with institutional money. And I think their focus area will be on real world assets, whether it's real estate, whether it's gold, tokenizing gold, whether it's, you know, there's a lot of costs with wrapping contracts around and creating ETFs around gold.

1:06:55Right. I think it's actually going to be a lot more efficient taking commodities and tokenizing them than the current state of how they're being traded, which is through ETFs or futures.

1:07:11So RWA to me is going to be a big thing going forward. And you think Maple Finance has a key role? I like Maple Finance. I like what they built. I like what they do. They have projects that they've partnered with, like I said, Cicada in California. You know, there are RWA is really about tokenization of credit and financial products that exist today, essentially extracting the current yield that is generated from real world assets and bringing that yield back into DeFi and crypto. Because, you know, DeFi yields have not been where they were from a few years ago, right? So that shows a lot of utility value with tokenization, with all the machines that run DeFi.

1:08:09And I think the market will like that as long as regulation allows it to happen. Because it's really about taking the technology and creating utility value for this stuff, right?

1:08:22You are a big fan of Africa? Huge fan of Africa. both as a market for Web3, but also in terms of what it means geopolitically regarding the shift from West to East. So we don't have a lot of time, but this is really something I want to explore, both these topics of, I mean, your opinion on the shifting global power from West to East and how Africa plays a role in that. Yeah. Very simply, I have for a number of years, because of my banking background, I really pay attention to a lot of macroeconomic signals. I follow politics globally. Like I look out for a lot of these types of global indicators.

1:09:15What I've started to realize is that there was several years ago, and I actually, there's a whole chapter in my book that talks about this. I started seeing a trend of people, countries de-dollarizing. It started with Iran and then Russia and then eventually even the EU choosing to de-dollarize to buy Iranian oil directly. So if you Google Iranian embargo and EU purchasing, Europe purchasing Iranian oil, you'll see that there should be a number of articles talking about how the EU didn't feel that the US sanctions was fair in terms of Iranian oil. and so because the u.s sanctioned them no one can buy their oil because oil settles in u.s dollar in the open market which means that you have to go through swift and if the u.s is like you're sanctioned you can't go through swift so what the european union did was create a separate entity to deal directly with the iranians to buy their oil this is not something i'm making up it's news it happened.

1:10:35So that, I was still in banking when that happened. I think it was 2016 or 17. And I remember thinking, wow, this is fucking huge. This is a turning point in history. For people maybe to understand, because there's a key kind of like message that I'd like to get to here. Can you explain how the BRICS country started? How it evolved? And how these countries' dependence on the dollar, US dollar changed over time? Because essentially, you think the dollar is over, right? Yeah, my bet is that the dollar is going to sink. Well, when I mean sink, I mean, it's not going to be the global intermediary currency for settling trades anymore.

1:11:25So yeah, BRICS started out with Goldman Sachs. It was an idea by one of their research analysts or research people. They wrote a paper about a research paper about BRICS and how these were BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and how these countries are countries to watch out for in terms of emerging markets. That's how it started. It goes from that to actually the country's going, you know what, that's a great idea, and forming a formal sort of a membership where they all came together. And then they've just recently started adding more members to this body. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Ethiopia.

1:12:12And so what I think BRICS is doing is they are realizing, I mean, Russia is a part of BRICS, right? Let me just reemphasize that. What they're doing is they're looking to create a separate alternative to be able to trade with each other without having to go through SWIFT and the US dollar.

1:12:34What does this completely mean? Like, what's the consequence of that for the US? What this means is what I believe, and people can dig into this, I believe that the alternative that they're creating will be a blockchain-based digital currency. Whether it's a CBDC or a stablecoin, it's all going to run through blockchain-based settlement rails. And what this is going to mean is, if you think about it, the U.S., the only way they can thrive, and this is why, in my view, it's a country that actually needs wars for their economies to grow, for their economy to grow. And therefore, my view is like some of these proxy wars in the Middle East or in Ukraine and potentially down the line with Taiwan is not something that the Americans would be heavily opposed against because it would enable them to then go justify printing more U.S.

1:13:27dollars. So basically, that was my question. The U.S. dollar, I mean, the U.S. needs wars to have an excuse to print more dollars. What is going to rile up the Americans more than a war of reinforcing patriotism and also keeping them a little bit sort of disillusioned so that they can go and pass bills and have money being printed? Most recently in the fourth quarter of last year, uh joe biden is passing a bill or passed a bill for a hundred billion dollars to fund ukraine israel yeah and indochina which means taiwan yeah okay i'm not making this shit up people can go look at it a hundred fucking billion dollars on top of you know every bill every trillion that they printed before like this is how the system works for them but what they didn't anticipate was that the whole world would get off the US dollar because if they do, the demand for the dollar sinks.

1:14:32Think about it. Yet they have to push supply up. That's not going to work well. Which is... I mean, understanding this is extremely important because that's one of the reasons why Bitcoin exists. If you read the Bitcoin Standard by Save Dinamos, it's just explaining what's been happening since hundreds of thousands of years, right? Which is governments, not only the US, printing more money to fund wars and economic crisis over and over again, right? And why, I mean, what's the sound money? What's not the sound money, et cetera, right? Yeah. So concretely, what's the timeframe? The dollar is over.

1:15:17What's your timeframe? And I'm going to think very selfishly, but because we are all, right, I mean, yeah. We talked about being selfish versus being thinking about the greater good, right? But everybody's like, fuck, man. What does that mean for my investments? Should I invest in US-denominated assets, S &P 500, NASDAQ, if I invest in stocks, which a lot of us don't do much because we like Bitcoin and crypto. How do I, what's the timeframe and how should people maybe switch their personal investments? Obviously, we're not doing investment advices, but like what's the even do I store my cash in dollars or something else?

1:16:00Yeah. Look, I mean, I'm not sure, you know, what this means for people's portfolio. But what I would say is people in general should, now that they know, they should keep an eye out on how this evolves. Timeline-wise, I mean, if I'm a betting man in Vegas, I think a lot of this will accelerate once and if, if and once China decides to go after Taiwan. Why? Because if China decides to go after Taiwan, which if you were to ask me, I think they will sometime in between now and 2027. If they do, and when I say go after, there's different ways of going after, right? Like you can go and physically start a war or you can start by sanctioning Taiwan.

1:16:49and then creating a layer of cyber war, sending drones, right? It doesn't have to be face-to-face combat or military jets flying over and bombing people. Like, let me be very clear. So when that happens, I think it's going to trigger the West and their allies sanctioning China. But I think China's ready for it because they've already had a dry run. If you remember COVID, they had an extended period of COVID lockdown. And no one, people were scratching their head going, why are they the only ones that are extending this? And not only that, if you paid attention closely, they were drilling Shanghai.

1:17:25Everyone in Shanghai who lived there, they tell you like, holy shit, my parents can't even get their medication. And they were making a case out of Shanghai in the news. Why not any other major city, right? Like why not Shenzhen? The reason why is because Shanghai is the most internationally exposed city in China. that the Chinese government doesn't have full control over. In a sense that people are free thinking, like if you've been to Shanghai, it doesn't feel like any other city, quite frankly. I was there 10 years ago. Exactly. Been some time. So they put it on Shanghai to make sure that they knew what it was going to feel like if they're going to get sanctioned.

1:18:06It was a dry run and they're ready for it. And if they get sanctioned and they need to pull off the US dollar because they can't use SWIFT anymore, They've tested and piloted the eRambi already. And they've already started discussing at BRICS direct swaps to settle stuff. They're prepared. The Chinese, I always say to people like, and it's not because I'm pro-China. It's just I'm pro-intelligent people, right? Like the U.S. may play chess. The Chinese are playing Go, right? Thousands of permutations. So they think way far ahead. and yeah so if they hit Taiwan I mean and China gets sanctioned you're going to start seeing that first domino where a real second largest power in the world starts getting off the US dollar and then that will create a domino effect with everyone else who trades with them maybe as an end to this podcast which could be a good introduction for our next podcast together can you tell us obviously it could be and probably will be a podcast on its own but what's attracting you so much in Africa what's the opportunity there everything I just told you if it all happens the biggest benefactor will be the continent of Africa and the reason for that is because Africa is the most geopolitically neutral continent India is exposed to the West and the East.

1:19:43Obviously, China, Russia, Europe, the US, like you're taking even Singapore, you have to take one side or the other. Africa hasn't really taken one side or the other. You can argue that the Chinese are there building bridges, but that's not meaning that they're politically aligned to them. They're just taking their money to build these bridges, which is quite different than politically siding with them on various different stances, so to speak. They're clearly not in the direction of Europe or the US. So they're one of the freest, politically, they're one of the freest. In addition to that, they have over 30 % of the world's resources, 60 % of the world's arable land.

1:20:27And I think as we start getting into more inclusive behavior from countries and away from globalization, there will be a lot more challenges with not just supply chain, but things like food or things like minerals and other kinds of resources. And Africa is ultimately where a lot of these countries will come. It'll be the marketplace for the world. Are they, I'm sorry, is Africa politically more neutral because people don't care about them yet? Because they're less developed and it's only when you're more developed that you have a bigger sort of like say or people want you on their side? I think they're more politically neutral because they represent themselves as a union, just like Europe.

1:21:22So, I mean, you're from Europe, right? Like if Germany had an opinion about China, the EU would say that's Germany's opinion. That's not the EU's opinion. The African Union is also similar, right? 52 or 54 countries. I think if Nigeria had a view, right, and they decided to join BRICS, the African Union itself might have a different view because they're representing a union just like Europe. And I think this is what enables them to be a little bit more arm's length in having to side with different positions. But also historically, no one really gave a rat's ass about Africa to a point where they wanted their political, you know, where they wanted their political sort of votes, right, globally.

1:22:13What's the takeaway from today's podcast? I think the takeaway is that crypto and blockchain and Web3 is more than just a cool piece of technology. It is actually becoming – it is actually at the forefront of changing the way that countries will trade, the way that countries will operate in terms of settling trades, continents, democratizing their resources through this. I think it's also dangerous in a sense that all of that as it goes online gives more power back to the government because things become so traceable so it is a double-edged sword

1:23:03thank you so much for doing this man a lot of fun it does also fastest hour and a half of my life