E87: Why Solo Bitcoin Mining is Dead (How to Succeed with a Bigger Network) - Sui Network Founder

34:57and so the salary on the 25th or whatever date it is here in the Bay Area is not coming from the sky, but it's coming from actual revenue and actual cash flow. Yeah. People that can't deal with uncertainty shouldn't be an entrepreneur. And people that can't deal with uncertainty should probably rethink working in a startup. Right? Those are the two things. If you deal with like things are a bit vague, if you can't deal with things that are vague, just don't work in a startup don't work as an entrepreneur try and go to defined areas we've been around for a long time i think i'm very comfortable in the unknown very comfortable in figuring things out and i think most of our teammates right like over time it's hard to trust you okay let's say this is going to happen maybe it's taking a bit of time but we've succeeded before we succeed again so you have to build that history and memory with your team so to show i call that credibility right it's part of building credibility to a large extent you know how comfortable are you with certainty it's boring what happens to you when you feel bored i check out like do you have an example in your career where you just checked out and bank at the bank right it's very predictable i know what i'm i i could tell you from the time i woke up to the time i'm gonna leave like i could literally tell you what i was going to do what train i was going to take who i was going to see at the door who's going to be sat down before i sat down what i'm going to write how i'm going to do my tests i'm going to check in the code what the trader is going to say about the new improvement i've made before i go home i could tell you all that it was so predictable right sounds like a nightmare but that's for some people some people love it right but like i it's just not me yeah it's just not me um and people literally fight to fight and fight to get to that level where they can work on that kind of software.

36:55That was a pinnacle in banking in the UK. That wasn't for me. That was it. Even any banking job I had, it became predictable within the first two to three months. You'd already sussed all the problems. There wasn't any new challenge. It was just maintenance. And I cannot do a maintenance job. I cannot do one of those jobs at Facebook where I PM a product that is a checkout or I PM stories or reels or whatever, right? Like they're not, I can't get passionate about those problems. I think it's for other people. I can't get passionate about those problems because I can't see where my long-term value is going to be had, where I can make a significant impact.

37:37I don't want 1 % improvements, right? It needs to be 100x. It needs to be something that I could talk about and feel really proud of over and over again, which also means you're always going for home runs, which also means your likelihood of failure is probably high too. But that's where I think the magic is. Where do you think this comes from? It's kind of dry, fire in the belly, love for chaos, risk-taking. I don't know. I've always just been a competitive idiot. Like whether I'm on a field playing football, playing basketball, playing video games, I've always wanted to win. I've always wanted to win.

38:15And the win comes when it's a big win. I don't like like I beat you 1-0 in FIFA. Like I have to beat you 6-0. I have to be like, it has to be like, it has to be a big gap, right? And if I know I'm not going to win, I'm not going to play you. Probably stay away. I'll play something else. But I think, I don't know, maybe there's something in my childhood that it stems from. Have you thought about that? Probably not much because it's probably the first time I've dealt with. You're becoming my shrink now. Like maybe I'll think about it. Tell me about the time when, that's what we do here yeah but but maybe if you think about it as a child really right i wasn't always the top of the class i wasn't always like the best at this or the best at that right and it always left me with a chip on my shoulder um because i didn't try hard enough i wasn't interested enough i was like okay this wasn't this isn't that interesting so i wouldn't do something else like i remember the night before my exams right i was i was playing video games right I wasn't that interested I wasn't you know like I didn't feel like it was challenging enough so I didn't try hard enough but also I didn't show up and then I was like okay I screwed myself because I didn't apply myself right and then I probably overcorrected to a point where I'm going to over apply myself in everything that I do right everything I do I'm going to put an extra effort I want to make sure I definitely draw a line between myself and others so perhaps that's where comes from you talk about chip on the shoulder is kind of funny because uh i did a podcast maybe a week or two weeks ago in new york with kiao wang from alliance now yeah and he said basically we talked about the chip on the shoulder thing and that most of the big founders they have big chip on the shoulder and things to prove right yeah especially bad relationship with the dad or um and he said that what they're looking for in founders is actually two things one is like a big degree of autism yes because you can think critically about the world right take a step back and think critically and not be kind of a sheep right you don't follow the trend you're just like thinking very so the the more autistic you are the better for that yep and the other one is probably a good childhood trauma yep yep so you just feel like you have this sheep on the shoulder and you need to prove right and you're never stopping and you're always like pushing and working hard it's funny you say that because i i would also accredit that to evan our founder our ceo exactly the same mindset he's definitely got a big chip on the shoulder and certainly you know what happened he wants to win he wants to win all the time um i mean if you ask him right like if you think about what we did at libra project right for me he was by far the most knowledgeable about what we needed to do, what we needed to build, how it needed to be done.

41:01But it was not given, it was almost like those who were not as well-versed in a topic and the area were given responsibilities that they shouldn't have been given. And I could see this. I'm literally sat there and I'm saying, like, why on earth are these guys making decisions when clearly, you know, which is interesting. When I joined Facebook, I started working on a project called Identity. within three weeks I'm like this thing doesn't make sense why am I working on identity we didn't have a blockchain right that thing got shut down very quickly and I'm happy we shut that down and I went to look for a new team and I was looking for okay who are the crazies and I was like I want to work with the crazies and I was looking for each team didn't want to work on the apps because I thought that was very easy and very it's very basic I don't think there's much innovation that could be had there didn't want to work on the infra team because really I thought the real infra was going to be the chain rather than all the monitoring didn't want to work I mean I ended up working with the research team and also the custody team as a result.

41:58And that's where I PMed. I was a partner with Evan on the research team and really worked with that team. And I was able to realize the brilliance of who we had hired. I remember telling you that one of my, our best researcher at VMware got stolen by Facebook. And at that point, it was actually like a big punch in the gut for me. It's like, we're already building this amazing thing and we lost our best researcher. And that's one of the things that also drew me to Facebook too. and I found that this research team, like Facebook were able to build, like I've seen many research teams. We were able to build one of the best research teams I've ever been able to see from various.

42:34We had a professor from Stanford. We had Dalia Markey, one of the prominent computer scientists on distributed systems in the world, in the world, right? And we acquired amazing technology from people like George, Denise's. I was able to see that he was able to curate a great team of excellent people, but they weren't always given the will to drive forward the innovation. And that was a gap. So I think there's a chip on the shoulder there, but I think certainly... Why is that the case? This gap that you just talked about, right? It's so common in the corporate world, right? You have these people who are extremely capable, but for some reason, it's basically called corporate politics, right?

43:13That's it, right? So Evan doesn't do politics. I think that's probably one gap right he just wants to build good product he doesn't want to do all this kissing up and whatever yeah he wants to be left alone to build the best product because the moment you're in politics right you are thinking about yourself not about the greater good or the greater kind of success of the company you're thinking about how do I get to this position how do I get to this right absolutely which is completely counterproductive but is happening in every organization of a certain size and we argue even like much smaller companies are full of politics but also it's a sink it's a time sink right like you can't make the best use of your time for the things that really matter namely building a better product for your customers solving real challenging problems right like which is why in our company we don't really tolerate it right whether you're like whether you're uh you know an executive all the way to an engineer like we're not interested in that politics we're very we care about rewarding people based on their contributions right like if you contribute you'll be rewarded like we just care about results so it's very metrocratic in that regard right like we don't like we didn't want to build another facebook from my perspective and we understand why facebook had to be like that and other companies have to be like that but people like us don't really work well in that environment um and in that regard we don't think we want to build that kind of environment um all over again as well so you moved to facebook right and then you were part of a team that was working on something called libra where was libra libra was a very very ambitious project where facebook put together a consortium that built a blockchain and this blockchain was going to be run by 20 plus organizations we're going to be founded by 20 plus organizations with a view of decentralizing in the future.

45:07And why are we doing that? We thought there was a big opportunity to make sending money around the internet as easy as sending an email. Facebook had done a great job in creating messaging products. Like, you know, you can argue they acquired WhatsApp. You can't argue it is a fact they acquired WhatsApp. Built Messenger, built Facebook app. That the idea of sending messages for free and engaging in that sense was already something they'd done a really good job at. And we thought a world where sending money was frictionless was only a public good. It was actually a good for the world. And definitely born to that mission.

45:40I think it made a ton of sense. If you had to ask me, like, was that the right way to go about it? I think it's one thing to build infrastructure. It's another thing to have a basket of currencies where, you know, if you have a distribution platform like Facebook with 2 billion users, right? And you give any sense of it or any air of sense that, you know, you're going to unilaterally make a decision on who is in that basket. Although that wasn't the case, right? Like, but it doesn't matter. People thought, right? Even me, I remember I was like, I don't trust Facebook. Yeah. Like, I don't trust them.

46:15Like, it's a monopoly, right? They're just there already. Like, how can they do that? Like, I mean, there's Bitcoin. The problem of Bitcoin is, because that's what it was, like peer-to-peer cash initially, right? Electrionic peer-to-peer cash, but too volatile. But then you have these stable coins, right? Tether, USDC, and I mean, there was a lot of also talk about tethered backing all that stuff but then you're thinking would i trust more like kind of like a kind of crypto native company or like the kings of the world who already control everything would i trust them more about having good intentions for me yeah probably not probably not that's what congress probably thought too right i mean look i really appreciate the fact that mark zuckerberg and dude mark has had the balls to actually try to do that right it would not i don't think you could have pulled this project off at google you couldn't have done it on amazon no other company would have had that entrepreneurial spirit to actually take on something so important but i think we should have probably taken more of a step-by-step approach just start with a blockchain and then build from there or just use an existence stable coin to show that we're supporting the u.s like interestingly like if you think about it blockchain is a great distribution network for the dollar right it's a great dollarization tool, it's not something to be fought against, something to be welcomed by Congress.

47:31It's making the US dollar even more powerful. If I was a content distribution network for money, DRM for money, why would you not embrace that? I think it's just the messenger who got killed. It killed the messenger to a large extent. Why did the Facebook Libra project not work? I think because the company who had founded the project, namely Facebook, was, I mean, what they had done in the past from losing public trust when it came to public data, it was used as leverage as a way to say they're not trustworthy to start a new system. And I understand that. I definitely understand that. no matter what we did to make it as you know democratic as possible bringing multiple parties in we cannot shake that idea that facebook was central to the foundation of this project you know so that's one of the things but is it the real reason that a government or the congress would say you can't do that guys look if you think about it if you wake up tomorrow morning and 2 billion people have a bank account, the bank of Facebook.

48:41It's bigger than every country in the world, GDP-wise. It's the biggest bank ever. That's scary. So I think for any nation state, that's a problem. That's like, it's the unknown of what could happen, what the, you know, the second and third order effects of that could happen that people don't want to find out. The reality is Facebook could have just set this thing up overnight and asked for goodness after. The problem is the overnight thing, right? Because if you think about it, Bitcoin, probably 2 billion people will own Bitcoin at some point, hopefully, right? But it's happening. It takes so much time.

49:15It takes so much time. You have time to evolve and to understand. Whereas this thing is like... Overnight. Literally overnight. Like Facebook can fund everyone with a dollar bank account overnight. You have 2 billion people with a bank account. Like they have a big bank balance to do that, right? So I think, I actually thought it would have been a great project to start off. I just think the history was a problem. I do think, right, the mission of sticking it to the banks or providing more accessible financial services to the world is a noble one. It needs to be done. And I think an organization that has resources to do that, private sector organization, is trying to do that.

50:02Obviously, they'll benefit from it financially in the future. I think it's a great idea but unfortunately the history is a problem what do you think would have been the right way to do it who should have done it and how should they have done it well think about it other people are doing it now right without the same problems that Facebook has right PayPal just launched PYUSD all good right but it's much smaller it's not like an overnight thing it's a smaller company it's not an overnight thing right and it's a US dollar directly so I think if Facebook had probably gone with the mindset of just like hey we just launched US dollar a tokenized US dollar on a blockchain, it would be available on Facebook app and it would be available anywhere else.

50:39Perhaps would have had less of the same kind of worry. But at the same time, I think the basket of stablecoin issue became the index. It became what people have really honed in on over and over again. To the end where we took it away and just said, hey, we'll launch with a stable USD, but still, even after that, it's still too late. Yeah. But look, I believe in a world where Facebook in the future will onboard a stablecoin. I think that's going to happen. Like they'll have to because the rails, if you think about SWE right now, SWE does transactions faster than any other chain. It's the cheapest than any other chain.

51:17And the transactions are instant. It's faster when you tap your Visa card and pay. So blockchain is now at the stage where it can reach mainstream. After a while, like your fees you pay to processors are going to be too high comparative to a ledger that does it instantaneously at a low cost. So they're only going to have to pivot to the technology that makes sense. So I do see a future where Facebook will adopt the technology because it's going to allow them to compete with other payment rails to a large extent. I think right now they'll probably have to stay back given still the history and the stature of Libra.

51:50The government and the Congress kind of being able to shut down the Libra project, What does it actually say about the power that the governments have over the big technology companies and by extension over our data? It says a lot, right? It says a lot that they can effectively meddle in private enterprise at will, all with the disguise or the guise of like public good, right? Or public interest. because if you think about it some of the questions that are being asked in public i was my jaw just fell like wait so how does facebook make money i'm like are we asking that question isn't it clear like it's always been clear they made money so i felt like there's a lot of grandstanding and it's less about the issues and more how to grandstand in front of the of the people um i do i do think it it is concerning but i also see actually both sides i i do think look there is a need to fight for the needs of the people.

52:55There is a need to ensure that, you know, monopolies do not dominate because then we have no choice and it becomes problematic. I do think, I do believe in that. But also, I also at the same time think, you know, single entities having power over your data and being able to set the rules ad nauseum is unfair. So I think, you know. And we just went one, I mean, 10 step further in this direction with the arrest of the Telegram founder a couple of days ago. Like, so you're seeing, it's not just, hey guys, you're too big, you can't do that. Facebook, right? It's, hey, if you don't comply with us, we'll come after you.

53:38We'll come after you and we throw you to jail, right? Which is completely crazy, right? Yeah. But a huge argument for decentralization actually. I think the things we're building is only going to make it easier for people to build applications that are fair for consumers. Like we just announced Walrus, which is a decentralized storage layer. You can run your application fully decentralized now, right? So if you want to not be drawn to the demands of a centralized party, let's say you get a call from Congress about, why don't you turn your machines off for this user, right? You almost think about that happened to TikTok to a large extent.

54:15Like that's in our partner with a US company, right? So I think democratic infrastructure is the way to go. Essentially, it started with TikTok, now it's Telegram. And then there's not many left. It will go over and over again. So the kind of time is limited to decentralize everything. If you think about it, you talk about democracy, right? The democratic system. I know you're a big fan of Switzerland, where I'm from. Shout out to Switzerland. But not Switzerland. Switzerland, sweet Switzerland, but not for the reason that most people mention, right? The nature, the calm, the fresh air is great, but it's not the reason why you love Switzerland.

54:59Can you explain why you love Switzerland so much that you included in the Misten Labs and SWE network pitch? Yeah, I love Switzerland because I think if you think about it, it is a neutral platform, right? it's a neutral area for us to deal, to do business with one another. And Switzerland's always been very neutral in that regard. And we think that that ideology really resonates well with the concept of decentralization, right? The reason why I'm very bearish on enterprise blockchain, I was one person involved heavily in enterprise blockchain for quite a while. And I came out of it realizing that ultimately, you know, someone decides, somebody, the bootstrapping issue first, then people want to make up the rules.

55:44right i want to have a piece of ownership i want to decide my rules right i want to decide who participates it you you're shut down before you can even start and it's no wonder why we're not seeing much success with with centralized or enterprise blockchains i still think it's going to be problematic and you're starting to i'm actually starting to see more and more conversations on how do we use public infrastructure in a way that still allows us to comply and what that means is there's no more argument around who owns infrastructure right who sets the rules for the infrastructure the rules are clear for everyone to accept you either participate or you don't choose another network right i think having that very neutral layer where the rules are set the it's it's clear how you engage and clear how you don't engage is only going to be beneficial and i think the kind of infrastructure we're building like we've said there are multiple things you have to decentralize from the internet to make better you have to decentralize the coordination of assets, which is sweet.

56:41How I exchange one value for another. You have to decentralize the storage as well. Because where do I store my files? And how do I make sure that is also not held by single entities over time as well? That's Boris, which we've built. Then it's going to be how to decentralize the networking layer as well. Because that's another way that can shut you down. Oh, we're not going to write your traffic through here. Maybe we'll force you, we'll ignore your connections. We'll go through here instead. So we're going to do all that. We've started with a coordination layer. We decentralize that. We're now doing a storage layer.

57:12We're decentralizing that. We then go to the networking layer. We decentralize that also. And we'll add other mechanisms. You need a multi-layer approach. And I think, which is why I always say, like, I love it. It's fun. People are focused on building blockchains. I think the target addressable market of that is small compared to what we're trying to do. Like, I'm thinking about the internet as a whole. I want to compete with Google, Amazon, Alibaba. I want to build a layer of the internet that allows everybody to build commerce from that regard. And I think Switzerland is the right kind of mechanism.

57:44It's just fortuitous, I would call it SWE. And people always, whenever Switzerland's playing, people would say, hey, SWE winning today. Why is the SWE system not replicated in many other countries if it's so fair and beneficial for its citizens? I don't know enough of the history to be able to give a good opinion there. so I have to admit that but I think there's also a need of there's also like a hunger for power right and I think the Swiss system to a large extent almost extends power to the people right which is what a blockchain does which is what decentralized infrastructure does whereas I feel other democratic systems tend to want to concentrate power within the government rather than something that's really it's given with a guise of to the people but it's not really right that's my uneducated answer off the top of my head I think it's more of a question like who do you prioritize what do you prioritize we prioritize the people so we build a system that's beneficial to the people and yeah others will come with other arguments but this is my argument what is bitcoin and crypto to you bitcoin for me is an embodiment of a financial system that the people deserve but they don't have.

59:07Can you explain that if you're talking to your mother? Yeah. So I say, mom, today you put 20 pounds in the bank. If things go, if the bank make bad decisions, that 20 pounds of yours may not be yours. It might belong to the bank. We've actually had banks do bail-ins. Forget about bail-outs. Bail-ins. Where certain amounts of funds over X amount of dollars, right, or whatever denomination it is, the bank will put that as part of its own pool of funds to protect the bank's assets. So your money that you give to the bank is actually not yours. Beyond that, on an annual basis, the government has freedom to dilute your ownership of the amount of value you have.

59:55So you've worked for a year. First, you pay taxes, which is one thing, because you're contributing to the upkeep of the country. But then they'll dilute the amount of money you've earned over the last one of a year because of debts and everything else. So the amount of money you have is not what you think. Bitcoin is the embodiment of what the people deserve because it has no inflation. There is no way by which to dilute the money you have. What you have is what you have. Separately, it's visible. So you could always see what you own. You could prove what you own at any given time.

1:00:35It's decentralized, which means there's no single body that can take ownership of your asset or make rules around your assets. So I think it's also Switzerland in the sense that the rules are clear of how you engage. So I think it is where the financial system, what we really need. Think about the gold standard. It's what we want. It's better than gold in my view because you could always make more gold. You can't make more Bitcoin. But I'm not a bear on gold. I actually love gold. But I think it's, I feel it's the future of what we need for the financial system. I think it's a terrible currency.

1:01:06It's a great commodity. It's a great way to, it's a great store of value. Absolutely proven store of value, the best store of value that we've had in the last 10 years. What's the biggest problem that we're facing today in our industry? In crypto as a whole. my view is the last eight years have been a repeated film that has not changed which is basically magic internet money, no value add just keep getting more retailing and you know find a way to extract value a great casino it's a great casino right like I absolutely crypto is a great casino absolutely I do look there's an element of gambling to everything that we do right like you buy stocks you like people say you're investing right like look you put 10 ,000 in JP Morgan you're not investing you're making a punt right it's a bet it's a bet JP Morgan don't see your money right like it's a bet your money on the future absolutely yeah so I think an investment in crypto infrastructure is a bet that you make in a public company.

1:02:08It's very similar in that regard. But I think unfortunately that what we've failed to see is like breakouts to the mass consumer. Like we want to see, like I always say DeFi is great, but DeFi is great for only those who have assets. Right? We touched about, we want to build infrastructure that everybody can gain value from. But if I have no assets, I have no way to play. But I'm also positive in the sense that it takes time. Right? It takes time to realize its value. And I'm hoping in this next cycle, with some of the work we're doing and some of the work other chains are doing, we'll start to see those breakout applications.

1:02:43Like I want to see a world where, you know, hundreds of millions of real users are using crypto but don't know they're using crypto, but they're using it because it's a better rail, right? And they're not being shilled a coin. They're being basically welcomed into a new ecosystem that gives them value that they can't extract from a traditional rails. So I think that's the world I want to see. And I think, unfortunately, we've been playing the same games over and over again in crypto for a while. Why do you think that's the case? I think lack of really good product builders. I'm just going to be honest, right?

1:03:13Like, if I look at the amount of talent that's gone into crypto, which is why when we're at Facebook, we're looking, wait, these guys keep building, like, they keep building the same stuff. They're not really innovating. The products are really just rehash of each other. Everyone's trying to make, like, if you think about the games that came out in crypto first as well, they end up being casinos they just like spreadsheets turn into games aren't real games aren't really fun and we thought well people are missing the big impact here like we saw like if you can build this swiss army knife of the infrastructure that everybody can play on you can really disrupt a lot of businesses and i think the product builders did not entered if you look at the quality of builders in the last two three years i say the skill level has gone up significantly.

1:03:59Our team alone, we have a ton of PhDs, some of the best researchers in the world. There's no way, right, like you'd have seen that in crypto five years ago. Impossible, right? We have some of the best consensus researchers, best cryptographers in the market, in our company, as a result. Great product builders who are building amazing experiences now that you wouldn't have seen before. And even looking at things like you, right, like great product builders are now coming into the space. And I think that skill set is starting to increase. And I think over time, and we'll start to see the applications that are going to reach the mass market, in my view.

1:04:32So I think, yeah, it's a lack of skillful builders, lack of high quality, and I think we'll start to see the reward of that over the next coming years. So you said we need to build a Swiss army knife of infrastructure. What is Miston Labs? So Miston Labs is effectively a lab. We call ourselves a lab. But our goal is to build platforms and protocols to make the internet more decentralized. So we will birth public infrastructure and give it to the community and help grow adoption of that infrastructure because we think it'll make the internet a better place. That's the mission of a company. And that's what we sell to our employees over and over again.

1:05:15You're here because you're building a better version of the internet. We'll start with SWE. It's going to be the best layer one possible. We'll then go to Walrus. It'll be the best storage layer possible. We'll decentralize the networking stack and we decentralize other things as well. So that's what Mr. Labs is. It's a team of highly, probably I would always argue like we have probably the greatest density of talent in the crypto space within the lab itself. If you look at the citations of our researchers, the amount of things we've shipped in the space of 12 months since mainnet, we've upgraded our consensus after a year of mainnet.

1:05:54I mean, people struggle to ship one protocol upgrade in like three, four years, right? I think ETH is still trying to upgrade to whatever version it is. I think Firedance is a couple of years away. Who knows, right? Like we're already there. Like we already have something that does 100 ,000 transactions per second. We already know how to scale infinitely by adding more nodes, right? So the craft and the expertise of coming from a big company like Facebook and building things that billions of people use day in, day out, that has not come to the space. And I think Mistend uniquely brings that space.

1:06:25You mentioned SWE Network, your first project, basically. What is SWE Network, if you had to explain it to your mother? I had to explain it to my mother. Okay, so I'd say the internet is great for moving information. It was built to move information. Do you see how you send your email? Great at doing that. You see how you do a video call? Great at doing that. now I want to send money. I want to send you money. We have very complicated things that exist today that allow you to send money from person A to person B. And because of a complicated nature, it ends up being quite expensive to use, right?

1:07:13It gets owned by single organizations who want to charge as much as possible or extract as much value out of it from your perspective. So I would say SWE comes into the place to reduce your cost, gives a very simple piece of infrastructure to reduce the cost for you to send money or send value across the internet as simple as possible. It is what the internet needs to make sending money easier across the board. So that's always been our thing. Like our goal with SWE, like these are the requirements. I would say from a product perspective, what is your requirements? We want developers to be able to build and they should be able to understand how to build compelling applications within three to four days.

1:07:54That's the first thing. Within three to four days, you should be able to build compelling applications. Second, you should not be a smart contract expert to be able to build on SWE. That's the second thing. Third, you should not have to worry about scale of infrastructure, right? When you go to build on Amazon or you go to build on GCP today, your worry is not, would Google be able to meet the demand of my application? It's, can I make enough money for my business to keep the lights on, right? Infrastructure and crypto today doesn't offer you that. For one, if you get successful, fees go up. Which means you can't scale, right?

1:08:27The more transactions, the higher the fees. Congestion. Transactions fail. All these things that you shouldn't see in traditional web 2.0 exist in web 3.0. SWE doesn't have any of that. So SWE, we're learning now that devs, within hours, all the way to two to three days, they're picking up really, really quickly, right? We're talking about web 2.0 and web 3.0 devs. People who have experience in writing. In fact, I think Ruta from Solend, which is a Solana protocol, built Suilend on Sui. They said it's a 10x improvement in development from Solana, from our experience. So we've nailed the developer experience with Sui, and now we've also nailed the performance.

1:09:08So transactions finalize on Sui end-to-end within 600 milliseconds, which means it's fast on the website. You click, before the website's reloaded, you've already your transaction's gone through so you can build compelling user experiences on SWE and you can build it and not worry about fees going through the roof because blockchain can add more capacity as needed so gas fees don't spike in SWE at all hopefully that helps your mom is a solid mom your mom's brain I took a bit beyond my mom there yeah yeah my mom struggled with emails so So it's a different story altogether. You told me crypto hasn't delivered for too long, right?

1:10:00How is SWE Network solving this issue? So I'll say, look, what has delivered so far is Bitcoin showed us that you can have a very solid store of value. So it succeeded to a large degree. And anyone that argues it, I don't know what history, in economics they've read, it's done a really great job ensuring it's a great store of value. No matter how much people like to dump on it, it's done a great job. It's slow, fine. I think that's a feature, not a bug. It's meant to be the way it is. I don't think Bitcoin's ever going to change. I'm okay with that. Ethereum taught us effectively that you can have programmable money.

1:10:35They can start to build rules around money. From SWE perspective, we show that you can coordinate any kind of intent on the internet. so that's really where we want to deliver i think ethereum was great as if you think about it right it's a more advanced form of a spreadsheet but it just really just holds balances and allows you to do very basic things it's not great at really allowing to build complex rules around assets i think that's why you have all these crazy standards and ease you have so many hacks because the platform was not built for what it was designed for and it's very hard for smart contracts and I actually think developers in ETH space are very, very good devs.

1:11:16So it's not like they want to write things with bugs. They're doing their best to actually build safe code. And they have auditors and everything else. Still, you have hacks. Because it's very, very hard to build on a platform that is inherently unsafe. Right? Which is why at Libra, we could not use ETH. There was no way. We already had enough regulatory issues to deal with. But then to now convince them that we can build the world's monetary system on inherently unsafe language, it's just not when it wasn't going to fly so we had to build a much more safer program and paradigm for people to work with so crypto is largely like you can't you can't build a business if every couple of years every couple of months right you see a 20 million 100 million dollar hack right it's going to keep setting you back so i think crypto is largely undelivered because the developer platforms are not are not expressive enough for developers to build really complaining applications One, they're too slow.

1:12:07They're too expensive. It takes too long to learn, right? It encourages you to build in really bad tokenomics, ultimately because if you're successful,

1:12:21the gas fees go through the roof because it has to deal with congestion one way or the other. So it's not the right environment to build real businesses. I think that's one of the things that crypto largely wants to deliver on, but technology-wise, it's not been possible. ask the following question to Keone from Monad. So I'm going to ask you the same. Do we really need another layer one? Yes. Why? So I would say, do we need yet another ETH L2? Right? So you will answer yes too. I would say, look, I think the only place that L2 should exist is in the E space. I'm going to be very clear on that.

1:13:07ETH has built a lot of value. It has a lot of value that's built over time. And, you know, people want to do things faster, right? And you can argue that ETH needs better L2s to allow that to happen. Unfortunately, none of the L2s actually work. They're too expensive. They're not that flexible. They make a lot of compromises. And largely, they haven't delivered on a mission, right? now i believe l1s have no excuse if you're building a new l1 you have no excuse you should absolutely build a scalable l1 don't force multiple layers of abstractions for people build something that's scalable from day one and my argument is all l1s today are highly unscalable do not have great developer experience discourage success right and ultimately have not proven to be as robust as infrastructure demands.

1:14:05For example, SWE is the only chain that's never had downtime. We've never had a single day of downtime since the network's been live. We've never had fees spike through the roof. Networks have always never had congestion because network can handle. We did more transactions in the day than any blockchain in history when games were running. Nobody noticed. It was so boring. Nobody noticed because a network could handle the scale. So I would say all blockchains bar SWE have that problem. It sounds crazy, but that's just the facts. Like we don't have reports of transactions failing, you have to restart all over and over again.

1:14:35It doesn't happen because that's how the internet should work. It's how highly scalable infrastructure should work. And you cannot argue that you're scalable infrastructure if you have outages, right? The whole point of being scalable is to be able to deal with, is always to have uptime. You can say I could do a billion transactions per second, but if you're out every couple of days, right? Like you're not usable, especially if you want to have highly resilient applications. So yeah, that's my view. I think we do need another L1 because I think most L1s are filled to deliver on enabling developers to really experiment with what's possible.

1:15:09And I think some of the things we've built in SWE, the fact that devs can build within two hours and be really, really, start to understand the primitives. And if you're a normal object-oriented programming language developer, you can pick up SWE very quickly because it's the same concept. But also you don't have to know what happens under the hood of SWE. Like it's just easy to build on.

1:15:33What is the second project that you're building? What is Walrus Protocol? Okay. So now we feel we've met our mission in solving the coordination problem for the internet. We think SWE will be the most interesting or the most important coordination layer for assets. The next thing we need to coordinate is data. Right? Right now, Web3 is a bit of a joke because you have an NFT, you mint the NFT. Where is the file for that NFT? It's on Azure. It is on AWS. It might be on IPFS, that count guarantee that a file will be there, right? It might be on other forms of storage that you can't read it back readily as fast as possible.

1:16:15It might have super weird tokenomics that discourage you from storing a lot of files. It might encourage you to pay 100 years in advance for your storage, as in RWE, for example, which is not economical. So what we've built is a business fault tolerant storage layer for the masses. So if you want to run your application fully decentralized, if you want to store video content, if you want to store terabytes, petabytes of data, you can now do that on a blockchain for the first time. And it does it with economics that people are used to. You can pay for storage as you go. You can pay for storage well in advance.

1:16:54You could trade your storage in. If you don't need the storage anymore, you could sell it in open marketplace. It's what I feel is a decentralized AWS or GCP. And the great thing about Walrus is it also supports traditional technologies like load balancers. If you want to put, you know, cache layers on top of it, you could do that as well. So you can build fully immersive web experiences on Walrus using Walrus sites today. And that I think is going to elevate the building experience. So now every app in Web3 can have a layer where the entire app is built on. Rather than having a decentralized backend, you can have a decentralized frontend as well.

1:17:32There are security benefits as well to this because now the app is built on a public layer. You can know that the app you're interacting with is not malicious. You can know it's what the developer is intended to do. We have some binary transparency as well that makes it possible for you to know, for the wallet to know that it's engaging with a real application. So these elements of where you have DNS hacks and whatever will not be possible anymore. So even worlds where sites get hijacked, now all you have to do is try to hijack the private keyword. We know key management is an easy problem to solve than paying a lot of money to have security teams run all sorts of monitoring to ensure that your site is always up.

1:18:14So I think it's going to simplify the security story for devs in Web3. it's also going to give them the ability to have fully decentralized applications for the first time which I think is key to the mission of Web3 as a whole.

1:18:31So you guys managed to do something pretty big. You got Raoul Pal as a board member of the SWIFT Foundation, right? Raoul who was also on this podcast. why did it make sense to have Raul as an advisor? so it's interesting because Raul is someone I've actually listened to for quite a while I love his Twitter account I love his videos on YouTube I've always watched them even before we started missing actually and interestingly we wanted people who would come with a broader worldview than just crypto as a whole. If you think about what you want your board to be, it can't always be yes people. It can't be people who might be contrarian.

1:19:23So at the beginning, it wasn't like Raul was like, oh, gung-ho, I love sui, whatever. He had to learn what we're trying to build. Why is it differentiated? Okay, I'm going to advise you guys and give you some great ideas on how you could think about growing the network and how you could think about ensuring that you're trying to meet the mission that you set out to do. And over time, I think it's becoming a lot clearer to him how truly differentiated the technology is i always make the point that no one looks at the sweet tech and doesn't love it like i kid you not if if anybody looks under the underpinnings of sweet you read the papers you play around with the dev experience nobody walks away thinks this is terrible no one walks away thinking this isn't innovative i think it's tech that starts to make sense and the things we've done when we read it over to people it's so obvious it's so obvious right um so people start to fall in love with the tech and we're a very tech driven team people say we stuck that marketing at the beginning largely right because what we focused on was let's like we were obsessive let's build the best developer experience possible and Raul could see that we're passionate about the dev experience it had to be the best like we're not interested in building just a 2x experience it needs to be 10x 100x better than building anywhere else and they needed to scale and I think that mission really resonates with him and I could see that now from an app experience just take one app in suite and play with it play with another app on ETH or stall or whatever the end-to-end responsiveness is something you can't argue about it's there what's the kind of value added that most people would not think of that a person like Raul can bring to a project as an advisor um I think he comes with a so he has a very good long-term view he's a great economist as a whole right so when when you have like market cycles like ours in crypto that's volatile as hell he's been through it right he could tell you calm down like there's nothing we've been through this before right so it's great from that regard to have someone someone who's crypto native also been through the wars and can see what has happened before i think i've been in crypto since 2012 i've seen all sorts of cycles but the whole company isn't crypto native right people in the company come from facebook come from google come from all these other companies where you don't have like crazy volatility in in your emotions on a day-to-day basis right so i think having someone in a room that has been through that is being super helpful as a whole and he's got a great strategic mind as well right on you know helping us make the right decisions when it comes to you know prioritizing what we do with the foundation You're fascinated by the space and space exploration.

1:22:04Why is space exploration so important for the advancement of humanity? First of all, Star Trek, not Star Wars. People are going to hate me, they're going to write me off right away. But I just grew up with Star Trek. I was always like a geek for anything space related. I think the idea of like, captain of a starship, flying out to all sorts of unknowns and discovering strange new worlds. The adventurous part is something that really, really caught my eye. which is one of the reasons why I also went through astrophysics, right? Like, couldn't be further from what we're trying to actually do here today.

1:22:34But I was always fascinated by physics and space as a whole. Technically, we're all trying to go to the moon, so. Yeah, we're all trying to, we're still trying to go to the moon. You know, but. Crypto is a. Crypto is another thing, you know. It's another thing. We'll go to the moon. But I love the idea of space in that regard, right? It's the uncharted, the undiscovered. and just new things that can be discovered, right? So I totally understand Elon's idea about space, like why he's trying to go there. Like it's this uncharted territory. But another thing is like, we're not going to the bottom of the ocean as well.

1:23:09Like things to be charted on our own planet as it is, right? So, you know, but I will always be drawn to it. Maybe one day I can afford to fly to do the, what do you call it? Is that Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic? Virgin Galactic, maybe one day. I think the ticket is 250k now. Oh, okay. I'll wait for many people to go first. Just, yeah, exactly. No, I want more people to guinea pig it first. Before I go. Yeah, but I'll be all on that. Calculated risk-taking. Yes, yes. I think my wife would be a no. She hates skydiving as a whole, so, you know. Have you ever done skydiving? I've never, every time I've signed up for it, something happens.

1:23:53I remember I signed up in Miami and the clouds were too low. sometimes too windy. Like there's always something, but it's something I've always wanted to do. Have you ever done bungee jumping? No, I've not done that. That I don't want to do. Interestingly, I prefer skydiving to bungee jumping. I don't think it's interesting. I'm the same. For some reason, I feel like one is much less risky than the other. I think skydiving is way less risky than a bungee jumping. Yeah, I think too. Yeah. So the idea that it's a rope that they have to calculate precisely so that my head doesn't go bouncing off the concrete or the water versus I'll trust the, something I see people do all the time, namely a parachute.

1:24:28I think that sounds more interesting to me, but also it's longer. Like I think there's a, you know, you get to enjoy a bit more. And probably because you're so high, you don't kind of feel the risk, right? Because you're kind of like really far away. Far away. This kind of theory, it's kind of like a physical theory, like infinitely small and infinitely big. Yes. They kind of join, right? Yes. And so I think it's probably linked to that. Yeah. the two type there are multiple types of infinity that people have to learn right talking about infinity the space is by definition infinite infinite i'm not sure how we say that in english what does that mean the space is infinite because it kind of sounds like if you really think about it it's really hard to comprehend we're talking about space a space or spaces in crypto space yeah it's infinity is actually a hard thing for people to comprehend like i find myself um i find myself also thinking the same thing like for example there are different levels to infinity right there's a different infinity for the size of universe versus the amount of stars that exist right there's a different infinity for how many grains in the sand or on the seashore versus you know how many air particles that we have in our when things there are different degrees of infinity I'd like to argue.

1:25:48I think the infinity of space is scary as hell. Like, it is very, very scary to think that you can go into the depths forever and ever and ever. And even let's say you reach the edge of the expanse, right? I mean, people think there's still things beyond that expanse. What's outside the expanse? That's scary as well, right? You know, like, who knows? Like, what do we meet at the end of the expanse? Do we burn up or do you meet a supreme being at the end of the expanse, right? Who knows? Like these are amazing things, but I don't think we'll ever find out. I actually think there's some things we'll never find out in our timeline, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't venture out to figure it out, to be honest.

1:26:32I think this is why like it's a space that you'd research forever and ever and only learn incremental new things over time. Yeah. What would you answer to the people who say, complain, hey, we're spending too much money on exploring all this stuff when we have much more pressing issues to solve on Earth? I'm sympathetic to those, for sure. I mean, if you think about it, right, like a lot of our tax money goes to space exploration. It's funded by the public. The public should have a voice with how their funds are spent, right? They should have a say in how the democratic system, right? You could argue that we've had a lot of scientific advancement from space exploration and the ROI is high.

1:27:20It would be good to have a public view on what that ROI is. So people can make an informed opinion, right? Rather than just making it this, you know, this thing that people don't have a view on. People don't have a say in, in my view. Give people information and data with which to make a decision rather than hiding and shielding it in obscurity. So I actually think people, I trust the public in that regard. If you can show, hey, look, we're able to cure this X, Y, and Z disease because we spent 20 billion in space exploration, then maybe people might be more sympathetic because it ties to things that matter to them rather than random scientific discoveries that they might not be able to correlate with the real world.

1:28:02I mean, one such argument could be that the technology used to fuel a spacecraft, right? can be used to build planes that are much faster and to go like, let's say, I mean, I came from Singapore here, right? If you do it, I think direct flight is probably 15, 16, 17 hours. You could probably do it in the future in one or two hours, right? Yeah. Thanks to space exploration. Yeah. So. I don't like that argument. Because we had Concorde before, right? And we shut that down. But also, I mean, look, this is public enterprise. If a private enterprise can see an ROI in doing it, they should fund it and take the space technology and build the faster plane.

1:28:51I think a world where we think government should go and spend that money and figure that out, that probably doesn't make much sense. Probably never really works, right? We have the example with Elon, SpaceX, right? Versus government, right? See how he's done it way better than the government could have, right? So if someone is driven by profits, they might make better decisions in that sense. Maybe Elon might build us better planes, faster planes. Yeah, but Elon has so many other things to do. He has many things to do. He's juggling many balls right now. He's got bigger problems. Another big topic that you're passionate about is God, right?

1:29:31You told me you're a very spiritual person and a big believer in God. What is God? to me well what is god god god for me is a supreme creator of everything that we see and that we are today um like you see on my twitter account i say jesus family crypto and that was the order yeah jesus family crypto so it's it's it's always been a very important part of my life um i grew up in a christian family um became a christian at the age of 16 and always endeavored to follow the principles of the Bible ever since. Things like treat people like you want to be treated, these things make sense. Things like love your neighbor, make sense, right?

1:30:18Try not to take revenge on people, make sense, although it freaking hurts. You know, if someone is jibing you on Twitter, you want to go back and stick it onto them, I still have to work on that. But, you know, I think these are great principles. But beyond that, I think I do believe that there is a supreme being in God, right? I do believe that he's made himself known multiple times through history. But I also believe that, you know, unfortunately, in the world we live in today, a lot of it has been, a lot of aspects of what God is and, you know, has been monetized by, you know, charlatans and whatever.

1:30:52And it's even been politicized as well, which I absolutely hate. But I think God for me is a personal thing. It's something you have to have a personal relationship, a personal faith in. And that's what I have, a personal faith, a personal relationship. I pray on a regular basis. I read the Bible on a regular basis. It's not something I try to throw in someone else's head, right? So, yeah. And I hope that those principles are the way by which I treat our employees, I treat people around me and over time as well. Why do you believe in God? So, I believe, so why do I believe in it? For one, I believe from the preponderance of evidence from my own study that Jesus was a being that actually existed 2 ,000 years ago.

1:31:37From not just biblical sources, but external sources that Jesus existed. Beyond that, the history that we have in Genesis all the way to Exodus, Leviscus, Numbers, from what we have from Moses, Abraham, you name it. Like, I think from every book I've read, I find it very, very hard to imagine that, you know, one person or a group of humans can come together with such a great story. From the predictions that you have in the book of Daniel, all the way to the destruction of, you know, the temples, from the prediction of the Messiah coming in the Old Testament. These are amazing, amazing stories.

1:32:24If you look like in the book of Genesis and Exodus, every 50th word in Genesis and Exodus, basically, it basically, in fact, if you look at Deuteronomy, every, I can't remember if it's 49th word or something like that. Every 49th word basically spells God's name. Every 49th word in Genesis, Exodus, Exodus, numbers in Deuteronomy also read some similar word as well. So you basically got numerology happening in the Bible. You also got predictions in the Bible in regards to what's going to be foretold in the future. It predicted the coming of the Roman Empire. It predicted the coming of the Greek Empire.

1:33:04It predicted the fall of the Roman Empire. It predicted the destruction of Babylonian, the Babylonian Empire. So, I mean, for me, those are enough. And from my relationship from praying and seeing things answered and from my experience, it's enough for me. Now, is that enough for everybody else? Probably not. This is why I think it's a personal walk, right? It's a personal walk for each and every single person. Naval Rabicon said, everybody wants spirituality. No one wants the truth. See, the reason why I disagree with that is it's already making a supposition that spirituality isn't the truth, right?

1:33:49Like we already know that, you know, there's more to this world, right? There's more to this world than what we see, right? Like even elemental science will tell us that there's more to this world than the things that we see. And I also think if you think about as a software engineer, just thinking about DNA, the code of life and everything else, right? Like you're trying to tell me that I have a programming language that writes itself, that has its own compiler, that has its own error correction, that replicates itself with almost 99.999 success rate is something that just happened by chance.

1:34:29These are the things that I think that level of infinity for me is almost impossible mathematically. Again, it's good for me, it's acceptable, right? I think those are the kind of things that I add as the evidence list. it's not the only thing right but i think for others they love chance and they think that for me like i follow people like james torr professor james torr who is for me one of the most profound um um profound organic chemists in the world and just the amount of research he's done over the years and the discoveries he's made over the years he's one of the most celebrated um scientists in space and he's a big believer he's a big he's a big believer in jesus right um it's i just feel like there's too much evidence of of of of a supreme being right some people might say it's aliens some people might say it's who knows right it could be whatever you want right um but yeah being out of this world built everything you could say it's an alien for me it's god right whatever it is for you.

1:35:35Do you believe in destiny? What is the definition of destiny? Something is written. Your path is basically written. Everything happens for a reason. My definition of destiny. Okay. So everything happens for a reason. I think everything that you do has a cause. Is the way I would say it, right? Like there's a cause behind what you do. Nothing is truly random. that there is always a cause to everything that happens, right? Everything in this world has a cause. The universe basically has a beginning, right? The Big Bang. Everything that happens that we've observed in life has a cause. The universe started, therefore has a cause, right?

1:36:17And normally causation is something that's driven. It's something that happens because someone had to do something. So I would say everyone has the ability to chart their own destinies, right? Decisions that you make will result in outcomes. So you could also say karma, right? Like you get what you get. You put something in, you get something out, right? It comes back at you. I think everything does absolutely have a cause, but I don't believe that there is this thing that written that you can't change it. I don't think that's possible in that regard. For you personally in your life, right? Like I think you have the ability to change your destiny by making the right decisions or making the wrong decisions.

1:36:57I had Ray Chen, the founder of 9gag and Mimland on this podcast. And he shared with me the incredibly sad story of losing his young son. He's very open about that. We talked about it for like 10 or 15 minutes and went really deep into that. How do you explain this kind of tragic event in the context of spirituality and God? Really good question.

1:37:24So, unfortunately, we live in a world where... So, if I explain it from a Christian point of view, right so i believe that god made a perfect world to start with but in making a perfect world he also wanted children who can make their own decisions i think it's one thing to create people that are sheep that have no decision making ability whatsoever right i can make let's say i make your wife and you know this wife is programmed to love you 100 cannot deviate from you is that real love at that point the person cannot make a decision there's no free will There's no choice there. So that's an imperfect being from my perspective.

1:38:04And God is a being that can make his own decisions. So in his view of making beings like himself, he gave us free choice to make a decision. He also told us what happens when we make good decisions and bad ones. We decided to make decisions that ultimately benefited us. And I think sin is something related to doing something opposite to what God's will is. And we live in a world that is full of opposition to God's original design. and as a result we have many um side effects as a result of decisions that were made thousands of years ago by you know people before us and over and over again and we're paying for that now it is the argument would be is that fair i would say in god's view like honestly like i it's it's one of those things right like i i've reached a position where i don't question god because i ultimately believe that he can see the beginning the end and the beginning so his wisdom completely supersedes mine i'm willing to delegate my destiny or my thoughts of the future to him i think unfortunately the world we live in we live in a fallen state of the world where things happen as a result of of sin and unfortunately for him as well right he lost his son and also disease so a disease of the young son would come from a scene no no i'm saying i'm saying disease death all these things were not things god wanted for us right because remember Adam and Eve on the day you make this decision you shall surely die right death was not something that was designed for us disease and not something designed for us he wanted good for us right but ultimately we can make our own decisions and as a result of our sin at the beginning all these things came into the world which is why he sent us a savior and the end of the day will come and change the world and make it perfect again right so I think at that point you'd have if you imagine from day zero today today to the end of the day right you'd have found people who had made a decision to follow him who have made a decision to believe in him or who have made a decision to live lives that um have the principles that he he wants in life right so yeah i mean it's not a perfect answer but it's it's my response in in this very short very quick question that you asked me i i think it's suffering is is a reality that we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis i was explaining that my mom um eight years ago eight years ago had a stroke and she's been bedridden ever since and my mom is a avid believer right strong believer strong faith woman right um you know and to see her in that scenario is very very difficult for me as a as a son um but again like my my faith rests in the fact that there'll be a day when and she would perfect it again, right?

1:40:50This is a temporary state we're in in this world, and in the future, there'll be a perfected state for her where she's not going to be sick anymore. But again, I'm not going to be in a position where our lamb ask God, go, why didn't you make it perfect, right? Why didn't you fix it, you know?

1:41:07So even in that situation, that is a really bad one with your mother, you're able to explain what happened with the help of God? Or is there like such a moment in your life where you said, I really can't explain why this happened? So if you imagine when Jesus was in the world, I remember when the lady, when she poured almost a year's worth of salary of perfume to wash Jesus' feet, right? And people say, you could have given that money to the poor. Jesus said, the poor you'd always have with you. And in my view, what he was signaling is that this world that you're in, it's always going to have poor people.

1:41:54It's always going to have the sick. It's always going to have the lame. It's always going to have the blind. It's always going to have people who are suffering. Suffering is inherent in the world that we live in. And I've come to recognize that that's the state that we're in. It's a fallen world that we're in. And I, but I also recognize that the state that we're in is not the permanent state that we're in because it's promised that there'll be an improved state coming for those who believe. So that is how I reconcile it for me, that the glory that will come at the end is greater than the punishment that we deal with now.

1:42:28But it's also very hard for those. It's a hard thing to explain to people without faith because it's almost like you're making a gap for God, right? Okay, there's a gap, so I'm going to fill it with God, right? you know which i but but my argument would also be the humanist element has no space for this right it doesn't give you an answer the humanists can't give you an answer to this right there'll be oh well we're a result of our environment well so if i'm a result of my environment then you can't blame me if i shoot someone in the head for free right like because i want to right like what what is that who defines what's right and what's wrong right if i'm just a random element of what i've become right like i can do whatever i want and how can you lock me in jail for something that's part of my nature so i actually think the humanist angle or the non-spiritual angle actually doesn't give you answers it gives you it puts you more in a sad state of affairs and a more degenerate state of affairs than anything else in my view you told me you were diagnosed with some health issues about a year ago yeah what happened so i believe about when was this i believe during the time this was this was in 2000 and 2018 i believe i went to the doctor to do the dentist to do a procedure on my tooth and when it put me under when they're about to basically start the procedure they measured my blood pressure and it told me oh your blood pressure is high like surprisingly high and so sometimes happens with people because they might be a bit panicky and i'm truthfully i was kind of worried about to stick a big needle in my mouth so I come down a bit five minutes later it was fine I went to the doctor and they said you're okay but lo and behold literally seven months ago went to the doctor because I was getting headaches and I said you got high blood pressure which was a shock to me um I did not know my dad had died blood pressure he had not told me so it's certainly something hereditary but he's he's controlling with medication he's actually doing some herbal stuff that's he's off the medication now and the herbal stuff has actually helped him and he's actually clear now so i've started um i started on blood pressure medication and take more care of myself do more cycling more boxing more running so health has become like a very focused part of my of my routine i don't just take good health for granted anymore i think we can get in positions where we get lazy and like oh you're blessed with good wealth you feel good so obviously everything's fine you have to actually work for it so now i have to work to have good health and i think that is a new part of my brain i never had before i think i'm 42 years old now so um i've got to take a lot more care of my body what are the risks of high blood pressure strokes strokes heart attacks all sorts i got all sorts of scans and luckily everything was good so it's not to the point where it started to damage organs and things like that.

1:45:23But it's now in a good level. And I monitor it. Well, I should monitor it more than I should. But I monitor it now. More regularly than... Very regularly, I'd say. Just to make sure I'm always keeping ahead. So my wife is always asking, do you check your blood pressure today? Just to make sure, you know. One of the reasons you brought up for being more careful about your health is actually not you, but your kids. Yes. how does having kids change a person's way to look at life and at themselves yeah once you have children like the perspective of what matters in life drastically changes right it becomes all about looking after somebody else rather than yourself like you you start to find muscles in yourself that's less selfish focus on other people like these good characters start to come out.

1:46:20I think that's one of the differences of spirituality also. If you don't look at a religious way, it's thinking outside of yourself, right? Correct. I actually agree with that. I think it really forces, and again, this isn't, for those who don't have children, I hope you don't read it as, you have to have children to have this element of life because it's not true. But I certainly can see that those qualities certainly are magnified in a parent. I've seen it for myself, right? Like I'm less greedy. I'm more forgiving, right? I'm more loving. I'm more patient, right? These real good qualities that I have to do for my children because there's no, like, a child's not going to understand.

1:47:04I've got to be more patient with my child. I've got to be more loving with my child. I've got to be more caring about my child. I need to be here long enough so my child, actually my child grow up. So for me, maintain my health because I want to be able to see my kids get married. I want to be able to see them fall in love. I want to be able to see them do well in school and everything else, right? So my life starts to circle really around them and less around me, you know? I think that's the element that I really, I'm really loving to see with my children. My daughter is nine now. My son's 11.

1:47:36And it's been phenomenal. That's why I hate going on business trips because I miss them so much. I think I try to limit the amount of days I'm away. I try to get back before the weekend. so I can spend time with them as well. But no, it's life priorities changes, man.

1:47:55There's a tradition on how we kind of close these conversations on this podcast. I always ask the same question. What's your biggest prediction for the next 12 months? In regards to the election? In regards to crypto?

1:48:19So we've been on record saying that the biggest use case for crypto that has ever been seen is going to be seen early next year with SWE. Think about whatever partner you think is huge, double that or quadruple that multiple ways. Like we're going to actually see mass crypto adoption for the first time. I think SWE is going to do that. We're working on some really amazing things now. But there's always been a goal for us, and we're very, very excited about that. But beyond that as well, I think, I do think that things will settle down from a regulatory point of view for the industry. I think that clarity will not be there next year, but I think the environment will be a lot less hostile.

1:49:01Whether it's a change in regards from a politics point of view, I think that's actually going to be great because we see both sides, both the Biden and the Harris administration are certainly way more friendly to crypto. Whether or not they believe long-term and it's more opportunistic thing, I think you're going to realize a lot of the youth actually care about what they think about the crypto space as a whole. And they're both playing to that to a large degree. So I think it's going to be, I wouldn't say clear water for crypto, but I think it's going to be certainly less hostile environment to do crypto to a large extent.

1:49:34So I'm looking forward to that. I think next year would be the year for crypto. Next year is the year. Next year is the year. Thank you so much for doing that, man. That was a really, really great conversation. I really appreciate it. Thank you.