 And we are live. What's up guys? I got a really good episode for you today. I got my good friend, Ryan Gale. Now before we begin, I do wanna say his bio because it is extensive. So for the last 10 years, Ryan Gale has navigated working as a founder in media and technology and supporting a portfolio of companies at the intersection of culture, ventral capital at the bleeding edge of web 3.0 innovation. He now oversees blockchain technology initiatives for Peter Diamandis and runs business development in the English speaking world for a crypto fintech lab in Japan. Ryan, welcome to show brother, how you doing? Thank you man, appreciate it. I'm doing really well, enjoying the beautiful LA weather. How are you doing? I was about to say, where are you calling from man? Cause it looks fucking great. Yeah, right outside Venice area called Mar Vista. Nice, you live there full time? Mm-hmm. Beautiful, how long you been there for? I've been in LA for about six years, all the different areas have done West Hollywood downtown. Now I'm on the West side. So let me ask you this, man, like how did you get involved in the blockchain slash crypto space? Yeah, so I remember back in probably 2010 or so, I was working for a director named Ridley Scott and I read the Wired article about Silk Road. So it wasn't fully about Bitcoin, but Bitcoin was the way that that model worked. And so I was aware of it from that point, but not being a technologist and being sort of focused on business, I didn't really think to dive in and get involved. And then when Ethereum happened, the blockchain ended up extending away from just the use case of Bitcoin. And we started to see the potential of these things, these assets being different company shares or membership tokens or anything of value that we could apply to these tokens. And that really started to open my mind a little bit more. And I've been exclusively working in this space probably for about 15 months now. So somewhat new, but I kind of take a venture capital approach to it. I look for a portfolio of companies that are doing really interesting things, solving big problems. The ICO is really a framework for fundraising, which is kind of replacing the venture capital model, but it goes so much bigger than that around asking the question, what is money and what is governance and all of these really philosophical things. So right when I had that sort of aha moment of the philosophy of it, that's kind of where I decided I needed to make the jump. And so right now, what would you say is the most exciting thing for you in the space right now? For me, I think that this technology can be used to solve the biggest billion person problems that we have on earth, and the ones that we haven't even faced yet. I think it provides new infrastructure for us to organize and design societies. That's far off into the future, but we're seeing the potential of that being built now. So so many people draw this parallel of the internet. It's early 90s for the internet. I think that is really true, but we're underestimating exponential change and exponential technology. And so if you're gonna skate to where the puck is going, you need to do the work now. So you as a venture capitalist working with Peter Diamandis, and obviously he's a big name. He's been in technology for a really long fucking time. What are some, what are two angles to you view the space as? A, you as a venture capitalist, what are you looking at when you're investing in let's say blockchain technologies or blockchain companies? And two, you as a venture capitalist, where do you see the evolution of let's say DAOs or ICOs going in the future? Do you see it replacing venture capitalist? Do you see a hybrid model? Like what's your take on this? A couple of phases. The first phase was really this open wild west that everybody talks about where you had these utility tokens that didn't have utility yet, right? But speculatively could have utility in the future. And the excitement of those visions really got the crowdfunding aspect tapped in to raise really amazing amounts of money. Some of those, most of those projects haven't even realized the utility that they had promised. And so within that unregulated market, you have to have people come in and step in with protections. I think we're kind of in the middle ground between that first phase and the second phase, which is really retrofitting this new technology into the existing regulations, which is what state regulators in country, countries all over the world are really trying to figure out. We have exemptions around the jobs act, Reg CF, Reg A, Reg A plus, all of these innovations to open up the financing but do it within a regulated framework. That's the phase that we're in now. I think in the future we'll probably try to extend that and try to understand it's a bit different. And there's a lot of people in Wyoming and in New York that are lobbying for that right now. And the eventual outcome of all this is gonna have to be a hybrid. It can't be trying to fit into the old world that we understood before, but it has to be that we extend our minds to the possibility that this really does change quite a lot that we thought that we had figured out. And if people all over the world can create money, how do we regulate that? And when the enterprise get involved and we're hashing these assets of value on the blockchain, where does all that fit in from a governance perspective? So I think we're right now in the middle ground of figuring out what that is and people like yourself and the work that I do is really trying to make sure that we do it right. And so, you know, it's interesting, Todd, like I see two worlds that are gonna exist. You're gonna have the open decentralized world where it's a wild, wild west. People will go to jurisdictions like Malta, like Gibraltar, like wherever Barbados and they'll open up shop over there. And obviously they will legally stop accrediting investors or investors specifically from North America and they'll give access to people around the world. Then you'll have the regulated blockchain space where people are trying to securitize everything. I'm not quite sold yet on securitized assets. I wanna say assets, I wanna say securitized equity. I see a lot of downfall on that. For me, my biggest- You know, you gotta remember in addition to assets, there's 15 to 20 trillion dollars of asset classes that are not liquid, right? You have bonds, you have munis, you have private placements. But see, this is where it's interesting. Like I see, for example, you creating a real estate token where actually open up cash flow, open up capital. That's fascinating. We're actually increasing more liquid capital from a preexisting asset that has value. My issue when it comes to like, let's say you and I start company A, brand new company, Ryan and me are starting it and we're issuing securitized token, one dollar equals one share or whatever and our initial investors go in. And so there's a period of arbitrage, a period of speculation where it gives value towards this token, right? Let's say it's a year, hypothetically. So within a year, it's getting value based on actions that we're doing as founders within the company. After a year is said and done, these investors have liquidity on this new securitized token. They will sell it, most likely, there'll be clauses like no other contract. They first have to offer it to the preexisting investors and founders. If no one wants to take it, then they can offer it to the public markets. Now this is funny, because if you look at traditional markets, it is in 24-7, right? There's rules and regulations. And so I always look at incentive, Charlie Munger talks about this, show me the incentives and I'll show you the results. I look at incentive models for like private companies were having a 24-7 liquidity pool that that is a token as security is like once a first investor sells these tokens and opens up to the public market, I think we'll see an equilibrium of a depreciated value of a company because the incentive models aren't there. There's a reason why being vested for four years makes sense for both investor and founders. But imagine if you and I just start a startup, raise half a million dollars and people then exit within six months and all our equities liquid changing hands around the world. I just see a lot of issues with that. Yeah, there's definitely a certain point where the incentive structure gets broken, right? And so many of these are experiments right now. I think there's a huge argument on one side of this thing to say, there's assets where you can lock up the investment, but not lock up the investor. That make a lot of sense. Some real estate use cases, sometimes some funds, but at scale when that's being done with a great level of adoption, then you start to run into some of the setbacks that you're talking about. And I think the only way that we can truly know is for those pioneers to go first through the door and to learn from them. So, I give all credit to the people that are trying to do it now, some of these early movers, because likely the data shows that they won't be the ones to eventually bring it in to cross the chasm, but this is a really very important early adopter stage that we're in. But I don't think we should let the fear of that. No, no. And I think people that work in this time they have more upside because there's so much more risk. And I study Munger Operating System Theory quite a lot. I'll give a shout out to Farnham Street Blog. That's a fucking amazing blog. Shane is amazing. It's one of my secret weapons. But it's a bit torn right now because you have these traditional titans. I think Munger and Buffett are the best at what they do, but they don't exist in the world that we're moving into very much. There's a lot of criticism around it, but I think the idea of value investing still needs to remain at the core of what we're doing. Another issue I have with SecureTie's Token has nothing to do with the actual technology, even though that's a big issue, is for me, I hate regulations where it legally stops people from participating. For example, I'm an accredited investor, you're an accredited investor. And just because we've created wealth in the past or the definition of wealth and the jurisdictions that we live in, we have the luxury of investing in ex-companies. And so other people don't, but at the exact same time, they can go to a casino by the original token, which was a casino token, and spend a billion dollars, that's okay. Perfectly fine, go gamble your money. Well, God forbid you're too stupid for your own good to go invest in a company. Now, you see these... I agree with that. I think the big difference is the level of scale at which you can do it, right? If you do an ICO, you're raising a lot of money globally is what was happening. A casino is pretty localized to that and they take the responsibility for that. But are you familiar at all with Reg CF, Regulation Crowdfunding, or the things they can? Yeah, yeah, like we have jobs act here in Canada. So it's kind of similar to the framework that you guys have. Yeah, so there's a guy named Kendrick Nguyen who started a company called Republic, which was spun out of Angelist. And they're really at the front lines of all of that. Right now you can raise $1.07 million a year from unaccredited investors. Hopefully that continues to extend up to 5, 10, 15 million. But I think it is a shame that unaccredited people that really have the ability to build wealth with some of this stuff don't have access to it because we're protecting them against it. There are other options like risk disclosures and education that we could pump these resources in this capital into. And I think we'd see a lot better outcomes than that. And it's also the paperwork. I don't know if you've ever done it, but if you look for, at least for Ontario, the Jobs Act paperwork, let's say you're not, you've never invested in a company before and you're reading the disclosure of the Jobs Act. It's like you're reading Martian. It's like, what the fuck are these 25 pages of gibberish I'm reading? And so a normal person supposed to what, become a detective, analyze in the cipher, these 25 pages, is outrageous, is ridiculous. No wonder no one does it. It's stacked against the average person for sure. And this is where I see like- That's not unique for what we're in right now. I mean, you have to, if you need, if you wanna be really good at what's happening right now, you need to know computer science, game theory, how that's gonna work around behavioral economics. You have to understand network and how networks work. You have to understand monetary theory if you're gonna build an economic model, that's gonna actually sustain. So this is such a cross-disciplinary thing that it almost takes this like polymathic approach of being an expert generalist and not being so deep of an expert in one field because then you cannot contextualize. You don't have the integrative complexity to look at how it affects other stakeholders. Let's kind of switch gears over here because you have a big focus in Japan. Why have you decided to focus in Japan as opposed to any other place? Yeah, so last year Japan was really taking a huge lead. You know, they legalized Bitcoin as tender, as a real monetary system where you could go buy things. They're tired of the flat-land economy, I think that they've been in for a long time and they were really rallying around innovation, not just in the blockchain or crypto space, but all Web 3.0, self-driving cars, wearable technology, sensors all over the place. But somewhere along the line of Mt. Gox and Coincheck, that sort of free spirit closed up a bit and they've become the fit, which is two very big events that happened. So they are taking an approach of legalizing all of this stuff, but the timeline is now a little different. So I still vest very deeply in Japan and I'm positioned there for a reason. I think it's a much longer time horizon than some other countries, but in the long run I do believe there'll be a world leader. So you're in the States, I'm in Canada, I'm in Toronto, I just came back from Berlin. What would you say is the most progressive country right now pushing this tech? Switzerland? ZUG? Yeah, well all of Switzerland, I mean ZUG has really become, we have a subsidiary office that's based out of ZUG. The company's called Tech Bureau, it's headquartered out of Tokyo and Osaka. I, with some partners of mine, help run the US side of it and we have this subsidiary in ZUG because that's the clearest compliance right now. The guidelines are the clearest, they've come out with the multiple times, they've updated them. You just know where you stand and what you can and cannot do. So it's clear and I think that's much further than any other country. You have all these island destinations popping up that really wanna drive innovation and become a hub. We'll see how those go, I think a lot of them are promising but it's too soon to really tell. Are there currently any open source platforms or I would say open source, yeah let's say platforms, are there any open source platforms currently that got you or is getting you excited that you're looking forward to or are you currently working with that you really like? Open source platforms. The whole public chain side of the world with the protocols, I think I feel like people have gotten a little used to it and they've moved on to applications and businesses but they're still not strong enough yet. And so that's what has to be fixed right now. We don't need to scale to infinite transactions but we need to meet the demand of what real businesses are gonna create. And I don't think we can right now. The whole EOS crew are really great friends of mine and I love watching what's happening there. That's one big fucking experiment man, it's very interesting to see what they're doing. Well that whole thing is built on Austrian economics school of thought. So it's really interesting to see that play out and nothing ever happens perfectly the first time. So I think they had a brilliant token offering design, maybe one of the most brilliant things that has come out of this and they did that very successfully. Now they need to have a buffer of time to set the network up and make it work and scale. I'm curious to see how, because you know how the SEC came out with their definition decentralized and like what the fuck is their definition of decentralized? Like they never had some clear thought on that or they didn't create a paper on that like what is their definition of decentralization? So you look at EOS, which is 21 delegated nodes that have been voted on but the voting was weird because of exchange. At any one time it's actually a very dynamic system. Yeah. It's not 21 fixed nodes. Yeah, it's variable nodes. Exactly. Yeah. So it's interesting to see what the SEC will be like. Well, does it have to be X nodes or does it have to be nodes plus let's say people, how many people are controlling the GitHub? Like I still don't know what their definition decentralized is. I don't know what everybody's definition of decentralized is. I think to me decentralization is more of a lesson to learn and not a specific goal of a thing to run towards because this only works in a hybrid environment where all stakeholders have their fingerprints on it and it actually crosses the chasm, right? If we just wanna exist in this space of speculation and early adopters, that's fine but that's not interesting to a lot of us. I think we really wanna see this scale into the world and make big changes. And pure decentralization just like pure anarchy or libertarianism is really just not plausible for a lot of people. So I kind of pick and choose lessons from all of these modalities and decentralization just means let's take it away from this top and let's distribute it back down to some people and let's not have it be so imbalanced in the governance and the ownership, right? And so when we figure out how business models are gonna work around that, I think we'll probably eventually see the balance go back to at least in 80-20. Well, there is this power line in nature, you know? Soul, one of my favorite people on the planet talks about, you know, human capital, intellectual capital. And so the whole ideology of like if you distribute wealth and if you create everything equal at the end of the day it will flow upstream to the people that have the abilities to capitalize on it. Yeah. And that's just- You know, so many people point to the 1% at the top and it's very right that what they do is wrong but if you remove those people there will be other people at the 1% at the top. It's a human issue. It's not a, let's point at those people up there issue. Now there are systemic things that we need to look at and really embrace and focus with why is that and are we supporting structures that enhance or amplify that? And I think that's kind of where we are. If we could reinvent the system now with this new technology and these new assets of value how would we do it differently, you know? I think Austrian economics is a really good place to start with all of that stuff. What's your favorite, well, you mentioned it earlier but I don't know if you have something else but what's one of your favorite resources for people to learn about Austrian economics? There's a website called mises.org, M-I-S-E-S.org. It's really just tapping into the core of it. It's, look, you got to dive down these rabbit holes yourself and you start at one point and then you get further down the layers. But again, I think you take it with a grain of salt, everything. It's not fully black and white thinking to say that Austrian economics is everything. It's one of the lessons that we can learn from this and how do we, my playbook is Integrative Complexity. It's how do we pull all these different things that make sense from all of these different ideas and these modalities and these structures of thought and create something new that might be, you know, what we can do with the future technology. So that being said, like you with Peter Diamand is like, what's your guy's thesis model when you're investing in companies? Yeah, so we, are you familiar at all with Peter and the work that he's been? I know, I would say I know a little bit. I don't know too much. So he wrote a book in a philosophy called Abundance which is really data-driven optimism. It's forget what the sentiment is out there from the media or the sort of fear of what is happening. If you look at the data, it's never been better than it is right now across everything and technology is giving us the tools for more abundance so that we can keep getting better. But it is important to not have like a utopian view of this. There still are terrible things happening. So our thesis is how do we use the tools and the technology now to build businesses that solve problems for those billions of people because by relation, if you do that for billions of people you'll have a billion dollars or you'll have more if you build a company that can reach that many people and get them out of their state. You put them back on the world economy through this now digital infrastructure and we're at a whole new world, right? Half of the people still aren't on that economy. So our thesis is really an abundance one. Who's using this technology towards that kind of stuff, right? We think if you can use the tech for that then why would you do anything else with it? Yeah, I saw you guys invested, I'm not correct me if I'm wrong but you guys did invest in Block V? Yeah, yeah, so the Block V team is really close. Eric Poulier and Peter have been very close for a long time and that again is just it's kind of an experiential component from the consumer aspect of what true abundance and digital assets in the real world look like. And so what do you think is gonna happen in space in the next six months? Can you make any predictions? We'll see some security token exchanges pop up. That's a big part of the work I'm doing right now. We will absolutely see private placements move to blockchain assets. You see NASDAQ already come out publicly and say things like they're open to moving into that direction. I think at some point we'll look back and realize that not having something hashed onto some blockchain or some hash graph or not just hash graph but any acrylic graph, some sort of infrastructure that provides trust didn't make very much sense and was a lot of the reasons why things fell apart because we trusted a very small group of people that we're always gonna look out for their best interest because that's human and those trusted third parties were really kind of the problem. Interesting. I'll tell you my predictions. I think six months we'll have a major flaw in an exchange, decentralized exchange, something like a mountain gox. Another one? Yeah. Another one, yeah, yeah. I think that's inevitable. Yeah. Because people don't give up at scale. People are not willing to give up convenience for security. I know. So. I know, but that's why I'm bullish in decentralized exchanges. Like what X is doing, Kyber is doing. It's needed in space. I find it an oxymoron. It's like, all right. So for me to buy a decentralized currency, cryptocurrency as Bitcoin, I need to give you my passport information and then I gotta wait three days to get approved to buy it. Yeah. Yeah. I know it's ridiculous. The AirSwap guys are our friends at X. I don't know them personally but I'm watching and tracking what they're doing. I think maybe the decentralized exchange problem is the hardest one right now to solve because you need to figure the swapping thing out. It's definitely easier said than done. So again, very early experimental stages but when that happens, we'll see big changes because we won't need custodial sort of authority on other companies. Yeah. I think we have about two, three years runway for a lot of these exchanges for the profit margins that they're making and then it's gonna be a Walmart model afterwards where it's all big quantity play. Sure. I'm wondering if this industry is gonna end up in a long tail or if decentralization changes that. It's power laws, man, right? Pareto's principle, Zipf's law, it has to. There's something. But we judge those principles off of what we've already seen, right? Yes. I do hesitate saying this time it's different. Yeah. I don't think it truly is but there's gotta be some things that change where, you know, what got us here is not gonna get us there. Well, one thing I'm really interested in with those changes are. One thing that has changed is the story of money. Yeah. That has changed. So let's say even if the SEC and the OAC here and kind of then make crypto illegal, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, that doesn't stop the genie out of the bottle. The Pandora's box has been opened and so people insert the jurisdictions around the world where there's really no enforcement and why the, don't give a flying fuck what kind of laws are in North America. And so they will create localized currencies and the story will be told among the local, like the perfect example of this pre-cerca cryptocurrencies and M-Pesa and Kenya where cell phone minutes are used as currency for everything was used to buy food, used to buy land, used to buy groceries. And so it's a story that we tell each other. If, you know, if Ryan and Amir decide to make a token called whatever, funny token, and you and I wanna trade a funny token, to find value in it, that's the story we tell ourselves. Yeah, yeah. I think it's Gallia from, from Bancorp that said this. So I wanna give her credit, but it's almost like money first came from the earth with gold and with, you know, minerals and all these things. And then we had dynasties and those people had full authority to decide how much money, who gets the money, where it's distributed, how it's controlled. And I would say that the Fed and the government is also within that phase. And now we're moving into where the people can create money and organize together to create consensus around that. So it's definitely an exciting time to watch what happens. It's better than a Fed. It's mathematically cryptographically proved as opposed to me printing four trillions of dollars. Four trillion dollars have been printed since 2008 with QE. Right. It's ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah, it's, look, I think people that think like us and a lot of your audience have been aware of these things for so long. The biggest, people talk about what's the killer app or the killer use case. To me, this is not tangible, but it's the biggest use case of the blockchain so far has been people waking up and asking the question, what is money? Right? Not, I'm caught in this rat race and I work and I work and I get it so I can pay my bills and I break even. And money is this thing that I survive with. It's a very scarce mindset, you know, which is by design and there's no one's fault by any means at all. I've experienced it. Sure you have, it's just part of life, but now we have this place where we can move into a little bit more of an abundant mindset, at least speculatively for now about, well, let me pull back for a second and ask really what is money? Is it not just this dollar that was backed by gold and now is controlled by a government? Is it, could it be something else? And then moving towards what is government? What is the value that government has? If you read the book, Sapiens by Noel, the greatest and this ties into one of the most greatest human beings that I appreciate. It ties into mythology and Joseph Campbell talks about this. Netflix just added his whole thing. I saw that, that's fucking amazing man. It's Christmas day for me. So for us, it's all mythology, right? It's the stories that we tell ourselves. Like in the government's case is a little bit different. It's a story with a gun, right? Sure. I am forced to use this and I can't even opt in or opt out. If I opt out, I literally hear a knock on my door with a gun to my head saying you're going to jail, right? It's violence against me. And so this is where it gets fascinating, right? You mentioned the abundance. Peter Diamandis talks about this is for the first time ever, we as a tribe, and if you look at Dunbar's number, you know, 150 people that we can closely tie ourselves together or at least have a really deep connection with. I think more and more we will start deviating back into living into like a cohesive tribal unit where we create our own mythologies, our own stories. And this is why I think having a government with one president representing 400 million people is an old model that is broken, that doesn't work anymore. Sure. I having a, it's the same thing, you know, I won't get too deep into this, but it's the same thing with the meat industry, right? Like we've just, we've surpassed the ability for the infrastructure and to support the population and the level of demand that's on it. So they're cutting corners, you know? That's why everyone's getting so sick. That's why there's all these outbreaks of everything, right? And that over financialization at such a unbalanced in equal structure is, it doesn't matter the industry you're seeing it pop up all over the place where these problems are now getting very significant, right? So again, if this technology can create solutions for that and those solutions can become businesses that are valued much higher than selling sugar water to people, that's what I wake up every day and try to think about. Beautiful, I think we'll leave it at that note. That's a great note. Ryan, if people want to get ahold of you, what is the best way or best resource? Yeah, so ryanatdiemandis.com, D-I-A-M-A-N-D-I-S.com, we're actively looking for what I call the top 1% of deals out there, ones that are real with real teams that are solving these big problems. We join as an advisor strategically to open the platform up for people, which is an incredible amount of companies that are all different valued sort of visions towards space travel and XPRIZE is solving one of the biggest problems and human longevity is sequencing the human genome and working with CRISPR technology. If it's on the private blockchain or enterprise side of what I'm doing with the company in Japan, it's ryanattechbureau, T-E-C-H-B-U-R-E-A-U.J-P. What we've done is we're the engine behind the NEM protocol. And so we've kind of built the NEM presence in Japan, forked it into a private chain and have hundreds of companies testing on the private chain around different use cases. We've just recently launched the testnet for Catapult, which is the future of both the private and the public chain. So we're getting early companies to test on that on that testnet and work out different use cases, enterprise banks, some governments, any company that feels like they could use a private blockchain or a permission network inside their company. We'd love to talk to them. We've perfected it so far and we're gonna continue to try to work with the best companies in the world to build the private blockchains for them. Very cool. Ryan, thanks so much for coming on the show, brother. And I'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Yeah, man. Thanks. Bye.