 In terms of digital literacy, I think that computers are the most powerful tool ever created by humanity. They allow for infinite leverage without permission. And to me, that knowing how to be good with computers is the modern literacy. It's like the new reading, writing, arithmetic. And this will be widely accepted and acknowledged decades from now, but today we're in that transition phase. Yeah, immigration is interesting because I think people look at Silicon Valley and they say, how can we create a Silicon Valley here? And that's an experiment that's been tried all over the world. But really, Silicon Valley is not a place that creates entrepreneurs or wealth or technology. It is a place that attracts entrepreneurs who create wealth and technology. And so it's really an attractor function. So intelligent immigration policy is actually the largest wealth creator in the world. It's a nature of technology that the destructive power arrives before the creative power. You get to have a nuclear weapon before you get to have a functioning safe nuclear plan. You get the, unfortunately, in social media, you get combat before you get civil discourse. So even if you go back through human history, you get gunpowder before you get steam engines and airplanes. So it's just, unfortunately, the nature of technology that the destructive and the disassociative power arrives first. So I think it's completely fine to use an entrepreneur as a source of inspiration, but I think it's silly to use them as a source of truth, right? Like, in fact, it's silly that I'm up here and I'm kind of giving you all this so-called truth. And really, I just have very narrow specialization and a very narrow set of things. But somehow, for some reason, somebody wants to hear my opinion on everything. That's the cult of personality kind of poking through. But still, you got to pick some monkey to get in front of the tribe at various points. So that's my turn right now. I got into cryptocurrencies and blockchains back in 2013. And it was, to me, first fascinating technology solution to a very particular computer science problem called the Byzantine generals problem. But all you need to understand is what they've solved is a way of getting a bunch of people who don't know each other and don't trust each other to still agree on something. And this is a much harder problem than it may sound like. It is the nature of the current generation of technology that is a highly centralizing force. We have replaced geographic oligopolies with global monopolies. That trend line is very worrying because that's not the internet I think we were all promised. We were promised a decentralized internet where we kind of all collectively control outcomes. But like in any system, you have to have rules, you have to have consensus, you have to have ways of rewarding people who contribute to the network, you have to have ways of punishing cheaters who harm the network. And blockchains use mathematics, cryptography, peer-to-peer networking to create digital consensus and allow truly leaderless digital networks. And I think that is what is compelling about them. So fame is a curse. I don't recommend it for anybody. You want to be rich and anonymous, not poor and famous, because this is a disease of social media. Everybody is getting their five seconds of fame and becoming a celebrity. And celebrities are the most miserable people in the world. So it's not necessarily a good thing to go for. It's the nature of the technology business that 99 out of 100 startups effectively fail because the winners are so outsized and so rare. So most entrepreneurs walking around know that they don't have product market fit, live in mortal terror of it. They're not allowed to talk about it. And everyone has to pretend they're winning and crushing it all the time. And this is highly stressful. So I just decided five or six years ago that I was done being miserable and I was going to be happy. And I know this sounds easy in hindsight, but it was sort of like, well, this entire time, I've just assumed that happy people aren't successful. And if I'm going to be successful, then I can't be happy. I have to be miserable. If I'm going to make a difference in the world, I have to be unhappy along the way. And I just sort of shifted my mindset and decided, actually, I'm out of time. It's now or never. There's no future to live for. And if I don't figure out how to be happy, I'm going to die unhappy. So tokens kind of can help bootstrap networks and solve the cold start problem that networks suffer from. But now in the regulatory environment we're in, these are all considered securities. So under securities law, I can't just distribute you a Wi-Fi coin or an Uber coin because I have to worry about, did I comply with securities laws? Am I ripping you off? Are you speculating? And there's such onerous restrictions that it basically just kills the whole thing. One example that I think a forward-looking regulator could do is they could say, okay, when things have a dual-use case, like a utility token and a security token, we will err on the side of letting it be used for utility early on. We're going to work with the companies to have a clear regulatory framework. And then you could see a whole bunch of companies that want to experiment with utility tokens basing out of here and bootstrapping large networks that could then eventually go on and compete globally because it is the nature of these things to be winner-take-all. Today there is no government that has put its weight behind any cryptocurrency. Whichever cryptocurrency gets a legitimate government putting their weight behind it first will win the crypto wars. Winning the crypto wars is worth a minimum of $10 trillion is the value of gold, not even counting all the other use cases. And so if you're willing to be the first one out there and put your neck out there and bet on that, your people benefit. You're essentially the founding shareholders of that thing. The key observation here is a lot of crypto is just norms. It's like we're trying to establish, do you drive on the left side of the road or the right side of the road? Do you speak English or do you speak Maori or do you speak Japanese? We're trying to decide on norms. But these are financial norms. So if you are the one who establishes the financial norms for the world, then you have the benefit, the financial benefit of those steward assets. If you want to make a good venture investment, you want to be non-consensus right. If you make a wrong investment, you lost your money, you make a right investment, you can make money. But if it's conventional wisdom, if it's consensus, then it's heavily competed, the prices are bit up, you're not going to make that much money. So you get paid for being non-consensus right. And non-consensus, especially in a technology context, means being first. So you take risks. At least in the technology business, whatever the geeks are doing in their garage on weekends is what the entire world will be doing 20 years later as a mainstream thing. So you sort of have to have a culture of tinkering, experimentation, following intellectual curiosity. You're not going to figure that out unless you have people who are obsessive tinkers. You have to be kind of obsessive about weird things. The good founders tend to be strange. The good businesses all look strange at first. It's only in hindsight that they become accepted asset classes. As an individual, if all you do is trend chase, you will go insane, right? Like, oh, AI is hot, I better go brush up an AI. Well, by the time you get good at AI, it'll have moved on to autonomous vehicles. So I think you're much better off following your genuine intellectual curiosity rather than chasing whatever is hot right now. The equivalent for a nation is whatever it is that you're naturally good at doing and have both geographic and cultural and educational advantages in doing, which somehow aligns in the world stage. I'm reminding myself that there's a few things in life that I care about. And there's a few things in life that any of us can truly, passionately, deeply care about, things that we want to change in effect. And you kind of want to focus on those and not get distracted by caring about everything that comes along. Because we're evolved to live in tribes of 150 people. We're not meant to have all of the world's breaking news and emergencies packaged up into clickbait news attached with graphic images and videos and delivered to us with your phone buzzing in your pocket. And while I'm saying this, my phone is buzzing in my pocket, you can't help people while you're drowning. I mean, one of the problems I have with the modern environmental movement is it is a culture of pessimism and that does not appeal to people. It's a culture of fear and I would rather appeal to people through greed and optimism, which people respond to. I just think that you really have to be indifferent and not in a reactive way, I must be indifferent, just by realizing that if you take on all the world's problems, it will destroy you. In some ways, we are desensitized to the horrors and then we are constantly being over-sensitized with just this wave of news just constantly coming in. And you have to be okay with saying to people, like, I've got my thing, I'm working on it, I'm solving that problem. You've got yours, fantastic, I'm glad you're solving your problem. But I can't take on all the world's problems, otherwise I become a problem. You could even argue, like, that some of the things that are making a difference in the consciousness movement, everything from so-called plant medicines to yoga, these are ancient technologies that are just becoming more prolific. They're becoming more widespread, but they're becoming more widespread as a consequence of technology. It feels like everyone in Silicon Valley is going to Peru for mysterious reasons recently. But that's facilitated by technology called airplanes, another technology called the internet. So these are tools. Another extreme example is in Roman times, one of the ways that you kept the masses from fighting each other all the time was you had bread and circuses, very famously. You give them some bread, you give them some entertainment, they're busy, keep them out of trouble. Luckily, modern society, we're very enlightened, we're not going to be fooled by such things. So we have cannabis and video games and Netflix, which are the advanced technological versions. So there's a way of getting sucked into competition by looking around you. And the way to escape competition is through authenticity, because no one can compete with you on being you. No one can compete with your business and doing what it uniquely does. Yes, competition is a real thing, it does exist. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but it actually exists more in fake human-made games, like sports and politics, where for one person to be above, another person has to be below. Those are status games. You do not want to compete. You want to be a market of one. That's why older individuals in society tend to be really impressed by how many people are working for you. And people who are a little more savvy are like, how much money are you managing? Or what kind of revenue are you doing? But really, the correct question is how many robots are working for you? How many programmers are working for you? How many machines are working for you? Because those are the ultimate force multiplier. Really, I think we need to have a culture of adult education. What if we had a model where every four years you were expected and it was socially and culturally acceptable and there was a financial support that you would go to school for a year? That app store is the critical access point into the entire technology ecosystem. And the fact that that's owned by private companies means that all of the means are leveraged. Now, this is where Karl Marx would have a field day. Karl Marx today would not be attacking the people who own the money or the machines. They would be attacking the people who own the gateways to the app stores. Because that's where the means of production are really gated. Busy is the depth of productivity. And people will spend a lot of time responding inbound to meeting requests and notifications and squander all of their time and energy. Whereas if you want to accomplish anything in life it gets done through focus, intent and focused action. At some level, I do firmly believe that everything I've done in life is useless. It's not going to bring me any lasting satisfaction or peace and it doesn't follow me to the grave. So it's kind of pointless. So if I'm going to do it, do it for the art of it. Do it because you enjoy it. Do it for its own sake. Do it for self-expression. In terms of fundraising for technology companies here in startups, it's difficult because you're not in a technology hub. And funding markets actually develop backwards. People think like, oh, I'm going to have angel investors and then series A and series B, but that's not how the market develops. The way the market develops is some company bootstraps its way to an IPO, creates a whole bunch of millionaire angels. Then those angels, the smart ones actually don't invest in seed stage companies. They actually invest in companies that are about to go public. And then those ones, then they form little firms and they invest in the ones that are just step before that, step before that. So you de-risk all the way back down to seed level. There are a few of these kinds of places forming. And I don't see why Wellington can't be one of those. I think it just, it takes a little bit of focus and effort but I think Wellington is well within striking range of being a great place to build a startup and you just funnel the money in from Silicon Valley.