 Okay, welcome to today's show. I have one of the most special episodes for you. I have Brock Pierce here who, if you don't know, is I consider you one of the OGs of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, he is the chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation. He's humble, so there's about 30 titles I could give him, but if you know anything about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, he is one of maybe the most well-known person in the world, number one expert, been into virtual currencies since the 1990s. He is the co-founder of Blockchain Capital, which is the biggest crypto blockchain venture fund. He's the co-founder of EOS, which is the largest ICO in history. I did the math, it's probably over $700 million raised. And is it fair to say you're a crypto billionaire? You asked me one of my sort of favorite questions lately. I've been putting into all of my talks that a billionaire isn't someone with a billion dollars. A unicorn isn't a billion-dollar company. A real billionaire, in my opinion, is someone that has positively impacted the lives of a billion people. A unicorn, in my opinion, is a community or an organization that has positively impacted the lives of a billion people. I think one of the kind of misconceptions and a lot of what's leading to the world in which we live is this kind of misunderstanding of money. Money's a bad thing, it's just a tool, but that people spend a lot of their lives in pursuit of it thinking it's going to make them happier and it's gonna provide them with something they need. And all they have to do is ask themselves, why do they need something? And then they'll learn maybe if they'll discover whether or not they really need it. And so they'll go through a lot of their life thinking that money's gonna bring them happiness and then if they're lucky enough to eventually get it, a lot of those people end up staying unhappy for the rest of their lives afraid to lose it. Cause it's all about being in the present and living in the now and in the now, you don't need very much. And so I think people are thinking about money and clearly, well, we're attempting to reinvent it. So the old adages of money is power, that paradigm is going to come to an end and it's gonna be technology is power and consciousness is power and all sorts of interesting changes to come. So if you're watching my target audience in this conversation, he's jetting to Columbia. He's speaking at the number one Bitcoin conference at all South America. So I want to get as much, I want to respect your time cause you're a super busy guy. I got back into LA this morning. We got into this morning. We were supposed to meet up on Friday and it was like, we might have to helicopter him in and I was like, all right, let's just, let's put it off to today. So for people not familiar completely with cryptocurrency, blockchain, Bitcoin, in one sentence, if I have to explain to somebody what Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is, what do you say to them in a one or two sentences? Well, I mean, the funny answer is it's magic internet money. There you go, magic internet money. But no, it represents something far greater than that. And that is that it's a monetary system that is based on math and cryptography. And so, and it's open source and it's transparent. So it's governed on a peer to peer basis. So it's a system that can't be corrupted. You know, it can't be cheated. It's a system kind of for the people. Do you think big picture, there is a potential that Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, blockchain will take down the Federal Reserve, US dollars, pounds, euros. Can you see that in a world in 20 years? Or does it compete? No, I think that there's uses for both. And what Bitcoin is, isn't a currency. It's not a transactional currency. It's far too expensive to do transactions. What it is, is it's a store of value, meaning you're better off thinking of it as gold 2.0 or digital gold. And when you think about it from that perspective, you have to ask yourself about the history of money. And so for the last 5,000 years, the primary form of money was precious metals, gold, silver and copper. And those three, you know, after 95,000 years of experimenting with everything, were selected because they had specific attributes. It was sufficiently scarce so that you didn't need a truckload of it to buy a loaf of bread. You know, you can transport it. It had to be malleable. You got to be able to take it apart, put it back together again. It had to be fungible, like diamonds. It has to all be the same. It can't be like diamonds. Nonspoilable, you wouldn't want to put it in a safe. Go get it in a year and it's rotten. Right. So these precious metals have very specific attributes. Bitcoin possesses all of those attributes except for it's a lot better at all of them. And the other big difference is gold is physical. Bitcoin is intangible and the intangibility is a positive trait because you can send it from anywhere in the world instantaneously and it's just, you know, gold actually, it's easier to club you and take it off you. Yeah, PayPal, Western Union may be a thing of the past. So. It's more gold, I think that's the. You think gold. Now gold, no more question that we have. I asked just some beginners on the drive over here. Is Bitcoin a bubble? I know you're probably sick of being asked this. Everybody's been saying it's a bubble. You see big bankers saying this. The more they say it, China's banned ICOs, Russia's banned cryptocurrencies, the more it's going up right now. What's your answer to that? Is this a bubble? Yeah, of course it's a bubble, but, you know, what are bubbles? Markets and this one in particular, the price, you know, sentiment is the primary barometer, you know, of the price right now. So, you know, when you think about it from, you know, that perspective, it's going to be an emotional market and you're going to see emotional run-ups and because it's scarce, you know, you can see these big movements and you're going to see corrections and you know, it's just like back in the internet bubble, you know, it wasn't all this straight up and to the right for years. We had lots of like, you know, movements during that phase. And so this is going to be no different. So the data point I would give you though that's most interesting is we're calling it a 300 billion, you know, we're, we can get $400 billion market cap sector more or less right now and you know, kind of doing this in this period. How big do you think the internet was during its heyday? In 1999, it got to over 7 trillion, the internet tech stocks. And so, 7 trillion, and that was when it was an only a Western phenomenon and this is not adjusting to inflation. So I could argue it would be a 50 trillion or 100 trillion dollar market today. So relative to that market that was betting on the future potential of the new technology, which is inferior to what this is. This is 10 times bigger. I think, yeah, we're in maybe a temporary one, but it will go far from being even anywhere close to where the internet got. And so the thing that I would argue is the biggest bubble today is the stock market. So you think cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin at 300 bill, 300 to 400 billion dollar market cap is not nearly the bubble as conventional S&P 500 regular stock market, what people have their 401k. I think the stock market's more of a bubble. So you could see that crashing, a bigger crash than you could see crypto. Of course, it's a bigger market too, so obviously, I mean. So would you recommend people listening? Should be starting moving a little bit of their money from conventional stocks over into Bitcoin, Ether, things like this? Yeah, so I don't ever like to give anyone investment advice. And I don't think that if someone tries to tell you you should do this, you should invest in that, always be very skeptical. Because a good teacher doesn't say you should do this. They give you information, they transfer knowledge to you so that you can be informed and get more informed if it's inspired you in some way. And you should know what you're doing and then make decisions for yourself when you feel that you're adequately informed. And I think that's what good teachers do. These are the types of people that you should listen to, people that are trying to hawk something at you. Normally that should like put off the red flags. And so the information that I would give people is if you're doing what's called asset allocation. If you have assets, you want to try and figure out how they should be allocated and give some thought to it, have intention into things that you do. And so you can say, OK, I've now been informed enough due to my own research to inform my own opinion, to have my own view, because I'm making a decision for myself, I am choosing to do this. Once you've done that, you say, how much do I want to allocate? And that's going to be a matter of what level of knowledge you have and what level of conviction you have. Your prediction of the future. And you might say, I want 1% of my assets and something like this. You might say, I want more. I'm more or less mostly in blockchain and crypto related assets in real estate. That's where you put your money, either in crypto or real estate. So real estate is your physical asset that if something happens, you know you're balanced out here. Well, I think the real estate market's interesting because it's undervalued, hugely undervalued It's the second largest asset class and it doesn't have a matching engine or an order book. It's still running on real estate agents and talk about some draconian infrastructure, a market of this size. So as soon as real estate title gets put on the blockchain and where it becomes digital title, it becomes fractional. The stuff that's going to come out of that is going to be utterly insane. So imagine if you could say, I want to buy $100 in every house in the neighborhood or $1,000 and it's all fractionalized and it's a whole market that's trading all the time in fractions of home ownership. If you make it truly liquid, markets have liquidity discounts. Yes. Bring liquidity to the market and you will cause them a huge increase in price. So you think theoretically, so this is a whole thing for those of you who don't know. You have cryptocurrencies and they're built on a type of technology that's broadly called blockchain and there's different blockchains. There's Bitcoin is on one technology and Ether is on another one. You are the co-founder of potentially one of, well, EOS is going to be or is another technology. You're saying real estate is gonna go up on this technology and no longer just be realtors with titles in old fashioned 1800s methodologies. Yeah, I mean, this is the technology that will have that big an impact. It's gonna affect everything, so to help. Yeah, what else will it affect? What are the huge things? Let me take you down to the foundation. So the internet itself, if I wanted to describe the internet in three words, I would call it a data transport protocol. Okay. It's a system for moving information. Now the problem is it's an insecure data transport protocol and that's because back when the internet was first being designed, we couldn't, we didn't have the processing power to run the types of cryptography necessary to do this. And so the foundation of the internet was built wrong and then we just kept building on top of it. But the problem is when the foundation of a system is wrong, meaning it's insecure and the way that it was constructed, it'll never be secured. The internet is essentially broken. What the blockchain is doing is it's going to bring and create the secure data transport protocol. And so the internet is only fulfilling one small part of its potential because of the security flaw. When you fix security, the internet is gonna reach its full potential, which is gonna be, I think, 10 times greater. Every industry in the world is going to be affected and it's going to be a beautiful, beautiful thing. See, are you saying the internet will be gone as we know it? Yeah, this is the new internet, it's the upgrade. Huh. So the entire internet's gonna go, I think. So will websites like Amazon, like Google, disappear, or they'll have to go on the blockchain? Well, they're gonna have to go through their process of upgrading. And anytime you have a big transformational event like this, read the innovator's dilemma. You know, you've got the incumbent and you've got the new entrance and there's gonna be a meeting of the minds there. But my view is I help the incumbent industry as much as I can and I help the startup community as much as I can because if anyone is successful in changing the world and making it a better place, we all win, so I help everyone. I don't ever ask for anything. I give everyone in the industry, I can't help every person that I have as much time in the day to do. I don't sleep because it's such an inspiring thing to do. You're doing this free, thank you for that. I believe we have an incredible opportunity here to make the world a better place. And back to that being a billionaire, this is the opportunity to be a real billionaire and when you start to understand what's going to happen in the world, you eventually wake up and you go, wow, what I'm working on right now isn't gonna matter in a little while. And then you just, people all of a sudden, I'm watching it happen in droves all over the world. Once they come to this realization, it's like they can't get up and live the life that they had anymore because it's no longer inspiring. Because they realize that whole system's gonna change and now all of a sudden they're like, okay, I've gotta really rethink everything I'm doing. And it may stay in that same industry using those same skills, they have to be the one to do it. And that can be at the incumbents level, that can be at the startup level. When he says incumbents, we're talking about corporations, large companies. Yeah, and the big companies are gonna also drive a lot of progress too. So these big banks, should they be scared? I mean, some of these banks are hiring huge groups of crypto, Bitcoin, blockchain people to come in and consult with them, whether they be funds, whether they be banks. Do you think they should be scared? I mean, I think they're doing the right thing. I mean, the analogy I like to use is we used to make our phone calls over twisted copper wires. Yes. One day it switched to voice over IP and everyone said, hey, this is gonna be the end of the telcos, and on and on and on. No, the telecom industry became the biggest beneficiary of the technology, massively cutting their costs in their middle and the back offices. And the banks are gonna do the same thing, they're smart. They can benefit greatly from this technology. And yeah, I mean, when I was asked by banks early on in the space, because I did a lot of introducing the ideas to them, they'd ask me, is this gonna be good or bad for my business? Yes. I said it's gonna be both. It's gonna be balanced. You're gonna have some portions of your business are gonna be negatively impacted, maybe even go away. Some portions of your business will get better. And it's innovate or die. I mean, you can't stop change. You can't stop innovation. We are living in exponential times. So you have to get with the program and that is, you have to keep evolving. And we're accelerating, which means you have to evolve even faster than you've ever evolved before. And that's the kind of this really interesting thing about the period and time in which we live. There's this Japanese concept of kaizen, which is to continually improve. Approach every situation and don't just get the job done. Do it as well as you can and always strive to do it even better. Continual improvement. And if you start applying this to everything you do in your life, everything you do will become exceptional and you will be growing and evolving at a pace that you've never imagined. When you stop trying to live a life of mediocrity, I mean, when we came out of World War II because we won, because you have that pyramid of good, fast, cheap. And we won the war by being fast and cheap because we were able to mass produce and that won the war. But post the war, we kept just doing fast and cheap. And we've basically started to build, we live in a world of mediocrity where people are not making things incredibly well. We don't need to be fast anymore. We can be good and we can be good and fast but it won't be cheap. We can make it good. The Japanese grows up. It should always be good. And there's this other Japanese concept of Ikigai which is when you figure out what you love, what you're passionate about, what you're good at, where you got the skills. I'm never gonna be the NBA player. Figure out what you're actually good at too. And then figure out what the world needs. In the center of that is... So what you're good at, what the world needs. And what you love. And in the center of that is what you'll find is your Ikigai, that's your purpose. And what's your Ikigai? We've got multiple, I call them superpowers as well. And so the superpower that I'm using most right now is I know how to take complex ideas and distill them down into words that are generally easy for people to understand. I make my objective being able to teach a child. And if you can do that, you've started to hopefully master a skill as the Japanese do, it's about mastery. It's an Ikigai is how you get to this point. And so I'm a storyteller, which makes me an evangelist, a first follower of Satoshi and the many other great creators like Vitalik and Dan Larimer and Gavin Wood and many others. There's a lot of incredible engineers, incredible cryptographers, people that are making the code that's going to change the world. I just try to support these people that are operating from a place of good intention. And so my purpose though is everything in my life from digital currency to everything I've done kind of just uniquely positioned me to obviously do well in this. Because you've been in virtual currency since when? 90s? 99, yeah. What virtual currency was back then? It was gaming. So I was a teenager and I was a kind of a pro-ish gamer. He was also, a lot of you will remember him from Mighty Ducks. So he's also a child actor. We didn't put that in the, just a lot of people know that. Yeah, it doesn't, yeah. I'm still an actor. I just don't do scripted things anymore. That's right, you're a modern reality actor. The world is but a stage. You don't stop performing once you become a performer. You don't stop using your superpowers. You know, once you've developed them, they become part of it. Now you're using it for more powerful purposes. They become part of your toolkit of things. I mean, you just keep learning and you just kizen everything. And you just keep showing up and give everything your best. So yeah, the gaming stuff, 99, is collectible card games online. And so I was becoming the main trader and I bought, I called it in Menceller and I called the game company. I'm like, I'd like to buy your virtual packs of cards. You don't think Pokemon or Magic the Gathering? And I said, like comic book shops to do our baseball card stores. I said, that's what they do in the analog world. They're like, oh yeah, that makes sense. So I did that first deal in a small game that never got more than 5,000 users. But then I came back when the first MMORPGs were emerging, you know, all online and EverQuest. And then I built the whole sort of market for that. And I built up to buy and sell the digital currencies in games like World of Warcraft and Second Life. And I became the primary market maker for the world's digital economies or virtual economies. And I built up a supply chain of 400,000 people in China in my early 20s that were playing games professionally to mine digital currency. I did tens of billions of dollars of business, lived all over the world. Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul. And we met what, we met probably 10 years ago through a mutual friend who was in Tiger 21, which is an investment group that you were in. And we went to dinner and then we reconnected almost a decade later. When did you start with cryptocurrencies? As we know it, the big coins. Yeah, so I got familiar, not as well, probably as I should have very early on. But it wasn't until 2012 where, because when I was first approached and asked what my opinion was, I was like, Bitcoin, this or something like it is the future. I just don't know if the future is now or 25 years from now. Market timing is something that I try to be aware of, because that's kind of the main thing you gotta get right. It's not hard to see the future. Getting the timing right is the hardest part. And so I got in full time in 2012. That's when I said, hey, the future's now. Yeah. Good time to get it. Done a lot of things. Let me ask you a practical question, because Zach is here. His uncle was given about $1,000 worth of Bitcoin I don't know, a couple of years ago. It's probably worth 500 grand and he cannot access it because he can't remember how to get to it. What do people know, this lesson, this is a lesson on security, remembering your hash or 10 words that was worth. This is why you have backup. She has, you need to write these things down for us. So how do you think, a beginner, what do you need to know? Well, in this specific case, does he know what wallet he had? Probably. We will find out. Yeah, but let's start, it's an investigation. What do you, what does he remember? That we was using a blockchain.info wallet. Did he have a Coinbase account? You know, try to figure out what that is. Go through his emails, see if there's any sort of. I calculated it's worth 500 grand. Any account registered to that email address and you know, with a little bit of research you may find that the answer is there. But let's talk preemptively for someone who doesn't want this to happen to them. How do you, what's the basics of storing everything? Yeah, so when you set up, security is having two-factor authentication. Make sure that you've enabled that. Use a Google two-factor authenticator. Use the Google app. That's the, Better than SMS or anything like that. Definitely don't use SMS, SMS is not secure for anything. Never use SMS again. Google authenticator is the easiest. It's an app you download and it changes and gives you new codes all the time. So make sure you, you gotta get the basics of security, right? And the new world security is important because we now have secure systems, but it does require learning a new skill. And just have it on your phone. It's like learning to use email for the first time. You know, it's just a new skill and it's gonna serve you well. So put a little time into it because it's important. And so yeah, get the two-factor authentication stuff figured out, do not use SMS. And then when you open up a wallet, it normally has a pass phrase, something of that nature, or you're gonna get the two-factor auth, QR codes or whatever it might be. Make sure you get those numbers and things, store it down on a piece of paper. Would you do it on a piece of paper? Put it on a piece of paper, put it in a safe, you know. And it's safe in your house. Yeah, you don't want to save it as a photo or a screen capture because if someone hacks into your photos, they, you know, you don't want those things. What about something like LastPass? Not for something like this. I mean, I wouldn't use your private keys there unless it's a small account for convenience. If it's in a consequential amount of money to you, then, you know, take what- Piece of paper. If you want to do things well, yeah, just make sure you store that, put it offline. And if ever you have a problem, you know you've got redundancy. Yeah. And that's why I say have, you know, multiple of the hardware keys. Yes. Have one in a backup. So everything you're doing here, Have redundancy. You want something offline and multiple places, especially if you have a lot of money because that's a nightmare. At what percentage, I've read a percentage of crypto Bitcoin that people can't access. It's a large amount that people are forgotten where they put it. Yeah, it's a large amount. I mean, 10s of millions. Probably 10%, no, it's there. Hundreds of millions of dollars. No, billions, no, yeah. Billions, oh man. I read an article, I got to ask you this. It came out today, theorizing that Elon Musk is the man of mystery behind Bitcoin. You don't have to, you may know a lot more than you can say here on camera. Any comment on that? I've never, you know, Elon is obviously doing some of the most extraordinary things in the world. I mean, he's kind of like the entrepreneur of the world, like kind of the man in being an inspiration, doing like the most challenging, like out there, like, you know, dream big and remember there is no ceiling. It's all blue sky above you. Anything you dream, anything you can imagine you can do. Yeah. You know, the power is within you. Yes. You know, if you, you know, go from- They accept it, Bitcoin and Tesla. Yeah, and so. You can buy a Tesla with it. I mean, doing what he's done for electric cars, looking what he's doing for solar, look at what he's doing for space, and you know, and now look at what he's doing with hyper-loops and boring. I mean, he's the man, but I can't see that has any possibility of- You don't think that's true? Well, no, he couldn't. I mean, as much as he's the man, there's only some, and SpaceX, I mean, there's just only so much one can do. So much. And he's not been this guy. I mean, but he obviously was part of PayPal and you know, been a player in this overall broader spectrum, at least the fintech part and others, and just being a great mind. I mean, in inspiration, and he's helped obviously many people. I mean, he's made a lot of the entrepreneurs in the world, you know, the entrepreneurs today because he's inspired so many. So, you know, obviously PayPal and things led and inspired, you know, some of these types of transitions. You know, we had to go from the old world offline stuff to the online stuff and then figuring out how to continually upgrade it. How do things continue to evolve? Yeah. Let me ask you this. One of the questions I did this poll on the way over here. What coins, there's so many, there's thousands, there's the main coins, the Bitcoin, the ETH, the, you know, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash. Are there other coins people should be watching? Do you see, is there gonna be a world where there's a million coins? Every corporation, Apple will have a coin here at every place you use. For a beginning investor, let's start with this and then go big picture. For a beginning investor, would you recommend that wants to put, let's say $10,000 into crypto? Do you recommend a little bit of that into the main coins that have liquidity and then some of the alternative coins? Well, I'd say don't invest in anything you don't understand. And so start with the big coins because those are the ones with the most liquidity, they're the safest. And just work your way down the list. You know, start, go to CoinMarketCap or CoinCap or any of these sites and start at number one and just work your way down from coin number one, three, five, 10. And, you know, as you keep learning them all, you're gonna eventually get to the point that you can form your own opinions. But I wouldn't recommend investing in anything you don't understand. So start with the big stuff and then as you learn more, try to understand that the rabbit hole runs deep. So just keep kind of learning and you'll see amazing things emerging before your eyes. Do you think people should trade coins actively? I see people there, whether it's pumping them. If you think you're a trader, if you're a Wall Street trader and that's your competency, I don't trade, but if that's what you do, I can see it. If you know how to make algorithms, if you're a quantum, whatever, if you're good at it, there's obviously money to be made, lots of money to be made in this space. I don't like trading because when I get involved in a project or I get behind a project, I wanna be fully in support of it. And to trade it is actually to kind of short the project that you believe in because I can make a couple extra bucks by riding it down and actually causing it to go down more because I added to the negative pressure. I was selling it in the market and certainly as someone of influence, I don't wanna be doing that. And so I don't trade for that reason, but I don't judge others for doing what they do if that's your talent, do what you do. But I wanna be behind a project until I'm not. What do you think of Ethereum? I love Ethereum. I've been a huge supporter of Ethereum. I'm friends with very good friends of most of the founders. My firm was the first to invest in an Ethereum venture deal. I've been one of the founding board members of Mastercoin, which was the early iteration of kind of what Ethereum in some ways evolved into. We did the first ICO. In June of 2013, I'm a huge fan. I mean, Vitalik and Ethereum has done more for the market in the last couple of years than anyone. So for people listening that don't- Other than Bitcoin. And Ethereum has done other things to expand the market. More use cases than Bitcoin. Right, the smart contracts. Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, the classic. Someone listening that doesn't understand it. You're a master of making complicated things simple. How do you make that simple for people? People are going, what the heck? Do I bet it was Bitcoin Cash, is this what? Forking, forking is good. Forking is evolution. We're all here because of forking. We are a fork of our parents, DNA. And this is, forks are generally consensual. And for that reason, they're generally good. But then you have contentious forks. And it's the contentious forks that create a lot of the problems because you have a big disagreement in a community. And that contentious fork, watching it because it's open source, you get to see how the sausage is made is messy. And it sometimes leads to extinction, but that's sometimes progress too. I support all the forks where the people behind it are operating from a place of good intention. They're multivariant splits. And if the community wants to split, so be it. If you own any of these fork tokens, you don't have a strong opinion. I would highly recommend you don't sell them unless you know, again, have an informed opinion because you don't know if Bitcoin cash could be a winner. I mean, certainly I'm not saying that's the case, but until you have an opinion, you shouldn't be doing anything. Hold your tokens till you know. Do you think there's a chance? You'll see the recurring theme, learn to know, learn to know, learn to know, wake up, wake up. Yeah, which is kind of how we align. I'm all about knowledge and learning and you're a learning machine. Bitcoin theoretically, the main Bitcoin could go down and Bitcoin cash could go up. Bitcoin gold, do you think there's a chance or very likely chance that all of them go down to nothing? Or do you think it'll be one could go down and the other would rise? I mean, yeah, Bitcoin could fail. I mean, I don't know if Bitcoin's the friendster, the MySpace, the Facebook, the Instagram, Snapchat. You know, I think it's got a much greater chance of surviving than those did, but something else could come along that's substantially better. I don't see it as of right now, but I would never say never. It'll be a binary outcome. Bitcoin will go to a million bucks if it succeeds and if it fails, yeah, it's gonna go down but it'll take a very, very long time. You think it's conceivable Bitcoin goes to a million? Yeah, I mean, if it is used enough. So let's talk, are people using Bitcoin? Like I said, Tesla is being used in countries in Africa, being used in Africa, some cryptocurrencies. Curl like wire transfers of a store of value in places like Zimbabwe, Venezuela. Yeah, places where you've got currency control, keep in mind there's three billion people on the planet that have no financial services and other two billion people on the planet with limited access to financial services. One aspect, and it's almost a small aspect of what this technology is doing is it's going to democratize the global financial system in a way where every human being on the planet is going to have equal access and the least fortunate billions of people on the planet are gonna be the biggest beneficiaries. Get involved and you will be a billionaire by my definition because that's the type of impact we're going to have. I mean, and if that's not a reason to make you want to get up in the morning, you know, I mean, come on. So you're saying that? This is the sort of stuff that you want to find joy in your life, go and when you get all these things right and you find a way to give your gift and contribute to something beautiful, I promise you the money and everything in life that you need and want will most likely come to you. Yeah, so these unbanked people, they're people in third world countries, they're people in the U.S. My dad was unbanked. My dad from Harlem never had a bank account in his life or a credit card. He didn't trust the system. He kept money in his wallet. I took him to a trip to Puerto Rico once and he lost his sock that had $3,000 in it, which is a problem with being unbanked, you know, that you can get robbed, you can have this happen to you. So you're saying this thing that we call cryptocurrency Bitcoin blockchain theoretically is going to take these 3 billion people who, did you know right now the top 10 men in the world have more money if they add their net worth together than the bottom 3.5 billion people in the world? You think crypto blockchain has the potential to change that? Yeah, I mean this is one area where it's one of my only disappointments with Bitcoin is there's still a lot of concentration, you know, if Bitcoin were to become that big thing, I mean, yeah, I'd be one of the big guys in that world, but that's the only thing that disappoints me. I really want to build a system that's fair to everyone, but I think that Bitcoin is still a big improvement over what we have and the world can change in increments, you don't have to go from A to Z and it normally doesn't. Things normally happen in more of a hybrid type of things, evolution goes through phases, as you continually upgrade, leveling up, I'd like to think of life as kind of like a video game. People ask me, is it too late to get in? Bitcoin shot to 11,000 not too long ago is at 4,000 and people go, is it too late? Oh, it's, if anything, you're too early. Really? I wouldn't say you're too late, it's called, don't get fear of missing out syndrome, don't feel the need to just dive in, make sure you know what you're doing, don't rush in and what I always tell people is, like when I'm giving talks for these days, I'm like, hey, if you want to pitch me, don't walk up to me and just pitch me your deal. Don't just walk up to me and treat me like a street salesman trying to hawk a watch. That's not like how, or tell me you can make me a bunch of money. That's not how I want to transact. Right. Establish a human connection, so I think of the world as a game and I'm the game master of my game and I can give you the first tip on how to get through level one. Level one is don't start out as the first thing you do, pitch me, don't just walk up and be rude and interrupt someone else that's in the middle of something talking because you want immediate attention. Don't be a person that's like, what do you do when you're at an event? All of those things are basically saying, what can you give me? Yeah. That's people that are just basically going around entitled and just trying to take from everyone versus doing what you're supposed to be doing. So you fail right out the gate, if you pitch me, it's like thawing the first, press the button and floppy birds. Most people do that too. And so if you walk up to me and you're like, yeah, they do and that's why I don't invest, but I'm telling them now, this is a good lesson. I'm teaching you, I'm giving you the cheat codes to kind of my game anyway and this game is probably true for lots of other people. Whether they've thought it through and gamified it in their minds, it's a practice they've probably already put in place. I mean, no one wants to just have someone in their face hawking you a deal. It's just not interesting to any of us. So instead, like if you get a Burning Man, come up to me and tell me you're a burner, boom, you just skip to like level 10. If you want to talk to Brock, first go to, first definitely go to Burning Man. I can tell you that. I'm always burning. You and your wife, I've gotten married at Burning Man. How many years in a row? Remaried, or what is it? Well, we got married once there, two burns ago. This year we got married in Ibiza. Oh, okay. We get married every year, but it's a different place. So it's not always at Burning Man. What's the idea there? Is it redoing your vows? Is it just? It's called, I think it's always fun to celebrate. And so it's just another reason to party. It's a reason to throw an event to celebrate love and it's for your friends more than anything else. And you bought a place in Ibiza. What is it, a farm? Yeah, yeah. Is it one of the big, you told me it's a- 60 acres. 60 acres. We're building something magical out there. I'm working on also building a kind of a city, a big city somewhere else. Will you say where it is or not yet? A city, yeah, I can say Puerto Rico. The 51st state with like 180 billion of debt, 35% unemployment, and now a hurricane hits. I mean, it's devastating what's happened there. I'm moving right now. Really? I'm gonna be moving down there with a bunch of my friends shortly because it might just be temporary for a moment, but I wanna go roll up my sleeves and get some work done down there and help out. I think those people need our help and I think that we're capable of so much. Yeah, and it's almost become a blank slate now. Yeah, and so in these times of crisis, the Phoenix can rise sort of from the ashes. When you experience great loss, it creates an opportunity to upgrade, but where you can make these giant trans quantum leaps of upgrades because you basically lost everything and so you have to start over and when you have to start over from scratch, you would do it very differently than if you have this big thing that's kind of been building on top of itself for ages and ages. So in this horrible event that's occurred, there will be a great opportunity that emerges and I wanna be a part of helping the Puerto Rican people, helping people that are in need. I am here on this planet to live in service to humanity. I see an opportunity to make a difference in the world and I'm devoting my life to these types of things and I'm an American and I love my country. I don't love everything, but I feel incredibly blessed to have been born here and to be given the opportunities to be where I am sitting here today with you and eternally grateful thank you. I'm glad that we've reconnected and been spending time together. You do great things. I love who you are and I love what you're doing in the world, getting the word out and sharing the knowledge and the wisdom in ways that you can connect with mass. The masses is a wonderful thing. You have one of those incredibly important roles and great responsibilities and from what I see you're doing great work. I commend you. Well, I appreciate that. I'm trying to, this is the next thing that I think needs to get out there and one of the things that people are asking me is, you know, these ICOs, you've done the biggest one, right? Aren't you the, isn't EOS the biggest by far? I think that's what they say. Brock's humble, but it is the biggest because nothing's done over 500 million and you're not even done because it goes to what, May or something of 2018? June 1st. June 1st. So. Do you know what the logo is? No. Oh yeah, you showed me. It's the, it's the chest of Hedron. It's the sacred geometry of the heart. Yeah. You, you actually, he was nice enough to give me. I have it. You gave me a necklace. Thank you for that, by the way. Are most ICO scams? I wouldn't say most of them are scams. There are a lot of scams. Anytime you get this big of an asymmetry of information where the, you know, the difference between the people that have the knowledge and those that don't is so great. I mean, when you get it, you just don't understand. Yeah. You can't get scammed if you don't invest in things you don't understand. But there are ICOs we think that are solid. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Like all things, you know, some, you know, there are good deals and there are bad deals and you need to do your research and that's why don't invest in things you don't understand. You can't get scammed if you know what you're doing. Yeah. So make sure you learn to know. Yeah. Knowledge first, you know, get the knowledge first before you act. Don't like rush in and let someone tell you what to do. What about entrepreneurs that are or yourself, take responsibility for your life. What about entrepreneurs that want to raise capital? I think it's fantastic. You think an ICO could be for them? So the ICO is basically, on a theory, and the ICO is essentially replacing most of venture capital. Yes, it's bigger than, what's the number? It's where you're crushing it. We're over 3 billion. I mean, we're doing like four or five times what the early stage venture is right now. I mean, this is going to crush it all. It's going to crush it. It's the world's changing. And there's an opportunity to get involved. If you're interested in building the city of the future, get to Puerto Rico and be a master and be ready to roll up your sleeves and build. I might come down. I'll pop Puerto Rico. I mean, we'll roll up our sleeves. We're burners. We're guys that can build cities in the middle of desert. We can do things that very few people in the world can do. And why not go down there and construct something awesome that creates all sorts of opportunity for the Puerto Rican people? To support the Puerto Rican people and any of the indigenous tribes and old ways of being and making sure that they have the freedoms that they need to still be respected with things like Standing Rock and such going on today. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the indigenous tribes, most of the world's resources, most of the world's minerals and water and things that we need to survive are on the lands of the indigenous people. And we think in our big cities that we're somehow superior and that you have these people that have old ways of being that are just incredibly beautiful. Yeah, Columbia, too, where you're going. And all of these places, such people that have been doing this for so long and doing it so well, that because it looks primitive to us because we don't understand their ways and they've learned how to live in harmony. They kind of have had their avatar sort of. That's where they are. We're not necessarily the advanced ones. For somebody who wants to do an ICO and they're educated themselves, do you think, number one, that this is a viable replacement of raising capital going up to Silicon Valley? You answer this, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Two, do you raise outside of the US? Because the US, the SEC is coming down. I know you guys did, I think EOS is outside the US, right? You've excluded everybody. Yeah, we don't even talk about the token sale in the US. Yes, we exclude the US. But we do encourage US developers to build on EOS. You don't need the token to be able to use the software. Yes. The software is an open source software available to everyone. And so we encourage you to. Do you recommend most people do that, raise outside of the US if they're doing it? I mean, again, I love my country, but our regulations are the most complex. And the risks of making a mistake are really high. Yes. And so I did it with the B-CAP deal. But I generally don't recommend it, because the US is where most of your risk comes from, but only a small amount of your capital. Are you willing to leave some money on the table to sleep better at night? Yeah. And it's not that you would do anything wrong. The well-intended ICOs are doing this to the best of their abilities. And they're being as thoughtful as they can be. But the risks are high. So you have to make that decision for yourself. I encourage people to do the US if they are doing it correctly and they're properly, legally advised. But if you're doing the US, really know what you're doing. The risks of getting it wrong are severe. Yeah. It's no joke. Yeah, SEC is not. I know the orange is the new block and all. I know I wouldn't look good in that color. And I don't do anything bad. I look at everything I do. And I try to also look at it in the future with the benefit of hindsight if things go certain ways where, even though I didn't do anything wrong, it could eventually look bad. Because some sort of said, I try to think through all of the possibilities, because I just don't ever want to do something that could be perceived as bad. And it's hard. Would you do it as a utility token? Versus, because you have to securitize it. In general, do you think people should be trying to do utility token? I mean, it depends on your token. Each token sale is different. Each market is different. And you have to look at each deal on it. It's kind of individual basis. Yes. And so you have to ask yourself, this is community building. In designing your token, are your users, is your community better suited if it's a security token or a utility token? And always do what's best for your users. Always do what's best for your community. I like to call the ICO the initial community offering. Okay. Not just the initial coin. So you think, in general, there's a little bit too much greed right now? Yeah, but this is what happens when you get in these emotional cycles. And that's why you should have a little bit more. And you need that greed, though, to get people in. Yeah, it's driving growth. I mean, these are the cycles of things. This is how it goes. Yeah.