Liquidity & Liquor - Reeve Collins - Co-Founder of Smart Media Technologies & Founder of Tether | Being a Pioneer in Emerging Technologies

really easy thing to point to, and that is my very first job, Avenue A Media. So I graduated in 1997, and I got my first email address in basically 95, right, in college, and so the internet was just starting, and when I graduated, I lived in Seattle, and I was fortunate enough to get a job at a company called Avenue A Media. And I looked for, like everyone back then, looked for a job through the newspaper, because it's the only way to find jobs back then. And there was a startup, a worldwide web startup, and there's a couple of people there, and so I called up, and I went down and interviewed. And there's a bunch of, there's like a couple of young guys, and they're really smart, and they had this idea they wanted to buy and sell ad space. And no one was doing it, and they want to do this online. So I thought this was amazing, but I didn't get that job. They said that they were going to go with someone else, but I could call back in a few weeks. But what I enjoy about this story is that I just stuck to it. I called back in a couple of weeks, and they still told me, you know what, we're not hiring. You've got to call back in another week. I called back in another week. They said, saying, you know, call back later, and at this point in time, my father is like, you've got to take another job. This has been even chasing this for two months, and I had job offers from Boeing and like Verizon and Kellogg's, like I could sell cell phones or be in the finance department of Boeing. And I'm just a recent college grad, and I just knew that that wasn't for me. It just, it would, it would kill me. And the reason why I knew it wasn't for me was because prior to that, in 2000, I wish it was in 1991. That was 19 years old. And my mom sent me to a Tony Robbins Semino. And this Tony Robbins Semino, for me, I grew up in a small town while in Washington, very 30 people in my high school. So just, you know, 30 people. Yeah, yeah, I went to a Catholic school. Okay. So I was extra repressed. Um, yeah, no, unfortunately, there was seven girls in my class. Okay, a lot of options. A lot of options. You better make it. Yeah. Yeah. And for me to go to Tony Robbins, at the time, never heard of, but I got to fly to California for four days to go to the seminar. I went down there, and one of the things, he was like, you have to set some goals in your life. And I'm 19, I have no goals. And so we sit there and go through all those exercises he makes you do. I am like, great, I want a million dollars, you know, I'd like to make a hundred thousand dollars a year. And I want to read Ferrari, you know, what other, you know, it's a pretty solid goals for a 19 year old. And, but you go through the exercises and you envision it and you believe in it. And those goals really stuck with me. Um, and so when I graduated college, the reason why I kept calling for this job and didn't go to Boeing or to Verizon or any of these other companies was because I knew that they would not help me achieve my goal because the kicker in the way Tony Robbins makes you do it, you have to have a timeline for those goals. So I had a timeline when I was 25. I wanted to have a million dollars make a hundred grand a year in a red Ferrari before 25. Um, and so I knew, and so those goals really helped me make these decisions. So very long-winded way to answer your question of what was the key moment of my life that set me on my path that gave me the success. It was, it started out with setting those goals and then sticking to them where I knew that I needed a job that could lead to that. And then I got that job and that job again was avenue way, which turned out to be the very first ever online advertising agency. And so I was the first media buyer at that company in the first media buyer online period. And when I started, there's about seven people. Um, and, you know, I kept calling, I eventually got that job. And that company went from seven people to five hundred employees and we went public within two years. Wow. Um, for six point six billion dollars. That's fast. Wow. Yeah, well, this was 97 to 99. That's fast. Wow. Wow. Wow. 97 tonight. What did I do wrong in my life? This is, this is amazing. So what was your position in the company? I was a media buyer. A media buyer, okay. So, but I was one of the first employees. So I got a lot of stock options. But in addition to that, when I was a freshman in high in college, my father gave me five thousand dollars because I went away to school and gave me five thousand dollars to buy a car. But I didn't need a car where I lived in Pullman, Washington's tiny town. I went to Washington State University. And I put it in, I think E-Trade just, just started right around then. So I opened up an E-Trade account and I put it in Microsoft and a couple of other things. But over the four years, that turned into quite a bit of money actually. Give us the number. How much did it turn out to? I ended up with about $80,000 when I graduated college. You had no trading experience? You just put, you just... Yeah, but does anyone college have trading experience? No, that's what I mean. No, that's very true. Yeah. So you made like 80,000 and now you have, okay, so you had some stock options. And so then I had an opportunity to invest, because they were doing another round of funding at this startup. And I read this quote by Warren Buffett. It said, you know, you need to be diversified. But if you want to put all your eggs in one basket, just make sure you watch that basket really closely. I'm like, well, I work here. I spend all day every day, you know, I live, you know, sleep and breathe this company, because it's a startup, but it's crazy hours back then. And so why not? I'm watching this basket closely. So I put all my money into that. And I got these options at about equity at a very, very low price. And we ended up going public at... Here's the crazy thing. We priced, so the pre IPO price was priced at $17. We opened at $89. Wow. So I mean, this is the peak of the bubble, like, the craziness. This is calm. This is, yeah. Yeah. So our, yeah, the day before, like, our friends and family shares that you got for everyone was $17. And then the next day was $89. Yeah. It was amazing. My equity was sub-a-dollar. So it really, yeah, it was a great experience to be 24 years old and go through that and have this front row seat to the right, this global phenomenon of euphoria, which is called the .com bubble, right? We got it. Like, everyone is making money over those years. Everyone's pouring money into these companies, and they're all going public, and really getting that experience was a valuable. No, I was going to say how fortunate you are to align up the right company, because everybody now in their 20, like, I don't think back then working for a startup was as sexy as it is right now. But now everybody tries to work in the startup, and a lot of them spend a lot of their career chasing after that early-state equity, really great strike price, you know, and they all fizzle out, and they waste a lot of good years. And it's hard to pick. I think it was about the six. I think the influence from Tony Robbins, when you were 19, where you said, okay, that's what other kids. I'm talking about other kids early on in their careers. No, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's why also, you know, Malcolm Gladwell in his book Tipping Point, he writes about a lot of the factors that enable people to become very successful. And a lot of it is essentially being in the right place at the right time. And I truly graduated in the right place at the right time. Fortunately, I live in Seattle, so it wasn't a tech hub, it wasn't San Francisco, but still it was a tech hub. But those years of 97 to 2000 is the best time still probably to date to ever graduate, because kids tried out of school. I mean, my job, when I started, because it was at the beginning of bubble, so I got paid $23,000 a year. But within a year and a half, I was making $100,000 at that company, because they were just paying people insane amounts of money. Like if you remember, they were hiring every tech company was hiring as many people as possible. It was absolutely crazy. What did you learn going into a startup when no one else understood what it is working over there? Coming out from the other side when it's already a public company moving into your next venture, what did you learn from the, what was your biggest takeaway? So, when we went public, you know, I decided I'd worked long enough, you know, I put in my whole two years. So hard. And I rewarded myself with the achievement of my goals. I bought a car and the red Ferrari on my 25th birthday. Yeah, and I moved to LA. And when I look back, the characteristics that I really learned there was I found that I was very opportunistic, overly opportunistic, and overly optimistic, because my entire professional two-year career, everything was a home run. Like every company you saw, every stock went up, as I moved to LA on top of the world. Unfortunately, the bubble burst like right after that, right? And so, most of my wealth at that point in time was paper money. It was in stock options. It was in illiquid stock, because it was still locked up. Fortunately, I still may, you know, I was able to cash out and still do do very well, but I lost a significant portion when the bubble burst, right? We went from $89, and our low after the $89, that company stock went all the way back down to 72 cents. Oh, okay. So that's a little bit, 72 from, from $89. It went back to, it ended up selling for six billion in cash. We went back to, with splits, about a $35 stock share. But the company ended up selling for six billion a number of years later. So it definitely, yeah, it came back. It sold to Microsoft. It was the largest cash transaction in history at the time. And then a few years later, it turns out to be the largest write-off a company did off their balance sheet. Wow. Yeah. It's an interesting story of having a way, razorfish, and over the years. But sorry, back to what I learned. Hello, the coincidence, to just consistently try to work in that company and having all that roller coaster. Yeah. Well, I left at the moment. It went public. Okay. Yeah. So I was 20. I just was about to turn 25. I left, bought the car, moved to L.A. And, and I was very optimistic and, and opportunistic. And so that kind of set the tone for what I did over the next couple of years. And I moved to L.A. and I started my own company because I had this experience in online advertising. I was the most experienced online media buyer there was because I did it longer. And, and we started my own kind of brokerage company. It's called traffic marketplace. And it was an ad network, like one of the very first kind of ad networks. And what we created there was the pop-up ad. So after that, I invented the pop-up ad. We made it more of a mainstream advertising unit. If you recall way back in the early 2000s, late 90s, if you ever went on an adult website and closed that, you get the exit traffic. That was you. Well, I didn't do that. We, we, we, we took that concept. It caused me a lot of problems when I was a kid. I'm just, I want to know if it was you. Yeah. And we took that concept and put it in the mainstream websites. And so that's how we, we popularized the, the pop-up and the method of media buying called arbitrage. And, you know, brokering ad deals with this ad. And that was your company that you built up? Yeah. Yeah. 2000. Okay. And how was it? And building your first company because, you know, you make it sound so simple. You just pivoted from a successful startup that IPO to just accidentally, you know, building a successful company. There's a lot of effort and energy and probably a lot of like things that didn't go right when you built your first company. So, um, walk me through some of the, the biggest screw ups, the biggest things, headaches, whatever, the you encounter. Because the first time founder, there's always stories. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you one of the most valuable lessons I learned from that world. Because you got to recall, this is 2000. The bubble just burst. All these companies that went public, uh, like home store, uh, were desperate for revenue. And so there was a lot of companies like traffic marketplace at that time that were, we were ad brokers basically, we were buying and selling ad space and pushing our revenue. And a couple of other companies were round tripping the revenue and, and home store being a public company, it would buy a ton of ad space on one site. And then they would buy it back. And then sometimes it wouldn't even run, but they would inflate their numbers. So we saw this happening. And why was the, the reason I was so valuable for me is because some other companies were doing it. And I knew the founders of those companies, they actually ended up going to jail. Like home store, you know, there's a big scandal back then. And there's a handful of companies that were, um, caught up in just facilitating the inflation of your revenue numbers. And obviously that's illegal when you're in public. Of course. But for me to witness that being another naive young guy, being like, oh, these are fast and loose playing deals. But then witnessing some other people that I actually knew, like getting real trouble at such a young age for me was really valuable because I just made me keep my nose very, very clean throughout the rest of my career because I sought first hand. And I just look at back at that. And, uh, it's, it was, it was a good lesson. Yeah, it's just, it's like a crossroad, it's a moral crossroad when you, when you grow your business where you can see things people don't seek because it's your business and you so tune into it. And you noticed something that's on the gray side, but you know that it's actually on the dark side and you shouldn't go there and you ask yourself, should I go and money can corrupt people and just very hard for some people to go and make the right turn instead of the left turn. So you took the right turn and then eventually things happen. And you look, thank God, you moved on. Yeah, for sure. And just to, to, because it gives you that experience that bad things can happen. Yeah, especially being at a young age and having your ability, exactly. And seeing that some of the people I knew was like, wow, that's, that's, yeah. So how did you, how did you pivot from marketing, ad buying, media arbitrage into crypto? What was that? Yeah. So after traffic marketplace, um, I had a handful like from there, what I learned. So, you know, the optimism really, the optimism was the most important because I believed everything was going to work. I just, I stuck, even after the bubble burst, I believed all these companies were going to work. And so then I was very opportunistic and I would chase down every single opportunity because I thought they were going to work. And so for these next 10 years between about 2002 and 2013, when I, before I got into crypto, um, I learned to be an operator because I chased down a hundred different types of business deals. And I probably started another 10, right? You chase them all down and you do the ones you can as you think they're all going to work. They're going to be great. But when I learned the skills, the foundational skills of being an entrepreneur, of starting a company and, and knowing enough about all of the departments and the divisions that it takes to start a company like from legal and HR on hiring and marketing and sales and then selling the company and taxes and, and everything. And so when, and I started a, a couple other companies, um, sold them. I had one of the very first ever, um, on, the company we created WebAsodes was brand funded content. So we would produce, um, short form videos for the internet and have them sold by brands. The other company that came out about the same time is Funier Die. Um, yeah. And so I had one of these coming. I sold it to a large ad network. And so we produced tons of content. But do I find your diet just sold? I want to say like about a year ago. So on day just exit. Yeah. Funier Die has been around for a while. And it's the best example of kind of that short form content that all started. And that was like 2006 or 2007. But, um, but I sold that company and I had another. And then I so, so did you sell also the ad agency company? Yeah. So we sold traffic and marketplace to the Vendee Universal. Okay. Um, and then I left. I took a couple of years off. I was 26 and I kind of just, just, I hung out in LA. How long did you take off from? Big two years. But I did some other things. I started a production company. We did 150 music videos. You default to creative a lot. You do default to creative a lot. I just, I'm just like trying to figure out the left brain, right brain dichotomy and all the different ventures you take on. Because even now, like you're working on creative stuff and marketing stuff and you were originally ad creative. And then you want like, it's interesting. And then somebody who completely different from from the type of person that I would assume would take on a project like tether. It's a very different personality. But it's obviously used to straddle both very well. Well, that's where the optimism comes in like, oh, tether. Like, well, what happened was I learned about the internet. I sold the hand. I sold three other two other companies before. And then, and then my friend, you know, in 2013 started telling me about the blockchain. Because I'm like, look, let's do something. I'm, I'm ready to do. I wasn't, I sold the company. I was just ready to do the next thing. He started telling me about the blockchain. So I started buying Bitcoin. And, and when he told me about the, about the blockchain, I'm like, well, this is amazing. It's, it's got to work. It makes sense. Like, you know, we can move money in a new way and fast. And, you know, then I would talk to other people that knew a little bit more about finance and technology. And they're like, this, the blockchain is a scam. It's not going to work. I don't even understand where you're talking about those that did say it's the worst thing ever. But I'm like, huh, sounds good to me. I love it. Yeah. But entrepreneurs need that almost like naivety towards what they're building, right? Exactly. Especially when you layer in, then, then so why don't we go take the most highly regulated asset in the world? The dollar. And put it on a brand new technology that allows you to send any amount of it anywhere in the world to anybody anonymously. You know, you think we're getting any trouble for that? Oh my God. So, you know, we just dove in. I'm like, well, at least I'm enough of an operator to understand how to make all this stuff work. And I'll understand that the nuances of the technology and the businesses we go. And at the time, there was only Bitcoin, Litecoin Ethereum, and I'm sorry, there wasn't a theory. Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, a handful of crypto currencies back in 2013, 2014. And so there just wasn't much awareness in this space. But we had the concept. It's like, great, there's a new way to move money, the blockchain. There's a new type of money being moved on the blockchain, crypto currencies, but that type of money, people, it's volatile. Yeah. So why don't we move real world currencies on this new financial infrastructure? So that was the impetus of Tether. And then we had to build the technology to tokenize an asset so we could put it on the blockchain. So we, there was a company at the time called Mastercoin, which turned into Omni, but we took that technology, improved upon it so we could actually tokenize the dollar. And then we rolled it out. And what I still say to this day is that the elegance of Tether's business model is in its simplicity. You give me a dollar. I put it in the bank. I issue you a token. That token works on a blockchain. Send me the token back. I give you the dollar. I mean, that is it. And Tether has stuck to that the whole time. And sticking to that as long as all that money is in reserve and it is in the bank, sticking to that will ensure that Tether stands the test of time and could handle anything that comes at it. For instance, when Tara Luna collapsed, there was a $13 billion run on the bank. Tether reimbursed every, you know, refund or let people withdraw $13 billion. Not many financial institutions in the world could withstand that. Interesting. With draws. And the reason why that the simplicity of Tether's business model is so important, especially when you think of Tara Luna and these algorithmic stable coins, those are experiments. People don't know if that's going to work or not, right? There's a bunch of smart people trying to figure out an algorithm that says, well, if you do this and that, then this will be pegged. Yeah, but what's the difference? So if you're saying, okay, I put my dollar, now I get a token from Tether, why is Tara Luna any different? Because you don't give them a dollar. Tara Luna is an algorithmic back token saying that we're going to buy and sell. We're going to do these different types of transactions to make sure our token stays right about a dollar. There is not a billion dollars in the bank for a billion dollars of Tara Luna. So you can just go to the bank. They're they're relying on a formula to pay. Interesting. Obviously did not work. Right. Oops. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, that I guess the question was, how did I get into crypto and that's how and why did I get into crypto and dive in because I'm a believer. I'm a believer in opportunities that are presented to me. Can you I know a little bit about Tether and stable coins, but I'm not obviously as involved in it as you are. So can you even just walk through the landscape because it seems like something as simple as a business model as, hey, put in a dollar, get a token, that doesn't seem to be a business with much of a moat. It's a great point. Try to raise money. They're like, what do you mean? Yeah. So you can't raise money. That's why I self-funded it at the beginning. Then we raised a little bit of cash. Okay. Because when you go to someone and say well, first of all, forget about the mo, they're just they just think you're crazy when when we tried to roll out. This is so early on with Tether. Yeah, they're like it made no sense to anyone. There wasn't people trading much cryptocurrency back then. I mean, the whole market the whole market cap was like two to three billion dollars when we when we started of the entire market cap, you know, just three trillion. So it's grown a lot. So there wasn't much going on and but Tether provided a dollar-based trading pair. So at first, which was actually to be honest, wasn't the first reason why we started. We thought it'd be a better way to move money. But it turned out that if you trade cryptocurrency, if you're moving from Bitcoin to Litecoin, it's two volatile assets. You needed a stable coin, a dollar-based trading pair to trade. So that's what my very elementary question is going to come. If I give you a Bitcoin for Tether, you would have to exchange the Bitcoin to a dollar. Correct. In order to keep it as to where it was. And then the transaction fee has to make sense that you guys don't lose money between changing the Bitcoin to dollar. Well, you pay the trade. If you pay, okay. Yeah, we would only to issue Tether's, we would only accept cash. Now, what you would do is you would take your Bitcoin to an exchange. And that exchange would turn into Tether and they'd take fees for it. I understand. Yeah. Do you get it? It's very simple. Yeah. Okay. What's the difference between Tether and, like for example, USDC? So in theory, the same structure. It's a 100% asset-backed. And USDC, you know, circle is more heavily regulated by the US because it's a US company. And Tether is not based in the US. So you built this up. Walk me through like the selling of a company, why you chose to sell maybe the life after Tether because even funny enough before we jumped onto this podcast, I was like, how do you, you know, how do you want to be introduced? What's the person? And obviously, Tether's huge. Yeah. So it's very much tied to you, but you've built a ton of stuff since then. Yeah. Well, and I'm extremely proud of Tether. It's an amazing, I don't want to say gift, but this is an amazing creation that that laid the foundation for the cryptocurrency ecosystem. And so, so I am proud of that. And it, and it has standard with stood the test of time. And the new operators, the people who have operated and who are really actually responsible for its massive growth because Tether didn't really see significant growth until 2017 until the whole market picked up. Yeah. But they have done, in my opinion, an amazing job at battling all the fun to date, all the negative news, and sticking to the promise of ensuring anyone can redeem their Tether for a dollar at any time. So, so Tether is, yes, it was an important contribution to the space. But after that, the reason I sold Tether was, you have to again, go back to 2015, Bitcoin had a huge run. It went up to $1,100, maybe $1,200, I don't recall, $1,200, $1,200 from a hundred, you know, like within a number of months, so lots of enthusiasm. But then the market crashed and it went back down to basically $1,180. And Tether, you know, we were trying to build this company. It wasn't getting a lot of traction in the beginning, but what it was getting a lot of was heat because it's a very regulated space. If you want to move money, you have to money transmission licenses in every state and all of this. And so really going down that rabbit hole of regulation and banking and everything, and maybe in a US citizen, I held all of that liability on my shoulders and on my back. And when you're thinking about, okay, the only way this company is going to be financially successful and lucrative for us as the founders is if it's the biggest company in the world, because our only business model is if we have billions of dollars in the bank, you know, that's a big gift. Turns out there's tens of billions of dollars in the bank. But at the time, I'm like, you know, I have a lot of liability here. And Bipfenex was our partner, the principles of Bipfenex were our partners in the beginning. And they were all offshore. And so it was easy to, so they took it over. And it just existed as a product of the exchange for a while and then really, really exploded on the scene. You feel it's part of your who you are, identity, when you walk around and you say I'm the co-founder of Tether. Yes. And yeah, it is, especially in the crypto space, right? It was my first crypto company, and inventing this stable coin is a great contribution. But it wasn't the last one, because after that, after I left Tether, another brilliant visionary, a friend came to me and who's an extraordinary business person, but really his vision is he had the vision for this next company. And he's like, look, let's create something that's not going to be regulated right off the bat. Let's take, since now there's this technology to tokenize things, let's tokenize collectibles, let's tokenize tickets, let's create highly programmable digital goods. And this is in 2015, there was no word for NFT. This is way before. Yeah. And so we created the very first ever NFT platform. So after the stable coin, the next contribution was of the NFT. We called it something different in the beginning. We called it a vatum of virtual atom. We had to come up with their own word to say, what are these tokens that you actually own now? And they're highly programmable and can do things. And so that company started in 2015. We raised a couple million dollars, but it built some some really amazing tech. But then when the ICO craze hit in 2017, because you got to think between 2015 and 2017, the market, the crypto market crashed. And it was kind of a low. It was pretty dead actually for a while. Ethereum did their crowd sale in 2015. They didn't release a product for two years. It took until 2017 for them to actually release the product. Well, it might have released a little before, but then it took a while for anyone to come up with a use case. So there's these smart contracts. No one understood what they were or what they could do. And the first real use case became the ICO. And that's what drove up one the increase of value and tether of the money and that. But also drove the entire market. It shot Bitcoin from you know, one to three thousand up to $20,000 because so much time and attention and awareness and attention was was was on the crypto space. The reason being is because everyone was gambling. Yeah, it was just a big gambling gambling. It's like now you have access to all these startups and anybody can invest and there's no instant liquidity, right? It's a token and you can sell it right away. It's a new exchange. It's open 24 seven. So so we jumped on that bandwagon because we had some amazing technology and I did an ICO. So then I raised $22 million in October of 2017. So is the tail end of the ICO window, the ICO bubble because at the end of that year, you know, beginning of 2018, the ICO just crashed. There was only about a hundred total ICOs that raised over $20 million and we were one of them that I think there's about a thousand ICOs in total. But out of those hundred, there's only very very like very few left. And I'm proud to say and I do say this a lot that that block V has delivered on all of its ICO promises. The technology is still in use and the token still is in use. But here's the interesting thing. What we got wrong was marketing. We didn't market it. We didn't pump the token because now as we all in retrospect, we all know that that's all that matters. And here's the best example of why marketing is the only thing it matters when it comes to token value. And this is that's a big statement. That's a generalization. But the reason I say that is look at the meme coins. Look at Doge. These coins are worth tens of billions of dollars. But it's all garbage, though. That's the thing. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, it's all marketing. There's no tech. Yeah, I know. I built extraordinary tech. Didn't do the marketing. So our token. It did go up 20 X. But that wasn't anything I did. That was the that was the hype cycle of the ICO. Yeah, you know, something this is this is something I was I was thinking when is the spot one been asked you about that because I think that anything related to crypto from NFT, uh, if it's metaverse, if it's any kind of crypto, it was all the winners are marketers. Even if it's for a short period of time, because then there's going to be a miserable collapse, like Shiba Uno and and Dodge, right? It really comes down to organized marketing where they had organized groups on Reddit and they would pump it and maybe telegram and this or very, very organized eventually everyone were doing that and and so on and today, it's it's much different, right? People want to see faces. So that opportunity disappeared. So then Tether really stood the test of time. But blocked the two, I guess. Well, yeah, that's true. Not as big as Tether, but I mean, but I mean, how did Tether promote himself eventually? I mean, was it just organic? No, pure utility. Beautiful. There's no need to promote like people like, oh, should I invest in Tether? I'm like, well, if you need to ask, if you're asking that question, the answer is absolutely not because Tether's not something you invest in. Tether is a dollar, and it stays a dollar. You can invest in Bitcoin and Ethereum and other crypto you'd like, but you don't invest in Tether. You use Tether. It's just a utility for the, for the ecosystem. So it didn't need to promote itself. It just was so useful. And for the first five years, it was the only stable coin. There, there weren't any others and then they started coming out. I think maybe 2017, 18, a couple of others started trying to do it. So, so, so, so there's that the answer to that. And and that block fee, we didn't promote the token enough, but we built some amazing tech. And so you built a, you built a company. Yeah, you should. But that's the thing. A lot of people don't build companies, right? That's the issue with Doge and she, but you know, all that it's a market. What's the difference between between you and say Dodge? Because that's that's a token and that's a token, right? So, what's the difference? So there's no utility other than it being a token. Okay. And it traded on a blockchain. What Doge did was they forked the copied Bitcoin like within, you know, but I don't even know when Doge came out probably 2010 or 11 or 12 or very long time ago. They forked Bitcoin and all they changed was instead of 21 million. It's, it's endless, right? So it's, it's nothing. But they just had this community and people believe and they buy and then Elon pumps it. And, and that's all, that's what, that's what takes to raise prices. People just, there's demand, supply and demand. And, but we built some extraordinary technology at block fee. And so then what happened was my partner there, the, the visionary behind block fee went and started company called Vatem Inc. And I started to come back called smart media technologies. So we both built new companies on top of this technology to deliver NFTs to the world. So smart media technologies today is one of the largest enterprise Web3 platforms that there is. We deal with some of the biggest enterprises in the world. And we provide the wallet infrastructure that ability to create NFTs and metaverse environments. So we are leading the charge in the Web3.0 movement for large brands and organizations to connect to their consumer on a one-to-one level through the wallet. Because when we get to Web3, the killer app, unlike Web1 and 2, the killer app has been email forever. In Web3, it's going to be the wallet. The reason being is, if all you have is an email, the only thing you can receive from brands and anyone else is information and spam and a lot of annoyance. Like, like, especially when they're marketing to you, very, not very often is it very valuable. Yeah. They now have the tools to actually give you value. Because now you're going to have your email address and you're going to log into a website. But there's going to be a wallet attached to that email address. And now that the brand has a wallet attached to it, he can actually send you cryptocurrency or NFTs. So let's touch on NFTs a little bit and then I'll dive more into it. I think that's important. So you're delivering the platform to communicate between the business and the consumer. But then the question comes up, okay, so great. I'm a business enterprise deliverant NFT and you're probably going to go into this. Okay. So what next? Right. Because especially when we talk about NFTs and the hype that you guys just, or that we all just experience, the hype from 2020. Again, that was just like ICOs, the NFT hype, pure gambling. People like, I don't understand NFTs. It's like, because you're overthinking it. These guys are degenerates for reason. They are gambling. They are just, it's just the frenzy. They're having a great time. Hopefully make it money and hopefully not losing too much. But it drove a ton of awareness into this space and it changed consumer behavior. It enabled people to understand what a wallet is and place value on it and also place value on digital objects within that wallet. Because before the last few years, no one, no one cared unless you were a gamer and had like inventory in the game and you place value on that. But other than that, no one cared about digital wallets or digital goods. But now the world cares. And so now brands can use this shift in consumer behavior to deliver them value to the wallet. And here's the best way to explain that. Think about to date how much brands spend an online advertising. So this year it's about 250 billion in the US, 571 billion worldwide. That's what's spent by brands on digital advertising. Guess where all that money goes? It goes to the middleman, the planners and the buyers of the technology. It goes to the agencies and it goes to the websites to Apple and to Facebook and to Google and to all the websites. Everyone has a data. All 571 billion dollars goes to everyone except the consumer. The consumer. That's all the brand wants to reach. Web 3 and the wallet gives the brands the tools to actually give that value to the consumer. So you can go and say, I'm enabling ads and I will get paid for the ads that I'm displaying on Web 3 or the wallet. Why? Why even have an ad? If this brand wants to market to you, and why would he spend five dollars to get that ad in front of you? Why does he just give you five dollars? Look we're fine. It's actually coupons, loyalty, all that. So when you think about loyalty programs to the past, they're kind of lame and maybe some people really enjoy it. And sometimes you get some points and sometimes there are a lot of value and sometimes it's just entertainment to get points. But loyalty programs are important but they're about to get 100 times more important in the future through Web 3. So what you think of your loyalty program of the past where you get some points, now the loyalty programs of the future with Web 3 wallets are going to provide you the consumer real value because the brand now has a tool to put that money in your wallet. Never been done before. The brand will have a one-to-one relationship to the consumer, to market to them into their wallet. And they're not going to just give you five dollars. They're going to give you a smart coupon that says, well, if you buy these two things, it's third one's free. And if you send it to five of your friends and they buy, you're going to get a free pair of shoes. Each coupon is going to be highly programmable because that's what programmable NFTs are. So back to what I was starting with, when people say they don't understand NFTs, are NFTs dead because they collapse? No, that's NFT 1.0. That was gambling. That was the buying and selling digital images. That's trying to create a community around an ape. NFT 2.0 and beyond are NFTs with actual utility. They do things like loyalty. And so now you're going to get this stuff from a brand that's really valuable because let's say the brand, let's say it's Nike and they give you this digital pair of tennis shoes that turns into a free pair of Jordans. But let's say you hate Michael Jordan or don't like tennis shoes. It's still valuable. In the past, you couldn't trade out your loyalty points. But now you have this digital good. You can put on a marketplace and sell it for something that you do care about. So now all the brand communications, when it is an NFT in your wallet, can become valuable to you because you can trade it for something else. Well, it's going to really be a reality because Web 3 obviously came out after, I mean, mostly for the masses during the NFT time. And there's a lot of excitement because they said it's decentralized internet. No one can shut you down. You can speak freely. No one can. There's a lot of reasons. A lot of, I would say, emotional reason for some, but but only again, just decentralized. Just let's just go and continue the philosophy. But, but yet, when do you think we're going to actually see a shift or majority of the young generation, Gen Z or younger than them? I don't know what the term is for younger Gen Gen. I don't know the general. Gen Z Gen Z. We're going to say, no, I'm not going on this one. That's centralized. I don't want to go into centralized. And really we're going to be able to see the mass adoption. Yeah, well, once you have critical mass that it's worth it for you to invest your time into it. So there's two things you're touching on. One is decentralization versus centralization. The other is Web 3. And the problem is, how do you define Web 3? Everyone defines it differently because one, one definition is a decentralized internet. I believe that's way much farther in the future. Okay. Because the easy use for decentralized technology isn't there for the average consumer. It's hard to set up a web wallet, especially if you don't use a system like Coinbase or three months ago FTX. Centralization offers a ton of value. Now, the drawback is, you know, it can be corrupt and fraudulent, et cetera, et cetera. But it does offer ease of use value. Now, that's slightly different than what I like to call Web 3.1.0. What's the first version that we're going to experience Web 3? How is the, like people have heard about it, and no one's experienced it yet. It's not tangible. And that's kind of your question. When's it going to happen? The decentralized version of it, I think, is much further out. But what we're going to experience soon, I think everyone else, the majority of people will start experiencing in some sense throughout 2023, is that you'll now have a wallet. You might not need to go set up a wallet anywhere. But the next, but soon you'll go to a website. And if you log in or sign up, you'll get a wallet and they'll give you an object because they'll give you an incentive. They'll say, enter the sweepstakes to win a free backpack. You're like, great, I love Fyall Raven. It's cool, funky brand. I want their, their, their, their conkin backpack. So you'll enter a sweepstakes. You'll get a digital backpack in your wallet. You send it to do friends. You get, you get two more entrance into the sweepstakes and they'll do a drawing every week. So it'll be a more gamified loyalty experience. So you're, so you're basically saying Web 3 1.0 is centralized companies deploying decentralized technology for, well, deploying. Let's get away from, because I'm trying to understand also the internet part behind us. How is it different? I mean, you, you, well, no, because I do understand, I do understand the added value of a loyalty program. So if I, yeah, that's a marketing. My point is that, okay, so if it sits on Amazon web servers, how is it different? Just because you download a wallet like Metamask that doesn't sit on a very slow, not very. It's not necessarily different. We're, we're talking about a couple of different things here, because I agree with exactly what you're saying. A lot of this quote unquote Web 3 stuff that I'm speaking about, like loyalty programs and ticketing and all this stuff. It does not need to be decentralized in any way, shape. Of course not. Yes. So it's a new, but, but consumer behaviors shifted because now we understand wallets. Look, COVID, one of the things that was beneficial from it is it introduced the US to QR codes. People now know how to use QR codes, which is a great thing for NFTs and digital objects, because now you can just scan something and instead of going to a website to read information, you're going to get an object of value. So if that brand wants to give you this NFT that's actually valuable, it's really easy to get now. And so consumer behavior has changed. You know what QR codes are? You place value on wallets and the digital goods within those wallets. And so the first version of what people are going to start experiencing is they're going to have a wallet and it's going to be filled with stuff and that stuff's valuable. And most of it's going to come from brands because those are the people that want to give consumer value. Why did you want to stay away from the word deploying? Because with finding that decentralized? No, no, in centralized. Look, I said your version of Web 3 1.0 is centralized companies. Like your company is centralized. You have an org chart, your centralized org, but you're creating decentralized widgets for people. Oh, decentralized. Yes, I say you're spot on. Sorry, yes. Now the NFTs that those people have in their wallets, they can work on any blockchain or centralized blockchain, you know, a closed loop blockchain if you want. But yes, they have the objects interoperable. And this is this is a slide I just showed earlier today, which is from or I will describe the slide I showed earlier today, which is we can find it in second in the video. Yeah, is one that I created in 2017 when I was doing my my ICO road show to describe how big of an opportunity we have in front of us about these interoperable digital objects. And I called it the trillion object opportunity because there are millions of apps and a billion websites, but there will be a trillion objects. And think about how much value has been created through apps and through websites. No value to date until well, when I was pitching this in 2017, there was no value in objects. And now the first year that NFTs hit the scene, they went from zero to 27 billion dollars of sales in NFT revenue in I think in 2020, right? And explode on the scene. That's the trillion object opportunity. That's what I'm sharing with people now. It's like NFTs, it's not over. We've just scratched the surface on the use case. Everything you do in your digital life moving forward is going to be an NFT. All the objects of value in that life will be NFTs, they'll be in your wallet and you'll get value. Again, not a very elementary question again. We're not we're not equipped to people over here. You got to take everything in your brain. And again, when you want to bring people into the industry, it is very important that you take all these concepts because it's going to affect your day to day. So in years from now, that information is going to be valuable for, but people would look back and say there was all that information that we didn't want to process and really understand. So I'm going to try to like with a little bit lame strum for myself, actually. So if you're saying it doesn't have to be decentralized. If you're telling me here is a digital wallet and I'm giving you this image and it's registered as your as our image in which we're giving to you and maybe in the future, it's going to be worth something and I'm handing it over to you. The currently on the blockchain, that's where you can all verify. There is just one centralized place where you can verify who owns what, what was the entire trail, all that Picasso. Okay, that is a digital Picasso type picture work. But if it's centralized and it's not sitting on the blockchain, then it's not web 3.0, 3.0. It's just a utility that's moved into 2.0. Am I wrong about that? It depends on what your definition of web 2.0 or web 3.0. It sounds like you're defining web 3 as a decentralized internet. And necessarily in this case, I understand the point that you're saying, look, it's going to be centralized. My point is if you're saying it's going to sit on Amazon web servers. Right now, if you're looking at it. Let me rephrase it. It can sit on Amazon web servers. It can sit on a blockchain. That's the beauty of these objects. It depends on the creator. So we provide tools. You're the creator. You're like, I want this on the Polkadot blockchain. I want this on Solan. I want this on Cardano. I want this on Ethereum. Or I don't want any of those blockchains. I want it on this database because I don't need to pay the extra amount of money or the time and cost to put it on those blockchains because it doesn't need to be publicly verified blockchain. So it all boils down to the use case for that object. And to date, right now, the majority of these use cases can all sit on a database. We don't need the blockchain for the majority of the use cases that brands need that when they want to provide value to their consumers. There'll be lots more use cases in the future. And I am a huge believer in decentralization. It is where we're going, but it's going to take a while to get there. I have a question for you. So you mentioned this is sort of going back to one of the points you made about the 570 or some billion dollars in ad spend that whatever that was. Now, you mentioned that companies will have that revenue because they want to communicate directly with their customer. But the the action that you're describing is basically last mile of the marketing funnel, right? Like you're talking about if I have already the connection with the customer, then I can exchange some sort of lowly program. So have you seen, because that's a huge budget of ad dollars, have you seen other emerging disruptive texts that can solve for awareness or general top of funnel stuff that you could that you don't have to go through Facebook for or agencies for. But it's a great question and and various student observation. But that is why first party data is so valuable to the brands because they get the first party data essentially your email address and permission to market to you. And this is what my company does. It's an enterprise great platform that that enables these brands to do this legally and appropriately, because you know, when you have to follow all of the different. Castle and GDPR. Exactly. CCA or whatever. Yeah, to get all of those licenses or approvals, I should say, is very challenging. But once you have all that and then you can collect that first party data and then you can market to these people right in their wallet. That is what the brand wants. But how do they get that first party day in the first place? They use the traditional methods and smart media actually does it across the board. We do all television media behind as well as full suite of digital. I love how you're like it's like coming full circle. Yeah, all your career is 100% and yes, and they all build on to one another. And that's why when we created the NFT, like to me, the use my use case that I was really passionate about is specifically this is enabling brands to connect on a one-to-one level with their consumer and provide them value because being in digital marketing since the advent of, you know, internet marketing, seeing all of the money being sucked out by middlemen, you know, and the consumer getting nothing, it's like we can finally solve that. And so that's something worthwhile. And that would be a major disruption. This is one of those disruption that happens once every couple of decades sometimes in certain industries. And that's a multi-industry disruption, right? It's going to be a, well, I guess that's when you short meta. Yeah. I mean, it's not like they need any more shorting. But that's going to be a major disruption for everybody. Yeah. Absolutely. And you know, you mentioned meta. Do you have a question you want me to ask? No, go ahead. No, I was looking at, I had some questions about the metaverse, but yeah, well, I can tell you the metaverse now. Yeah. So, you know, Mark Zuckerberg gets so much grief for putting so much money into the metaverse and investing so heavily on that and betting the future of Facebook on it. Well, if you didn't bet on that, what was he going to bet on? Because the future of Facebook is in a dire shape. Yeah. Because of the age of the cookie is over. The way we would track ads forever is over. Like, look at the upgrades with the new iOS platform. You have to like opt in everywhere. And people just say, no, I don't want to be tracked. Every website you go to now, you have to allow cookies. Most people say no. That's where I think that he might do it right. Maybe it is the future. The thing is it's a very long road for him. I think that his bet was supposed to go against Amazon by acquiring Shopify saying, all right. So Shopify is the largest platform for websites. If we acquire them and not just doing a partnership like we're doing right now, I can track them throughout. I can own that part where I understand that this is the person that came over. We have everything in the one roof. And then as soon as I, as soon as you come into Facebook, you already have your wallet or say Facebook, it's more Instagram, right? No, but your wallet is there just like an Amazon. And it would be probably more convenient to work to buy on Instagram, then later on on, then what it is today on an Amazon, right? Because you'll buy an Amazon. And then part of what Shopify would try to do. And I'm not sure what stage they are. They're trying to acquire a lot of a three three PL shipping companies where they process everything. So they can try to fully compete more effectively with Amazon with with the shipping process. Probably Facebook has a little bit of a better chance. And if they were going in doubt route, that would probably be introducing cash flow fairly fast just from the integration and then adding a layer of shipping parts where you can actually have the products in you can create a certain control. You can really go in and compete with the strategy they're deploying right now. No, they're not. They have not. And that is where I say he should have done this because it would have produced revenue fairly early. Right now Shopify is not a profitable company because of investments that are making in acquiring all those shipments types companies right where they could have been acquiring them. They're not big enough they can acquire them for stocks. And then on the entire flow from from seeing an image all the way to the thank you page all the way through the email everything else and you can just create a wallet. You would probably see yourself using Amazon much less. Yeah. And then eventually competing also that would have been my move to go and satisfy me term and then still invest but give myself a couple of years because that would have been a tough competition going after he's not wrong about that but it wasn't his only option. That's my yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't comment on the inner workings of his mind. I agree with you. There's probably a lot of roads that he went down but but he went all in here and good or bad business decision or not. It's great for the rest of us. The reason why it's because no other company to spend 10 billion dollars in trying to make extraordinary technology for virtual reality and in great software for the metaverse. They may fail in the software because today they haven't we haven't seen much but the hardware is great for the entire industry. Absolutely. Yeah. I think this is actually going to be quite the fact that they're putting so much cash into it where we're going to see that we're going to bear those fruits if even if they're going to collapse that that investment was made and someone's going to bear those fruits. It's kind of like similar to me where the dot com created so much hype around the internet a little bit too early so they started putting fiber optics in Antarctica. Yeah. And you said, okay, now you get internet everywhere because of the results of all that money that was put in and now we enjoy that. Yeah, 100%. And but speaking of the metaverse which I think is really interesting because just because of my like NFT 1.0 was the gambling on these images and it's collapsed. And at the peak about a year ago, we started hearing about the metaverse a lot and everyone got really excited. And the metaverse isn't new. It's like an immersive video game that's been playing for 20 years. But what's new is consumer behavior and these tools where the average consumer will now have a wallet and a digital good. And so when NFTs became popular, they're like, well, why don't we have a more immersive environment to view and interact with this digital good that I just purchased? I need to put it on a wall and showcase it, you know, if it's a piece of art. And so then companies like Decentraland and Sandbox, they exploded in popularity even though it's a very lackluster experience. It's kind of lame in there. And then Facebook does it's big. So then Decentraland and Sandbox, they're basically building an environment to support NFT 1.0. So I bought my art nice. Now I can hang it on my virtual wall, my virtual house, in my metaverse. But ultimately, I still think you're building a product for a problem that shouldn't even exist in the first place. Yeah. And it's this virtual world that people don't really, it's not all that great to hang out in. Now, we've all seen the movie Ready Player One. And for the listeners who haven't seen it, please watch it. It's great film. And it is what I believe will be the future. It is, you know, it's a very dystopian future. But I believe that the metaverse will be super immersive and people will live in it. Is that good or bad? I'm not placing judgment on two things. What do you think that, do I lay down the road? What do you think it's going to be a 2.0.3D for everybody? I think it's going to be 3D, but that could be a decade away. But all that stuff just doesn't matter right now. What matters right now is what is the metaverse in the next few months? My opinion on metaverse 1.0 and the technology and software we're pushing out there is just a small enhancement to websites. Why don't we go from 2D to 3D? Yeah. Why don't we go click a button, the website all the sudden expands? Yes. You're in there, you can talk to a sales guy, the merchandise is way better because now it's 3D, it spins around. And guess what? Your buddy can meet you there. You're like, I'm going to REI to buy a kayak, so you go to REI.com. You both log in at the same time, you get to walk around, look at five kayaks, talk to the sales guy, and then maybe there's a professional athlete in there that's one of the best kayakers in the world, right? And you can talk to him or watch a film of him talking about this stuff, right? It's just much more immersive engaging. So all it is is a simple upgrade to your website. And it's also an e-com buying experience problem. Exactly. Now you got your wallet and your NFTs, you can get a little digital kayak and put it in there. And if you click five of them, maybe you get $10 off, right? They gamify the experience. It becomes more engaging and more fun. So it's a much better buying experience. You can shoot zombies and hunt for treasure with all of your friends for the last 20 years on video games, right? You can run around and kill each other. But you've never been able to go online shopping with your friend. Now you can. That's Metaverse 1.0. You're going to log in and almost be like a video game and walk around the store with your buddies. And it's just a much more engaging immersive and ultimately valuable experience. You bother like even like personally investing in any Metaverse anything right now? Well, for me. So it's just for fun. I am not a. The land, the big hype around Metaverse, especially in Decentral and Sandbox. It didn't make sense to me. I kind of get it like you might as well buy a piece if it's like this fully built out space that you want to hang out in. And so it's like buying a website off the shelf that's already built. But land, I'm not sold on that in the Metaverse. But as far as how do I invest and get involved in Metaverse? There's a stock called Meta not Facebook, but it's Meta ball and it is a ETF for all the companies that are public that are involved in Metaverse technologies. There's a small piece of portfolio there. You know, yeah, so I just bought some of that stuff. This is this is where I can relate because when you tell me and you need to buy a land, but then Metaverse is just a website, not a website. You'll have endless websites like why would they go and spend so much money in Decentral and the Facebook is going to come and take over or maybe Apple. Decentral and it's going to be a thing and it's going to be just like FTX, right? It's going to disappear all the money. No one's going to care all this buying land for a million dollar right next to Snoop Dogg and so on. It doesn't, I don't know. It's like, it's like, you know, now you have a couple different projects. You can go down like anything else. I know, but I mean, at least nobody needs to hold them high. DeRest slightly, I find. But then the stocks that are traded in this ETF are like Nvidia, Nvidia and that's different. This is just publicly traded companies that provide the technologies for companies to build Metaverse. If I thought it would be a good place to, if I was going to get out of crypto a little bit, what stocks would I invest in and some stocks that actually will participate in the future of the Metaverse. When you build out, I'm just still curious about sorry, I'm going back to your actual company. When you build this out, the mechanics of building a company, call it whatever you want. Web 3, I don't care. We can just come up with a fake name for this iteration of what you're trying to build out. But the mechanics of building out a company, is it difficult to build out a traditional enterprise sales force, what's the revenue like, onboarding cost like all the metrics and KPIs you would normally look to when I'm trying to take a software company, B2C, B2B to market. How does that play over when you're building out something like this? It is, I'm sure Tam is, I don't know how you figure it out. Blue Ocean probably, like it's messy, it's not easy. Yeah, it's extraordinarily difficult. Fortunately, I have an amazing partner. Sky Tyler, maybe, this is the CEO and the real brains behind all of the execution of everything and a lot of the vision of what smart media technology is. And a long time entrepreneur himself. So yes, it's really hard to build an enterprise sales software, both to build the software and then build the sales team. But the real interesting nugget there is, since we've been pushing NFTs since in this iteration through smart media technology since the beginning of 2018, well before anyone was buying them at all, there's no revenue, there's no money, there's no profit. I know it's an issue. It is a lost leader. So we were super fortunate that Tyler already had an ongoing business and we kind of rolled all these companies together, we rolled three companies together. So I started at the time, it was called Vatum Labs with him and that was the pure play, NFTs for brands, right, and it was built on top of BlockVee. And then he had another company that was a digital, it was a digital ad agency that really supported outdoor lifestyle brands, but he built a full stack of technology, a good demand side ad platform and all the analytics software and everything. And then we bought a television media buying company as well. So we combined a TV media buying company, his traditional digital media company, and then this new company that was going to take NFTs to brands. Those two other companies were highly profitable. So we had the foresight and the vision to say, okay, we'll roll in a lost leader because we believe that the ad landscapes changing and we believe in this vision of, I mean there wasn't anything called Web 3 back then or even NFTs, but what we believed is that through this new technology, through smart media objects, through these smart NFTs, we could shift how brands engage with their consumers on a one-to-one level, enable brands to provide value to consumers. But it took a long time for that to take off and we didn't actually participate, even though I've been in the NFTs space since the beginning, since before the beginning, we did not participate in 1.0, because never in our wild... I didn't buy any board apes. I didn't buy any board apes. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that gambling was going to be the first use case, and then buying and selling all these images was going to be the first use case. But at what, as we thought, is it going to be utility like ticketing or loyalty? And ticketing still hasn't come yet, but that's more politics versus technology. The technology is there, but ticket master and lighting nation have such a monopoly. It's funny because even it's a great point because all these ideas of different NFT style projects, they were floating around way before NFTs became a thing. Look, and every time someone came up with a new, oh, this NFT can do this or that, I'm like, would you like to see my deck from five years ago? The thing is, it goes back to marketing, right? If it wasn't Logan Paul and Gary Vee promoting every day from the top of their lines NFT, most people wouldn't know what it is. Then luring in any celebrity talking very sealed on anyone goes talks about NFT and wider boring, buying board apen, just just creating all that that hype over just buying digital images instead of understanding the utility behind NFT. And to instead look, it's just a utility, but you really need to buy a computer generated image that 10,000 other ones were created equally just because other people that are celebrities are buying it, that suddenly decide to be art collectors, digital art. So it was that hype that we I guess forgot what it was all about. You started about the utility behind this and then it was kind of like forget that. Let's just buy art. It's digital this time. Yeah, it can be used by an NFT. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great point. Like the frenzy happened. People were making money, so everyone went into it. So it did a great service and disservice at the same time, the services that it brought a ton of new entrance into the crypto space because before NFTs, the only people buying crypto were people that were into finance, into stocks, into cryptos, right? Like they they were somewhat finance people. Now it's much more gamers and artists and collectors and people that don't care about finance, but want to participate. So that was a great thing it did. You know, the negative thing was a lot of people have lost a lot of money. When you when you mentioned that it was tough to take this company to market, but how is it doing now? Like is it doing is it profitable yet? Or are you? Yeah, it's doing extremely well. Okay. We're we're about to announce one of the you know largest credit card companies in the world, you know, announce a handful of partnerships with a bunch of big companies where they're going to utilize our technology platform for for for their wallet. So you're seeing shifts like you see shifts because now you have big brand names that are onboarding your tech like yeah absolutely massive shifts. Huge brands and enterprises that and even the agency holding companies that they're all diving in because they know web3s the future and how do you participate in web3 if you're an agency you have to have a wallet you have to be able to provide those services so they're using our technology and the way this gets all tied back is our technology smart media has built a massive proprietary stack, but it has built it on top of the block V protocol. So smart media still uses V our token that we issue in the ICO to power it. And so again, there's just a ton of utility in the token that we created because we're a massive company utilizing it. So you've done this obviously a few times. So I'm curious about lessons for entrepreneurs that are trying to build in the web3 space. So raising money right now I'm sure it's probably pretty hard, but what advice would you give an entrepreneur who wants to build a company from scratch? Do they raise money? Do they try and bootstrap it? Do they get a technical co-founder? What's the what's the game plan for somebody? Well back to being opportunistic. So it's an individual answer for that individual. So what is that person's experience like? So look at your close circle of influence in friends and lean in. Lean in. Is there a benefactor that's actually going to help support you? Can you support yourself for a while? What's your level of experience and expertise? How certain are you that you can make it 12 months without like going broke? So all those things weigh in on the strategy of how do you move forward? And especially in the beginning those are the most important aspects. Because any generic answer, I mean it's generic. Well build a great plan. Do your research, find money, talk to angels, go network. It's like okay, but you know you got to dig a little deeper and look at your own strengths and weaknesses and and plan to those. So I have a question so pretty much every business you had eventually you exit. You build them for exit. You do it just like you sell it just like I sold black boxes would make up in it. Well eventually I sold that business but but eventually you look at a business just like this in the same way I look at black boxes we wrap them up and we ship it. Is there going to be a point you think in your life that you're going to just keep a lifestyle business that you want to move on to your kids? Or there's always an exit strategy? Yeah I mean right now I would probably for me say more it's the exit strategy because my creative outlet the way I'm artistic is in business. Like I enjoy the deal. I enjoy seeing these new opportunities and and get excited about them. I get excited about tons of opportunities. Very few of them are worthwhile but I get excited about all of them. So that's actually what makes it fun. I get more excited about the ones that I can push even farther forward. I'm most excited about what's about to come. I'm about to launch a web 3 a handful of companies in the web 3 space that all that revolve around entertainment, media, gaming and and I'm really really excited about this next chapter because it builds upon all of the technologies that have built in the past and partners with a lot of those companies to lay the foundation to be able to take it to the next level and I believe that this next suite of companies which all announced probably in January will be one of the ways that a lot of people get to experience my definition of web 3 for the first time and my definition is simply that you have a wallet and you get digital goods in that wallet that are valuable to you and and then you have a sense of community. And so I'm really excited to actually roll that out and so your question is do I want to have a lifestyle business? I don't know. We'll see what this turns into. I feel this is this is this next chapter for me will be a really big chapter and and I could be in it for a while but it's a handful of companies. I know I will sell a number of them hopefully that they're successful and I sell them in the short term. Makes sense. Yeah. I just had one more point that I wanted to go into and I want to understand your perspective on this because it's very topical right now and I guess it's about central bank digital currencies. Yeah, CEDC. I want to understand more about those because it's a trending topic but that's technically what Tether originally did but without a central bank. So what is your opinion? There's a lot of concern about them because now you've digitized your dollars right and now the government's digitized their dollar and you're doing a test run in Japan if I'm not mistaken. So what's your opinion on those? Are those going to be a replacement for Tether for USDC? Is this something that's good bad? Well good or bad is in the eye of the beholder for the government's best thing that's ever happened. For the citizen it's potentially one of the worst things that's ever happened especially for citizens in countries like China and countries where the government really exerts its power doesn't care about the the citizen so much. The reason it's so bad for them is because it it provides technology for the perfect surveillance state right because with a CEDC with a digital dollar with a dollar that's on a type of blockchain the government will know every penny of every dollar you spent and where you spent it and can track it perfectly on an individual basis and can program that money because you've all heard that Bitcoin is programmable money a CEDC can be programmable money. Guess what the first thing they're going to program is well I'm going to take 30% of every transaction for my taxes right off the top right so the reason why people are concerned is because the technology is there for the government to do extraordinarily intrusive things to its citizens with this technology were somewhat protected in the United States more than a lot of these other countries and the reason why I wouldn't be so concerned is a U.S. citizen of a CEDC in Fringian Prongian privacy the best analogy an example is just surf the internet you now have to click allow cookies on every single website right you get a warning and pop up everywhere you go and that's just to get permission to track anonymous web surfing data not where you spend every penny of every dollar right so think about the level of bureaucracy and legalities that the government would have to do to be able to successfully do that in the U.S. so I'm not so concerned about it but they do they will have the tools to do it it's a bigger concern in other countries because that's like if I if I just you know I wrote down a whole bunch of like trending crypto web 3 topics I mean we've already spoken about FTX to death with other people before so we don't have to belabor that point again it's like it's all it's in the news like unless there's something revolution there that you want to speak about but CBDC is one thing that's obviously very top of mine for people I'll throw it to you is there any other things that are circulating in crypto web 3d5 that are just trending things that people should know about your opinion on it that I'm probably not smart enough to research well you know the the thing I since you asked and since you did mention FTX and block fire and and you know this crypto crash is much more significant than any to date because in the past all the crypto crashes were simply because people were getting out of Bitcoin they're like something's going on I'm selling Bitcoin or I'm selling my crypto I'm selling the sidelines that's not what happened here this is a new industry d5 decentralized finance all these exotic financial products built on blockchains so all these centralized companies now using blockchain technology to offer financial products to their users was created over the last two years and it exploded in value and what's taken place is these centralized companies on top of decentralized technology are failing and so this is systemic failure of a new industry that's on top of blockchain that's what's caused this crash it started with Terra Luna so the failure of it experiment of an experiment of an algorithmic stablecoin and that had a cascading effect because like block fire had a lot of exposure and they had a lot of exposure to three arrows and two FTX and now block fire is finally in bankruptcy and block fire actually was run by some fairly sophisticated operators and they're to it right now it doesn't appear that there was any fraud or anything there is just some some bad decisions but they got swept up in this and there's a lot of companies that are going bankrupt in this space causing this massive crash were experiencing it is not also because the market just went down and traders or traders and the mostly doer traders but the market went down but that's not what necessarily caused the the whole crash of the market went down and it's well well Terra Luna was a big part of it and then fraud was it was a big part of it mismanagement. Absolutely it was bad but I mean the market started declining and on the same day the same minute the same second so was the crypto market right so if we if we take the point or the bear market start I would say it's the day where Netflix reported their earning the bitter earning but because of one word that their CFO said it they lost 20% and at the time I think they're 200 billion dollar market cup and for that reason at the same second so did the the crypto market right so it went down with the stock market and then obviously those didn't have right right so it had this cascading effect but what I was sharing is it's not just people selling crypto which is causing this massive decline it's these companies in DeFi failing but what I wanted to bring up and leave the audience with don't blame DeFi right DeFi is an amazing advancement in kind of this ecosystem in the technology that the the the financial services that these decentralized financial companies are going to start creating and delivering really will transform how people do banking it will create much more global inclusion for people to use financial services for people that don't have access to good financial services now they will so let's call it DeFi 1.0 it just had its spectacular inclusion but DeFi 2.0 all those things will be improved upon and ideally they'll offer better safer products in the future because look at the banking look at traditional finance banks and they're still massive meltdowns in the most highly regulated industries so you can't just blame it on crypto so I do want to make sure that people don't think that DeFi is dead and that these financial products are dead just because some companies failed do you think how long do you think it's going to take to restore confidence for the average maybe see non industry person yeah it might be a little while but this is the beauty at least of my focus yes which is a non-financial kind of blockchain based businesses a lot of web 3s stuff juicy trickle over but there's a lot of a triple go like without all the financial stuff we wouldn't have had the idea of cryptocurrencies and wallets and then it turned into NFTs which brought in other people and now it's turned into web 3 which is bringing in the brands and that they can use all this technology to better engage with their consumers and then throughout this next year I think that what's going to drive the next big bull run will be recognizable web 3 projects that have actually delivered on the promise and then people will start believing again and pouring more money in the next five I don't know do you think in next five ten years we're going to start seeing young people start buying again with with ease and each other with each five or ten months or years no no years years I think in months well so right now the trade around crypto is decline right because majorities are investors but then when will come the time where a lot of the trader know if I want to say the majority or not but but just say a lot for a percentage of the trade is going to be around just day-to-day transactions yeah retail some I'm paying you to do to cut my my grass or something like this this way you don't pay taxes a lot of people were doing it already and and it's gonna it's gonna start coming back right now they don't want to touch it because it's too volatile but how when do you think it's gonna be stable in terms of volatility when they'll use a stable coin for that like okay big coin isn't meant to replace cash right it is too volatile all these cryptocurrencies are too volatile anything that you know you need a stable coin and and what's gonna happen is there will be CBDC so while I said people should be scared of the amount of control that a CBC can offer it will also offer a ton of benefits and the ease of use you'll be able to send money globally instantly and for free you know and so CBDCs will have a huge use as well but there is a lot of concern for them and so something like what you're saying is when are they going to use kind of cryptos they'll probably use this a digital dollar so you're saying you're saying they're not gonna use ease they're probably gonna use stator or some stable coin this way they don't have to worry about volatility unless eventually it became stable because that's also the by the way people are already doing that like USDC but not enough as a volume no no no most of it was if you were if you were to buy an NFT or anything it was all east because it was the only option at the time yes that's why the layer 2s exploded in popularity because it was too slow and too expensive so yeah cardan and solana and polka dot and everyone else and and polygon you know came out yeah no I just find it fascinating like building in this basis so it's like it's tumultuous but it's exciting but that's not disruptive right some massive roller coaster it is okay um where do you want to leave the audience with um final thoughts on the industry and then also working they like reach out to you check out all this after working on yeah now you can find me on instagram and twitter and linked in at rive underscore callons on twitter at rive callons on everywhere else um but my final thoughts are look we all experienced a lot of pain right like especially in the crypto space this last uh six months and it's really sad but it doesn't take away from the the massive potential of the technology and for where we're going so just you know when people say NFTs are dead and the metaverse is dead and defies that and bitcoins that is just it's just not true so the quote I will leave everyone with is a quote by victor Hugo and it says that the only thing stronger than all of the armies in the world is an idea whose time has come so when you think about that what bitcoin is it's a new type of money and this is the first time in history that anyone other than kings and governments could create not only their own money but their own monetary system this was never possible before and so that quote is so so perfect for for for this industry because this is the most coveted things that governments protect and all the armies in the world will fight to protect their their money but guess what now the average user now the citizens have the ability to build their own money and their own monetary systems and that's what's happening that's why cryptocurrency is so important I love it thank you man yeah absolutely thank you yeah pleasure my pleasure