Latest / King Dems Podcast | Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights / AI, Fintech and Growth Mindset with Zach Anderson Pettet

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AI, Fintech and Growth Mindset with Zach Anderson Pettet · King Dems Podcast | Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights

• 0:00
  Money drives the world. The infrastructure of that money
• 0:02
  matters more now than ever. If you think AI is about a chat
• 0:06
  prompt that gets you something scheduled for vacation, maybe
• 0:09
  The bigger impact, though, is going to be in the world of
• 0:13
  financial services, in the world of insurance, in the world of
• 0:15
  this and that. The world is changing and it's
• 0:17
  going to change Before we know it, it's changing in front of
• 0:21
  our eyes. If you're curious, if you're
• 0:24
  scared of AI, if you're scared of.
• 0:26
  Any of these things? If you're excited about these
• 0:28
  things, jump in. Give it a listen.
• 0:31
  Before we dive back into today's conversation, I want to share
• 0:32
  something important. This episode includes a pay
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  partnership with Better Health, a platform designed to make
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  starting therapy easier. I know for my own journey as a
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  leader and entrepreneur that life can sometimes feel
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  Once again, this is a big partnership with Better Help,
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  and I encourage you to take that first step if you've been
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  thinking about it. Sometimes the best investment
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  you can make these games yourself.
• 1:36
  Welcome to the King Dems Podcast, where we share the
• 1:39
  stories of extraordinary people and dissect hot, relevant topics
• 1:43
  that shape our world. From visionary leaders to
• 1:46
  trailblazing creatives, we uncover the mindset, strategy,
• 1:49
  and grit behind greatness. Whether it's business, culture
• 1:52
  or personal growth, we ask the real questions.
• 1:55
  This. Isn't just conversation, it's
• 1:57
  transformation. The Kingdom's podcast.
• 2:00
  Your next breakthrough starts here.
• 2:02
  Music licencing reimagined your life.
• 2:08
  Ladies and gentlemen, once again welcome to the King James
• 2:11
  podcast in diary of the CFO. And today I've got with me
• 2:16
  fighting out of the United States of America.
• 2:18
  Mcwalkum, Zachary. The Morning 2020 hero pattern.
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  I'm in the ring, I'm ready for it.
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  Let's do this. I'm in the ring, baby, let's go.
• 2:33
  For the For those just catching up, we've been talking for half
• 2:35
  an hour and had to force ourselves to start recording
• 2:38
  finally. Yeah, we've been having too much
• 2:41
  fun. Exactly the audience.
• 2:44
  We start on Part 1 of the forecast.
• 2:48
  And that means we have to do a Part 2, but it's going to be
• 2:50
  really confusing when we go from Part 1 about fintech to Part 2
• 2:53
  about MMAUFC and the rest of the world.
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  Wow, OK, so I did. I did do my homework.
• 3:01
  I prepare a nice little introduction to you.
• 3:03
  So let's see back in it. First, let me give you flowers.
• 3:07
  OK, let me get come get comfortable and prepared to
• 3:10
  accept some flowers. I like this.
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  OK, let's go. So today on the Kingdom's
• 3:15
  broadcast and diary of the CFO, I'm Shield still welcome the
• 3:18
  true fintech visionary, Zach Pettit, VP of Global Fintech
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  Strategy at Money 2020 and host of the Fintech Family Hour.
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  Zach has been instrumental in shaping the conversations that
• 3:31
  define the future of financial innovation, from embedded
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  banking and digital inclusion to the evolving relationship
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  between technology, money and trust.
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  He's worked with some of the most influential in tech brands
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  and continues to build breaches between founders, investors and
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  vacated in the global in tech ecosystem.
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  SAC. He wants to be welcome to the
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  show. It's a privilege to have you on
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  here today. Thank you, my friend, Thank you.
• 4:01
  I don't know if I deserve all that.
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  I mean, I'm trying, trying to connect the dots, trying to make
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  the world a better place. But I will take it.
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  And it's good to be here with you, man.
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  Good to be here with you. It's actually not good to be
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  here with you on my side. It's actually great to be here
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  with you. You're oh, you're a one
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  operator. OK, This is this is going to get
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  competitive. I can already tell.
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  All right, all right. Whoa, you actually we are so
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  many hearts right. We were talking about anything
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  and everything just before we keep the record button, but
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  let's talk about fintech. Right, take it, take it whatever
• 4:35
  direction you want, man. Like I think you know, fintech
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  is probably fintech, financial services, AI, blockchain, all
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  that's probably where I know the most.
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  But you know, we can explore. It's just a subset of of the
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  man, the myth and the legend. But it is just a sub sect at
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  first. You're passionate about
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  something. I'm passionate about AI.
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  I am AI. My parents knew something
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  everybody did not know, like they just had to code it.
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  They knew that I'm actually an endangered species.
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  So said, OK, let let's protect this one.
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  Let's not call him artificial intelligence.
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  Let's call him Ademola ACMA. Yeah, Ademola comes Adamola is a
• 5:13
  little more approachable than artificial.
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  If I if I had to like jump on and be like hello artificial.
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  It's a little different than Hello Ademola.
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  You know, it's like. You see, they they will know
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  there's troubles over there. But this is a little little
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  different. Little different you're I guess.
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  I see a real human on the other side of the screen here.
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  Absolutely, absolutely. You know you, you said something
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  about me earlier, you said you noticed, you know the real
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  recognising, real notice that I have a knack for growth hacking.
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  Yeah, what? What is growth?
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  Hacking without AI? Boring.
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  That's my best answer. I mean, I think growth hacking
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  is taking on so many different. Like I think there was a time in
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  Silicon Valley, like Paul Graham, you know, kind of
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  writing the thesis on the idea and especially in like the
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  earlier days of it, that really was was very hacky and not not
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  hacky in terms of like bad comedy or something like that,
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  right? But in terms of like, how can I
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  fit, you know, how can I write A blog post that has 5000 words,
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  as in 999 of them are the word fintech and or, you know,
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  whatever it might be. And I think the exciting part
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  about AI is the ability to gain that algorithm is actually going
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  to, if not, if it hasn't already disappeared, it's disappearing.
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  And my hope from that is the the best, like the, the cream will
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  rise to the top, right? So what is it?
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  What is growth hacking without AI?
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  My, my, I don't know. My bigger question is what is
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  growth hacking with AI like? There's so many opportunities,
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  so many different things that I think people haven't even
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  considered yet in terms of that, right?
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  Like a death of the search engine, all these sorts of
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  things that like to me, I think the to me, I think it's good
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  content, right? Like if you're putting out good
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  content that's getting the eyeballs, that's getting that
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  kind of algorithmic boost as a result of just the sheer
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  eyeballs, then, you know, when you ask GPTA question or when
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  you ask, you know, cloud a question, you're going to pop up
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  And like, I think it's just one of my favourite Steve Martin
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  quotes is be so good. They can't ignore you.
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  I think that's what it is. I love that.
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  I love that, you know, there being about, I think two or
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  three guests on this forecast that have actually confessed
• 7:32
  that before they reached out and paid for their episode, they
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  checked me up on the client, they checked me up on the TTPT
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  and they checked me up on Brock. And then they were like, the
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  AI's have really great things to say about me and about they're
• 7:53
  interested enough. That's where they're like, well,
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  he's a handsome man and he's that could get interesting man,
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  the future that could get really interesting when it starts to
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  get a little too personal, you know, like starting to run
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  background cheques and AI and things like that.
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  Like, could you, I, I don't blame them, you know, like how
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  would somebody from another country pay money to a guy who's
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  in the United Kingdom to be on the podcast and not do some due
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  diligence? I think it's all the stupid
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  person if we do that. But it's interesting that that's
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  where the due diligence happens, right?
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  Because I mean, people have been doing due diligence on podcasts
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  since podcasting, but the idea of going to cloud or going to
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  whatever to do that is especially when I mean
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  hallucinate, like AI hallucination still exists,
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  right? That that might be how we got
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  here is you were like looking for guests and you were like
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  somebody in fintech and then is hallucinated.
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  And it was like, oh, Zach Anderson Pettit, he's great at
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  fintech. I'm hallucinating, right?
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  I don't know, You know, we get here interesting ways, but it's.
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  It's going to be. Interesting to see how it
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  progresses. Definitely in terms of like
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  actually helping companies grow, but I think it's going to kill
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  some companies real fast too, because a lot of folks spend a
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  lot of money on Adsense and I don't know if that's going to
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  last that long. I also talked to somebody
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  yesterday. I'm like, well, I wish companies
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  out there knew how much they needed me.
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  I I. Think a lot of people have said
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  that sentence. I I just wish they'd know
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  because we like when it comes to AI, any company that refuses to
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  leverage an AI for their growth, it's actually going to be left
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  behind. Do.
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  You think any company actually refuses though?
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  Or do you think most companies just don't know what to do?
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  That's my theory. Like, I don't, I don't.
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  I don't think any company is out there like rejecting technology
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  outright. I think a lot of companies are
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  really confused about what to do with these technologies.
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  And that's not just true with AI, it's true with blockchain,
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  that's true with stablecoin. You know, it's more true in
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  financial services I think than a lot of other places because of
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  the regulations. Like there's this really, really
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  cool thing I want to put it in, but I also really don't want to
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  get a consent order in $100 million fine.
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  So I'm very, very nervous to put this here because if I do, I
• 10:16
  might have this, you know, 20% spike in, you know, revenue or
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  20% decrease in touches, whatever it might be.
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  But I might have to have a really hard conversation with my
• 10:26
  regulator after kind of thing. So that's, I think that's the to
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  me that that's what I see is people is fear.
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  It's it's not even about avoidance or anything like that.
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  It's just pure fear of what it could be.
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  I fear. Fear of the unknown, but you
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  know, there are actually ways around this thing.
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  There are ways around this thing.
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  And of course, if you carry the the regulators along, I have a
• 10:45
  background in audits, right? Peak for accounts and fans.
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  So basically you need to document they honestly, if it
• 10:54
  wasn't documented, it was not done.
• 10:56
  Of course you need to do your due diligence.
• 10:58
  You need to do your RMD, right? If you do your RMD proper issue,
• 11:03
  you'll be in a good place, right?
• 11:05
  I think when the when the use of something is unknown, abuse is
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  inevitable. So, yeah, so that's why I like
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  your perspective. Like do they even know what they
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  need to do? They don't.
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  I mean, there's like 2024, I think was the year of it was the
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  I should have actually probably written something about this or
• 11:26
  I'm sure someone did. But 2024 I think was the year of
• 11:30
  like the board remit, right? It was the every board of every
• 11:34
  Fortune 500 all the way down to, you know, series B startup
• 11:37
  saying AI, we must go AI. What are we doing on AIAI?
• 11:41
  It's time for AI. Like every board meeting.
• 11:43
  It was just a banging AI hammer over and over again.
• 11:47
  But then they were just waiting. They were just waiting for you
• 11:50
  and they were just waiting for you.
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  But then that turns around when you have that on high remit,
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  right? Like that has to especially if
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  you're talking about let's say 300,000 person company.
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  They say we need to do something with AI.
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  Everybody looks around the room. OK.
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  Well, we all, we all own different portions of of the
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  business. We're all incentivized
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  differently probably for the most part because how often are
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  business, how often are businesses that size actually
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  incentivized to run the same direction, right?
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  Very rarely. So then you have these little
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  like fiefdoms that develop, right?
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  And then you got like we're building an AI inside of this
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  that's just going to solve this. But we haven't really thought
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  about like it's like, let's say it's on the deposit side, right?
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  And it's going to do something for know your customer or like
• 12:37
  identification, but they haven't thought about how that connects
• 12:40
  to the underwriting side, which I'm hoping they have, but a lot
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  haven't, right? Because those are two different
• 12:46
  parts of the bank or two different parts of the company.
• 12:48
  So I think that that age of the board remit of 2024 where it was
• 12:53
  like, do the thing, whatever it is, do the thing we need a press
• 12:56
  release is turning into 2025, which is where we're actually
• 13:00
  seeing products, We're actually seeing use cases, we're actually
• 13:04
  seeing like, you know, Klarna and and open AI doing stuff.
• 13:07
  We're actually seeing, you know, a lot of different things
• 13:09
  happening in that space that are providing real value.
• 13:13
  And so, and also it's not just the quads, and I mean we're
• 13:17
  talking a lot about quad and open AI, but people are, believe
• 13:22
  it or not, I should give Co pilot and Microsoft their do as
• 13:25
  well. But people are actually seem to
• 13:27
  be building really valuable internal AI first engines
• 13:31
  themselves. And it seems like maybe that's
• 13:33
  the next or one of the next kind of competitive moats to develop
• 13:38
  in financial services. I mean, if you can build
• 13:41
  something like that, that actually connects the dots,
• 13:43
  right and solves that data silo issue that I was kind of
• 13:47
  referring to before. So you're getting into some
• 13:49
  interesting territory. Interesting territory.
• 13:52
  And of course, Speaking of interesting, you know, when you
• 13:56
  get the Sintech landscape, the world's number one ranked
• 14:04
  podcaster globally in fintech spaces, Breaking Bads by
• 14:08
  breaking. Yeah.
• 14:10
  Wow, that. Yeah, good for you, Brett.
• 14:12
  I didn't realise that. Congrats.
• 14:15
  So the apparently it's not even my podcast.
• 14:18
  That's the guy, Brett King. He was an economic advice to
• 14:23
  Barack Obama. And of course, I think he did
• 14:25
  some work with the Chinese government as well.
• 14:27
  Yeah, which is 2 very ironic things to put together in a
• 14:30
  sentence. And he started moving.
• 14:32
  I mean, he's an OG. He deserves Speaking of flowers,
• 14:36
  he deserves some flowers for. I mean, moving I think had a
• 14:39
  really hard time getting moving because he was he was early,
• 14:43
  right? Like he chose to start a neo
• 14:45
  bank before anybody was probably ready for a neo bank and ran
• 14:48
  into some some tough times as a result.
• 14:50
  But anyways, I think you were going somewhere with the actual
• 14:52
  Brett King piece, so. You know, Brett King has been on
• 14:56
  this podcast. Before Oh, well, I would expect
• 14:59
  so. I would expect so.
• 15:00
  That's the talker he gets out there, you know, so.
• 15:07
  You are in good company, brother.
• 15:09
  Well, you as soon as I knew that Francis and Ghana's coach has
• 15:12
  been on here, I'm, I officially feel, you know, I feel in, in
• 15:15
  the company of greatness. You know, I feel like I got, I
• 15:18
  got, I've been elevated. Shout out to you shout out to
• 15:22
  practise and guidance coach Dewey Cooper very great guy.
• 15:25
  He he was on episode 50 so PT of his broadcast.
• 15:29
  Brett King has actually touched on all of these things that he
• 15:32
  he were talking about, and it's crazy to think about how we
• 15:37
  actually predicted a lot of these things that we've seen
• 15:40
  today. That's why he's rightly top 10
• 15:43
  futurists. Right, agree completely.
• 15:45
  I think I think Brett's biggest problem is he's too early on
• 15:48
  everything. Like that's the that's the thing
• 15:50
  with futurists in general is like there's futurists and then
• 15:53
  there's entrepreneurs, right? Like or, and then there's
• 15:56
  futurists and entrepreneurs and you, you put those two things
• 15:59
  together and I guess you kind of get Elon, which is a whole other
• 16:02
  thing. But like it's really hard.
• 16:05
  I think it's really hard to maintain this kind of like
• 16:12
  trying to put together that, you know, the the idea of like the
• 16:14
  Internet of Things with self driving cars, with the
• 16:17
  blockchain, with AI and put that all together in your head and
• 16:21
  turn that into one company, right?
• 16:23
  It's just, it's too much, right? Especially thinking about like
• 16:26
  the way that startups are built, Like you start with a thing,
• 16:29
  right? Like the clarinet just IP owed,
• 16:32
  excuse me, buy now, pay later. Pretty simple concept at the end
• 16:37
  of the day, right? You, you buy it, you buy it now,
• 16:40
  you pay it later. It sounds like a credit card,
• 16:42
  except just a different structure.
• 16:45
  And now they're, you know, on the New York Stock Exchange.
• 16:48
  They're the kind of sexiest company on the block.
• 16:51
  But that's made because they started with that niche, right?
• 16:54
  Like they were maybe a little early.
• 16:56
  I think they started in 2005. But think about that Klarna
• 17:01
  started in 2005 before the actual financial crisis like
• 17:05
  that that and they stuck with it all in here we are in 2025.
• 17:10
  That's a 20 year success story. That too.
• 17:12
  I think a lot of people feel like a three-year success story,
• 17:15
  right? Then just that persistence and
• 17:17
  that growth. And like now they're talking
• 17:19
  about being, you know, the bank to a generation, right?
• 17:24
  And like out of they had a very interesting level as well.
• 17:27
  I had the pleasure of interviewing their CMO and
• 17:29
  getting to talk about some of their future and how they even
• 17:33
  think about what they are, I think is really interesting
• 17:36
  because they, they do not see themselves as a buy now, pay
• 17:38
  later company, right? They see themselves as the Bank
• 17:41
  of the future. And but you can't, you can't
• 17:43
  start there, right? Like you can't.
• 17:45
  We could, could raise $150 million and start there, but
• 17:50
  that presents a whole other set of challenges.
• 17:53
  Absolutely. And you know, Brett King said
• 17:55
  something on the sportscaster set, The bands of today are
• 18:00
  going to be limited in terms of their capacity to grow based off
• 18:07
  their what I say these are the complexity of their size.
• 18:11
  So the size is going to be a disadvantage.
• 18:13
  So you said something about having organisations that have
• 18:17
  like multiple divisions, right? It's difficult to you make that
• 18:22
  unified decision. You say, OK, let's go for AI,
• 18:26
  but you have different pockets of interest.
• 18:29
  So how do you see that limiting the growth of the banks of
• 18:33
  today, You know, partnership here you says they would
• 18:37
  experience, you know this gradual phasing out and you'll
• 18:41
  see the styles of future like the clients and you know, the
• 18:45
  digital and agile banks take over.
• 18:50
  One, Brett, love you, but I think I disagree.
• 18:53
  I think that there's I think there's a a shift that we're
• 18:57
  seeing right. So this idea of product market
• 18:59
  fit is the thing that's mattered forever.
• 19:01
  And that's in 2005, what Clarina like really started to have,
• 19:03
  right. They had that we have customers
• 19:06
  that want this very specific thing that don't want to use a
• 19:09
  credit card, right. That very, very specific coming
• 19:14
  to 2025. My question is, does product
• 19:19
  market fit or distribution market fit matter more, right?
• 19:23
  Because if you think about the impact of, so the combination of
• 19:28
  traditional finance and decentralised finance, Connexis
• 19:32
  from JPM is a good example, moving billions, trillions of
• 19:35
  dollars on the blockchain. They couldn't do that if they
• 19:39
  weren't JPM and they couldn't do that if they hadn't spent
• 19:42
  billion. Well, they maybe could have done
• 19:44
  it without spending billions and billions and billions on R&D.
• 19:47
  But also they're the biggest bank in the world and they can
• 19:49
  spend billions on R&D. So if the if they're able to
• 19:52
  build something and have the power of the partnership right
• 19:56
  where JPM, but also we can pull in City, we can pull in the
• 19:59
  regional banks, we can pull in Standard Chartered, we can, you
• 20:02
  know, we can create a consortium of banks that are on the same
• 20:06
  page and able to move money around.
• 20:09
  In a cohesive and safe fashion, all of a sudden you have one of
• 20:13
  the biggest, highest producing, highest volume products or
• 20:19
  platforms I guess is maybe a better term out there.
• 20:22
  So I think it's, I think we're getting really close to a point
• 20:26
  of partner or die or something along those lines.
• 20:29
  But distribution from my perspective matters so much more
• 20:34
  than product at this point, assuming you have a good
• 20:37
  product. Absolutely.
• 20:39
  I think he he actually does agree what he said because he
• 20:44
  set us some things along those lines, right.
• 20:47
  So basically he's talking about if you don't adopt AI, if you
• 20:52
  don't start to involve yourself in these strategic partnerships,
• 20:58
  you will experience a slow death.
• 21:01
  Yeah, that that I agree with. And I mean, you know, I, I do
• 21:06
  what I can to when I'm in podcast, not make it money 2020
• 21:09
  plugs. But like that is the
• 21:11
  conversation that we are that we had last year and that I think
• 21:15
  it's a conversation we had last year and this year.
• 21:18
  It's the thing that we're seeing, right?
• 21:20
  It's, it's actually what people are doing with the technology
• 21:24
  that's actually making a difference.
• 21:26
  And the, the geographical piece of this matters as well, right?
• 21:30
  You're sitting in London, I'm sitting in Kansas City.
• 21:32
  Very similar cities, obviously, but because in the in the US,
• 21:36
  here's a fun little quiz. If you had to guess, how many
• 21:39
  banks do you think we have in the United States?
• 21:42
  Whoa, how many banks That's. Let me just put in perspective,
• 21:48
  like in England or in the Uki think you have what, less than
• 21:52
  50? Something along those lines.
• 21:55
  I think you should have over 100 in.
• 21:58
  The US, we have about 4500, yeah.
• 22:03
  So over 4000. And it was, it was more than
• 22:05
  that a few years ago. And they're they're either
• 22:09
  getting bought or dying or whatever it is.
• 22:11
  And it's a lot of it comes from this kind of community bank
• 22:15
  thing that we have here where, you know, you can drive down the
• 22:18
  street and you got your local banker and, you know, it's,
• 22:20
  it's, it's similar to having a personal banker in London.
• 22:24
  It's just a lot more. It's less posh, right?
• 22:28
  Like you don't need to have a certain amount of money to have
• 22:30
  a personal banker if you're working with the community bank.
• 22:34
  I used to work at a community bank.
• 22:35
  That's where I learned banking. But how do you how do you scale
• 22:39
  that right? Like you can be a billion dollar
• 22:42
  bank in perpetuity with a decent UX on a mobile app and whatever
• 22:47
  and whatever. But what happens when the you
• 22:49
  like, when the form factor changes?
• 22:51
  Like when we go from this right to whatever Johnny I've is doing
• 22:57
  over at Open AI and we're going to have like our next thing is
• 23:00
  just going to be something around whatever that thing is
• 23:02
  they're working on like. It's a scary.
• 23:05
  Thing to think for some of those banks that aren't the absolute
• 23:08
  biggest of the biggest, what does happen because just the
• 23:11
  form factor change of mobile almost killed so many companies.
• 23:14
  What happens with the form factor change of going away from
• 23:19
  a phone completely? Right?
• 23:20
  That's I don't have the answer, but it's an interesting
• 23:23
  conversation. Technology keeps changing, keeps
• 23:27
  evolving, you know, and a person with us be the millennials,
• 23:30
  we've actually seen that evolution over time.
• 23:34
  You know, it's quite interesting.
• 23:35
  Think about when we use cassettes.
• 23:38
  You know, the videotapes, the CDs.
• 23:42
  Did you have typing class? Definitely Marvis Beacon.
• 23:46
  Marvis Beacon, brother. The way you position your hands,
• 23:51
  it's, yeah, it's, you know. It's, I don't think, I mean, I
• 23:54
  think that's, it's this, it's just so funny to think about
• 23:57
  some of the things that whether we were taught in school that
• 24:00
  now are just like kids just do when they're, you know, 6
• 24:03
  because they're handed an iPad. Like it's just the world's going
• 24:06
  to be a very different place in 20-30 years and an even crazier
• 24:10
  place in 50. So I don't have the answers to a
• 24:12
  lot of it, but it's going to be fun to watch, man.
• 24:14
  You know, it's just fun, you know, just watching the
• 24:16
  transition, you know, Blackberries, Nokia, Android,
• 24:22
  iPhones. Let's see.
• 24:24
  Let's see what the future holds. We will.
• 24:26
  Let's we'll, we'll make that part of the follow up.
• 24:28
  I, I, by the time we do the follow up, maybe, you know,
• 24:31
  maybe that whatever it is, the Johnny Ivan team we're working
• 24:33
  on is out in the world and we can actually we can talk about
• 24:37
  that. Who knows?
• 24:38
  You just never do. I was telling somebody yesterday
• 24:40
  that technology is the best at the worst speed that happens in
• 24:43
  mankind. Agree completely.
• 24:46
  Agree completely. I think we may absolutely be
• 24:48
  ending ourselves very slowly whilst improving the quality of
• 24:52
  life dramatically for most of the world, right.
• 24:56
  I mean, that's, that's the other part of the conversation is are
• 24:59
  we actually bridging the digital divide?
• 25:01
  Are we getting people what they need to be able to keep up?
• 25:03
  Or is this going to, you know, create even larger divides?
• 25:09
  And that's an unanswered question.
• 25:12
  You just never know. But, you know, you spoke about
• 25:15
  something about the fear of AI, and I really don't like that
• 25:19
  because why would people be afraid of me, you know?
• 25:21
  Oh. You're so friendly, why would it
• 25:23
  come on? Good of me, but there are a lot
• 25:28
  of profits of doom when it comes to AI.
• 25:32
  Yes, but I think a lot of these people have seen too many sci-fi
• 25:35
  movies. I think that's probably the
• 25:37
  problem, right? But for me, my perspective is I
• 25:41
  think AI is an assistant, not meant to be the controller,
• 25:45
  right? So AI is as good as the human
• 25:49
  who is using it. So I have an, I have a podcast
• 25:53
  episode, Mark Andrews, he's also in the US.
• 25:56
  He's a tech guru. And I think that that episode is
• 26:00
  titled Humans first, AI Next, right?
• 26:03
  So when you look at what you're able to do with AI, let's take
• 26:07
  ChatGPT for example. Sure.
• 26:10
  Some people want to do a project or do an assignment or have a
• 26:14
  query ChatGPT. I look at them, I say, do you
• 26:17
  know how much I have trained my own type GPT?
• 26:21
  Type GPT is on steroids, bro. And you know.
• 26:25
  I think a lot of people, people don't know they can do that
• 26:27
  though. That's the thing you know, don't
• 26:28
  know. It's education.
• 26:30
  No, it's education. Prompt engineering is a theme,
• 26:34
  is a theme on its own, right? And of course, you know, train,
• 26:38
  training your AI to, you know, do work for you at an
• 26:41
  accelerator speed and of course, in line with your reporting
• 26:46
  preference, right? A lot of people don't know and I
• 26:48
  tell them they're like, some people like to shame you for
• 26:51
  using AI and like, I don't really care about what you have
• 26:55
  to say, right? Ask your ChatGPT the same
• 26:57
  question. Don't go.
• 26:59
  And I'm not asked by all the same question.
• 27:01
  Are you going to see the difference?
• 27:03
  And why would you not like I I? I didn't know somebody, do you
• 27:08
  know what to say? They say wow how come my ChatGPT
• 27:10
  is so dumb? That's an it.
• 27:12
  That's a very interesting perspective.
• 27:14
  I don't know. I mean, my perspective on the
• 27:16
  whole thing is that I don't think AI is going to.
• 27:19
  So my favourite AI movie is Ex Machina.
• 27:22
  I don't know if you've ever seen it, but if you haven't, go watch
• 27:24
  it one. It's beautiful.
• 27:26
  I'll try. I only see movies based on
• 27:27
  recommendations. Actually, I'm not a movie
• 27:29
  person, I'm a music person. It is it is one of the best how
• 27:34
  AI will impact the world. It's kind of like a it's a
• 27:38
  movie, but it feels like an episode of Black Mirror.
• 27:40
  And the idea is kind of like, it's like it if it's loosely
• 27:45
  based on kind of one of the Google founders, probably like a
• 27:47
  Sergey Brin or somebody like that goes to this private island
• 27:51
  they're developing. You know, they're developing
• 27:54
  human like a is around them. Like the whole island is just
• 27:58
  actually human like a is. And spoiler alert at the end,
• 28:03
  one of them escapes. It's it's, it's just go watch
• 28:06
  it. It's it's, it's great.
• 28:08
  But it it is, it is scary. It is really scary to think
• 28:11
  about. And I think when people watch
• 28:12
  movies like that or they watch her or they even see some of the
• 28:15
  news about, you know, people's best friends being ChatGPT,
• 28:19
  like, I think it either makes you scared or sad.
• 28:23
  But from a business perspective, I, I, I worry less about this
• 28:28
  idea that AI is going to, you know, get rid of the workforce
• 28:31
  or something like that. One of my favourite quotes that
• 28:35
  I don't know if it should generate.
• 28:36
  I don't, I think it's by now it's kind of just a truism, but
• 28:40
  I heard it first from Jenny Goldberg, who is at Open AI.
• 28:44
  Shouts to Jenny, one of the true, true fintech Ogs.
• 28:47
  She's been through fintechs and then ended up at Open AI and
• 28:50
  just amazing human. But she actually open, it was
• 28:53
  like one of the worst. Like one of the worst, not
• 28:55
  worst. One of the.
• 28:56
  First words spoken at at Money 2020 last year was your job is
• 29:02
  not going to be taken by AI. Your job is going to be taken by
• 29:05
  somebody who knows how to use AI right?
• 29:07
  Like whoever can actually copilot.
• 29:10
  And like I was talking about, you know, my best friend earlier
• 29:13
  before we started talking and that man, I mean, I think he
• 29:17
  does the, the work of three people at least in a single day
• 29:21
  based on his work with AI. And he's the one that's taught
• 29:23
  me everything. I know, right?
• 29:25
  Like I, I have to output because of a lot of the work, we do have
• 29:28
  to output a lot of scripts. I do a lot of kind of creative
• 29:30
  writing type of stuff. And if I didn't have the tools
• 29:34
  that I used to do 1 script, I think to do 1 script well would
• 29:38
  take me at least 2-3 hours. And I've gotten to a point now
• 29:45
  where I can turn out 12 scripts or not.
• 29:47
  Let's let's say like 6 scripts in six hours.
• 29:52
  That that's the thing with AI and you know, that's even of
• 29:54
  course you have a very high tasting quality.
• 29:59
  That's why. Yeah, that's the thing.
• 30:00
  You're not just like turning them out, I guess.
• 30:02
  Yeah, because you need to be engineer.
• 30:04
  And exactly, it's the prompt. You know, it's crazy.
• 30:07
  Somebody saw me with a prompt for a particular project, and I
• 30:12
  had that prompt in Microsoft Word, and I think the prompt was
• 30:15
  well over 15 pages. And they're like, is this just a
• 30:20
  prompt? And I'm like, yeah, it is a
• 30:22
  prompt there. They're like there, what is the
• 30:25
  the mid report itself? Don't worry, Prompts can
• 30:28
  actually get that long if you know what you're doing in terms
• 30:32
  of you're prompts. Engineering, Yeah, if you.
• 30:35
  Don't know this especially I mean speaking, you know, to the
• 30:40
  to the diary of a CFO side. I mean, the, the, the impact on
• 30:45
  the CF OS life should be nothing but positive as a result of
• 30:48
  this, right? Taking the data resulting out
• 30:51
  like insights, like if you're not getting real positive, I'm
• 30:58
  not going to say positive output because if you're not making any
• 31:01
  money, it's not a positive output.
• 31:02
  But if you're not getting real productivity as a CFO out of
• 31:05
  using AI, there's a disconnect. You're missing something.
• 31:09
  You're not using something, you're something needs to
• 31:11
  change, I guess is what I would say.
• 31:13
  And in my experience, it's just trying it.
• 31:15
  I think, you know, we were talking earlier about fear.
• 31:17
  I think, you know, a lot of people that maybe like went to
• 31:20
  accounting school or whatever it is, is, you know, I like, maybe
• 31:24
  not like I like my Abacus, but like, I like my Excel.
• 31:26
  And there's there's a lot more to be done in the world with a
• 31:32
  lot less time now that we have some of these tools.
• 31:35
  And you know, we, we shout out to people like data reels, you
• 31:39
  know, that's external star arts, you know, so basically it has
• 31:43
  come for everybody. You cannot run.
• 31:45
  You can. You can.
• 31:48
  Can run, you can hide, but hey, I was coming baby, he's going to
• 31:51
  find. You, he's going to find you.
• 31:53
  He's going to find you, right? You know, talking about fintech
• 31:57
  like you've actually like won, like so many hearts from founder
• 32:01
  to strategies to fintech leader. So what's the personal mission?
• 32:06
  What's the why that drives your journey in Fintech?
• 32:10
  Yeah, well, when I started in fintech, AI was still a thing
• 32:13
  that, you know, we were not talking about.
• 32:15
  So for me, the origin story of why I really care, and I'll
• 32:20
  leave a lot of the companies nameless, was I was doing an
• 32:22
  internship in college. It was for a large investment
• 32:25
  bank and it was specifically for wealth management going to the
• 32:30
  office every day, putting on that, you know, suit that didn't
• 32:33
  quite fit because I couldn't afford a fund that actually did,
• 32:37
  you know, just kind of looking a little scrubby.
• 32:39
  But, you know, sitting in meetings and selling index funds
• 32:42
  and you know, like balance portfolios to to folks and doing
• 32:46
  generally what would be considered, you know, the term
• 32:48
  fiduciary would be yeah, of course you'd based on your
• 32:52
  background, of course you do would be considered fiduciary
• 32:55
  level advice, right. But what I didn't realise is
• 32:58
  that you can as a fiduciary also be a registered broker dealer,
• 33:03
  right. So.
• 33:04
  We have that hat like conflict of interest, conflict of
• 33:07
  interest. It's conflict.
• 33:09
  You hit the nail on the head. We were talking about this hat
• 33:12
  earlier, so I'll use it now. So.
• 33:14
  Show me the money. So the hat says, lucky me, I see
• 33:19
  money and I almost wore it just because, but it was a little bit
• 33:22
  too on the nose, but we'll use it for this example.
• 33:24
  So we were selling these, you know, responsible portfolios and
• 33:29
  then suddenly we go to lunch with a, a salesperson that will
• 33:33
  remain nameless from a company that will remain, remain
• 33:35
  nameless. But they were selling annuities
• 33:39
  specifically. And what we could make selling,
• 33:41
  you know, index funds and, you know, fiduciary products was 25
• 33:48
  basis points, you know, 30 basis points, something like that on
• 33:51
  assets. But as soon as you take off that
• 33:54
  fiduciary hat and you toss on this bad boy and you're a broker
• 33:57
  dealer, you can start doing a lot of creative things.
• 34:00
  And I look like an idiot with this on the top of my head, but
• 34:03
  you can. You can become without.
• 34:04
  Telling the client. You could go from, hey, here's
• 34:08
  the thing you should buy, here's the thing we should put in your
• 34:10
  portfolio, I guess is what I should say.
• 34:12
  And then you can take off that fiduciary hat and say, oh, and
• 34:15
  just, you know, really to cover you because it's a insurance
• 34:18
  product. You should have an annuity as.
• 34:20
  Well, oh, by the way, I'm going to kind of not share this with
• 34:25
  you, but instead of making 25 basis points, I'm going to make
• 34:28
  300 basis points. I'm going to make 3% on this
• 34:30
  product. And from that lunch we went back
• 34:34
  to to the office and that afternoon we started selling
• 34:37
  annuities basically in every single meeting.
• 34:40
  I mean, there were sometimes that where they were like, you
• 34:42
  know, literally 22 where it would almost be illegal to sell
• 34:46
  somebody an annuity. But if it was even close to the
• 34:50
  idea that you could sell them an annuity, the attempt would be
• 34:53
  made because you're making it, you know, if it's, if you have
• 34:55
  100K to invest, wouldn't you rather, you know, make 3000
• 34:59
  instead of like, come on, right. That's incentives.
• 35:03
  But that's a very broken incentive system.
• 35:06
  So from that moment I just like struck me like this bolt of like
• 35:10
  wildly unethical lightning and I just decided I wanted to spend
• 35:14
  the rest of my life in finance and hopefully die leaving it 1%
• 35:19
  better than I found it. So started joining startups,
• 35:21
  studied entrepreneurship in school, realised that meant
• 35:23
  absolutely nothing. So I talked to my teachers into
• 35:26
  basically like letting me go join startups instead of coming
• 35:28
  to class. And I think I graduated with one
• 35:31
  of the lowest Gpas you possibly could, but I talked him into it.
• 35:34
  And yeah, I've been working in startups ever since, I think
• 35:38
  since junior year and what you would call uni.
• 35:43
  So the answer is anger. Basically just anger at the
• 35:47
  system. You picked business acumen.
• 35:50
  You knew that business acumen was the real deal.
• 35:53
  You know, during my time PwC, they had this 5 criteria
• 35:58
  framework for evaluating professionals, whole leadership,
• 36:02
  business document, technical, competent, beauty, relationships
• 36:07
  and global acumen. So me, I've always like taken
• 36:11
  beautiful relationships and Jesus acumen very, very
• 36:14
  seriously. Because of course, your whole
• 36:16
  leadership, how do you need yourself?
• 36:17
  How do you need your team? I love that framework a lot
• 36:20
  because I told my colleagues like these guys have bleached me
• 36:23
  giving us the cheat code to succeed in life.
• 36:27
  Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think.
• 36:30
  I think if you can, if you can find a way to act ethically and
• 36:35
  make money at the same time, you're living the dream.
• 36:38
  And that's what I think people miss that a lot about finance
• 36:41
  where especially that's the beauty of fintech, right?
• 36:44
  Like the biggest impact of fintech to this point over the
• 36:47
  last 10 years probably isn't actually the fintech companies
• 36:51
  like Robin Hood's big, Chimes big, Klarna's big and 26 is in
• 36:57
  Germany big. You know, like there's a lot of
• 36:58
  these companies that are that are big Plaid.
• 37:01
  But if you think about the impact of Chime as an example,
• 37:05
  or of Revolute, where did all the overdraft fees go?
• 37:09
  Right at the big banks, all the overdraft fees went away because
• 37:13
  all of a sudden these fintechs were offering no overdraft fees.
• 37:16
  And then, you know, in America, there's the two day early pay.
• 37:20
  I don't know if you guys have that, but the two day early pay
• 37:22
  thing that Chime had. So that was like Chime's entry.
• 37:25
  They were, you know, sign up for Chime, get your your pay two
• 37:29
  days early. It was so simple and you're not
• 37:32
  really taking any risk. Yeah, we have that.
• 37:34
  We have that here as well, revenue each month.
• 37:37
  So Yep. So I mean, that's think about
• 37:40
  the risk you're taking, you're taking payroll risk, which is
• 37:43
  pretty much like the only risk you have is like if that person
• 37:47
  gets fired somehow between payroll getting run and they
• 37:51
  actually there isn't any because even then the payroll's still
• 37:53
  going to run. So why would you not just kind
• 37:56
  of bank on the fact that the payroll's going to run, get that
• 38:00
  money in there and acquire an unbelievable amount of users
• 38:03
  just in a small amount of time because of a very, very basic
• 38:06
  feature. And now you see the likes of,
• 38:09
  you know, some of the larger banks saying to get your money
• 38:12
  two days early, right? And as to.
• 38:14
  That as. Well, and from Robin Hood, you
• 38:15
  see, like when was the last time you you logged on to anything
• 38:18
  and saw a trading fee? Their trading fees are gone.
• 38:21
  So the impacts of Fintech at this point, I mean, it's been
• 38:25
  big, but I would argue that the like societal impact mostly has
• 38:31
  been in that Fintech has pushed these huge organisations to be
• 38:35
  more ethical. They've given them a run for
• 38:39
  their money The exactly. And of course, you know, it
• 38:42
  links back to the speed of a perfect competitive market.
• 38:47
  You know, I have a first degree in economics, but a lot of
• 38:50
  people don't even know that because of like the fact that my
• 38:54
  career has actually been mostly in accounting.
• 38:58
  You know, economics teaches you a lot of themes at the micro and
• 39:02
  looking at and I think economics is mostly mostly about
• 39:05
  optimization. So how do you optimise the
• 39:08
  benefits to the consumers and of course create a perfect
• 39:13
  competition market. So in a perfect competition
• 39:17
  market, you would have 0 or no charges, right?
• 39:23
  And of course there's no barrier to the entry in the market.
• 39:26
  So it forces people to bring down the prices to that, you
• 39:32
  know, equilibrium point. Usually the the lack of
• 39:36
  competition, you know, make those guys raise the bar in
• 39:41
  prizes and thousands of beneficial to the consumers,
• 39:45
  you're going to see something. Yeah, I mean, if, if you have a
• 39:48
  monopoly or an oligopoly, you can charge whatever the hell you
• 39:51
  want to charge, right. But the more competition that's
• 39:54
  going to drive prices down. It's, I mean, the beauty, the
• 39:57
  beauty of fintech is exactly what you're talking about.
• 40:00
  It's exactly. And it pushes innovation.
• 40:02
  Yep, species innovation, that that's a thing.
• 40:05
  I think competition basically drives innovation.
• 40:08
  But I stand to be corrected. But that's what I think our
• 40:10
  competition is the fuel for innovation.
• 40:13
  I think so I think, I think competition drives innovation
• 40:16
  and I think, and I think innovation drives competition.
• 40:18
  I mean both, right. At the end of the day, like if
• 40:20
  you think about AI, it's a noob with AI as an example.
• 40:24
  Like, it's kind of just like, here's a technology that we
• 40:27
  just, like, threw into the fray and now everybody's like, well.
• 40:31
  We got to do something with it. Whoever does the best thing with
• 40:33
  it is probably. Going to win, so Sprint, right?
• 40:36
  I mean it's it can go both ways for sure.
• 40:40
  Yeah, I, I think it's kind of like a loop, but you know,
• 40:42
  coming back to your own personal experience like you worked at
• 40:47
  MBKC Visa, like how did that shape your perspective and what
• 40:53
  fintech innovation is truly impactful?
• 41:00
  Yeah. So V sum was a I'll, I'll
• 41:02
  separate the two a little bit. So MBKC was working in a
• 41:05
  community bank. It was 1000 or sorry, not 1000.
• 41:08
  It was a billion dollar bank, which in the US in terms of
• 41:12
  assets is pretty candidly tiny. Really.
• 41:15
  But. Say again.
• 41:18
  I said it's. Immaterial, basically.
• 41:20
  Basically, yeah, yeah. I mean, you got to be, but but
• 41:26
  if you structure the bank correctly and you think about
• 41:29
  building that business correctly, it can produce the
• 41:32
  revenues of a bank much larger with much lower risk, right?
• 41:37
  So and with a much lower employee account.
• 41:39
  So that bank was fascinating in that it was and is one of the
• 41:44
  top, I don't want to get it wrong.
• 41:47
  So I'll use a larger number top 2025 mortgage lenders in the US,
• 41:51
  right? It's a billion dollar bank in
• 41:52
  Kansas City. But because of the ability to do
• 41:56
  business online and you know, rate tables like NerdWallet,
• 41:59
  things like that, people were finding that the, you know,
• 42:02
  customer service was unbelievable.
• 42:04
  The speed was unbelievable. And this little bank that's NBK,
• 42:08
  this is 4 like 4 letters. Why, what, what is this?
• 42:12
  But oh, that rate looks good. Whoever just called me after I
• 42:16
  applied for the loan doesn't they seem nice.
• 42:18
  They seem trustworthy. And the Midwest does have kind
• 42:21
  of a, you know, we're known for being a little more trustworthy
• 42:24
  than maybe if a New York bankers calling you.
• 42:26
  No offence to my New York friends, but we figured out this
• 42:28
  thing or they I shouldn't take any credit for it because it
• 42:31
  happened before I got there. They figured out this machine,
• 42:35
  but that machine needed to be funded, right?
• 42:37
  And a billion dollar bank is not sitting on enough, enough
• 42:42
  deposits to be able to lend out the amount that was necessary to
• 42:47
  be able to satisfy those loans. So we would always go to, we
• 42:51
  would every single night, every single day, go to the go to what
• 42:55
  was called the Federal Home Loan Bank, which the idea is
• 42:58
  basically it's this big pool of money where we could go pull
• 43:01
  from fund the loan and then securitize the loan and sell it
• 43:05
  off. So we, we can stay, we can stay
• 43:08
  this small, we can stay, you know, NBKC, this community bank
• 43:12
  where I still bank, where I still walk in and talk to Robin,
• 43:15
  my, you know, my friend Robin and she, she hooks me up with my
• 43:17
  checking deposits and you know, all that stuff.
• 43:21
  But we, we can function on this, on this national level.
• 43:24
  So my job there was actually growing deposits.
• 43:27
  It was how do we go out, especially in this world of
• 43:29
  fintech as the chimes And you know, all of these groups are
• 43:33
  starting to grow and be the bank behind that fintech, right?
• 43:38
  Because if you think about it, the biggest expense of growing
• 43:41
  these businesses is just customer acquisition.
• 43:44
  And if we can just be on the back end of that, then we can
• 43:47
  let the chimes of the world, which Chime was not actually a
• 43:50
  partner, but I'm just using as an example, we can let them go
• 43:53
  acquire those customers. All of a sudden our balance
• 43:56
  sheet is growing like crazy as far as the deposits go, right?
• 44:00
  So our ability to lend becomes a lot more profitable.
• 44:04
  So if from the federal and trying to kind of keep it simple
• 44:08
  from the Federal Home Loan Bank, let's say we would have to, we
• 44:11
  would have to lend for three. We would borrow for 3% and then
• 44:15
  we would put out the loan at 4% just to keep math simple, 1%
• 44:19
  spread. If we partner with the fintech,
• 44:23
  that's not free, but it's inherently a free deposit.
• 44:26
  It's like me walking in the bank and saying here's 10 bucks
• 44:29
  lending out that 10 bucks. All they need to do is make sure
• 44:32
  that they're actually compliant and can give me that 10 bucks
• 44:34
  back eventually. Now we have a four point spread
• 44:38
  on that loan, right, which the impact of that is gigantic.
• 44:42
  So really that was exactly exactly.
• 44:45
  So that was my job was find creative ways to build the
• 44:49
  deposit side of the business. And that led to working with
• 44:52
  start-ups that led to we built an internal accelerator where we
• 44:55
  would actually fly companies to Kansas City for a 75 day like
• 45:00
  intense process where there we go from no partnership to full
• 45:04
  partnership, keeping in contacts that like the average time it
• 45:08
  took to build one of these a year, six months, something like
• 45:14
  that we're doing in 75 days. That was like, that was the
• 45:18
  thing because like all the only advantage that a Midwestern tiny
• 45:22
  bank has is speed. So that was the thing that we
• 45:24
  figured out there. We did some investing that
• 45:27
  worked out pretty well. And basically what that was for
• 45:30
  me was learning banking. Like if I had not spent that
• 45:33
  time there, I would not understand banking balance
• 45:37
  sheets. I wouldn't be able to talk about
• 45:38
  the Federal Home Loan Bank. You know, I wouldn't understand
• 45:41
  reading between the lines on regulation.
• 45:43
  Like there's so many things that I think a lot of folks in
• 45:46
  fintech miss out on by not getting that experience inside
• 45:49
  of a true bank. So I could talk about that
• 45:52
  experience for forever, but that's basically what that was.
• 45:56
  And then V some, we started with one of my favourite people on
• 46:00
  earth, a guy named Ben Milne. He's what has he done?
• 46:03
  Now he's on his second company. His first one was called Dwala
• 46:07
  and it was a very Web 2 payments company.
• 46:11
  You can almost think of it as a Stripe esque sort of situation,
• 46:15
  but out of Des Moines, IA so little harder to raise money,
• 46:19
  little harder to, you know, kind of take scale things a little
• 46:21
  bit. But it's a billion dollar
• 46:23
  company. He's now moved on to his second.
• 46:25
  You know, he's doing something completely new now and he's
• 46:29
  actually building a stablecoin company.
• 46:31
  So he's gone from web one or web web 2 to web three, I suppose.
• 46:35
  But during COVID, we just got bored and we wanted to find a
• 46:39
  way to, you know, kind of continue the community and the
• 46:42
  ecosystem and, and learn this entirely new technology set of
• 46:47
  technologies that was coming out, right?
• 46:48
  Like at that point, I would, I didn't know how to set up a
• 46:52
  digital wallet, right? I didn't know what a digital
• 46:53
  wallet was. And I'm not talking about Apple
• 46:55
  Pay, right? Like I'm talking about cold
• 46:57
  storage. I'm talking about all of these
• 46:59
  intricacies of the blockchain and of Bitcoin and buying
• 47:03
  Ethereum. And you know, how do you mention
• 47:05
  NFT, all of these things? That's all it's coins.
• 47:08
  Exactly, all of it. And So what V7 was, was really
• 47:11
  an online virtual community where we would get to meet
• 47:14
  companies like Paxos and Tether and etcetera, etcetera.
• 47:19
  Companies that you see today is like the companies, right?
• 47:22
  Like we, I think we even had circle percent back in the day,
• 47:24
  which is crazy. But from that, I mean, I learned
• 47:31
  the underlying infrastructure of Defy.
• 47:33
  So the I separate the two because they're very different
• 47:36
  experiences and one was a job and one was a hobby.
• 47:39
  But if you think about like how the world's coming together
• 47:42
  today, I very accidentally stumbled into the exact
• 47:45
  intersection of what's happening, right?
• 47:46
  It's this coming together of tratify and defy and what that
• 47:50
  actually means for the world. I definitely not would not give
• 47:53
  myself the credit to say that I knew that that's what this all
• 47:58
  was going to be. But you know, in if you line it
• 48:01
  up in reverse, it kind of the the story comes together into
• 48:05
  what is happening today. Interesting stuff, you know,
• 48:08
  like sometimes great scenes happen out of, would I say,
• 48:15
  lucky mistakes or. Oh yeah.
• 48:18
  Yeah, I say lucky mistakes. Just I was reading something
• 48:21
  some years ago, I heard that the person who invented silk, I
• 48:27
  invented it by way of a lucky mistake.
• 48:29
  And I'm like, wow, interesting. And I remember when I was
• 48:33
  interviewing with KPMG in the UK and the lady asked me why did
• 48:38
  you get into order? I'm like I did not choose order
• 48:42
  or they chose me. That's deep.
• 48:47
  Yeah, that, you know, that's the thing.
• 48:49
  You know, sometimes you don't choose a line of work people.
• 48:53
  It just happens that maybe one door closed.
• 48:55
  And at first, you know, people always say, oh, you'll be good
• 48:57
  at this thing, try it out. Somebody just told me, try it
• 49:00
  out. Try Peter and yeah.
• 49:05
  That's all you go. Yeah, that's actually.
• 49:08
  I was actually, I was supposed to have an internship with the
• 49:11
  Kansas City Chiefs before and I found out it was going to be a
• 49:15
  50 hour a week unpaid internship while I was still in school.
• 49:21
  And I do not, I do not come from money, my friend.
• 49:24
  So I like basically I was like, how in the world can I possibly
• 49:28
  do this? And I was, and there's like a
• 49:31
  high end car wash here in town where I was selling car washes.
• 49:34
  And that's actually How I Met the general manager of the
• 49:36
  Chiefs and just annoyed him for I think 2 years before finally
• 49:40
  they gave me that offer and I was like, OK, I'm in, I'm doing
• 49:43
  this. I'm taking six months off school
• 49:44
  like going all in. And then I found out it was
• 49:47
  unpaid and it was like I just took six months off school.
• 49:50
  Like I don't know what do I do? Pass.
• 49:52
  Well, I like I did pass, but I had no backup.
• 49:56
  I didn't know what to do next. So one of my other regulars from
• 49:59
  the the car wash was the wealth, was the wealth manager that
• 50:03
  ended up at that got me to that internship I told you about that
• 50:06
  got me into finance. So yeah, I mean, it's it's wild
• 50:10
  how these things happen. Happens, then happens, then, you
• 50:12
  know, these things happen sometimes and then people be
• 50:15
  like, oh, so you had it all planned out.
• 50:18
  No. Sorry, sorry, I learned I did
• 50:21
  not have it all planned out. You just work out together.
• 50:25
  And of course, you know, for me, I'm a person of faith, believe
• 50:27
  strongly, you know, in the patient faith in the Bible, this
• 50:31
  is versus all things work together according to his
• 50:35
  purpose. So like I see that happening,
• 50:38
  you know, in my life a lot like things just happen.
• 50:41
  Sometimes the door closes and of course another one opens and of
• 50:44
  course, you know, opportunities come up.
• 50:47
  I remember like my very, very first, or would I say contract,
• 50:54
  right I ever had in my life. What happened?
• 50:58
  I seated, I used to lecture professional students and what
• 51:02
  happened was I was left in one of my students private lessons
• 51:06
  and there was this corporate training they needed to do.
• 51:12
  And this guy kicks up the phone and like, oh, we needed to do
• 51:16
  training. And then he was like, oh, what's
• 51:19
  the date for the training? And he was like, oh, I'm not
• 51:22
  available for that date. I'm out of the country.
• 51:25
  And he says, OK, I'll try to find you an alternative.
• 51:30
  He called the first guy. The first guy said, oh, I'm not
• 51:34
  available for that date. He called the second guy and the
• 51:37
  second guy was like, oh, I'm not available for that date.
• 51:39
  And then he looked around, he saw me was like, bro, what's up?
• 51:42
  Can you handle this training and guess what my best Bible verses
• 51:47
  Philippians chapter 4 verse 13 I can do all things through crisis
• 51:51
  strengthens me like yeah, I can do all things but through crisis
• 51:54
  strengthens. We had yeah, he was like, OK,
• 51:56
  check out the topics and how you develop material for this.
• 51:59
  I can do all things and. Say yes, right, like at the end,
• 52:03
  put, put, put good stuff into the world and you'll get good
• 52:06
  stuff back. And I think the other thing is
• 52:08
  just say yes to everything I'm telling you like.
• 52:12
  Preparation meets opportunity called a success.
• 52:14
  But I think about that situation a lot like I wasn't the first
• 52:18
  choice, I wasn't the second choice.
• 52:19
  I was not even the third choice. I was the 4th.
• 52:24
  For a reason probably, you know, I mean, it will never know that
• 52:27
  reason that that reason is some of the it's ethereal.
• 52:30
  It's up in, you know, somewhere, but it ended up that way for a
• 52:34
  reason, man. Yeah.
• 52:36
  And of course, I was also at the right place at the right time,
• 52:39
  right. You know, it's all about when
• 52:42
  you develop sets and skill sets. If the opportunity comes, yeah,
• 52:47
  you can, You can get it. What?
• 52:48
  A lot of people don't even develop themselves to the extent
• 52:51
  that you can even be frantic an opportunity.
• 52:55
  And that's very sad. Agreed.
• 52:58
  Yeah, I mean, I think again, a lot, so much of this comes back
• 53:01
  to education. You know, at the end of the day,
• 53:03
  like I, I hope to spend a large portion of my life in finance.
• 53:10
  But from there, I really, really hope that I'm able to spend
• 53:13
  from, I don't know, hopefully I'm able to make enough money
• 53:16
  that by 45, but let's say 5055 that I spend the rest of my life
• 53:21
  in education and not just teaching, but like what is what
• 53:24
  is the next version of schooling?
• 53:26
  And if anything, I should be focusing on this right now,
• 53:28
  probably as AI is coming around, because this is this is the
• 53:32
  moment that that education is going to change completely.
• 53:35
  That education already is changing completely, right?
• 53:37
  Like we're able to educate ourselves in a way that we never
• 53:41
  could before. So, yeah, I mean, all of these
• 53:44
  things are about about a mix of things.
• 53:49
  But I also think the one thing that you kind of said there that
• 53:52
  like brings it all together is showing up, right?
• 53:54
  Like if you just, if you just continuously show up, you're
• 53:57
  going to end, you're going to end up in the right conversation
• 53:59
  with the right person. And it's just going to kind of
• 54:01
  happen. Show up and show out.
• 54:05
  Well, yeah, you, you got a little more show out than I do.
• 54:08
  But you know, when, when given the opportunity, I shall show
• 54:11
  out indeed. OK.
• 54:14
  You know, that's something that I say.
• 54:17
  There's a theory I came up with and I like to pity to you
• 54:20
  because you brought up the the concept of education.
• 54:23
  I think the capacity of a human being is dependent on 4ES.
• 54:27
  OK, four education, enlightenment, experience and
• 54:32
  exposure. Education, enlightenment,
• 54:37
  experience, exposure. I don't think I could disagree.
• 54:44
  I think there's, I mean, I think there's a lot of levels inside
• 54:47
  of that, right? I think to me, the one is
• 54:49
  exposure that goes beyond all of those.
• 54:52
  I mean, I think there's like, I think we were talking about is
• 54:56
  like the table stakes of a potentially successful human,
• 55:00
  right? Like everything you just said is
• 55:01
  like what you got to do to get to a certain place, right?
• 55:06
  But I never thought I would work in events just to be totally
• 55:09
  candid, right? Like I, I studied
• 55:11
  entrepreneurship, like I thought I was going to spend my entire
• 55:14
  life just building companies, either founding them or being,
• 55:18
  you know, early employee of that, whatever it might be.
• 55:21
  But the exposure, I mean, I've been in Money 2020 for four
• 55:24
  years, never thought I was going to work in events.
• 55:26
  I've been here four years. And one of the big reasons is
• 55:29
  not exposure from the perspective of I stand in on
• 55:31
  stage in front of 5000 people and they know who I am, but I
• 55:35
  get to stand backstage with the CFO of Open AI for 10 minutes
• 55:39
  before she goes on stage, right? Like the Vice, the vice chairman
• 55:43
  of IBM, Gary Cone, who was actually in the first Trump
• 55:46
  administration and spoke last year at Money 2020.
• 55:49
  You know, whatever your opinion on the Trump administration
• 55:52
  might. Be I'm not American, so yeah,
• 55:56
  I'm neutral. If you're not American and your
• 55:58
  opinion is neutral, then you're just lying.
• 56:00
  But we can pass it. We can go past that.
• 56:02
  Whoa. You know the interesting thing?
• 56:04
  You know the interesting thing, right?
• 56:06
  Yeah. Personally, like I love being
• 56:09
  neutral. Like people that know me know
• 56:10
  that I love neutrality. Why?
• 56:13
  Because think about it, I am trying to be a global top rated
• 56:19
  podcaster. I'm trying to be one of the top
• 56:22
  journalists in the world. And but you've got opinions.
• 56:25
  Yeah, yeah, I have my personal opinions I'm not going to like,
• 56:28
  right. So, for example, I don't support
• 56:30
  any football team. That is what you guys call
• 56:33
  soccer. And one thing I've noticed about
• 56:37
  neutrality is the fact that when you're neutral, it helps you to
• 56:41
  be able to form the best informed opinions.
• 56:46
  Of course, you're not taking sides.
• 56:48
  And I think I learned that from my work in audit, right?
• 56:51
  You cannot, you have to be independent of your client in
• 56:54
  order to be able to do the best job and of course, make what I
• 56:59
  see a well informed opinion about their financial
• 57:01
  statements. So you cannot maybe have shares
• 57:04
  in them or know somebody on the board or have friends in top
• 57:10
  management or you to make a good decision.
• 57:13
  You will never make that good decision.
• 57:14
  So as much as possible, I try to, you know, throw myself out
• 57:18
  of, you know, yeah, taking sides.
• 57:20
  So basically it's like, would I say a conscious decision?
• 57:24
  So about whenever I take sides, honestly I am taking this side
• 57:27
  and This is why so. Yeah, I get that from from an
• 57:31
  ethical perspective, I completely agree.
• 57:33
  And also in the world that you live in, if you say you're a
• 57:37
  Liverpool fan, you're just going to lose listeners, right?
• 57:40
  Like if you say you're a Tottenham fan, you're just going
• 57:42
  to lose listeners. So I completely understand that
• 57:45
  from that perspective. But at the end of the day, we
• 57:48
  all, you know, we have our opinions.
• 57:49
  And I'll be honest as to what my opinion was before I met Gary
• 57:53
  Cohn, the man, he, he's a, you know, you say I'm the man in the
• 57:58
  myth legend. And I say that to a lot of my
• 58:00
  guests as well. But I mean, he was, he was at
• 58:02
  Goldman for over 20 years. I will leave Goldman Sachs.
• 58:07
  Goldman Sachs. Yeah, I will leave it to others
• 58:09
  to look at what his separation package was.
• 58:13
  But let's just say it was enough to, if I remember correctly, it
• 58:17
  was over a couple 100 million. So the man did all right, just
• 58:21
  leaving Goldman Sachs and I should double check that, but it
• 58:24
  was it was big. So you think of this guy, I
• 58:27
  mean, just you just kind of assume Wall Street fella part of
• 58:31
  the Trump administration, like the first, especially the first
• 58:34
  Trump administration, like you just kind of assume a certain
• 58:37
  something, right. And then I get backstage.
• 58:41
  It's that big Monday morning, he's the big, you know, first
• 58:43
  opening keynote. He's over in the corner.
• 58:46
  He's got his, you know, his, he's his GC, you know, is
• 58:50
  everything's monogrammed, looking too fresh.
• 58:53
  I can't even handle it. Like I'm literally nervous to go
• 58:55
  say hi to this guy. Exactly.
• 58:59
  And I walk over to him and he was in the middle of something.
• 59:03
  I'm nobody to him, right? Like I'm just some guy that
• 59:06
  like, I'm, I'm dressed up as if I'm about to get on stage.
• 59:08
  I have a microphone like in my hand.
• 59:11
  So I think he assumed something of substance was maybe going to
• 59:15
  come out of my mouth. But I'm nobody to him.
• 59:17
  He set everything down, like just completely took everything
• 59:21
  he was doing, set it down, gave me his undivided attention,
• 59:25
  shook my hand. We talked for like 10 minutes
• 59:27
  and I fell in love with this man.
• 59:29
  Like if I like truly I was, I was taken in by his personality.
• 59:34
  I was taken in by his candour. And I fully expected him to get
• 59:37
  on stage and kind of just be a banker, be, you know, get, get
• 59:43
  on stage and be a banker government guy.
• 59:45
  But he got on stage and he just started going.
• 59:48
  He was just like, I disagree with this.
• 59:50
  This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard over here.
• 59:52
  We should be doing this. Not this like it's you, you get
• 59:57
  surprised by people and that that exposure is addictive,
• 1:00:00
  right? Like getting to actually know
• 1:00:02
  that side of a human and actually getting to meet some of
• 1:00:04
  these people. It I mean, what what that will
• 1:00:07
  ever lead to? No idea.
• 1:00:09
  But I mean, you know, maybe sometime in the future.
• 1:00:11
  I'm working with Gary. I hope.
• 1:00:13
  I kind of doubt it, but I hope. But more so, it gives you that
• 1:00:17
  exposure to realise maybe you shouldn't judge so fast.
• 1:00:23
  Maybe you should have, maybe you should have a little more
• 1:00:25
  empathy, you know, And I think a lot of what you were talking
• 1:00:28
  about before is really about empathy.
• 1:00:30
  Yes, because really I don't know, like in my life, that's
• 1:00:35
  something I like to say. Never say never, right?
• 1:00:37
  I have realised that so many times I have been wronged by
• 1:00:43
  taking a side, so many times I have been wrong by judging a
• 1:00:49
  people or institutions or anything at all before observing
• 1:00:55
  the facts. And of course, being a being a
• 1:00:57
  science guy, you know and three season is, is the order of the
• 1:01:02
  day. So if you judge by the facts, if
• 1:01:04
  you follow the data points, you follow the numbers, you follow
• 1:01:07
  what you can observe, right. So if I cannot observe it, you
• 1:01:11
  know, with my own, I don't think it makes sense to you to form an
• 1:01:15
  opinion about it. Speaking of about what you
• 1:01:18
  experienced with a guy, one thing I've experienced with
• 1:01:20
  success with people is they're oftentimes humble.
• 1:01:24
  Yeah, much more than you expect they have.
• 1:01:26
  Nothing. They have nothing to prove.
• 1:01:28
  Yeah, but people that are, you know, one of these try too hard
• 1:01:35
  and it's crazy. So for me, like I've decided to
• 1:01:40
  to embrace that culture, the attitude of having nothing to
• 1:01:45
  prove to anybody. Yourself.
• 1:01:47
  When you take when you take $100 bill, right And you put it on
• 1:01:52
  the ground, you stepping it, you know, you put it in mud and you
• 1:01:56
  say, oh, you are $50, take you to the shop.
• 1:01:59
  Is it going to be $100? Yeah.
• 1:02:02
  So that's the way I see myself. It's not on you to tell me who I
• 1:02:05
  am. Like my value is in treats seek
• 1:02:08
  my value is set by God. So it's, it's not on you.
• 1:02:11
  So whatever you say, it's your business, right?
• 1:02:13
  I know who I am and of course I know who my God says I am.
• 1:02:16
  So basically like over time, I think in a person's life or with
• 1:02:22
  you achieving success over time, just cover that.
• 1:02:25
  You have nothing to prove to anybody.
• 1:02:28
  You just need to be yourself, so.
• 1:02:31
  Like make yourself proud. Like if you can lay down, if you
• 1:02:34
  can lay your head on the, you know, on the, on, how can I not
• 1:02:38
  think of on the pillow, on the pillow at the end of the night
• 1:02:43
  and feel good about what you did?
• 1:02:44
  Like, I mean, what else is there, man?
• 1:02:46
  It's, it's, you know, life, life's only so long and there's
• 1:02:50
  only so many hours in a day and might as well spend them trying
• 1:02:53
  to do something good. Absolutely.
• 1:02:56
  You know, some people feel like I want revenge.
• 1:03:00
  I want my OK. Like that's this crazy talk that
• 1:03:05
  somebody was telling me recently of like, oh, they want their ex
• 1:03:08
  to see them as a richer person. I'm like, what?
• 1:03:12
  What the hell? Like you leaving for your ex,
• 1:03:15
  bro? Like leave for yourself, be
• 1:03:16
  successful for yourself, not because of your ex.
• 1:03:20
  And you know The funny thing? She likely doesn't even leave.
• 1:03:26
  She's not paying attention. About about you.
• 1:03:28
  So what are you talking about? I don't like people who leave
• 1:03:33
  for other people's validation. I don't like it at all.
• 1:03:36
  No, no, I mean, at the end of the day, what's it's the
• 1:03:39
  emptiest way you can live like if you're just be happy with
• 1:03:42
  yourself, be happy with what you're doing, try to do
• 1:03:45
  something good for the I mean, that's like that's I know that I
• 1:03:47
  am not going to, you know, change this industry
• 1:03:50
  dramatically, right? Like no one person can change
• 1:03:53
  finance in 75 years that much technologies can, you know, but
• 1:04:00
  there's a very few number of people that really can change
• 1:04:03
  this industry dramatically in one lifetime, right?
• 1:04:09
  So I just want to change it by 1%, all right, Like that's if I
• 1:04:12
  can just do that, then I'm pretty damn happy with what I've
• 1:04:16
  done with my life. And as long as I take some tiny
• 1:04:20
  step towards that. You say, if it's a podcast, a
• 1:04:22
  conversation, if it's a, you know, an introduction from an
• 1:04:25
  entrepreneur to another, like whatever it might be, like it's
• 1:04:28
  just it all builds, right? It all builds that momentum and
• 1:04:31
  that flywheel into goodness. Interesting stuff.
• 1:04:35
  Well, you, you know, The funny thing, right?
• 1:04:38
  A lot of people who actually viewed, you know, things that
• 1:04:41
  are highly impactful did not really think it was going to
• 1:04:45
  blow up that much. We just set out to solve a
• 1:04:49
  problem. Yeah, Stripe, and that's
• 1:04:52
  literally Stripe. That has a thing, just try to
• 1:04:55
  solve problems. And that's what I do, try to
• 1:04:58
  solve problems. A lot of times, like big breaks
• 1:05:01
  that I've had personally, like I did not go chasing them, it just
• 1:05:05
  happened and I go chasing certain things and never get it.
• 1:05:08
  So what's the point? But the chase still matters,
• 1:05:11
  right? Like at the end of the day, if
• 1:05:12
  you're not getting up every day doing that work, chasing after
• 1:05:16
  whatever that thing is like, you're not going to get the
• 1:05:19
  opportunity you didn't expect. So you still got to, you still
• 1:05:21
  got to do the work, you still got to chase it.
• 1:05:24
  Exactly, just like the example I gave you know previously.
• 1:05:27
  Because for me it's all about solving problems.
• 1:05:30
  When you are busy, you wake up every morning and you're out
• 1:05:34
  there to solve problems. Don't worry, something's going
• 1:05:37
  to happen. Exactly man.
• 1:05:39
  Exactly. Get up and work.
• 1:05:42
  Get up and work. I'm telling you, you know the
• 1:05:44
  interesting thing. You know the interesting thing.
• 1:05:46
  I don't know if I still have that alarm.
• 1:05:48
  I do have an alarm with the same exact words I just said get up
• 1:05:55
  at work. I have an alarm right on my
• 1:05:59
  phone with that same exact words that you said.
• 1:06:02
  Get up and work. Oh, I love that.
• 1:06:05
  I need that. It's motivation.
• 1:06:10
  It feels you like I have different alarms, you know, for
• 1:06:13
  different times of the day. This I love is a motivation for
• 1:06:15
  this. This allow is a motivation for
• 1:06:17
  that. You know, I think it is good for
• 1:06:19
  people to visualise things. I don't know different strokes
• 1:06:22
  or different folks, but for me, like when I see it, if I can
• 1:06:25
  read it, then yeah, we can make it happen.
• 1:06:28
  Yeah, I agree completely. I agree completely.
• 1:06:31
  Whoa. Morning 2020.
• 1:06:34
  It sits at the heart of global fintech conversations.
• 1:06:38
  So like, what are the top trends currently shaping how fintechs
• 1:06:42
  approach innovation and growth? Man, talk about a big question.
• 1:06:47
  I mean, we've talked about a lot of it already, right?
• 1:06:48
  Like the world of traditional finance having permission from a
• 1:06:52
  regulatory perspective to now start working in the
• 1:06:56
  decentralised finance world. Like you can't really get into a
• 1:07:01
  conversation about fintech right now without talking about stable
• 1:07:04
  coins. Like it's just it's impossible.
• 1:07:07
  Stable coin this, stable coin that.
• 1:07:09
  Exactly. Exactly USDT.
• 1:07:11
  Exactly. So that's one side of it, but at
• 1:07:15
  the same side or not the same side, the other side of the same
• 1:07:19
  coin is. AI on the flip side.
• 1:07:22
  Yeah. And I think, I think what
• 1:07:25
  excites me the most is not. Is not D Phi and Tri Phi coming
• 1:07:29
  together, It's not AI moving into financial services.
• 1:07:34
  It's the sum of all these things being greater than the parts.
• 1:07:38
  Right? Like when you start thinking
• 1:07:40
  about the impact of a smart contract on Etherium,
• 1:07:45
  hypothetically, whatever being applied with an AI agent from
• 1:07:51
  Visa, MasterCard, would, you know, pick it alongside a power
• 1:07:55
  of attorney that you're giving to this AI that is able to make
• 1:08:00
  financial decisions on your behalf, right.
• 1:08:03
  You're getting really close to this idea of self driving money.
• 1:08:07
  And it's a scary idea because this and this is Angela
• 1:08:10
  Strange's theory or thesis from God, I don't know.
• 1:08:13
  She wrote this almost 7-8 years ago, something like that, but
• 1:08:16
  she wrote it before a lot of this technology existed.
• 1:08:19
  But now when you really think about it, like AI agents for
• 1:08:23
  commerce, AI agents for all these different things are
• 1:08:25
  starting to come about. Are they all great?
• 1:08:28
  Maybe not. But if you Fast forward five
• 1:08:30
  years and you think about what, what could happen if you combine
• 1:08:33
  the idea of, you know, just your, your current account, just
• 1:08:36
  the basics, right? And wealth management, just the
• 1:08:38
  basics. But you're adding on the idea of
• 1:08:42
  blockchain technology, the security they're in validation
• 1:08:46
  of identity, all of these portability of identity.
• 1:08:50
  And you throw in the idea that an artificial intelligence that
• 1:08:53
  to our earlier point in the conversation, has been trained
• 1:08:56
  by us, right, to make these sorts of decisions to manage the
• 1:09:00
  budget or to make a purchase here, not there.
• 1:09:04
  That that's world changing, right?
• 1:09:07
  When you start thinking about the combination of all these
• 1:09:09
  things together, the world changes dramatically.
• 1:09:13
  So there's a lot of like real time payments.
• 1:09:16
  There's, there's so many cool things happening in fintech
• 1:09:18
  right now and all of them will be discussed at Money 2020.
• 1:09:22
  But I think the biggest thing that's hardest to talk about
• 1:09:25
  because it's such a big thought is what happens when you combine
• 1:09:29
  all these things. Food for thought indeed.
• 1:09:33
  Food for thought indeed. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:35
  It's, it's something that is convoluted enough with enough
• 1:09:40
  layers of nascent technology that I mean, it's just the
• 1:09:47
  ability to speak to depth on it. There's probably 5 people in the
• 1:09:52
  world, you know, they could really have an educated
• 1:09:56
  conversation about what that would look like.
• 1:09:58
  I'm not one of them. I'm just excited about it, you
• 1:10:00
  know, and that's, that's kind of the beauty of my job and your
• 1:10:02
  job. We get to ask the questions,
• 1:10:04
  right? Like at the end of the day, is
• 1:10:05
  asking the right question matters so much Tell you?
• 1:10:09
  Well, bro, I I think you should have conversations with Brett
• 1:10:12
  King because Brett King told me something.
• 1:10:15
  Is that talking about me? To tell people that you are the
• 1:10:18
  kind of person with the right curiosity.
• 1:10:20
  To ask the right question. It's, I mean, yeah, it's, it's
• 1:10:28
  candidly it's, it's weird to be a guest on podcast sometimes, as
• 1:10:31
  you can probably tell, like I have a hard time not asking
• 1:10:33
  questions back to you because yes.
• 1:10:36
  You know, right, It's hard, man. Guess what?
• 1:10:39
  And here today I published an episode with a guy in the UK
• 1:10:44
  called Kevin Appleby. He's the host of the host of
• 1:10:48
  Grow CFO. So Grow CFO, they're really
• 1:10:50
  doing a great job in the UK. They are like a community of
• 1:10:55
  helping CFO's pro, the mentor CFOs and provide training and
• 1:11:00
  all not so we did a collaboration.
• 1:11:02
  So I was on this podcast and he was on my podcast.
• 1:11:05
  You know, like, you know, the persons podcast it's really hard
• 1:11:09
  you're holding yourself back from.
• 1:11:11
  Asking, but why do we do that though?
• 1:11:13
  For me, the beauty of podcasts is the conversation, right?
• 1:11:16
  Like as if I hold like I, I, I'm sure I have some opinions or
• 1:11:20
  some knowledge because of time in banking or fintech or
• 1:11:23
  whatever that you don't have. But you spend time in audit, you
• 1:11:26
  spend time in all these different portions that I don't
• 1:11:27
  have. So why would we spend the whole
• 1:11:30
  time with you asking me quite like it should be a
• 1:11:32
  conversation. Like the listener is going to
• 1:11:33
  get so much more out of the idea of us just talking about our
• 1:11:36
  mutually shared or not shared experiences and how they do or
• 1:11:39
  don't fit together than just me saying Federal Home Loan Bank,
• 1:11:44
  you know, like it's just, it's just different.
• 1:11:48
  Then you should go, you should go watch the the episode with
• 1:11:51
  Kevin Appleby, especially the testimonial.
• 1:11:54
  But he was saying that what he really enjoyed about the episode
• 1:11:59
  was that it was a conversation was in.
• 1:12:01
  According to him. He said he's been on podcast
• 1:12:04
  where in the post is so I've forgotten the exact words he
• 1:12:09
  said or he said something along the lines of the host mountain
• 1:12:12
  pressure on the guest as though the unlike journalist that is
• 1:12:18
  getting a politician to to make a mistake.
• 1:12:21
  Yeah, yeah. I mean, unless you're a Kara
• 1:12:24
  Swisher, why in the world would you do that?
• 1:12:28
  I just do not understand the idea of like, put like, if it's
• 1:12:31
  not about politics. And I mean, here's a hilarious
• 1:12:36
  example, kind of hilarious, kind of really sad.
• 1:12:40
  Do you remember when Benjamin Netanyahu went on the Nelk Boys
• 1:12:45
  podcast? The.
• 1:12:46
  The Israeli Prime Minister. Yeah, do you know?
• 1:12:52
  Yeah, those are skinny guy. Yeah, the the ones that do the
• 1:12:56
  Happy Dad beer and just kind of sit there and like fart into
• 1:13:00
  microphones and whatever. Like, I don't know.
• 1:13:03
  Not the highest brow podcasters in the world, but they they do
• 1:13:06
  numbers, numbers, right? It's crazy.
• 1:13:10
  So they have Benjamin Netanyahu on and they just kind of talk
• 1:13:15
  and like the most that they disagreed on anything with him
• 1:13:18
  was the fact that he liked Burger King more than
• 1:13:20
  McDonald's, right? And that like those are the like
• 1:13:24
  in those moments, good God Almighty, do your preparation.
• 1:13:28
  Have, you know, be ready for a real conversation.
• 1:13:31
  Don't just sit down with someone who is one of the most important
• 1:13:34
  political figures at the centre of one of the most intense
• 1:13:38
  moments in history and have a debate about, you know,
• 1:13:42
  McDonald's versus Burger King. That's not the time.
• 1:13:45
  But for the most, when you're when you're not doing that,
• 1:13:49
  like, why not just have a conversation?
• 1:13:50
  You're going to get a lot more out of it.
• 1:13:52
  Yeah, exactly. Like free flowing.
• 1:13:55
  And I think I really, really am grateful to that training from
• 1:13:59
  the Big 4. You know, you tell us, ask
• 1:14:02
  open-ended questions, ask probing questions, you know, ask
• 1:14:06
  questions driven with curiosity, learn.
• 1:14:10
  And of course, you know you need to learn before you can earn.
• 1:14:15
  Yeah. And you give up, I would even
• 1:14:17
  say give up some earning to get some learning, you know,
• 1:14:20
  especially early in your career like.
• 1:14:22
  Yeah, a lot of times you have to do that.
• 1:14:24
  Yeah, work I've, I've the numbers I was making when I was
• 1:14:30
  first starting in startups were not, not significant, but the
• 1:14:34
  amount that I learned from that was worth 1000 times what I was
• 1:14:39
  making. And I would give that advice to
• 1:14:41
  especially to younger folks over and over and over again, is give
• 1:14:45
  up some learning to get some learning.
• 1:14:47
  You're out of my mind. It's just that you need to
• 1:14:48
  switch that microphone for a megaphone.
• 1:14:51
  Yeah, help the younger folks that. 100 percent, 100%.
• 1:14:56
  Like, I see it's crazy how, you know, I have conversations with
• 1:14:59
  a lot of younger people, especially, you know, the Gen
• 1:15:02
  Z's, and it beats my imagination how many of them, once increased
• 1:15:09
  returns, increase results with minimal in future.
• 1:15:13
  And like how? In what world does that work?
• 1:15:19
  It doesn't, I mean, I, I think we live in this world of Andrew
• 1:15:24
  Huberman and, you know, all in optimization and, you know, I'm
• 1:15:28
  waking up at 4:00 AM and I'm getting my 15 minutes a red
• 1:15:31
  light and then I'm pouring Saratoga water into this thing
• 1:15:33
  and I'm dipping my face. I mean, we're, we're getting
• 1:15:35
  into this world where it's almost like this discrepancy of
• 1:15:38
  like there, there's this like kind of over glorification of
• 1:15:46
  incredibly hard work, right? Or at least it looks like
• 1:15:49
  incredibly hard work on Instagram.
• 1:15:51
  But is it really like, is that actually what's happening at the
• 1:15:55
  end of the day? I don't know.
• 1:15:57
  Because a lot of the technologies, I mean, I think it
• 1:16:00
  was Jamie Dimon. I can't, I can't remember which
• 1:16:02
  CE OS it was, but it was like 3 of the more significant CE OS.
• 1:16:06
  And actually, I don't think it was Jamie Dimon because this is
• 1:16:08
  not a thing he would say, but a number of CEOs are talking about
• 1:16:11
  the yeah, yeah, a number of CEOs are talking about the impact of
• 1:16:17
  AI potentially being that we go to a three day work week.
• 1:16:21
  No, no, Jamie would never hear that.
• 1:16:24
  Exactly. That's what I'm saying.
• 1:16:25
  I don't think I don't. Think he wanted the workers
• 1:16:27
  back? He wanted the workers.
• 1:16:29
  Yeah, yeah. And maybe the answer is three
• 1:16:32
  days a week in the office and, you know, the other two days
• 1:16:35
  you're not working. The point being, I think there's
• 1:16:37
  this really interesting discrepancy between kind of this
• 1:16:39
  hustle culture on one side of it.
• 1:16:41
  But at the same time, we're being armed with tools now that
• 1:16:44
  give us an ability to either produce at such a higher rate or
• 1:16:49
  produce at our same rate and then live a life.
• 1:16:52
  And, you know, that's a, so that's a personal choice around
• 1:16:56
  happiness and impact at the end of the day more than it is
• 1:16:58
  anything about, you know, corporate structure or anything
• 1:17:02
  like that. I, I and you know, for me, I'm
• 1:17:07
  OK here. I have an opinion, right?
• 1:17:09
  So for me, I believe in hybrid culture, right?
• 1:17:13
  Yeah. I believe that organisations
• 1:17:15
  that do not adopt the hybrid culture, I, I think they are
• 1:17:22
  going to be counterproductive, intuitive, truly.
• 1:17:26
  Yeah, it's here to stay. It's just here to stay.
• 1:17:30
  Yeah, if I had to go into the office five days a week, I
• 1:17:32
  couldn't work for money 2020, you know?
• 1:17:36
  Yeah, I mean, that's just the the fact of of where we're at.
• 1:17:39
  Like, and I, I would be happy to move to New York, but that would
• 1:17:44
  cost them more money, right. And so as a result, I'm sitting
• 1:17:50
  here in Kansas City. You're in London.
• 1:17:54
  There's definitely more value that could come out of this if
• 1:17:56
  we were sitting together in person, for sure, right?
• 1:17:58
  But a lot of that value would not come from the actual
• 1:18:02
  conversation on camera. It would come from the time we
• 1:18:04
  spend together before and after, right?
• 1:18:06
  Which we got a little bit of anyway.
• 1:18:08
  So I think it's just a matter of, you know, is the juice worth
• 1:18:12
  the squeeze on some of this stuff like.
• 1:18:14
  Ben, a pizza novice. Exactly.
• 1:18:16
  And I'm, I mean, it's, it's lonely too, right?
• 1:18:18
  Like sitting in Kansas, Speaking of mental health, we were
• 1:18:20
  talking before it gets lonely sitting in a city that is not
• 1:18:24
  necessarily New York, trying to build in a New York esque, kind
• 1:18:29
  of, you know, global fashion. And that's why every single time
• 1:18:31
  I get to get on a plane and go see my team in New York or
• 1:18:33
  London or even get to go to Singapore and see my team,
• 1:18:36
  they're like the energy that comes with that is so
• 1:18:39
  significant. But if I had to do that every
• 1:18:42
  day or if that was just my normal, I don't know if I would
• 1:18:45
  know if I'd have that same energy.
• 1:18:46
  So I agree completely. I think the hybrid is 1.
• 1:18:49
  What's necessary to attract the best talent and maintain it.
• 1:18:52
  Two, it actually creates more energy and creates space for
• 1:18:56
  creativity and thought. That kind of wouldn't exist if
• 1:18:59
  you were just, you know, banging in an office 9 to 5 five days a
• 1:19:02
  week. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:19:04
  You know, people don't realise that entrepreneurship is is both
• 1:19:09
  an art, honest science. So art, creativity drives on
• 1:19:16
  what I say balance and yeah, balance and also being able to
• 1:19:25
  reflect, you know, be on your own, especially interact with
• 1:19:29
  nature and you should do really, really, really well.
• 1:19:33
  And of course, you know, you're talking about hiring and
• 1:19:37
  maintaining the best talent. Yesterday I was a keynote
• 1:19:40
  speaker and a webinar for HR professionals.
• 1:19:43
  So what what what a coincidence, you know, I get to webinars.
• 1:19:47
  But then one was he's just accident for HR professionals.
• 1:19:51
  And of course, I think the other on an international standards on
• 1:19:57
  HR. So basically we've seen that the
• 1:20:00
  world is shifting in terms of the way we manage him capital.
• 1:20:06
  Yep. But a lot of organisations are
• 1:20:09
  not, you know, moving at this heat, or would I say at the
• 1:20:15
  average industry speed and that that would actually hurt them if
• 1:20:19
  they don't do something about it.
• 1:20:21
  But, you know, I come from Africa and financial inclusion
• 1:20:27
  is a very, very big issue in Africa.
• 1:20:33
  So how do you see AI regional tap of financial institution?
• 1:20:42
  See, this is 1 good question too.
• 1:20:46
  This is where I kind of get on my high horse a little bit
• 1:20:48
  think, I think sometimes we get too attached to these new
• 1:20:51
  technologies, right? If you think about M PESA, if
• 1:20:55
  you think about a lot of what has already been deployed
• 1:20:59
  across, I won't just take Africa emerging markets, right?
• 1:21:06
  The problems to be solved are, are ones that for the most part
• 1:21:11
  have been solved in developed markets.
• 1:21:13
  Are there better ways to solve them with AI or with block chain
• 1:21:16
  or whatever that might be? Like if I, if I implement an
• 1:21:20
  underwriting system for the gig economy that has better tracking
• 1:21:25
  as a result of actually, I mean, how does AI improve something
• 1:21:31
  like, you know, Google Maps, making sure that you're actually
• 1:21:33
  stopping the places you're stopping or things that we like.
• 1:21:37
  One of the big underwriting pieces for some of these is even
• 1:21:39
  just, you know, how, how charged you keep your phone, right?
• 1:21:43
  Like there's, we don't need groundbreaking technologies to
• 1:21:46
  solve a lot of the problems in emerging markets.
• 1:21:49
  We need entrepreneurs, we need the people we we need, we need
• 1:21:53
  to give a shit about something besides the United States and
• 1:21:56
  the EU is my opinion. And we need to get out there.
• 1:21:59
  We need to start building like that.
• 1:22:01
  That's what matters more than any of it.
• 1:22:02
  And like if part of that is, you know, an open AI enterprise
• 1:22:06
  subscription, great. But for the most part, in my
• 1:22:09
  opinion, that's a nice to have. Like I think that we need to
• 1:22:13
  find creative ways to solve problems that have already been
• 1:22:17
  solved. And in some cases, we don't even
• 1:22:19
  need to like we don't even need creative ways.
• 1:22:22
  We just need to put attention on it, right?
• 1:22:25
  Because there's a perception that, you know, this group of
• 1:22:28
  people doesn't have any money, therefore we're not going to
• 1:22:30
  build products for them. But as the cost of technology
• 1:22:34
  decreases and, you know, technologies that existed 20
• 1:22:37
  years ago, you know, an API call for this was was a terrible
• 1:22:41
  example, but like an API call for this was, you know, 10 bucks
• 1:22:43
  and now it's a cent. Like, why can't we apply that to
• 1:22:47
  this specific thing happening in this specific area of Africa,
• 1:22:50
  right? And to me, it's a, it's a lot
• 1:22:52
  less about AI, it's a lot less about blockchain.
• 1:22:54
  It's actually about solving Triadfi problems more than
• 1:22:58
  anything else. And it's about entrepreneurs
• 1:23:02
  caring and realising that emerging markets are actually a
• 1:23:05
  lot more interesting. Like I would, I would, I would
• 1:23:11
  if I'm thinking about like measuring a life right, going
• 1:23:15
  and starting a company, an emerging market that has an
• 1:23:17
  impact on a million people and helps them get from, you know,
• 1:23:21
  here to here economically. I would much rather do that then
• 1:23:25
  start a unnamed trading company that, you know, doesn't have
• 1:23:32
  fees, but sells all of its order flow into certain organisations
• 1:23:37
  that then front run their customers and sell that off and
• 1:23:41
  make literally all of their money off of, you know, money
• 1:23:45
  off of like selling order flow, right?
• 1:23:47
  Like what good does that do for the world?
• 1:23:49
  Not really like you actually you're if, if the if it is free,
• 1:23:54
  probably you're paying for it in some way and it's probably not a
• 1:23:58
  way that you actually want to be paying for it.
• 1:24:01
  So if you know you're, you're going to trade yourself to 0 or
• 1:24:05
  do you, you know, go to an emerging market, build something
• 1:24:08
  of use that people actually benefit from every day and helps
• 1:24:13
  the world like that, That would be that would be my answer.
• 1:24:16
  I don't think that it's as much about these groundbreaking
• 1:24:19
  technologies. I think it's about attention and
• 1:24:21
  about diverting entrepreneurial. Resources and capital to the
• 1:24:25
  right places and just like doing the damn thing.
• 1:24:30
  I love what you see about attention.
• 1:24:32
  It's actually very important to you to bring attention to these
• 1:24:35
  issues. And at first I've actually done
• 1:24:36
  my own. You need to part.
• 1:24:38
  So there is this economy are what I say students competition
• 1:24:46
  that I sponsor in Nigeria. So I finished, I went to the
• 1:24:51
  habit of Nigeria, by the way, it's called, of course, I be our
• 1:24:54
  law university. So they have this annual
• 1:24:57
  conference wherein they're close to about 10 universities.
• 1:25:01
  All economics are students, right?
• 1:25:03
  So the King James podcast earlier this year we had the
• 1:25:07
  inaugural that I say competition request, you know, even price
• 1:25:11
  money and oppressor the winner, the mentorship, right?
• 1:25:15
  So what do they do? They watch the podcast and take
• 1:25:21
  any of the favourite episodes and use the lessons to learn
• 1:25:25
  from that episode to create an innovative solution to an
• 1:25:31
  existing economic programme in Nigeria and make a 5 minute
• 1:25:35
  presentation on it. Yeah, it's sometimes I think we
• 1:25:39
  overthink. I mean, especially in the US and
• 1:25:42
  the EUI think we over engineer, we overthink we over a lot of
• 1:25:45
  things, but especially when you're talking about emerging
• 1:25:47
  markets. I mean, I I I'm oversimplifying
• 1:25:50
  it very much, but these are solvable problems, right?
• 1:25:56
  It's just that. Absolutely, absolutely.
• 1:25:58
  I think you would love to see the presentations of.
• 1:26:01
  I would. I would, yeah.
• 1:26:03
  I mean this. This across the board, these are
• 1:26:06
  solvable problems and the technologies exist to solve
• 1:26:09
  them. And for the most part, the
• 1:26:10
  technologies are not, in my opinion, the groundbreaking ones
• 1:26:13
  that require, you know, someone to know Solidity or something
• 1:26:16
  like that to solve. Like, a lot of these problems
• 1:26:18
  can probably be probably be solved by putting together, you
• 1:26:21
  know, a set of the right open source protocols.
• 1:26:26
  Right, like you would be surprised at the simple
• 1:26:29
  technology that the winner suggested for providing a
• 1:26:36
  solution to the problem she was trying to solve.
• 1:26:39
  I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, so I'll let you go
• 1:26:42
  watch it. I'll go, I'll go, I'll go watch
• 1:26:44
  it. But but yeah, I, I mean, I think
• 1:26:46
  I, I also think that a lot of people get paid a lot of money
• 1:26:49
  to overcomplicate things, right? Like as soon as you start going
• 1:26:52
  and working for an unnamed consulting firm, it benefits you
• 1:26:56
  a lot to make things really complicated, right?
• 1:26:58
  But as a founder, like, that's not going to serve you,
• 1:27:01
  especially in the early days. Absolute absolutely, you know,
• 1:27:05
  like simplicity, toss it like why?
• 1:27:09
  Why should you overcomplicate things?
• 1:27:11
  Like it gets on my nerves, but it is what it is.
• 1:27:14
  Yeah, yeah. You know, different strokes on
• 1:27:16
  different folks, but maybe as an entrepreneur you you discover
• 1:27:20
  that the Steam fact needs the. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:27:24
  And less tech debt less, I mean, it's just more scalable, more
• 1:27:28
  ability to adjust as new things come in.
• 1:27:31
  I mean, across the board, like the simpler you keep it,
• 1:27:35
  probably the better it's going to be.
• 1:27:37
  I mean, think chlorine as an example again, right?
• 1:27:40
  Buy now, pay later. It is in and of itself like
• 1:27:43
  regulatorily compliance wise. It's this whole new thing that
• 1:27:46
  they had to work through the, you know, is this legal level of
• 1:27:50
  but when you think about it, it's very simple.
• 1:27:53
  It's not it's not the craziest thing in the world, right.
• 1:27:56
  And from that one kind of groundbreaking innovation that
• 1:27:59
  is absolutely groundbreaking, but also not the craziest thing
• 1:28:02
  in the world, we see a multi multi multi billion dollar
• 1:28:05
  company come out of it because they've been able to listen to
• 1:28:08
  their customers and learn and build on top of and you know.
• 1:28:13
  I to rate and innovate. Exactly.
• 1:28:16
  I think that that's as a secret to growth.
• 1:28:17
  But of course, you know, Speaking of the Planner IPO and
• 1:28:20
  of course our market signals. So the IPO actually sparked
• 1:28:25
  fresh conversations about fintech valuations, and that's
• 1:28:29
  the confidence. So from your own vantage point,
• 1:28:33
  like what does this moment tell us about the state of fintech
• 1:28:36
  markets in 2025? This is the hard part where I
• 1:28:42
  think, I think anybody that tells you that they know
• 1:28:46
  everything about finance or anybody that gives you a really,
• 1:28:50
  really convicted answer on something along these lines that
• 1:28:53
  like it means this for the future of fintech or it means
• 1:28:56
  this for the future of public markets.
• 1:28:59
  I'd be willing to place a bet that they're wrong.
• 1:29:01
  Like the more confident they are about whatever their answer is,
• 1:29:05
  I would be willing to bet against them even stronger.
• 1:29:08
  So what that IPO tells me is that Klarna was ready to IPO.
• 1:29:13
  I know it's the worst answer in the world, but it's.
• 1:29:15
  Yeah, so I saw sometimes the the tourist answers are the simplest
• 1:29:19
  ones. Yeah.
• 1:29:21
  And it, it, I mean, does it signal an opening of IPO
• 1:29:24
  markets? Does it, does it signal good
• 1:29:25
  things for Finta? It's, it's, it's not, it's
• 1:29:27
  positive signals across the board.
• 1:29:30
  But it's but but an IPO is a moment in time, right.
• 1:29:34
  It's, it's about, it's about, it's about continuing that,
• 1:29:38
  right. It's about the, the quarterly
• 1:29:39
  earnings after that, it's about the quarterly earnings after
• 1:29:42
  that. It's about, you know, half year.
• 1:29:44
  It's about all of all of this. And if you start to see, you
• 1:29:48
  know, a decline in some of this, it could also mean terrible
• 1:29:50
  things. Excuse me?
• 1:29:54
  You know, speaking about the earnings, right, you're talking
• 1:29:56
  about at the end. And so I'm just going to
• 1:29:58
  corroborate your point and you know, give you a lead up.
• 1:30:00
  So growth versus profitability. So how can pounders actually
• 1:30:05
  balance that growth, ambition, value, profitability in this
• 1:30:09
  area where investors are prioritising the fundamentals
• 1:30:12
  again? See, I, this is another, another
• 1:30:15
  area that I'm not quite sure about because I think, I think
• 1:30:18
  in traditional fintech, AKA I'm going to build a neo bank one.
• 1:30:23
  I kind of think people are done building neo banks in, in
• 1:30:26
  developed nations. Like I think that to our earlier
• 1:30:29
  conversation in emerging markets, there's a tonne of Neo
• 1:30:31
  Bank South things left to be built, but in a like here
• 1:30:37
  they've kind of been built. So we're.
• 1:30:40
  Talking about balancing growth and profits.
• 1:30:43
  Growth, Yes, yes, yes, so. While we do, there is this
• 1:30:47
  narrative around unit economics, there's this narrative around
• 1:30:50
  all that. But when you look at where most
• 1:30:54
  of the VC dollars are going, they're going to AI, right?
• 1:30:57
  They're going to these companies that unit economically are
• 1:31:01
  selling a dollar for $0.50 in a lot of cases, right?
• 1:31:05
  And they're being subsidised by VC dollars.
• 1:31:08
  So this idea that unit economics is mattering is very true for
• 1:31:13
  the Clara's, is very true for the companies that are prepping
• 1:31:16
  to IPO. But is it true across the whole
• 1:31:20
  tech industry? I don't know.
• 1:31:21
  And I actually think that there's a shift happening back
• 1:31:24
  towards the let's take absolutely gigantic swings
• 1:31:29
  because especially in the age of AI, like it's not going to be a
• 1:31:33
  0 sum game, but there's, there's going to be a number, there's
• 1:31:37
  going to be a Fang, right? There's, there's probably going
• 1:31:39
  to be a set of 10 or less absolutely gigantic winners that
• 1:31:44
  come out of this. So, you know, if they're making
• 1:31:48
  20% margins versus 30% margins, I think a lot of ECS at this
• 1:31:52
  point, they just want to see growth, right?
• 1:31:55
  Like if, if open AI can end up with 5 billion users, even if
• 1:31:59
  they aren't profitable, they can turn on that profit spigot
• 1:32:03
  pretty fast because by that point they've got everybody
• 1:32:06
  addicted to the product, right? And addicted in a good way
• 1:32:08
  because it's the copilot to their life, right?
• 1:32:11
  And if I'm paying $20.00 a month for it now and they change it to
• 1:32:14
  30 price elasticity, whatever. Like I'm paying 30, it's just
• 1:32:19
  going to, I'm paying, I'm going to do, I'm not, I'm not losing
• 1:32:21
  my, my copilot, right? Like that's not an option.
• 1:32:24
  So I, I guess I, I challenge the premise of it a little bit.
• 1:32:31
  With that being said, I think if you're starting more of a
• 1:32:34
  traditional finance company, it's just hard and I would maybe
• 1:32:40
  stay away from doing it unless it's, unless it's more on the
• 1:32:43
  infrastructure side or unless it's something that's able to
• 1:32:48
  scale across the world without having to depend on consumers,
• 1:32:53
  right? Like I think, I think the age of
• 1:32:54
  consumer fintech is not over, but it's, it's starting over.
• 1:33:02
  And as a result of that, I, I'm sceptical about how much unit
• 1:33:07
  economics really is the focus versus the story of the eventual
• 1:33:12
  unit economics, right. Like as long as you can tell the
• 1:33:15
  story about the eventual profitability, then you can get
• 1:33:19
  people there. But I, I don't, I don't, I don't
• 1:33:22
  know how true it is that they care as much as they say they
• 1:33:25
  care in Forbes and Wired and TechCrunch and whatever.
• 1:33:30
  Marginal profit versus total profit, right?
• 1:33:34
  We'll see we'll see what happens in the end.
• 1:33:36
  But you just touch the nerve with the pricing of Open AI and
• 1:33:43
  think about it. What will happen like, OK,
• 1:33:48
  confession time. I think there was this time I I
• 1:33:51
  I was trying to leave open AI to trial and some other module.
• 1:33:58
  I just discovered that Whoa. So I need to start training this
• 1:34:03
  new. Yeah, exactly right.
• 1:34:06
  This new thing from the scratch, I'm like no, no, no, no, no, I'm
• 1:34:09
  going back. There's there's, I mean, I don't
• 1:34:12
  know if it's sunk cost is not really the right way to think
• 1:34:15
  about it. But like you are, you're
• 1:34:19
  developing especially because of ChatGPT having memory and you
• 1:34:23
  know, some of those things like, yeah, you develop relation, not
• 1:34:27
  relationships, hopefully not relationships, but you, you
• 1:34:30
  develop loyalty as a result of just the product itself.
• 1:34:35
  So. People don't understand that you
• 1:34:37
  know what goes into training your AI and just tell you.
• 1:34:43
  But this, this is an alternative.
• 1:34:44
  You can just easily speak to this one.
• 1:34:46
  It's even cheaper. And like, don't worry, you
• 1:34:48
  can't. You cannot understand.
• 1:34:50
  Yeah. And imagine that in an
• 1:34:52
  enterprise level, right? Like think about like, so one of
• 1:34:54
  the biggest companies in the US doing really cool stuff with AI
• 1:34:58
  is Rocket, the Rocket Mortgage actually.
• 1:35:00
  So they basically like an underwriting and actually trying
• 1:35:05
  to like get somebody. Through a loan, right?
• 1:35:07
  There's a whole bunch of steps in that process.
• 1:35:09
  And if you just like apply AI horizontally through that,
• 1:35:13
  that's not going to go well for regulation regulators or a lot,
• 1:35:17
  though, there's a lot of things that could fall apart.
• 1:35:19
  But if you take a step back like Rocket did and you say, OK,
• 1:35:23
  piece by piece, like we're going to we're going to turn this into
• 1:35:25
  basically microservices, if you will.
• 1:35:28
  And within some of those microservices, we're going to
• 1:35:31
  apply AI and explainable AI, not AI that we just, I don't know,
• 1:35:35
  it said this. So we did it, you know, because
• 1:35:37
  that doesn't work in financial services.
• 1:35:39
  So if you can apply AI in specific places in that stack,
• 1:35:44
  the outcomes are crazy. Don't remember the numbers off
• 1:35:46
  the top of my head. This was a little while back,
• 1:35:48
  but Rocket announced something along the lines of like a 20%
• 1:35:52
  decrease in touches and a 20% increase in throughput of actual
• 1:35:57
  volume, right? And that was just as a matter of
• 1:36:01
  that kind of micro service AI attachment, which I'm keeping
• 1:36:05
  very broad because I barely understand it, but that, you
• 1:36:08
  know, it's, it's things like that where I think we're really
• 1:36:11
  going to see fascinating things happen.
• 1:36:13
  I, I think we're still very, very far away from this AI that
• 1:36:17
  we're just going to plug into a bank and it's going to somehow
• 1:36:19
  make things better, right? Like stable coins will do that
• 1:36:23
  to some degree. But even then you're not just
• 1:36:24
  plugging that in. That's, that requires
• 1:36:26
  engineering there. There's there's building that
• 1:36:29
  goes into all this. Yeah, a lot of engineer and
• 1:36:32
  prompt engineering ease. I don't know, it's a difficult
• 1:36:36
  thing and you, you get better as you as you as you do it more,
• 1:36:40
  it's more like driving. You become a better driver by
• 1:36:42
  driving more. And I think I like that, that
• 1:36:45
  perspective that our rockets are adopted.
• 1:36:48
  So it's that's a project management perspective.
• 1:36:50
  Basically, you pull, you pull it in.
• 1:36:53
  Yeah, exactly. It's of processes, right?
• 1:36:56
  And of course you optimise, you know, the chains within other
• 1:37:00
  processes. So if you optimise those pockets
• 1:37:04
  within the processes, definitely you'd have an overall
• 1:37:10
  optimization. And that's pretty smart.
• 1:37:12
  And that's why we go to school, you know, to learn this thing.
• 1:37:16
  Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:37:18
  It's not as sexy to talk about as some other stuff, but I mean,
• 1:37:21
  it's the stuff that's going to really make a difference in the
• 1:37:25
  future. Financial services, especially
• 1:37:26
  in in regulated industries. I mean, the same is true in
• 1:37:30
  insurance. The same is true across a lot of
• 1:37:32
  different spaces, I think. Even even in start tops, right?
• 1:37:36
  If you adopt that approach, right?
• 1:37:38
  Just adopt A project management approach and of course optimise
• 1:37:43
  your processes. If you optimise your processes,
• 1:37:46
  just T stems will be optimised right?
• 1:37:48
  There's automation now, right? I love automation.
• 1:37:51
  I don't need to the performance setting repetitive tasks, right?
• 1:37:56
  So you are you automate the financial side to the operations
• 1:38:03
  and if you're happy, you don't need to do more.
• 1:38:05
  Smart work beats hard work all day long.
• 1:38:09
  But you still need that audit. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:38:11
  But you see, you still need the hard work.
• 1:38:13
  They pass it. Getting the hard work in is even
• 1:38:16
  what is going to make you smarter, you know?
• 1:38:18
  Yep. A. 100%.
• 1:38:20
  Really you need to, you need to know what to do.
• 1:38:22
  Like right you said earlier, if you do not work hard enough you
• 1:38:25
  would not even know what to do. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:38:28
  And so, and I think it's another one of those things where, I
• 1:38:31
  mean, you know, Sam Altman, who it's so weird to me who Sam
• 1:38:34
  Altman has turned into. But back when he was, you know,
• 1:38:37
  the startup guy, what he would say over and over and over again
• 1:38:40
  is solve the smallest problem that you can as well as you can,
• 1:38:43
  right? Like take the smallest pain
• 1:38:45
  points and just solve it within an inch of its life.
• 1:38:48
  Stays close to your customers. You can and iterate, iterate,
• 1:38:52
  iterate, iterate. And it's possible that whatever
• 1:38:54
  that thing is has nothing to do with AI, has nothing to do with
• 1:38:57
  blockchain, has nothing to do with any of these things.
• 1:38:59
  And if anything, I mean, I hope we don't become over obsessed
• 1:39:03
  with some of these new technologies because there's a,
• 1:39:09
  it's not great that some of our bank systems are still running
• 1:39:12
  on COBOL and like really old mainframes.
• 1:39:14
  But there's a reason that they are, you know, there's, there's
• 1:39:17
  reasons for all these things. And I think that sometimes
• 1:39:20
  startups that haven't studied the history or had the chance to
• 1:39:26
  work inside of some of these organisations just have this
• 1:39:29
  assumption that it's stupidity or something, or this assumption
• 1:39:32
  that it's it's, they're just Luddites.
• 1:39:34
  Very very often it's not that. Very, very often there's a very
• 1:39:37
  real reason that that specific server is on Prem at that very
• 1:39:40
  specific place, be IT security, be it whatever it might be, so.
• 1:39:43
  You read by Mighty Gay. You know, it's the security.
• 1:39:48
  Regulate your concerns. Yep, we got to be careful about
• 1:39:51
  getting too far over our skis with a lot of this stuff.
• 1:39:54
  I mean, it is wildly exciting and it's going to change the
• 1:39:56
  world. But you know, watch Ex Machina
• 1:39:59
  and. You see how it could go bad?
• 1:40:02
  We need to put a link to that movie, you know, in the in the
• 1:40:08
  in the distribution section. So Speaking of strategy, like
• 1:40:11
  what lessons can in tech entrepreneurs learn from planner
• 1:40:16
  with how they have to detect from pandemic darling, it's a
• 1:40:20
  long term sustainability? I really think that the biggest
• 1:40:24
  lesson from Klarna, the thing that impresses me the most about
• 1:40:27
  them is the business model innovation, right?
• 1:40:29
  It's the fact that they're serving multiple sides of a
• 1:40:33
  marketplace, sitting in the middle.
• 1:40:35
  They're they're facilitating connections in a way that no
• 1:40:37
  other company does, right? They're a payments company, but
• 1:40:40
  it's also a discoverability of that new pair of shoes.
• 1:40:43
  It's also right like it's, it's a place where people spend time
• 1:40:47
  like you're wait, hold on, rewind.
• 1:40:49
  I'm opening a financial app to spend time doing something other
• 1:40:54
  than just a pure fight. Like I'm not, I'm not
• 1:40:56
  transferring money. I'm not investing in anything
• 1:40:59
  necessarily. I'm just getting on there to
• 1:41:03
  check out maybe some shoes, check out, you know what's going
• 1:41:07
  on. But the payments app and in the
• 1:41:11
  US especially that like you know, in Asia, super apps,
• 1:41:14
  things along those lines, that's very much more a thing.
• 1:41:18
  But I think with what Klarna has been able to do is to build that
• 1:41:20
  multi sided marketplace and to build a brand that people want
• 1:41:25
  to be a part of. I think that's the other thing
• 1:41:27
  about a lot of what fintech has done is like the pride of a
• 1:41:31
  Corona card. I think it says something about
• 1:41:33
  you, right? In the same way actually.
• 1:41:36
  So this is a conversation we had with their CMO and I was asking
• 1:41:39
  like, do you think the Corona is in some way a luxury brand?
• 1:41:43
  And his basic answer, he said no, but we as we got in the
• 1:41:48
  weeds of it, like there there's overlaps, right?
• 1:41:50
  Like there there's pride in the idea that I have a client of
• 1:41:52
  card like back in the day. I mean, if you think about the
• 1:41:55
  Monzo card having that orange Monzo card walking orange.
• 1:41:59
  Card bro. That meant something, right?
• 1:42:04
  It was a conversation starter I so.
• 1:42:06
  I I traded my orange one for for the white one.
• 1:42:09
  See, there you go. Even even that is like that's
• 1:42:12
  what I'm saying is like all of these different.
• 1:42:14
  I don't have that route. I don't like that orange word.
• 1:42:16
  It annoys me like. Everybody.
• 1:42:19
  Every top Deacon hire just has the orange one.
• 1:42:21
  But to our to our earlier question about growth hacking,
• 1:42:23
  that was a piece of growth hacking for them, right?
• 1:42:26
  So to the client point, I think, I think building a brand that
• 1:42:29
  people trust, you know, and building a building a friendly
• 1:42:32
  brand inside of financial services is something that's not
• 1:42:37
  easy to do that they've been able to pull off.
• 1:42:40
  And I think that the like the branding experiment in the
• 1:42:45
  branding execution they've done there is more exciting than, you
• 1:42:49
  know, buy now, pay later itself, like what they've done is so
• 1:42:53
  much bigger than what it started with.
• 1:42:55
  And to me, to me, that is the most exciting piece.
• 1:42:59
  I don't know if that's even really a good answer, but to me
• 1:43:01
  that's what's so unique about it that gets me excited about it.
• 1:43:05
  And you know, Brandon actually does.
• 1:43:08
  Would I say, I don't want to say Manifili or like has a yeah,
• 1:43:15
  influencing people. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:43:17
  Think yeah, Brandon is very, very big.
• 1:43:20
  Yeah, like I have a, you know, I fly a lot, so I have a Delta
• 1:43:24
  Amex Reserve card, right? If I didn't fly so much, I
• 1:43:27
  definitely wouldn't have that. It has nothing to do with my
• 1:43:30
  actual standing in society, but it's metal.
• 1:43:33
  It's heavy. When I drop it on the table, I
• 1:43:35
  feel a certain way. Right?
• 1:43:36
  Like there's. Yeah, it's all about like,
• 1:43:39
  there's only so many touch points in finance where you can
• 1:43:42
  separate yourself. And it's those little moments
• 1:43:45
  that I think companies like Klarna have really been able to
• 1:43:47
  figure out. Interesting stuff.
• 1:43:50
  You know those metal cards just like the the Monzo or white card
• 1:43:54
  as well. It's metal.
• 1:43:56
  And when I'm at the airport and you know, you swipe it and you
• 1:44:00
  get VIP access discounted, you feel good about.
• 1:44:05
  Yourself, yeah, you kind of like you're growing it, you know
• 1:44:07
  you're like yeah, excuse me, VIP coming through yeah, it's I mean
• 1:44:12
  all it's a card, you know, but but it gives you this it's it's
• 1:44:15
  emotion, right. It brings you back to the
• 1:44:17
  emotion of it. Yep.
• 1:44:19
  Yeah, and I, I like what they're doing with this.
• 1:44:22
  You know, partnerships, you see, it's not just about the fintech,
• 1:44:26
  but of course, you know the partnerships they're able to
• 1:44:29
  build. Sometimes they just come up with
• 1:44:31
  a new partner and tell you, oh, partner did this cinema.
• 1:44:35
  You can go grab, you know, the cinema tickets, popcorns.
• 1:44:40
  I'm like wow. If you think.
• 1:44:43
  Yeah, I mean a lot of things. I don't, I don't know if they
• 1:44:46
  would want me saying this and luckily I don't work there, so
• 1:44:48
  it doesn't matter. But I think a lot of what
• 1:44:50
  they've done is, if you squint a little bit, similar to a lot of
• 1:44:54
  what Amex did back with the black card, right?
• 1:44:56
  Not that it's at that same level of like only Jerry Seinfeld has
• 1:44:59
  one or whatever. But if you think about kind of
• 1:45:02
  the you, you mentally associate yourself with this brand in a
• 1:45:08
  way that makes you feel good about yourself, right?
• 1:45:11
  And if you can achieve that in financial services, you've
• 1:45:14
  unlocked something absolutely gigantic.
• 1:45:17
  You know, entrepreneurship is basically about unlocking
• 1:45:19
  markets, and these guys have been able to unlock multiple
• 1:45:26
  markets and yeah, it's a really good thing for them.
• 1:45:29
  But you know, you are at the heart of curated content or, you
• 1:45:33
  know, conversations that one needs 20 to 20.
• 1:45:36
  So what kind of leadership mindsets stand out to you in
• 1:45:40
  this space? Just before you answered that I
• 1:45:44
  have a philosophy. And by the way, Morgan Anderson,
• 1:45:48
  one of the top tax debt resolution experts in America,
• 1:45:51
  describes me as a modern day defence philosopher.
• 1:45:55
  OK, I I have taken that title around with it.
• 1:45:58
  Right. So part of my philosophies is
• 1:46:00
  that when you're hiring or when. Yeah, when you're hiring to your
• 1:46:05
  team, when you or having partnerships and visas, you need
• 1:46:09
  to consider three very important things, Mindset, skill set and
• 1:46:14
  tool set, in that order. The mindset, the skill set and
• 1:46:17
  the tool set. Yeah, a lot of people, a lot of
• 1:46:22
  organisations disregard the mindset and it costs you
• 1:46:27
  heavily. It has cost me heavily as an
• 1:46:29
  entrepreneur. Like let's call it speed of
• 1:46:33
  speed, right? Because you go for the skill set
• 1:46:36
  and you know, you can learn very quickly that it's not just about
• 1:46:39
  the skill set because the skill set kind of taught the tool sets
• 1:46:42
  kind of provided AI's here, you know, different softwares or the
• 1:46:46
  mindset. It's difficult to teach more a
• 1:46:50
  success mindset of both mindset, especially if people are not
• 1:46:54
  willing to adopt it. So like in terms of the mindset
• 1:46:59
  of what has like been impressed you in the space?
• 1:47:02
  This isn't really, I mean, we have, you know, 300, three, 150
• 1:47:07
  speakers, some of the most impressive humans in the world.
• 1:47:10
  Like we're going to have Jennifer Bailey who runs Apple
• 1:47:12
  Pay at the show and I actually get the get the privilege of
• 1:47:15
  getting to interview her. We have Max Levchin at the show.
• 1:47:19
  I mean, part of the PayPal mafia.
• 1:47:21
  Speaking of, you know, buy, buy now, pay later, just
• 1:47:24
  unbelievable people that we have coming.
• 1:47:27
  But the thing, the thing that comes to mind at most is, is
• 1:47:30
  another company that will be there and be there and with some
• 1:47:34
  strength, they'll have a good number of folks there is
• 1:47:37
  Microsoft and. If you.
• 1:47:39
  Think about I love Microsoft. Yeah, well, but what a weird.
• 1:47:44
  Take a step back. Think about what a weird sense
• 1:47:46
  that is. You just said.
• 1:47:47
  Would you have said that five years ago?
• 1:47:50
  I I'm speaking to you using a Microsoft laptop.
• 1:47:53
  Let's start from there. Have you always been like a
• 1:47:55
  Microsoft person? Yes, I'll say so.
• 1:47:59
  Yeah, I'll say so. Maybe.
• 1:48:01
  I've never owned a Mac in my life.
• 1:48:03
  Oh my. I you're.
• 1:48:05
  OK, so you and I are different in that way.
• 1:48:07
  I'm very like I'm Apple since the beginning but.
• 1:48:11
  Yeah, for phones, yeah. There you go.
• 1:48:13
  Yeah, but. The laptops, nothing.
• 1:48:16
  I I don't think I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Apple, only if you
• 1:48:19
  sponsor my podcast. But I want here you go.
• 1:48:21
  Yeah, I want Microsoft to sponsor my podcast, guys.
• 1:48:24
  But if if you look at kind of where Microsoft was, I mean,
• 1:48:29
  Satya Nadella, I'm getting CE OS mixed up.
• 1:48:31
  Satya Nadella is their CEO, right?
• 1:48:33
  Yeah. When you think about what he's
• 1:48:36
  done since taking over, it's been cultural and it's been
• 1:48:40
  mindset related, right? Because the amount of infighting
• 1:48:44
  inside of Microsoft of well, we have this resource, we have this
• 1:48:48
  resource, we have this resource. And like, we're not, we're not
• 1:48:51
  skipping levels, We're not talking amongst teams.
• 1:48:54
  Like he disbanded all of that. Like he actually, like he's
• 1:48:59
  incentivizing skip level meetings.
• 1:49:01
  He's incentivizing just going and talking to the person.
• 1:49:04
  Things that we would think of as you know, inside of a startup is
• 1:49:07
  very obvious. But if you're trying to go from
• 1:49:10
  VP to SVP at Microsoft in 2012 was not in your best interest.
• 1:49:15
  Your best interest was to do the thing that made you look good,
• 1:49:19
  right? And he's, I think been able to
• 1:49:22
  in a pretty small amount of time shift this culture and with AI
• 1:49:26
  that everything on top of it that they're building into one
• 1:49:29
  Team 1 dream, you know, for the most part heading One Direction.
• 1:49:33
  So if there's one company I had to pick that like really has
• 1:49:39
  done something unbelievable in terms of, you know, size of
• 1:49:43
  company and, you know, size of customer base and all that.
• 1:49:46
  Like what Microsoft has been able to do in shifting their
• 1:49:49
  culture is unbelievable. And I think so much of that
• 1:49:53
  comes back to the simplicity of allowing humans to talk to
• 1:49:56
  humans and send. I mean, humans are incentives.
• 1:49:59
  We are beings of incentives, right?
• 1:50:02
  So if he shifts some incentives internally, that changes
• 1:50:06
  behaviour. And those incentives that he has
• 1:50:08
  changed has changed the behaviour significantly.
• 1:50:11
  And as a result, Microsoft isn't this.
• 1:50:15
  Ten years ago you might have thought of it as I'm trying to
• 1:50:18
  be as nice about this as I can. They have taken thousand XA step
• 1:50:23
  forward in terms of their brand perception, in terms of their
• 1:50:26
  technology, in terms of everything, and they've done it
• 1:50:29
  in a pretty small amount of time.
• 1:50:30
  And I mean, it's not like, you know, it's not like Steve
• 1:50:34
  Ballmer and Bill Gates were slouches.
• 1:50:36
  It's just it was just a different time, right?
• 1:50:39
  And the CE OS in between, all very, very impressive people,
• 1:50:42
  but really understanding the incentive driving the broader
• 1:50:45
  company and being able to reorganise that to run One
• 1:50:48
  Direction like that's, that's impressive.
• 1:50:51
  And then how how about the acquisitions that they've made,
• 1:50:55
  for example, they are LinkedIn, which is very strategic.
• 1:50:59
  Yeah. I mean across, I mean their
• 1:51:02
  acquisition, their acquisition strategy, the fact that they've
• 1:51:04
  invested what they have in open AI at the point that they did,
• 1:51:07
  the fact that they're still also doing Co pilot themselves, I
• 1:51:10
  mean the list goes on as to the things that they're doing.
• 1:51:13
  That makes so much sense. But to me, the biggest thing is
• 1:51:17
  like, I don't think a lot of those things would have been
• 1:51:19
  able to happen without the mindset and the culture shift.
• 1:51:23
  Yeah, mindset, skill set, tool set, very, very pertinent, very
• 1:51:27
  important. And of course, speaking about
• 1:51:32
  innovators, the younger generation of innovators, so
• 1:51:37
  especially the ones that are getting into fintech, right?
• 1:51:41
  You. You are the pro.
• 1:51:42
  They are the Jews, right? So I don't know about that, but
• 1:51:46
  here we go. So, So what do you or what would
• 1:51:52
  your advice be to them right in terms of helping them not
• 1:51:56
  feeling overwhelmed by regulations or technology
• 1:51:59
  prevails first when it comes to finance?
• 1:52:02
  For Fentech entrepreneurs specifically, I apologise in
• 1:52:06
  advance for this advice folks, but my advice is go work in
• 1:52:09
  traditional financial services. It's that like it's work.
• 1:52:14
  Go work at a regulator is what? That's one thing I wish I would
• 1:52:17
  have done. Like I wish that I at some point
• 1:52:19
  would have spent some time at the FDIC or the OCC or something
• 1:52:22
  like that. If I had not gone and spent time
• 1:52:24
  in banking, I would not know 90% of what I know because just that
• 1:52:30
  time allowed me to learn even the right questions to ask going
• 1:52:33
  forward to allow me to know more, right?
• 1:52:36
  So my advice would be go work. Go work somewhere long enough in
• 1:52:43
  a portion of the company that you're interested in or that you
• 1:52:47
  or that frustrates you. Maybe find the problem that you
• 1:52:52
  feel is fixable or the OR candidly find the dumbest thing
• 1:52:57
  you can and build that thing. You know, as small as it might
• 1:53:01
  be, it might be as simple as you know right now, inside of this
• 1:53:05
  mortgage department, there's literally a person responsible
• 1:53:08
  for picking up a piece of paper or a stack of papers and
• 1:53:10
  carrying it up one flight of stairs to this.
• 1:53:14
  That should probably be a piece of software by now, unless it's
• 1:53:17
  legally required that that's a human.
• 1:53:19
  And in the US and sometimes it is legally required that's a
• 1:53:22
  human. But I would say go work in the
• 1:53:25
  regulated industry, understand it, and then build the solution
• 1:53:30
  that you think actually makes sense whilst staying close to
• 1:53:34
  the regulators, right? That's the other thing that's
• 1:53:36
  changed a lot is I think in the early days of Fintech,
• 1:53:39
  regulators, policy makers, those doors were open, but scary,
• 1:53:43
  right? Founders didn't really want to
• 1:53:46
  kind of preempt anything like they wanted to stay quiet.
• 1:53:49
  And I think the, the opposite is true now or well, the opposite
• 1:53:53
  should be true now where you know you're going, you're having
• 1:53:56
  that conversation, you're making sure that whatever you're
• 1:53:58
  building actually isn't. They're never, regulators are
• 1:54:01
  never going to tell you that what you're doing is right.
• 1:54:03
  That's not how they function. But they will give you, you
• 1:54:06
  know, broad strokes as to things that you can do differently and
• 1:54:11
  read between the lines on and you know, things along those
• 1:54:13
  lines. But it's, it's unfortunately the
• 1:54:16
  best advice I can give is go work inside of a incumbent, go
• 1:54:20
  work inside of a large financial industry company, insurance
• 1:54:24
  company, whatever it might be and solve that problem.
• 1:54:27
  On the other side of the coin, I work for AD 5 company.
• 1:54:30
  Like if you are a good learner and you can understand the
• 1:54:35
  specificities of tokenization and also understand the basics
• 1:54:40
  of deposit accounts and settlement, then you should
• 1:54:42
  probably be working in a stablecoin company or starting
• 1:54:45
  one, right? It just it kind of depends on
• 1:54:48
  who you are as a person and how much of A self kind of self
• 1:54:51
  learner you are. But I really don't think
• 1:54:55
  anything can replace the experience of being inside of an
• 1:54:59
  organisation, doing something that you see could be done
• 1:55:03
  better and then going. 100 percent, 100%.
• 1:55:06
  I do agree with you. There's no substitute for
• 1:55:08
  experience, right? Yeah, but a lot of people in
• 1:55:12
  this ageing time try to create shortcuts.
• 1:55:14
  Good luck. Yeah, good luck.
• 1:55:18
  You remind me of my experience in audit, and that's why I very,
• 1:55:21
  very much cherish my experience in audit.
• 1:55:23
  Right. Audit puts you in a very unique
• 1:55:26
  position. I I'd pretty much say auditors
• 1:55:30
  are accountants on steroids. They are the accountants, the
• 1:55:33
  accountant. So because in audit, you are
• 1:55:37
  doing a regulatory compliance work and of course, you'll also
• 1:55:45
  doing financial reporting work, you're reviewing the financial
• 1:55:49
  reporting of management, right? So you are just in between and
• 1:55:53
  you're doing auditing as well. So you grant like 3 different
• 1:55:58
  hearts at least in one person. So it's like a cheat code for
• 1:56:03
  you to get your business acumen, for you to get your technical
• 1:56:06
  competence, for you to build relationships as well, and of
• 1:56:10
  course for you to learn leadership.
• 1:56:12
  And of course, that global argument of working with cross
• 1:56:15
  functional teams, because it is very important to be able to
• 1:56:18
  work with cross functional teams, right?
• 1:56:20
  So it's, it's difficult getting all of that in just one single
• 1:56:26
  experience. And that's why I totally agree
• 1:56:28
  with you with that point of view of working in the traditional
• 1:56:34
  financial industry because that that's the only way you can get
• 1:56:38
  it right. We need to get the fundamentals
• 1:56:41
  right. Get the ABC before you get to
• 1:56:43
  XYZ. Exactly.
• 1:56:45
  Yeah. And, and ask all the questions
• 1:56:48
  you can along the way. People, people want to help.
• 1:56:50
  People want, you know, I, I had a very lucky experience at MBKC
• 1:56:55
  where I got to work with the executive team for the most part
• 1:56:57
  because of just the way my job was structured.
• 1:56:59
  And I mean, I drove luckily their friends now and feel like
• 1:57:03
  I didn't actually drive them crazy.
• 1:57:05
  But the number of just dumb questions that I would ask at
• 1:57:08
  the end of meetings, like we, we would have, you know, 30 minute
• 1:57:10
  calls, they'd end up wrapping at 20.
• 1:57:13
  But I didn't let people out of that room.
• 1:57:14
  Like I had 10 minutes of questions of what just happened
• 1:57:17
  because I didn't understand, you know, three different acronyms
• 1:57:20
  that were named. So I forced them to stay in the
• 1:57:23
  room and to find those acronyms for me.
• 1:57:24
  So next time I was on the phone without them, I could actually
• 1:57:27
  know what I was talking about, right.
• 1:57:29
  And people generally want to help.
• 1:57:31
  So ask those questions. Yeah, but but a lot of people
• 1:57:35
  just assume. So you don't like, I guess
• 1:57:37
  something I love to say you don't get the question or ask,
• 1:57:41
  OK, Mark is a closed destiny. Exactly.
• 1:57:44
  You gotta ask, baby, you gotta ask.
• 1:57:46
  The worst they can say is no. It has a worst and more like
• 1:57:51
  I've been taking nose since how long?
• 1:57:53
  The more nose the better. The more nose means more yeses.
• 1:57:57
  Yes, absolutely. The people who wait to take my
• 1:58:00
  nose definitely get to get the most yeses actually.
• 1:58:04
  So, but in, in terms of misconceptions, like what are
• 1:58:08
  the common misconceptions about, you know, the fintech industry
• 1:58:12
  that people have even till today?
• 1:58:17
  I think, I think that at this point, I think the the biggest
• 1:58:20
  misconception is that fintech is so dramatically different than
• 1:58:24
  financial industries. The idea that like if you think
• 1:58:27
  about some of these fintech companies, unless you're working
• 1:58:30
  in a true startup, they're at a point now where they're being
• 1:58:33
  regulated similarly to some of the biggest banks.
• 1:58:36
  They're like we, I don't really know how to say it other than
• 1:58:42
  like we made it yellow like we did it like financial, like
• 1:58:45
  fintech is big enough now that it is almost time for a new term
• 1:58:50
  like fintech is financial services.
• 1:58:54
  So this idea that like I, I am attached to the word fintech
• 1:58:58
  because it's, you know, something I've attached myself
• 1:59:00
  to through my whole career. But we've been doing this long
• 1:59:05
  enough now we've gained the trust and we've grown up, we've
• 1:59:08
  matured. So I, I don't think that fintech
• 1:59:11
  is fintech anymore. I think fintech is financial
• 1:59:13
  services. Yes, Fintech is financial
• 1:59:17
  services or I guess a lot of voice has still suffering from
• 1:59:23
  the trauma of yeah, that that wannabeam perception of fintech
• 1:59:31
  had you know what I say in the last decade, but it has come to
• 1:59:35
  stay where it's the bosses. Even the traditional banks are
• 1:59:40
  won't book and letting it smell meetings with.
• 1:59:43
  And I think Fintech just needs more respect to the name.
• 1:59:49
  Yeah, yeah. And I think it's getting there.
• 1:59:51
  I mean, if you look at I mean, just I think Plaid is a great
• 1:59:55
  like kind of the penultimate example of a fintech company
• 1:59:58
  that has grown up into a true, you know, financial services
• 2:00:03
  infrastructure provider, right? Like Zach and Will and team
• 2:00:08
  built something that might have seemed a little nuts at certain
• 2:00:12
  points and you know, had UPS had downs almost got acquired to
• 2:00:18
  their benefit actually didn't has what seemed to have worked
• 2:00:20
  out better that way, but they're.
• 2:00:23
  That's a that's a financial services infrastructure company
• 2:00:26
  now and they treat it that way like there's not a this idea of
• 2:00:29
  move fast and break things does not exist in fintech at all
• 2:00:33
  anymore because it can't we, we can't afford anything close to
• 2:00:38
  that anymore. I mean, we and true the same is
• 2:00:42
  true a million X in the crypto world like another FTX would set
• 2:00:47
  set that back another 10 years, you know, in terms of pricing,
• 2:00:52
  in terms of trust from regulators, everything.
• 2:00:54
  So I think, I think now we have a new responsibility on our
• 2:00:57
  shoulders to carry forward with responsibility with regulation,
• 2:01:02
  with you know, compliant infrastructure that you know is
• 2:01:07
  time to put on the adult pants basically.
• 2:01:10
  Absolutely. We more success comes on more
• 2:01:13
  responsibilities. Yeah, basically, you know, at
• 2:01:16
  first Fintech is that term that is very close to your heart.
• 2:01:20
  But the truth is it is not what it used to be in the last decade
• 2:01:24
  any longer. It is or would I say the proper
• 2:01:30
  industry right now and of course it is that I say that that adult
• 2:01:39
  industry subset of financial services, it is proper financial
• 2:01:45
  services. It's not just that baby industry
• 2:01:49
  any longer. Yeah, I'll put you that way.
• 2:01:51
  That's one thing that's really beautiful about fintech is the
• 2:01:54
  innovation and of course the the rate of rapid growth that we
• 2:02:00
  have experienced over time. It's I think people don't give
• 2:02:04
  Fintech the credit that you deserve with that rapid growth.
• 2:02:09
  You already see industries come up and just low and low up India
• 2:02:15
  fields the way fintech has, has done globally and it's on a
• 2:02:19
  global scale. So I think they just have more
• 2:02:22
  respect. But you know, speaking about
• 2:02:25
  these innovations, right, Like what do you think you know, from
• 2:02:28
  a personal standpoint is? But I'll say the most exciting,
• 2:02:33
  you know, on a global scale. And of course, you know, the
• 2:02:37
  need, the financial inclusion is very, very close in my heart,
• 2:02:41
  maybe because of the bias of, you know, my origin as a person,
• 2:02:46
  right, coming from the country in an emerging market.
• 2:02:50
  So I would always, you know, put the work out there.
• 2:02:54
  And of course, you know, it's my responsibility.
• 2:02:57
  I think it's my responsibility. I took it off.
• 2:02:59
  I don't know who gave it to me. I always try to ensure that I
• 2:03:03
  use my platform to ensure development in, you know, the
• 2:03:09
  country that I came from. So we should be shout out to my
• 2:03:13
  country. By the way, I'm always having my
• 2:03:15
  flag here, so. I bet that comes out during the
• 2:03:19
  UFCA lot. Yeah, so.
• 2:03:24
  I guess. To answer your question, I think
• 2:03:25
  the one thing that I haven't mentioned that maybe is like
• 2:03:30
  nearest dearest, closest to my heart and what I'm most hopeful
• 2:03:34
  and excited about of all of this.
• 2:03:37
  When you take all the technologies we're talking
• 2:03:39
  about, right? And you think about how all this
• 2:03:42
  data has been siloed in very extreme ways, that leads to
• 2:03:48
  money laundering. Money laundering leads to human
• 2:03:52
  trafficking leads. I mean, I think a lot of the
• 2:03:54
  time when people think about money laundering, they think
• 2:03:56
  about narcos, right? Which in and of itself not
• 2:03:59
  great, but a lot worse things than drug trafficking are
• 2:04:05
  happening as a result of money laundering, right?
• 2:04:07
  Human trafficking. Speaking of human trafficking.
• 2:04:11
  Yes. Speaking of human trafficking,
• 2:04:13
  I've had, I don't know if you know about the Meccan Club,
• 2:04:17
  right? So they're one of the world's
• 2:04:19
  top anti human trafficking organisations.
• 2:04:24
  I've had the CEO on this podcast and.
• 2:04:26
  Yeah, Yeah. So I mean this, this is this is
• 2:04:30
  the thing, right is if you think about the ability to break down
• 2:04:33
  those data silos, right and the ability for these bank
• 2:04:36
  consortiums in the same way that they're.
• 2:04:38
  Working to move money together, if we're able to track and
• 2:04:43
  understand more of the how those illicit funds move, if we're
• 2:04:46
  able to, to gather more of those illicit funds, take them out of
• 2:04:50
  the market, if we're able to find more of the bad guys.
• 2:04:52
  Basically, the world becomes a much better place.
• 2:04:54
  Like when I got into fintech, the stat was that we catch less
• 2:04:59
  than 1% of money laundering across the world every year.
• 2:05:02
  That stat has not changed. And it's a massive industry,
• 2:05:06
  massive industry. And if you think about the
• 2:05:10
  technologies we're talking about, if applied correctly and
• 2:05:14
  government in like in public and private entities are able to
• 2:05:19
  work together in good ways, like we could solve a lot more than
• 2:05:26
  1% of money laundering folks, you know, And to me that that is
• 2:05:30
  actually the thing that I'm not going to say it's the thing that
• 2:05:36
  gets me out of bed in the morning because there's so many
• 2:05:37
  pieces to 2020. But like, if there was one thing
• 2:05:40
  in fintech that I would want to go build, like if I had to, you
• 2:05:43
  know, go start something tomorrow, it would be around
• 2:05:47
  that. It would be trying to find a way
• 2:05:49
  to decrease money laundering in the world, to increase the
• 2:05:52
  quality of the know your customer rules, and to basically
• 2:05:56
  just try and do away with a lot of that evil.
• 2:06:03
  Very, very important, you know, but at least, you know, we just
• 2:06:07
  need to would I say, contribute the need to that we can
• 2:06:11
  contribute into that fight against money laundering and, of
• 2:06:16
  course, human trafficking. On my end, I've had Matt
• 2:06:22
  Friedman. Yeah.
• 2:06:23
  Matt Friedman is the CEO of Meccan Blog.
• 2:06:26
  Anybody who knows about the fight against the doing
• 2:06:32
  trafficking would know that guy. He he's based in Hong Kong, but
• 2:06:38
  he's done a lot of work I think for the past 25 years or so on.
• 2:06:42
  Yeah. You know the fight at first.
• 2:06:44
  We have Team Nelson coming to the spot pass later in the year.
• 2:06:48
  Team Nelson is the CEO of our Justice for Hope.
• 2:06:53
  Yeah, that's another big, you know, our charity that fights
• 2:06:59
  money. I'm sorry, human trafficking.
• 2:07:02
  Yeah, I've had Paul Moore as well.
• 2:07:04
  Paul Moore is, he's an entrepreneur.
• 2:07:06
  He's a real estate billionaire in the US and he contributes
• 2:07:12
  really, really deep to other fighters in money.
• 2:07:17
  Why do I keep stealing money laundry?
• 2:07:18
  Because he's. Doing trafficking well, because
• 2:07:21
  you're probably saying it because money laundering is,
• 2:07:24
  it's not just about human trafficking, right?
• 2:07:26
  Like, I mean, I, I use that as something very visceral because
• 2:07:29
  we can all agree that it's absolutely terrible, right?
• 2:07:32
  But there's a, there's a show on National Geographic called
• 2:07:35
  Trafficked. It's run by a woman named
• 2:07:37
  Mariana Van Zeller. It's I've had the pleasure of
• 2:07:40
  interviewing her a couple times at money 2020.
• 2:07:42
  And basically what she does is she goes into a new dark market
• 2:07:45
  every week. She'll go and literally follow
• 2:07:47
  from how fentanyl gets created where like the initial, you
• 2:07:51
  know, like the, the chemicals all the way into the lab all the
• 2:07:55
  way into the actual final consumer.
• 2:07:57
  She does the same with ghost guns.
• 2:07:58
  She does the same with like there's so human organs, right?
• 2:08:02
  I mean, there's so many things that money laundering is driving
• 2:08:06
  that we, we don't think about South in terms of like
• 2:08:09
  humanising it. One, go watch traffic on
• 2:08:12
  National Geographic because Marianne is the shit.
• 2:08:15
  But two, take a step back and think about the world of that
• 2:08:19
  dark money. It's, it's not good.
• 2:08:22
  It's not good at all. And it's actually really, really
• 2:08:26
  scary. And if we were able to solve
• 2:08:28
  even 2%, the world would look a lot better.
• 2:08:31
  So. Yeah, because, you know, it's
• 2:08:34
  very little money fighting against a lot of money.
• 2:08:36
  So like how? It's it's systems I.
• 2:08:39
  Don't know. Yeah, and I think we finally
• 2:08:41
  have. A knife to a gunfight.
• 2:08:43
  Yeah, yeah, it really is. It really is.
• 2:08:45
  But I think now we, I think we got our guns.
• 2:08:48
  The question is how do we put them together?
• 2:08:49
  How do we build them and how do we deploy them correctly?
• 2:08:52
  And that's an exciting question, exciting metaphor that I hope
• 2:08:56
  doesn't get mixed, but you know what I mean.
• 2:09:00
  Precision beats power, How many beats beat?
• 2:09:03
  Indeed. I think it's just a matter of
• 2:09:07
  strategy and of course we we're able to win that war against our
• 2:09:13
  human trafficking because it is very, very, very inhumane.
• 2:09:20
  It's unacceptable. All of it is man.
• 2:09:23
  I mean, it's, you know, I mean, when you think about just
• 2:09:27
  fentanyl coming and across the border from the top, from the
• 2:09:29
  bottom in the US, I mean, there's, there's, there's so
• 2:09:32
  many, so many things that money laundering powers that are the
• 2:09:36
  evils of the world. And if we could make a real dent
• 2:09:40
  on that, then we're doing something really, really good
• 2:09:43
  for the world. So anyways, that's that's my
• 2:09:45
  public service announcement is if you're thinking about going
• 2:09:47
  and starting something, think about money laundering, think
• 2:09:50
  about anti money laundering specifically.
• 2:09:54
  Interesting stuff. I hope they get to hear you on
• 2:09:56
  that. Wow.
• 2:09:58
  We've actually been on this spot for more than two hours.
• 2:10:03
  You said it, you said it our did it that we're going to have a
• 2:10:06
  lot of fun today. So we we will have our Part 3,
• 2:10:13
  the course. You know this is Part 2 big fire
• 2:10:17
  round. Are you ready to?
• 2:10:19
  I'm always ready to rumble, baby.
• 2:10:21
  Quick, fire me. Let's go.
• 2:10:22
  OK, good, good, good. I love that.
• 2:10:24
  You know, a friend of mine asked me Are you ready?
• 2:10:26
  And I said I was born ready. I don't know if I was born
• 2:10:29
  ready, but I'm ready right now. OK, let's go.
• 2:10:32
  So the one machine tech startup everyone should keep an eye on
• 2:10:38
  right now. One second.
• 2:10:40
  That's a tough one. Now I see why you say you are
• 2:10:42
  not born ready. Now I just want to make sure.
• 2:10:46
  So there's a lot of companies inside of fintech that have
• 2:10:49
  very, very similar names and I want to make sure that I'm
• 2:10:52
  saying the right name because there's two companies, Braille,
• 2:10:58
  Braille, Braille dot XYZ. It was this just because my
• 2:11:02
  brain's tired. I couldn't think of it.
• 2:11:03
  But it's that when I was talking earlier about the guy that
• 2:11:06
  started the company in Des Moines and is now doing the the
• 2:11:10
  stablecoin stuff, I keep an eye out for Braille.
• 2:11:14
  Ben Melon is one of the most impressive and good humans out
• 2:11:19
  there building in fintech. So I don't know if that was like
• 2:11:22
  lightning speed that I got you that answer because I wanted to
• 2:11:24
  make sure I said the right thing, but Braille dot XYZ would
• 2:11:27
  definitely be my answer. I say if it's better to be right
• 2:11:31
  down to the past, yeah. OK, so what's the biggest
• 2:11:35
  leadership lesson you've learned in the past year?
• 2:11:41
  Empower your team to an irrational level.
• 2:11:44
  Make your team believe that they can do more than maybe they even
• 2:11:47
  can. I there's a really quick story
• 2:11:50
  with this. So I used to coach for American
• 2:11:54
  soccer, for everyone else, football.
• 2:11:58
  I used to go to goalkeepers when I was in college or when I was
• 2:12:01
  in university. I used to coach goalkeepers for
• 2:12:03
  my high school. And there was this really
• 2:12:06
  impressive kid that just played baseball.
• 2:12:08
  And we've at my old school, we never had good goalkeepers.
• 2:12:12
  Like I ended up playing in college, but I had never touched
• 2:12:14
  the ball until my first year in high school.
• 2:12:16
  Just kind of ended up that way. And I always just told him that
• 2:12:20
  he was the best goalkeeper in the state of Kansas.
• 2:12:24
  Like athletically everything, like just he's competing against
• 2:12:28
  kids that have been playing since they were three.
• 2:12:29
  Who cares? He's faster, he's stronger.
• 2:12:32
  He's going to go harder. He's going to yell louder.
• 2:12:34
  He's going to come at you harder.
• 2:12:36
  He's going to communicate more like he is the 1.
• 2:12:39
  And I would like, I would pull him to the side before every
• 2:12:42
  time getting a little emotional. I'll pull him to the side before
• 2:12:44
  every game. And I'd be like, you are the
• 2:12:46
  one. It's you.
• 2:12:48
  It's you. Ain't nobody else, it's you.
• 2:12:52
  So I think like second guessing your team, like, you know, you
• 2:12:57
  got to validate, you got to make sure that you know, people are
• 2:12:59
  doing the things they're doing. But when it comes to true
• 2:13:01
  leadership, I mean, I think it's empower your team and make them
• 2:13:06
  believe they can do more than maybe they can even do.
• 2:13:10
  I think that's very. Important by the way, he ended
• 2:13:12
  up playing for two years, was Allstate, got college offers and
• 2:13:17
  like became one of one of the best goalkeepers in Kansas.
• 2:13:19
  Actually he got he got more accolades by the end of his time
• 2:13:22
  at the school than I did and I was very proud of that.
• 2:13:26
  Yeah, like you definitely will be proud of that.
• 2:13:29
  Like, I remember being a teacher, being a lecturer, and I
• 2:13:34
  had some of my students, like being a national prizes.
• 2:13:37
  I never won a national prize myself.
• 2:13:39
  And, you know, seeing my own students being prizes.
• 2:13:41
  And I've seen a number of my students go on to do, like,
• 2:13:46
  really great things. Some of my students have gone to
• 2:13:48
  Oxford for the masters and, you know, gone to Harvard.
• 2:13:52
  And I'm like, wow, like I think I'm proud of myself.
• 2:13:55
  Let's keep making, let's keep making the impact.
• 2:13:58
  You know hey if you could host any 3 guests leaving or dead,
• 2:14:05
  you know on Fintech Family Hour who who they do what.
• 2:14:09
  Any guests or any 3 guests? Any 3.
• 2:14:13
  Any three man Charlie Munger definitely 100% Patrick
• 2:14:20
  Collision. I feel sexist that they're just
• 2:14:22
  all going to be men, but Jamie Dimon.
• 2:14:24
  I just feel like the conversation between those three
• 2:14:26
  would be absolutely fascinating. Wow.
• 2:14:29
  Why Charlie Monger? Why not Warren Buffett?
• 2:14:32
  I know I had to guess. Because so Warren Buffett is, I
• 2:14:38
  mean, obviously one of the most impressive and amazing investors
• 2:14:41
  in the history of the world, but Warren Buffett would not be
• 2:14:44
  Warren Buffett without Charlie Munger like that, that
• 2:14:47
  relationship. You know, they weren't they
• 2:14:49
  weren't as close in later years, things like that.
• 2:14:51
  But if you've never heard Charlie Munger speak, go go to
• 2:14:55
  YouTube, listen to Charlie Munger like his he's done hours
• 2:14:59
  at Michigan where he just gets interviewed.
• 2:15:01
  There is a few brains in the world like his that are
• 2:15:07
  simultaneously his, his ability to simplify the complex and to
• 2:15:13
  do it in a fun way. I mean, the man's, the man's
• 2:15:15
  funny is another thing, you know, And I think that something
• 2:15:18
  that we forget a lot is like to learn, you need to be
• 2:15:21
  entertained. And he's, you know, I mean, I
• 2:15:24
  think entertainment Exactly. Yeah.
• 2:15:26
  So I mean, I wouldn't pick him because of the entertainment,
• 2:15:29
  but he's just one of the most prolific thinkers and one of the
• 2:15:34
  most prolific doers in the history of the world, I think.
• 2:15:38
  And he didn't optimise for wealth, right?
• 2:15:40
  Like he warns many X tend to 10s of thousands of XS more wealthy
• 2:15:47
  than him. I mean, I don't even I think
• 2:15:50
  Charlie died a billionaire, but maybe not.
• 2:15:53
  I mean, he's definitely in the hundreds of millions.
• 2:15:55
  The one thing he ever bought that was like really, really big
• 2:15:58
  for him was a boat. It was just a really big dumb
• 2:16:01
  boat. It just, it was like basically a
• 2:16:04
  yacht, but it would break down all the time.
• 2:16:06
  He didn't use it that much, but he wanted a boat.
• 2:16:07
  He's just a. Unique man that has created some
• 2:16:11
  really interesting mental models in terms of how to live life.
• 2:16:15
  And I think when you take a person like that together with
• 2:16:19
  my, who I believe to be the philosopher king of fintech,
• 2:16:23
  Patrick Carlson, and I just find Jamie Dimon to be fascinating in
• 2:16:28
  general. Like those 3.
• 2:16:31
  I mean, I, that would be maybe one of the few times I'd
• 2:16:33
  actually shut up. Like, you know, I would just let
• 2:16:34
  them talk. Interesting stuff.
• 2:16:39
  Jamie Darwin, I think, man, he's got some, would I say, very
• 2:16:44
  strong opinions or on controversial issues.
• 2:16:47
  Ed he just makes him a figure for you to see back and leak a
• 2:16:51
  lot. OK.
• 2:16:52
  Was my maybe my replacement, like if I had like, maybe Elon
• 2:16:57
  instead of Jamie? Maybe.
• 2:17:01
  Yeah. I don't know.
• 2:17:02
  That's a tough one. That's it.
• 2:17:03
  That's it. That's definitely like a, you
• 2:17:05
  know, it's a strong, strong debate between those two.
• 2:17:07
  But I would not replace Elon Musk for Jamie, or for Charlie
• 2:17:11
  Munger or for Patrick Olson. Let's have let you you turned
• 2:17:17
  into Mount Rushmore then. Exactly.
• 2:17:20
  Basically, yeah, Yeah. And then that's not about.
• 2:17:24
  Rushmore So OK, so what's one book or podcast that completely
• 2:17:29
  changed your mindset? Podcast to change my mindset.
• 2:17:34
  Man, it's been so many. I'll go with a book.
• 2:17:38
  So there's a the Almanack of Naval Ravikant and this was
• 2:17:42
  happens to be written by one of my best friends.
• 2:17:45
  But Naval is kind of a legend of this, of Silicon Valley, one of
• 2:17:49
  the founders of Angel List and similarly A philosopher king of
• 2:17:53
  his time, a philosopher king of not just startups, though, of
• 2:17:58
  health, wealth and happiness, right?
• 2:18:00
  So he's about building the best life you can and not just.
• 2:18:06
  Work work, work, work work. So the almanack of Naval
• 2:18:09
  Rafikant, I think would be with the one that had has had the
• 2:18:13
  biggest impact on my life. And it's the kind of book that
• 2:18:15
  you can pick up and just open to any page and there's value.
• 2:18:21
  You don't need the context of the previous, you know, 20 pages
• 2:18:25
  or whatever it is. And I do on a regular basis.
• 2:18:27
  Just open it, take a quote and think about that quote for the
• 2:18:30
  day. That is Eric Jogginson.
• 2:18:34
  Yeah, proud new father as well it.
• 2:18:39
  Would I definitely have to keep that being and I see it's quite
• 2:18:44
  it's quite cheap. It's quite cheap.
• 2:18:46
  Yeah, I think it's, I don't, I have no idea what it cost, to be
• 2:18:49
  honest, but it's the Audible he just redid.
• 2:18:52
  He just redid the audio version with actual some excerpts with
• 2:18:56
  an interview with Naval that he did.
• 2:18:58
  I mean, it's just Naval I think is probably the most prolific
• 2:19:03
  tweeter ever. I mean, hundreds of thousands of
• 2:19:06
  tweets. He said so much publicly.
• 2:19:08
  And to write that book, Eric literally read every word the
• 2:19:12
  man has ever said, written every piece, and he got it down into
• 2:19:16
  the succinct. Like, I don't know how many
• 2:19:19
  pages it is, but it's pretty succinct.
• 2:19:21
  And it is. I hope they have it on being
• 2:19:24
  kissed. There you go.
• 2:19:26
  Yeah, I would imagine. I would imagine they do.
• 2:19:29
  Yes they do. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's worth,
• 2:19:33
  it's worth a read. And and it's one of those books
• 2:19:35
  that, you know, you don't, you don't have the need to pick up
• 2:19:38
  and read from beginning to end because I don't think I could
• 2:19:41
  read it from beginnings. I mean, it's just you need time
• 2:19:44
  to digest. You need like, it's one of those
• 2:19:46
  things where you can just pick it up, open to a specific page
• 2:19:50
  and think on one sentence for three days.
• 2:19:55
  Just that kind of book. Love that.
• 2:19:59
  I don't know what you think about apps type blinkers, but I
• 2:20:02
  love blinkers, you know? In the stage in time it is
• 2:20:05
  difficult kind of book around or you know how busy we can like it
• 2:20:09
  just helps you to compress them to digest it.
• 2:20:14
  I'm yeah, I like, I like them. For me, I'm a I'm a podcast
• 2:20:19
  addict, so most of my ears are taken up if unless I'm at the
• 2:20:23
  gym, it's pretty much podcast time.
• 2:20:25
  So I don't listen to as many books or read as many books as I
• 2:20:28
  used to just because it feels like especially right now in
• 2:20:31
  finance, like if if you read a book, you're probably like a
• 2:20:35
  year or two behind if you're talking about the, the actual
• 2:20:37
  industry, but in terms of like mental models about how to live
• 2:20:41
  life. You know, yeah, yeah, those last
• 2:20:43
  a while. I love I love those I love those
• 2:20:46
  you know feel like but I see Evergreen everything principles.
• 2:20:51
  I remember the the the verse has been my father ever kissed me
• 2:20:54
  was thinking we'll reach by an apple and you.
• 2:20:56
  Know Yep, Yep, I've read that one too.
• 2:20:59
  I couldn't get through more than like 3 pages I don't think
• 2:21:02
  because I was like OK, I'm pretty sure I need to think and
• 2:21:06
  grow rich. Got it.
• 2:21:09
  Hey, you know. The very first book I OK I
• 2:21:11
  bought 2 books, you know, for myself with my money.
• 2:21:14
  The various press 2 books I got where Bill Kanecki possibly and
• 2:21:18
  friends and influence people on the art of public speaking.
• 2:21:22
  Yeah, how to win, actually how to win friends and influence
• 2:21:25
  people. I feel like is one that have Gen
• 2:21:27
  Z and John Alpha skip could be a scary thing.
• 2:21:31
  Like I think maybe it even needs to be like rewritten in a more
• 2:21:34
  modern fashion because yes, it's I would agree on that one as
• 2:21:39
  well. Yeah, very, very important book.
• 2:21:42
  Wow. And of course, the very last
• 2:21:43
  question for you is the future of money is Dash.
• 2:21:48
  What do you think? Being built right now, baby.
• 2:21:51
  OK, I love. That and of course with that,
• 2:21:56
  it's love and respect to you. I always podcast the SI unit for
• 2:22:02
  measuring life this time and when a person shares the time
• 2:22:06
  with you to share their life with you.
• 2:22:08
  It's been a pleasure. It's truly been a pleasure, man.
• 2:22:10
  This has been, this has been fun.
• 2:22:12
  It's rare that I actually get to like, you know, explore and, you
• 2:22:16
  know, conversate on these. You.
• 2:22:18
  Know because we're trying to talk talking points.
• 2:22:21
  So it's been a pleasure man and I really do want to do it again.
• 2:22:23
  And let's let's talk offline about some of the partnership
• 2:22:26
  stuff because I think we could do.
• 2:22:27
  Some I'm so new to Lee, you know, whoa, man, now, now I
• 2:22:34
  mean, tell you what, what what do we.
• 2:22:36
  Say we got to go to AUS, we got to find the right time, we got
• 2:22:40
  to find the right country and we need to go to a UFC together.
• 2:22:43
  You're coming to London again. Good morning like.
• 2:22:45
  Ali, any dude come in? Do UFC tell Olkadina?
• 2:22:51
  By the way, I have manifested this right that I would have
• 2:22:55
  been a right on this podcast. It's not a matter of if, it's a
• 2:22:58
  matter of when. I like it.
• 2:23:00
  I have manifested this. You know about the PKFC, right?
• 2:23:04
  About the PKFC. Yeah, the BKFC Ben Occo Python
• 2:23:08
  Championship. Oh, yeah.
• 2:23:09
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. DV Feldman.
• 2:23:14
  I've had DV Feldman in this podcast.
• 2:23:16
  Dude, you have so many second degree connections to Dana.
• 2:23:19
  You Yeah, yeah, I think, I think what you should do is just walk
• 2:23:22
  around Vegas and just try and find Dana at the right point
• 2:23:25
  with the right number of drinks in.
• 2:23:26
  And then I bet he'll do. He'll say yes.
• 2:23:30
  All good data, I'm looking for you.
• 2:23:33
  We'll track him down. We'll get him.
• 2:23:34
  Let it, let it, let us track him down.
• 2:23:36
  Let us track him down. Wow, interesting stuff, right?
• 2:23:39
  Yeah, gratitude is good attitude, right?
• 2:23:42
  And 1st, I am very, very grateful to you.
• 2:23:45
  And I always say this to the audience, always with the
• 2:23:48
  company in life, right? Conceived beliefs track the
• 2:23:52
  tribe and achieve. For me it's a goodbye.
• 2:23:55
  And of course, as Zach and Do you want to leave a shout out to
• 2:23:57
  anybody and 1st, do you want to leave any last words before you
• 2:24:02
  say goodbye? Well, I mean, I wouldn't be
• 2:24:05
  doing my job if I didn't say Money 2020 USA happening in
• 2:24:09
  Vegas in October because it's so many dates.
• 2:24:11
  In my head. I want to say 26th through 29th.
• 2:24:14
  Go to us.money2020.com. Depending on what part of the
• 2:24:17
  world you're in, what you're interested in.
• 2:24:19
  We also have shows in Europe. Amsterdam is going to be our
• 2:24:22
  show in Amsterdam happens next year.
• 2:24:24
  We also just two years ago launched a show in Asia and
• 2:24:28
  Bangkok. So depending where you're at in
• 2:24:31
  the world, what you're trying to learn about, come to money 2020.
• 2:24:34
  Reach out if you're interested and just want to have a chat.
• 2:24:36
  I'm on LinkedIn. Happy to, you know, occasionally
• 2:24:41
  busy, especially close to show, but always happy to help and
• 2:24:45
  mutual. Thank you for your time.
• 2:24:46
  This has been an absolute pleasure and really glad we
• 2:24:48
  actually got to meet, spend the time on and I'm excited to do
• 2:24:50
  this in person. Absolutely.
• 2:24:53
  Where you wonder where we're going to the studio and 1st I
• 2:24:57
  have to end this recording. That's important.
• 2:24:59
  All right, let's do it. Let's do it.