Latest / Masterminds Podcast / The Money Is Broken, And Bitcoin Is the Fix: Stafford Masie || Masterminds Podcast EP44

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The Money Is Broken, And Bitcoin Is the Fix: Stafford Masie || Masterminds Podcast EP44 · Masterminds Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Difference between me and a kid in El Dorado Park, I'm not more intelligent.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: The only difference is I was given a different frame.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: So I started Google in South Africa.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: Um I ran it for three and a half years.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: It's very difficult to verify gold.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: So the fall of the Roman Empire, if you go back in history, you'll always see that the fall of any empire is directly correlated to the money breaking.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: The Romans started taking metals that were not gold and melting it up into the gold.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: So that's why the term sound money comes from.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: Today on Masterminds, we sit with Stafford Massey, one of Africa's most influential tech thinkers, former Google South Africa CEO, groundbreaking entrepreneur, and the mind behind one of the world's most widely used payment innovations.
0:43
SPEAKER_01: Can you explain Bitcoin to me like I know nothing about it?
0:47
SPEAKER_00: 80% of the US dollars in circulation today was printed in the last five years.
0:52
SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: People say my groceries are getting more expensive.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: No, your groceries are getting more expensive.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: Your money is getting weaker.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: So the dollar's broken.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: The South African Rand has lost 98% of its buying power from 1994 to 2025.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: How are some people losing money?
1:08
SPEAKER_00: If your money debases between 3 and 5% every year, in five years to six years, you've lost 50% of your buying power.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: Repudiation is a big issue with AI.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: Is this real?
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Is this real?
1:19
SPEAKER_00: AI can't take all the jobs away.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: What I would tell every young person.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: Before we jump into the conversation, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for supporting and deciding to watch this episode.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: But now I have a favor subscribe to the channel.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: Subscribing to the channel helps me and the entire mastermind team to continue bringing you wonderful conversations and episodes that bring you closer to being the mastermind you deserve to be.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: So join the community.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: Stafford Mercy, welcome so much to the Masterminds podcast.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: I've seen some of the stuff that you're doing online, and you know, thank you.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: It's a privilege, honor to be here.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: Oh, thank you, thank you.
2:09
SPEAKER_01: It's an honor you accepted.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: I was actually quite nervous because I was watching your profile, listening to everything you have to say.
2:15
SPEAKER_01: I was like, I need his mind to share opinions for everyone to hear this.
2:19
SPEAKER_01: So I'm so glad you made it.
2:21
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
2:22
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
2:22
SPEAKER_01: I always like to start by understanding the person I'm talking to, especially before we go into technology, the future, and everything.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: You know, I want to understand little Stafford from El Dorado Park, right?
2:34
SPEAKER_01: That's right, yeah.
2:35
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I want to understand what shaped your mindset to become the man that you are today.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: You know, when you say became the man that you are today, I'm still a work in progress.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: So what you see here is still a story unwritten.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, I still suffer from imposter syndrome a lot.
2:50
SPEAKER_02: Oh, interesting.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: Believe it or not.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I still do.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: People see me get up on stage.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: I did an Amsterdam talk, and there was a few, there's thousands of people in the audience, and I still feel like I'm not, you know, that still happens behind the curtain.
3:01
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: And I think uh I think it's a good thing because it keeps you humble.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think my kids and my wife, and they don't, they they don't care about the fame, they don't care about the fortune, they don't care about the noise.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: You know, they just see Stafford at home, and I think that's a very grounding thing.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I grew up in El Dorado Park, south of Johannesburg.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: Um, a town that's gangster ridden, drugs, crime.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: Um, it's the epitome of uh we'll get to this topic later on, but it's the epitome of broken money.
3:28
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, we can talk about that in uh a little bit later.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I grew up there, and you know, my dad had the foresight to uh take me and and drop me into Israel.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: I spent some time in Israel.
3:40
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: Um I came back to South Africa, and uh the difference between me and a kid in El Dorado Park, I'm not more intelligent, I'm not more capable.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: The only difference is I was given a different frame.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: The aperture of my of my lens was opened up, and when I went overseas and and I went back, all the social things that generally and generically would attract me just didn't do that anymore.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to steal cars, I didn't want to wear certain clothes, and those things didn't matter to me.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: What I saw a bigger world.
4:15
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: Um, I dated a girl from Brazil, I you know, met someone from You were global.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: Global, I was global, and I met so many opinions.
4:23
SPEAKER_00: And I think when I went back, my mind had opened up.
4:25
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the difference between me and just someone where I grew up is I had the opportunity to see a different world.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: I I could see how big the world was, that the world is not as it's not El Dorado Park.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: It's not the extensions where I lived inside of El Dorado Park.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: It was bigger than that.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: And it was a privilege.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: My dad's foresight to take to take me overseas.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: And and coming back, I just that's been different.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: And ever since then, the world become smaller but bigger in a kind of contrarian way.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: And uh, yeah, that that separated me from the social challenges that we have um in places like El Dorado Park.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: So am I better?
5:03
SPEAKER_00: No.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: Am I I just had the privilege of seeing over the wall and experiencing what was over the wall.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: So when I came back, the norms just didn't attract me as much.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: And and uh yeah, that's I think that's what shaped me was probably that instance in my life where I lived overseas independently, etc.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: And I came back and then I worked in different instantiations in technology.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: My uncle was in technology, um, he was a computer programmer at a you know at uh and he got me into it.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: And I uh I then went on and worked at Telcom, which is the biggest telco monopoly in the country, and that was exciting.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: It was really, really exciting, and that's why I picked up that I looked, I'm really sort of good at this.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: And um, that was fun.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: I was a software developer, I worked on hardware, I met some of the most incredible people there.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I had you know, in that time, I had quite a few life experiences.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: I'll never forget an instance at Telcom where we were deploying this particular piece of software, and we were deploying it on a national basis, and I had to fly to all the different cities to go train people on this particular piece of software.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, now we're talking mid-90s, right?
6:08
SPEAKER_00: So South Africa just changed, things were completely changed, still on the rocks, yeah.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Apartheid was still pretty much around, the signs were still around, etc.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: And I'll never forget going to Bloomfantine, and I I was supposed to train a group of individuals on a particular software package, and as a group of white guys, and uh the day before I got there, I set up everything and I was ready for the training.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: And they came into the room the next morning and they asked, Where's the instructor?
6:41
SPEAKER_00: And I said, No, I'm the instructor.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: And they looked at me and they said, There's no way, there's no way we will be taught by someone.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna use the K-word, but um, we're not gonna get taught by someone like you.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah and they walked out, and that was quite shocking.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: And um, I I the HR lady showed up, she was in a flat panic about what happened.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: Um, I went back to my hotel.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: She told me, Go back to the hotel, we'll we'll sort this out later.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: I went to the hotel, I sat down and I was very angry.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: I was very, very angry.
7:08
SPEAKER_02: I can imagine.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: Very, very angry.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I so I called my dad, and I told my dad, I said, Hey, listen, this is just what happened.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: These white guys came into the room and they completely rejected me, they insulted me, they walked out, etc.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: And my dad said, Look, you've got two choices.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: He says, number one is come back home, we'll take it up legally, we'll sue them, we'll go to the media, we'll take on the organization, we'll make lots of money, and we'll win.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: We'll win.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: And you can take them on.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: Or you shut your mouth, you don't sleep tonight, and you make sure they're the best instructor in this particular discipline that they've ever met.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: Nice.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: Your choice.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna pick, I'm gonna and he put the phone down.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: He says, I'll back you either way.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: You come home, we're gonna take them on.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: You go back in there, I'll back you too.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: And he put down the phone.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: That's all he said.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: And I chose to go back in there.
7:58
SPEAKER_00: And some of those individuals in that room are individuals that I've known lifelong.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: Nice.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: Um, I was one individual in that room at his uh funeral.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: I was the person that he chose to read out his eulogy.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's sometimes what we need to do.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: Um, sometimes the harder path is excellence.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sometimes the harder path is to break the stereotype by living and personifying the true reflection of capability.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: And that's how you break a stereotype.
8:28
SPEAKER_00: You don't protest, you don't go crazy, you don't take legal action, you don't you don't shout out your victimhood.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: You get up and you show that you can.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: And those guys were forced to come back into the room.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: So when I went back, I told the HR LAD, these guys need to come back, I'm doing this course.
8:43
SPEAKER_00: And they were forced to sit there.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: They challenged me, they won, they asked me the hard questions, I answered them all, and I garnered their respect over four or five days of them being with me.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: And like I said, I grew lifelong friends, and I think that's that's sometimes what we need to do.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: And those are the challenge, those are the things in my life that when I look back at so-called success that I've had in my career and in my life, it's people, it's folks like my dad, it's folks that have come along and shown me options, and it was always the harder path that seemed to be better.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: And I think you always got to think about the next person that looks and feels like you, how does that person gonna deal with the situation based upon the situation that you're dealing with?
9:26
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so I've I've used it throughout my career, and when I say I've used it, I look different.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: So when I moved to the United States, I lived, I worked in Telcom, I worked in Dimension Data, and what I've picked up throughout my career is that because I'm in technology back then, and I'm the color that I am, and the capability that I had that I stood out.
9:47
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so like if you go to the United States, it's a very big place.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: So I lived in the States for several years, and when I lived there, I was the person that clients would remember.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: Not the other guys that were with me.
9:58
SPEAKER_01: You use what was unique about you as you advanced it.
10:01
SPEAKER_01: I stood out.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: I stood out.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: So I chose always to take who I was and the attributes of who I was and not use it to be a victim, but use it to overcome in a way.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: And that was something that my dad taught me and at the very beginning, and that's been very, very useful in my career.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: Um, and yeah, so I worked at Telcom.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: I went off uh I worked at Dimension Data.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: That's when I had my first startup.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: I got involved in a startup in the late nine, this is mid to late 90s.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: Um got involved in the first technology startup, it was lots of fun.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: We built tech there.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: Uh first time I was in a business of my own jointly with a couple of other individuals, and then I moved into a multinational company.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: And I'll never forget my dad when the opportunity to move into Novell, which was a software company, yeah, was one of the biggest software companies in the world at that time.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: They offered me a job, and my dad said, uh, I sat down with him again and I said, Listen, I mean, the company, we've just signed like millions of dollars of deals, rands of deals here with this company, and I'm a shareholder, etc.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, should I take this offer that this multinational company is giving me?
11:02
SPEAKER_00: And my dad said, You can choose the money, go for it.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: But at your age, there's still so much for you.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: So you can either choose wealth or you can choose a lifelong extended.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: And I again I chose the harder one.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: I turned away from what was the short-term option, and I went for more the longer-term vision.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: And I landed up at Novell.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: I became uh um a product manager, technology person inside of Novell.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: And then uh Eric Schmidt uh came to South Africa and I met him.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: That was before he was the CEO of Google.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: And um, he then left, and then another guy came to South Africa called Lou Wagman, and I did a tour with him.
11:41
SPEAKER_00: And a few weeks later, Lou said, Hey, we want you to fly to the United States.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: I flew and he said, We'd like you to be part of our global corporate business strategists team.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: Nice.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: And this was a team that could straddle both business and technology.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: And then I landed up in Utah.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, my first marriage, I got married, I went to the United States.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: We landed living up in Utah, it was amazing.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
12:05
SPEAKER_01: You really are global, yeah.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: So we lived in Utah, and um, yeah, so and then I moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and that was incredible.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: You know, three weeks out of every month, I was I was gone.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: I was I was living the life.
12:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, it was incredible.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: I I was living 10 MBAs, okay, you know, in that lifetime that I lived there, and then I came back to South Africa, um, and I I still continued working for Novell, and then Google came along.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: And Google was funny because Google came along, and this is how the dots sometimes connect backwards.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: They never, like Steve Jobs says, yeah, the dots never connect forward, connect.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: They always connect backwards, but the only the what people stop there and they said that's what he said.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: But the rest of what he says is the dots only connect backwards if what you do wherever you are is what you love.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: That's the rest of that story.
12:54
SPEAKER_00: True.
12:54
SPEAKER_00: Then the dots connect.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: Right?
12:56
SPEAKER_00: So uh, yeah, so so I've been lucky in my career.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: Everywhere where I was, um, I loved, and wherever I left, it was I always left on kind of a high.
13:06
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: And um, yeah, so I sent a journalist, said, Hey, Google's hiring in South Africa.
13:12
SPEAKER_00: I said to her, but Google's here already.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: I don't understand this.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: And while she was talking, I took out my Blackberry and I sent a message to a guy that knows Eric Schmidt really well, um, CEO of Google, and yeah, the rest is the history.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: He he the guy knew Eric.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: Eric saw the mail, they sent it to London.
13:29
SPEAKER_00: Mo Gordat at the time pinged me, interviewed me.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: I flew to London 18 interviews later.
13:35
SPEAKER_00: I came back to South Africa with a Google 18 interviews later.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: I came back to South Africa with a Google laptop and a Google corporate card that didn't work.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: And I I was the first employee for Google in South Africa.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: So I started Google in South Africa.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, I ran it for three and a half years.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then during those three and a half years, um this is kind of behind the success.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: Is my first marriage broke.
14:01
SPEAKER_02: Sorry.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: And um, and this is because I just gave my career everything.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: Everything.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: All your focus was.
14:11
SPEAKER_00: All my focus was there.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: And the price you pay is what we don't often talk about.
14:17
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: Right.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: So if I if if I had to rewind back in my life, would I do everything that I did the exact same way?
14:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: Were the rewards incredible?
14:26
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: The accolades, sure.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: The achievements, sure.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: But the price that was paid, dunno.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: I'd have to really, you'd have to really sit down with me and and like of over a couple bottles of champagne and really and really go through that.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: But but yeah, so I was I was lucky.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I started Google and Sarabica ran it.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: And I actually left Google because I it was an attempt to fix my marriage.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: Um I thought I'm just going to violently fix my personal life.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: And um, yeah, that didn't work out, but I did leave Google.
14:58
SPEAKER_00: And then I got involved again into this in the startup scene, and I got involved in payments, I got involved in technology.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: You did a thumbs up.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: I did thumbs up, the payment company that went global.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: It's one of the most successful um raises that we did at the time and and before fintech was fintech.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, great company.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: I I jumped out of that.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: I did an AI company, I did another AI company, I did another AI company before AI was mainstream.
15:21
SPEAKER_00: Um, and now um there's quite a few companies, but if you fast forward to where I am today, I'm the executive chairman of a company called um the Africa Bitcoin Corporation.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: Uh but before there were that, they were called Altvest Capital.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: It's a publicly traded company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
15:36
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: I was the chairman and then we've transitioned into this Bitcoin company.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh I'm the executive chairman now and director of the Bitcoin strategy.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: That's what I do 50-60% of the time.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: Nice.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, other times I'm invested in other technology companies.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: I I lecture at business school in various business schools in South Africa.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: I do keynotes um here and there when I'm asked to do it.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: I do them sp sparsely now.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: I've seen them and you're great at it.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't like to do them too much anymore, though.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: You know, so I'm very selective about the ones that I do.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: And um I mentor a lot of up-and-coming um, you know, entrepreneurs, and I love I love to do that.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: Okay, and I get called on a lot, so my my deal flow is incredible there.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, I'd select individuals that I think are gonna be superstars.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't care about the products or their services or the companies, I look at them and I can tell that this this person is a thoroughbred entrepreneur, and backing folks like that is fun.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: So that's where I'm right now.
16:35
SPEAKER_00: I've got a 25-year-old daughter, a 22-year-old daughter, um, a nine-year-old daughter, and I'm married to a lady that's called uh she's Lisa Riley.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: She's a fitness and wellness pretty well-known lady.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: She's been on TV and and this time you have the balance right.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: You always trying, you know.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: This time, do I have the balance right?
16:57
SPEAKER_00: No, because you always default to your norm, right?
17:00
SPEAKER_01: True.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: And my default is always to because whenever I get involved in something, you go all in.
17:05
SPEAKER_00: I get all in, and that's a challenge.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: How to balance that.
17:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but as I'm getting older, I'm 51 now.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: So as I'm getting older, I'm starting to learn how to do that better.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: Um, I love that saying, like, wisdom is wasted on the youth.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it's yes, no, youth is wasted on what is no wisdom is wasted on the youth.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that they don't have it.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so I um yeah, I do I strike I struggle with balance still, and I get involved in too much, but I love it.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: And right now I'm a big Bitcoin enthusiast.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, I'm a big, big Bitcoin enthusiast right now.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: I I discovered it in 2014.
17:43
SPEAKER_01: Okay, wow, 2014.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, when I was uh very deep into making payments technology with thumbs up, the little payment pebble and all that, and then Bitcoin came along.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: I looked at it and I first scoffed at it, and then when I really looked at it, I was blown away.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: Within 24 months of the of being introduced to it, that's when I turned completely.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: I mean, for me, it's fire, the wheel, Bitcoin.
18:05
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: That's how significant.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: That's how significant it is.
18:08
SPEAKER_01: All of human invention, fire, the wheel, bitcoin.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so fire is is the ability for us to externalize our stomachs.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: So when we had the ability to partially digest nutrition on the outside of our bodies, you know, we could vary up the nutrition, we could make it quite complex, and because we could feed on that, our brains changed, our DNA changed.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: That was fire.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, the wheel gave us mobility, gave us engines, yeah.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: It gave us the ability to make machines.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, if we go up in the sky, it's wheels.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think Bitcoin, the ability to exchange value globally, instantaneously, independent of an intermediary, more securely than we've done in the history of humanity.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: That's we still don't understand how big that is.
18:53
SPEAKER_01: Wow, that makes me so interested in Bitcoin more than I've ever been.
18:57
SPEAKER_01: In fact, this interview, part of it is going to be selfish.
19:01
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
19:01
SPEAKER_01: Because I want to understand Bitcoin.
19:03
SPEAKER_01: Right.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: And I feel you're the person who maybe five years from now, I'll be sitting there saying it all started with that one interview.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, maybe.
19:12
SPEAKER_00: Maybe I can they call it maybe I can orange pull you today.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: But let me just go back to my career and stuff.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the things that is very humbling, and I will say, just on the trajectory of my life, is you know, all my achievements and things that I'm I'm called out for and things that I've I've done, it wasn't me.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: You know, I was just, it was the teams that were with me, the people.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: And I wish I could call out all the names, but I've had the privilege of working with incredible human beings, like really incredible human beings.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that I learned in my career, and specifically at Google, was how to identify great talent.
19:45
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: And how to hire great people.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: You know, and Google, we were taught that when someone came along with a resume that had all the accolades on it.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: So this guy went to this university, cum laude, he does that, he does this, he does this.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: When you sat down with a human being, that was your ticket into the room.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: But when we sat down with you and we asked you, so okay, you say you're a scuba diver.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: Tell me more.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm a scuba diver, I'm a dive master, I've got these nitroxists, I've got these specializations, and uh, you just talk, talk, talk about yourself the whole time.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: Big X.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: Oh, you're a pilot.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: Oh, you fly also.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: Yes, I'm a pilot.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: What do you tell us more, more, more?
20:23
SPEAKER_00: We weren't looking for somebody that displayed excellence only.
20:28
SPEAKER_00: What we were looking for, we were taught this at Google.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: This was the trick that I learned there, which is very valuable.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: The trick was when someone sits down and says, I'm a scuba diver, I've gone on to become a dive master, and I specialize in this shark, all this other stuff.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: But where I grew up, they are disadvantaged individuals, and at the moment, I'm teaching those kids to become scuba divers and instructors themselves.
20:56
SPEAKER_00: I'm a pilot, I've put 10 kids through pilot school, through funding, da-da-da-da.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: When someone displays independent love, care, sharing, and leadership, you hire someone like that in your business, you never have to manage them.
21:11
SPEAKER_02: 100%.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to manage them.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: And that was a little trick that I picked up at Google.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: And uh, and yeah, so how do I select people that I work with and teams that I build?
21:21
SPEAKER_00: I have the saying, and I think Forbes magazine or Forbes Africa picked it up.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: I there's a saying, I choose insane passion, perpetual positivity, intermingled with integrity over any level of competency.
21:35
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: So I don't care how smart you are, because if you hire PhDs, they'll tell you beautifully, articulately, verbosely how it cannot be done.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: Hire folks that are ethical, have great integrity, drive, passion, can only perpetually positive people.
21:58
SPEAKER_00: Put coalesce a group of that.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Coagulate that character in a room.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: And you can run at the walls of Jordan, of Jericho.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Because they're all positive.
22:09
SPEAKER_01: They're all ready.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: And that's how you build great teams.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: And that's how you identify.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, how do you identify great talent?
22:16
SPEAKER_00: You know, look for someone that independently shows leadership, care, and love, and caring.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: And the second is coalesce people that are not academically brilliant, but are perpetually positive with high integrity levels.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: Those people, it's incredible what you can build.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: And I picked that up through my career.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: And that's why whenever I build anything right now, I don't build because of the technology only or the opportunity, etc.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: It's the team.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: And if you can build great teams, then you don't just you don't just build great products, you build families, you build friendships, you build impact.
22:53
SPEAKER_00: And that's more beautiful and more sustainable.
22:55
SPEAKER_00: I think and in Africa, we need to see more of this type of entrepreneurship.
22:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:59
SPEAKER_01: Because I've heard you talk a lot about systems.
23:01
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: And you talking about people and teams shows me how you're able to put together these types of systems.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, and uh and entrepreneurship is really tough in Africa.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: So a lot of people have asked me why did you come back and why don't you go away and and like why do you innovate here in Africa?
23:20
SPEAKER_00: Um and I always say, you know, the next Twitter is not going to come from here.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: The next Facebook's not going to come from here, the next Google's not going to come from here.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: The next Twitter of water purification will.
23:34
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
23:35
SPEAKER_00: The next Google of agriculture will.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: The next Yahoo of financial services will.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: Because in Africa, when you innovate, yeah, you have to be led not by market share and eyeballs and like buttons and hearts and things like that.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: You you have to innovate with human impact.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: Solving real problems.
23:57
SPEAKER_01: You have to solve real problems.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: If you're gonna if you're gonna provide anything that gets adoption at scale, you have to have real impact.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: And you've got to be driven by by conviction, not passion.
24:08
SPEAKER_00: So there's two, I always say there's two types of entrepreneurs.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
24:12
SPEAKER_00: There's innovative entrepreneurs, and then there are inventive entrepreneurs.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: Innovative entrepreneurs are folks that are driven by passion.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: They don't own anything, but they use the assets that they have to build incredible businesses.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: And they're usually the majority.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: So, example, you go off and build a mobile app development company.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: Right?
24:30
SPEAKER_00: You come to me for funding, I'm Stafford's Not 2%, because I'm not interested.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: Because you're taking, it's not your developer kit, it's not your operating system, it's not your network, it's not none of those, not your app stores, but you take a lot of those skills and you build a beautiful business.
24:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:43
SPEAKER_00: Kudos to you.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: Well done for building a business like that.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, those are innovative entrepreneurs.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: Inventive entrepreneurs build things that don't exist in the first place.
24:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: That is more difficult.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: When you want to build something and someone says, Yeah, but show me the cartner best practice for this, or it doesn't exist.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: And usually innovative entrepreneurs are driven by passion.
25:07
SPEAKER_00: Inventive entrepreneurs are driven by conviction.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: So when I built that little payment pebble that plugged into a phone, that converted the phone into a card acceptance machine, that was a world first at the time.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: But what originated that business wasn't market share or anything.
25:23
SPEAKER_00: What originated that business was I sat in a in a senior government official's office in South Africa and Johannesburg, and we were supposed to see the senior government official.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: And uh and a lady came, a black lady, and she had a baby wrapped in a blanket on her back.
25:38
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
25:39
SPEAKER_00: She was in tears.
25:40
SPEAKER_00: The baby was in tears.
25:41
SPEAKER_00: It was very traumatic.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: And um she came in, and then the secretary told me, Look, you can't see we're gonna the the this person has to see this person.
25:50
SPEAKER_00: And the door closed, and she came out, the secretary and I, and the receptionist, and I said, What happened?
25:56
SPEAKER_00: Why what's going on?
25:58
SPEAKER_00: And she said, We sent someone out to switch off this lady's utilities.
26:05
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
26:05
SPEAKER_00: Okay, this was local government.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: She had money in the bank, she had a wallet with cards, everything.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: But she gave birth to twins, and she was hurt during childbirth.
26:16
SPEAKER_02: Oh, so she can't.
26:18
SPEAKER_02: So she couldn't physically go make the payments.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: They went to her house, they switched off her utilities.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: She lost one of her babies because of the exposure.
26:25
SPEAKER_02: Oh wow.
26:27
SPEAKER_00: So I sat there and I realized that my entire career was useless and what I was doing wasn't good enough.
26:38
SPEAKER_00: That I was about to see this senior government official about a piece of technology that wasn't even built here in South Africa, and that I needed to do something about that lady that lost the baby.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: So after that, that broke me.
26:53
SPEAKER_00: And like I was really disturbed by that.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: I got a bunch of engineers together in my house and I told them about the lady, and I said, We need to solve this problem.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: And we didn't have a product, we didn't know what we were gonna do.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we had no idea.
27:08
SPEAKER_00: We just knew that a lady can't lose a baby because she can't make a payment.
27:13
SPEAKER_02: Conviction.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: We need so we started off, we thought maybe let's put a payment gateway.
27:16
SPEAKER_00: Let's do this.
27:17
SPEAKER_00: And then we finally landed up saying, Well, what if a mobile phone could accept cards like an ATM does, like a point of sale machine does.
27:27
SPEAKER_00: And that's where the birth of the payment pebble came from.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: And we start off, it was big and then small, it was a world first.
27:32
SPEAKER_00: Okay, it was tough, it was difficult, it was horrendous.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: It took seven, eight years of my life and squashed it, it ate up my time with my kids and everything.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: But what kept me going every single day was remembering that lady.
27:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and we failed, we failed a lot because we tried something that people kept on telling us Visa and MasterCard told us this, you can't do this, it's impossible.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: What you're attempting, and we kept on going back and we'd sit down and we'd say, What we're gonna try because we weren't led by anything else but that conviction, and if we could solve the problem, we could save lives.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: And that's that's inventive entrepreneurship is when you build something, people don't believe you, your engineers leave you, yeah, it's too tough for them.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: But when you hire teams and they are driven by the conviction that you have, you know what happens when you fail and you run out of money, everyone goes away, goes find, goes and finds other jobs until there's enough money again, and guess what?
28:33
SPEAKER_00: They all come back again.
28:33
SPEAKER_02: They come back again.
28:34
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
28:35
SPEAKER_00: See, a joint conviction is the most powerful thing when you're building a business.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: And that was that's what I mean.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: So I look for the right people, but I look for the right conviction.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: What was the drive behind this particular product, service, etc.?
28:49
SPEAKER_00: Because then the service of product doesn't matter anymore.
28:51
SPEAKER_00: Because it will iterate, it'll fail, it will go, and that's what we need to do in Africa more.
28:56
SPEAKER_00: We need to find inventive entrepreneurs like that.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: And I think I'm seeing more and more of that, and I'm very excited by that.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: That I'm seeing more inventive entrepreneurs starting to emerge.
29:05
SPEAKER_00: And I think what we're gonna see in Africa, I mean, we youngest population, youngest continent in the world.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: I think it's more than 60% of us are below the age of 20.
29:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, there's there's average ages.
29:18
SPEAKER_01: Is that below 25, I think.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: Below 25.
29:21
SPEAKER_00: Um, average age is 19.3 or 19.5.
29:24
SPEAKER_00: You know, we 1.4 billion, 1.5 billion people by 2030, we 2 billion people.
29:29
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: Um, we've got more terrestrial fiber on ground being deployed.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: We've got deep arterial veins in our oceans on the east coast and on the west coast.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: So we we're highly connected.
29:43
SPEAKER_00: You know, SpaceX has come along, Amazon is is doing more stuff, yeah.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: Starlink, you know, all of these other things, low orbit satellites.
29:51
SPEAKER_00: I think what's beautiful about Africa is that this promise of Africa rising, I think is going to happen in the next decade.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: I honestly believe that.
29:59
SPEAKER_00: Because I think all these kids coming up have two things.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: Three things.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: They've got ubiquitous connectivity, okay, they've got artificial cognitions, AIs, and the third thing that they have is perfect money.
30:14
SPEAKER_01: Perfect money, Bitcoin.
30:16
SPEAKER_00: Perfect.
30:16
SPEAKER_00: For the first time in human history, yeah, they've got that.
30:19
SPEAKER_00: So if you combine disparate species of artificial cognitions with this ability to transact globally, instantaneously, securely, independent, and in a sovereign, immutable way, and you combine that with all the latent human potential in Africa, and you put it in a smoothie.
30:40
SPEAKER_01: That's one beautiful smoothie.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: That's going to be something incredible.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: So I'm very positive.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm very excited about the future.
30:46
SPEAKER_01: I love your mindsets.
30:48
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's I think we're going to find that yeah in Africa.
30:50
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
30:51
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, can I go to the States and go join a startup and join the VC world and do yeah, but like it's almost innovation for innovation's sake.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: And I think what what Africa is all about is the human story.
31:04
SPEAKER_00: And I think what makes us different every time when we get up on stages in the world and we talk about what we do here and we talk about the human story, it resonates with people.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: Because I think the world's lost authenticity.
31:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we've lost our connection to humanity.
31:16
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
31:16
SPEAKER_00: And I think Africa brings you right back, it connects you deeply.
31:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: Because if you're not connected deeply, yeah, you you just you you're crippled.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: You just can't scale, you can't make it.
31:27
SPEAKER_00: And I think fast forwarding to where I am today, um, you know, we've built, we've transformed a business on the JSE into a Bitcoin-powered business.
31:36
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: And we didn't just do it because Bitcoin is cool or Bitcoin's gonna go up.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: What we realized was we now have perfect money, we have pristine capital.
31:49
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: And that that capital is being recognized globally as collateral.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: So if we can build up a balance sheet of this collateral, we can take it anywhere in the world and we can lend against it.
32:02
SPEAKER_00: So I can go to Switzerland and I can lend$10 million at 4% interest rate.
32:09
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: I can come back to South Africa with that money, collateralized with my Bitcoin, my perfect money, and I can deploy it in a private credit business that deploys it into SMMEs at an interest rate of 18 to 20%, which is cheap capital in Africa.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: Cheap, 18 to 20%.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: So that arbitrage is my profit that I feed back up into building my Bitcoin up again.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
32:32
SPEAKER_00: So I've created this beautiful flywheel that builds up a Bitcoin thermonuclear weapon.
32:38
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
32:38
SPEAKER_00: I plug it into my private credit engine that allows me to deploy fiat at scale in my SMMEs.
32:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
32:47
SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
32:49
SPEAKER_00: We work with SMMEs that the banks won't touch.
32:52
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
32:52
SPEAKER_00: So we work with the mama that has a chisel.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: So you're still supporting the system.
32:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
32:56
SPEAKER_00: So she has a chisinyama.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: She's pure cash.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: She's turning over$2 million a year with her chisinyama.
33:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: She builds houses to put her money in, which she doesn't put in the bank.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: She comes to a loan.
33:10
SPEAKER_00: She's she's totally securitized.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: But the bank won't touch her.
33:13
SPEAKER_00: A venture capital company cannot touch it.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: What we do is with our private credit engine, we have financial analysts.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: They go deep into the township, understand the township economy.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: We have a member of the board called Gigi Alcock.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: He's written a book called Castonomics, and he's written another update to that book that's just come out in the last month or so.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: And that's talking about the informal economy in Africa.
33:35
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: And in South Africa.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, in South Africa, the informal economy arguably is 30 times larger than the formal economy.
33:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I think most African countries have a larger informal economy.
33:46
SPEAKER_00: But it's not measured.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: It's not valued.
33:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:49
SPEAKER_00: So that informal economy is pure cash-based because financial instrumentation, financial electronic instrumentation doesn't work for them.
33:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: They don't want, they don't do it that way.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: Take Bitcoin to them.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: Their eyes opener.
34:04
SPEAKER_01: One of the most difficult things to do in financial planning is saving and investing towards a big goal.
34:10
SPEAKER_01: Now let me tell you my secret that I used to overcome this challenge.
34:14
SPEAKER_01: I started to do small top-ups consistently on Achieve by Petra to save and invest towards my bigger financial goal.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: For instance, when I decided to come and study masterminds in South Africa, I decided to top up daily, weekly, anything that I could until I raised enough to afford my tickets, my hotel, everything to bring this podcast to you from South Africa.
34:41
SPEAKER_01: So if you're like me and you want to overcome this challenge of saving and investing towards a big goal, use Achieve by Petra.
34:49
SPEAKER_01: The link is in the description.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: Can you explain Bitcoin to me?
34:53
SPEAKER_01: Like I know nothing about it.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
34:57
SPEAKER_00: You almost have to go.
34:58
SPEAKER_00: What Bitcoin does, when I when you touch it and you start going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, you actually don't learn Bitcoin first.
35:08
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: You learn about the history of money.
35:11
unknown: Yeah.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the history of money.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: Like where how how does money stitch together and how money is fundamental to society and how we've always um valued as a species scarcity.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: So if you go to the the Homo sapiens or I don't know, the Neanderthals in Europe, and they unearthed in the cave, I think it was last year or the year before, they found a whole bunch of these rare shells beautifully collected and all of them dead around it.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: Right?
35:44
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
35:45
SPEAKER_00: Even when we were homo, like we were back then Neanderthals, in our DNA we valued scarcity.
35:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
35:53
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
35:53
SPEAKER_00: So scarcity is a commodity, scarcity is an asset.
35:58
SPEAKER_00: Scarcity has value in our societies.
36:01
SPEAKER_00: So if you accept that and you start looking how we used feathers, spices, yeah, stones, um uh keep going, right?
36:11
SPEAKER_00: Throughout the history, calories, we kept keep going, and then we the metals came along, and then finally we found gold.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: And gold was extraordinary because gold, even though it was useless, I say that all the time.
36:25
SPEAKER_00: It's a useless metal.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: I mean, my for Gen Z, they don't care about a shiny yellow metal.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they really don't, right?
36:33
SPEAKER_00: They see no value in it.
36:34
SPEAKER_00: But I'll we'll fast forward to that in a second.
36:36
SPEAKER_00: But so but gold had its value because we could take our time and energy, and gold was a reflection of the store value of that time and energy.
36:48
SPEAKER_00: So, whatever work you do, if you can store it or be compensated in that.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: So when you do anything, you a podcast interviewer, you a cameraman, you are a person that cleans this place where we're sitting right now, your time and energy is rewarded in money.
37:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
37:05
SPEAKER_00: So through the ages, we've constantly tried to preserve that money.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: So we either put it in shells and spite, all these other things, but gold has been has proven for thousands of years to be a really great store of time and energy.
37:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: Right?
37:20
SPEAKER_00: Over time.
37:21
SPEAKER_00: So you can take your time and your energy and you can store it in this asset.
37:24
SPEAKER_00: And this asset is scarce, it's verifiably scarce.
37:29
SPEAKER_00: It has got a stock-to-flow ratio of about say 2%.
37:34
SPEAKER_00: What that means is what we have on the surface, okay, we can never take more than 1.8 to 2% out of the ground relative to what we have on the top of the ground.
37:44
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
37:44
SPEAKER_00: So the flow of relative to the stock that we have on the surface, it's predictable.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: So it leaks though, but gold still leaks.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: It leaks 2% a year.
37:54
SPEAKER_00: Because it increments in volume 2% a year.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: Every yeah.
37:59
SPEAKER_00: So it gets 2% less scarce every year.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
38:02
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
38:02
SPEAKER_00: So, but that for thousands of years, even though it leaked 1% to 2% a year, that stock-to-flow ratio was.
38:08
SPEAKER_00: Still measurable.
38:09
SPEAKER_00: Measurable and scarce.
38:11
SPEAKER_00: Scarcest asset.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: And that scarcity is how we've stored our time and energy over time.
38:18
SPEAKER_00: And that's been good.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: The problem with gold is that when you know the properties of gold.
38:25
SPEAKER_00: Gold is heavy.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: It's very difficult to verify gold.
38:30
SPEAKER_00: So if someone says here's a gold bar, you don't know what's inside that gold bar.
38:36
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
38:37
SPEAKER_01: That's what the Romans did.
38:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
38:38
SPEAKER_00: So the fall of the Roman Empire, if you go back in history, you'll always see that the fall of any empire is directly correlated to the money breaking.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: When the money breaks, the society breaks.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
38:50
SPEAKER_00: Everything breaks.
38:51
SPEAKER_00: Right.
38:51
SPEAKER_00: So in the Roman Empire, what did they do?
38:54
SPEAKER_00: They wanted to fight more wars.
38:56
SPEAKER_00: And when they were on the gold standard, look what they built.
38:58
SPEAKER_00: They built the Colosseum.
38:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:00
SPEAKER_00: Look at this, look at the statues.
39:01
SPEAKER_00: Look at the cities.
39:02
SPEAKER_00: Look at how they conquered the world on what?
39:04
SPEAKER_00: On gold.
39:05
SPEAKER_00: And they stole the gold.
39:07
SPEAKER_00: When they started running out of gold to fund their wars, what did they do?
39:11
SPEAKER_00: The Romans started taking metals that were not gold and melting it up into the gold.
39:16
SPEAKER_00: So that's why the term sound money comes from.
39:20
SPEAKER_02: Sound money.
39:21
SPEAKER_00: When someone says this is sound money, this is good money.
39:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:23
SPEAKER_00: It comes from that time because people who drop the coin on the floor and they knew the difference between a gold coin.
39:28
SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
39:29
SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
39:30
SPEAKER_00: And a coin that was hybridized.
39:33
SPEAKER_00: Right.
39:34
SPEAKER_00: And but the reason the Romans did was they inflated the currency.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: So they made more gold without extracting it out of the earth.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: So they could increase the supply so they could pay for their wars.
39:44
SPEAKER_00: And what happened?
39:45
SPEAKER_00: That was the collapse of the Roman Empire.
39:47
SPEAKER_00: It started with broken money.
39:49
SPEAKER_00: And that usually happens is when we increase in a when we print more money, when we increment more money in this inauthentic way, then we break society.
40:00
SPEAKER_00: Now fast forward to where we are today.
40:02
SPEAKER_01: Now money's based on debt.
40:04
SPEAKER_00: So here's a statistic.
40:05
SPEAKER_00: 80% of the US dollars in circulation today.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: 80% of the US dollars in circulation today was printed in the last five years.
40:14
SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
40:15
SPEAKER_00: Let me say that again.
40:17
SPEAKER_01: 80%.
40:19
SPEAKER_00: More than 80% of the US dollars in circulation today in 2025 was printed since 2020.
40:25
SPEAKER_01: Since COVID.
40:27
SPEAKER_00: Let me say that again.
40:29
SPEAKER_00: In the last five years, 80% of all the dollars in circulation today were printed.
40:35
SPEAKER_00: Printed on what fundamentals?
40:37
SPEAKER_00: On what basis?
40:39
SPEAKER_00: It was just printed.
40:41
SPEAKER_00: This happened in 1971 when Richard Nixon was fighting the Vietnam War.
40:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:47
SPEAKER_00: And he was held back.
40:49
SPEAKER_00: Right?
40:50
SPEAKER_00: I'm making it real simple, but the essence of it, he was held back because the dollar was tied to gold.
40:56
SPEAKER_00: And what did he do?
40:57
SPEAKER_00: He ripped the connection between the two.
40:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:59
SPEAKER_00: And he said, now the dollar is tied to political stability, economic this, uh, rule of law, military might, etc.
41:09
SPEAKER_00: Our stability is all these like esoterical.
41:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what did he do?
41:12
SPEAKER_00: He took the gold and he melted the other metals into to make more.
41:16
SPEAKER_00: So now the Fed in the United States could go print more money.
41:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
41:19
SPEAKER_00: Why to fight the wars?
41:21
SPEAKER_00: How did they fight the war in the Middle East?
41:22
SPEAKER_00: They spent arguably between nine and twelve trillion dollars in the Middle East.
41:27
SPEAKER_01: Which they printed out of.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: They printed it.
41:29
SPEAKER_00: And and so now they're sitting with$38 trillion of debt.
41:35
SPEAKER_00: $38 trillion.
41:37
SPEAKER_00: Who who do they owe exactly?
41:39
SPEAKER_00: So$38 trillion of debt, they keep printing it, and they're now printing a trillion, I think, every six to nine months.
41:46
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
41:49
SPEAKER_00: So the dollar's broken.
41:51
SPEAKER_00: But it's still the world reserve currency.
41:52
SPEAKER_00: It's still the unit of account.
41:54
SPEAKER_00: It is the most liquid asset in the world.
41:55
SPEAKER_00: When you want to buy oil from another country, you can't buy oil with gold.
42:00
SPEAKER_00: You can't buy oil with rubles.
42:02
SPEAKER_00: You can't buy oil with yen.
42:04
SPEAKER_00: You can't buy oil with czar or the pound.
42:07
SPEAKER_00: The only thing in the world that has the necessary liquidity to settle those large amounts is the US dollar.
42:11
SPEAKER_00: So it is the global reserve currency, but the money is broken.
42:14
SPEAKER_00: Now, when the money is not broken, then you get like the Roman Empire.
42:19
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
42:19
SPEAKER_00: When the money is not broken, you get the Renaissance.
42:22
SPEAKER_00: Go look at the Renaissance.
42:24
SPEAKER_00: You get a guy that can lay on his back and paint ceilings.
42:27
SPEAKER_00: You know, he can do the statue of David.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: He can create a staircase, Leonardo da Vinci.
42:33
SPEAKER_00: He can dream things up because his passion and his love is rewarded because his time and energy doesn't deflate over time.
42:43
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
42:43
SPEAKER_00: See, the problem that you have right now is whenever, and let me just go, when in human history, when we were on hard money, on scarce money, we invent things.
42:56
SPEAKER_00: If you take a look at the nine from the 1900s all the way up until 1960s, right?
43:02
SPEAKER_00: Take a look at the cars.
43:04
SPEAKER_00: We went to the moon.
43:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
43:06
SPEAKER_01: Look at all the inventions.
43:07
SPEAKER_01: Everything was new, everything was fresh.
43:09
SPEAKER_00: We won hard money.
43:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:10
SPEAKER_00: See, whenever we're in hard money, you go back to the Renaissance, hard money.
43:14
SPEAKER_00: You go back to the Roman Empire, hard money.
43:16
SPEAKER_00: Whenever there is hard money, then people's time and energy can be stored verifiably over time.
43:25
SPEAKER_00: And when you can do that, it changes what you do, it changes your behavior pattern.
43:29
SPEAKER_00: It changes the reason we have the mental health problems that we have, the reason Africa is in the state that it's in, the reason all the social challenges that we have, it's not social media and all that stuff.
43:41
SPEAKER_00: No, it's broken money.
43:42
SPEAKER_00: I have Gen Z's in my house.
43:44
SPEAKER_00: I have a 25 year old and a 22 year old in my house.
43:47
SPEAKER_00: They're Bitcoiners.
43:49
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
43:49
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
43:50
SPEAKER_00: And because they're Bitcoiners, they have hope.
43:54
SPEAKER_00: They have hope for the because their time and energy is stored in Bitcoin.
43:57
SPEAKER_00: So you know what they've seen?
44:00
SPEAKER_00: They've seen our house where we live four or five years ago, it was worth a few thousand bitcoin.
44:07
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
44:08
SPEAKER_00: Three years ago, a few hundred bitcoin.
44:10
SPEAKER_00: Now the house is worth three to four bitcoins.
44:13
SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
44:14
SPEAKER_01: So the house is losing value.
44:17
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, no.
44:19
SPEAKER_00: The house increases in value, actually.
44:22
SPEAKER_00: But the money is getting weaker.
44:24
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
44:24
SPEAKER_00: I guess you see in their eyes, everything gets cheaper.
44:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
44:29
SPEAKER_00: You see, when people say my groceries are getting more expensive, no, your groceries aren't getting more expensive.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: Your money is getting weaker.
44:36
SPEAKER_00: When you get that, when you see that your house may be going up in price, but the buying power over time keeps collapsing.
44:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
44:44
SPEAKER_00: In South Africa, the South African RAN has lost 98% of its buying power from 1994 to 2025.
44:51
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
44:51
SPEAKER_00: Let me say that again.
44:53
SPEAKER_00: 98% of its buying power from 1994 to 2025.
44:58
SPEAKER_00: So if you had put your money, your 100 Rand, if you put your 100 Rand in a bank in 1994, what you could spend with that money today, if you took it out of the bank.
45:08
SPEAKER_02: Only two Rand.
45:09
SPEAKER_00: Two Rand.
45:11
SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
45:12
SPEAKER_00: See?
45:12
SPEAKER_00: When your time and energy cannot be stored, you know what happens?
45:16
SPEAKER_00: You don't have hope.
45:16
SPEAKER_00: And when you don't have hope on a subconscious basis, you know what the first thing you do?
45:21
SPEAKER_00: You open up Sheen and Timu and you buy rubbish.
45:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
45:25
SPEAKER_01: Because you want to get rid of your money as quick as you can.
45:29
SPEAKER_00: Mentally.
45:29
SPEAKER_00: You get rid of your money as quick as you can.
45:31
SPEAKER_00: You buy things that don't matter.
45:32
SPEAKER_00: You invest in things that don't have certainty.
45:34
SPEAKER_00: You take risks because you're constantly trying to store your value.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
45:39
SPEAKER_00: The store of value in the world, art, commercial real estate, private real estate, equities, what are all those things?
45:50
SPEAKER_00: Those are things where wealthy people are trying to store their money over time.
45:56
SPEAKER_00: I buy the painting because I don't want it to lose value.
45:59
SPEAKER_00: Rich people don't have money in a bank.
46:02
SPEAKER_00: Rich people don't have money in the bank.
46:05
SPEAKER_00: They have money working.
46:08
SPEAKER_00: What do they mean when they say money working?
46:11
SPEAKER_00: It's because they're trying to preserve their time and energy over time.
46:14
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
46:14
SPEAKER_00: That's what they're trying to do.
46:16
SPEAKER_00: They're trying to not lose the value of what they have.
46:19
SPEAKER_00: So gold, great store of value.
46:23
SPEAKER_00: Problem is Gen Z, me, I've no like take 10 million rands of gold.
46:31
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
46:32
SPEAKER_00: Put it in a suitcase and try and check out the airport.
46:36
SPEAKER_00: Take 10 million rand of money.
46:38
SPEAKER_00: Money.
46:39
SPEAKER_00: Draw it out the bank.
46:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
46:41
SPEAKER_00: Try and get it.
46:42
SPEAKER_00: The bank won't give it to you.
46:43
SPEAKER_00: Try and take your 10 million rand out of a bank.
46:45
SPEAKER_01: So it's not hard money.
46:47
SPEAKER_00: It's not your money.
46:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
46:49
SPEAKER_00: It's not your bank.
46:50
SPEAKER_00: It's not your money.
46:51
SPEAKER_00: So your money's not there.
46:53
SPEAKER_00: So where is it?
46:54
SPEAKER_00: You go down that rabbit hole, you'll see your entire life is a lie.
46:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
46:59
SPEAKER_00: It's the craziest thing.
47:01
SPEAKER_01: Because if you get cut off, because you don't own it, you don't have it.
47:05
SPEAKER_01: So if you just get cut off like that, your whole world changes.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: It's like that's the endemic of Africa, right?
47:10
SPEAKER_00: A general takes over, the deeds office.
47:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:13
SPEAKER_00: Your house is no longer your house.
47:15
SPEAKER_00: Go to Zimbabwe.
47:16
SPEAKER_00: Money debasement.
47:18
SPEAKER_00: When I have$10 in the morning, and by the I know the loaf of bread is$10, by the time I get to the shop, it's$100,000.
47:26
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
47:27
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's inflation.
47:29
SPEAKER_00: That is money losing its buying power.
47:31
SPEAKER_01: Crazy inflation.
47:32
SPEAKER_00: Well, you say crazy.
47:34
SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about inflation.
47:36
SPEAKER_00: In South Africa, what is like four, four percent, five percent, go around the world.
47:41
SPEAKER_00: If your money debases between three and five percent every year, in five years to six years, you've lost 50% of your buying power.
47:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:50
SPEAKER_01: And we don't realize that.
47:51
SPEAKER_00: You don't realize it.
47:52
SPEAKER_00: It's a slow bleed.
47:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:54
SPEAKER_00: All the time.
47:54
SPEAKER_00: And that 2% to 5% inflation, who sets that target?
48:00
SPEAKER_00: How is it set?
48:01
SPEAKER_00: There's 12 to 20 people in the world that make up that number.
48:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
48:04
SPEAKER_00: They make it up.
48:05
SPEAKER_00: And your money in your bank account is based upon that.
48:07
SPEAKER_00: So why Bitcoin?
48:09
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
48:10
SPEAKER_01: Why?
48:10
SPEAKER_01: How does Bitcoin?
48:11
SPEAKER_00: Because everything else around you is broken.
48:14
SPEAKER_00: So if you can accept that, gold is not, you can't move around with your gold.
48:17
SPEAKER_00: You can't verify your gold.
48:19
SPEAKER_00: You can't go to Starbucks with a gold bar and then take shavings off your gold bar to pay for your latte or whatever you're buying.
48:28
SPEAKER_00: You can't move it.
48:29
SPEAKER_00: It's not divisible.
48:30
SPEAKER_00: It's you've not verifiable.
48:32
SPEAKER_00: It's not transportable.
48:34
SPEAKER_00: If you accept that the hardest thing on earth that's lasted thousands of years for us is no longer relative to our life.
48:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
48:40
SPEAKER_00: Gen Zs don't want gold.
48:42
SPEAKER_00: Right?
48:42
SPEAKER_00: If we were horse and buggy people, yeah, maybe gold would be very good.
48:45
SPEAKER_01: And like you mentioned, honestly, if you put a gold bar in front of me right now, I wouldn't know how to verify it.
48:50
SPEAKER_00: We'd have to cut it open or melt it down.
48:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
48:53
SPEAKER_00: And then you can say, okay, now okay, cool.
48:55
SPEAKER_00: That's a bunker.
48:56
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
48:57
SPEAKER_00: So it's not applicable to the digital age.
49:00
SPEAKER_00: In the digital age where a business has digital value and we're trying to move information digitally, we need digital money.
49:07
SPEAKER_00: We need digital.
49:08
SPEAKER_00: So what is Bitcoin?
49:10
SPEAKER_00: Bitcoin is value tied to energy and physics.
49:18
SPEAKER_00: So the way the Bitcoin protocol works is it is a ledger of all the transactions copied onto nodes, decentralized across the entire world.
49:30
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
49:30
SPEAKER_00: And the entire ledger every 10 minutes changes.
49:34
SPEAKER_00: It gets appended.
49:35
SPEAKER_00: So all the activity for the last 10 minutes gets added onto the ledger, and that copy is replicated in a decentralized manner across the entire world.
49:43
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
49:44
SPEAKER_00: Now every 10 minutes, something happens called proof of work.
49:48
SPEAKER_00: And proof of work is when you take computing power and you apply it to solve a cryptographic puzzle.
49:56
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
49:57
SPEAKER_00: And when you solve the cryptographic puzzle, the protocol rewards you every 10 minutes today with 3.1 bitcoins.
50:05
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
50:05
SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
50:06
SPEAKER_00: So every 10 minutes, Bitcoin spits out today, just over three bitcoins.
50:11
SPEAKER_00: You get rewarded with over three.
50:13
SPEAKER_00: So three bitcoins today is what, like seven million Rand.
50:16
SPEAKER_00: So every 10 minutes, 7 million Rand is issued out as a reward, a block reward to a Bitcoin miner in the world.
50:24
SPEAKER_00: So we call them Bitcoin miners.
50:26
SPEAKER_00: Bitcoin miners take tech um computers called ASICs.
50:30
SPEAKER_00: These are single-purpose machines built for mining Bitcoin.
50:34
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
50:35
SPEAKER_00: So what they do is they're trying to solve that cryptographic puzzle the entire time.
50:39
SPEAKER_00: So they put their hands up on a decentralized basis saying, I'll solve it, I'll solve it.
50:42
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
50:43
SPEAKER_00: And whoever has the most computing power, the most efficient power, et cetera, et cetera, cheapest power, gets to solve that puzzle, and then they get rewarded.
50:51
SPEAKER_01: So when they get rewarded with the Bitcoin, this means now this Bitcoin miner has received the 3.1 Bitcoin.
50:57
SPEAKER_00: Bitcoin.
50:57
SPEAKER_00: So they're sitting with that Bitcoin.
50:58
SPEAKER_00: So they can convert that Bitcoin into fiat, gold, or wherever they live.
51:01
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
51:02
SPEAKER_00: Or they can just keep adding.
51:03
SPEAKER_00: Now those Bitcoin miners are decentralized.
51:05
SPEAKER_00: They're all over the world.
51:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, they use up a lot of energy.
51:09
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
51:10
SPEAKER_00: So it's money tied to energy.
51:11
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
51:12
SPEAKER_00: And when you tie anything to energy, no government can.
51:16
SPEAKER_00: Energy is nature.
51:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's universal.
51:19
SPEAKER_00: It's energy is incorruptible.
51:22
SPEAKER_00: Energy is beautiful.
51:24
SPEAKER_00: Energy is truth.
51:26
SPEAKER_00: Energy can't lie, energy can't be influenced.
51:30
SPEAKER_00: Energy is energy, right?
51:33
SPEAKER_00: Power from Earth, electrons, power.
51:36
SPEAKER_00: And if you can coalesce that power, the computing power, that electricity power, and you combine it together and you mine Bitcoin, that's the Bitcoin network.
51:44
SPEAKER_00: And that's why Bitcoin is so different from anything else in the world.
51:46
SPEAKER_01: So it's still like hard money because the same way you'd have a miner who would go in the ground and get the gold out, you have a Bitcoin miner, this time it's just doing it through technology and getting the Bitcoin out.
52:01
SPEAKER_00: There you go.
52:01
SPEAKER_00: Now the difference is the stock to flow in Bitcoin keeps going down, down, down.
52:08
SPEAKER_00: And gold, the supply keeps going up, up, up, up.
52:11
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
52:12
SPEAKER_00: And it leaks.
52:13
SPEAKER_00: See, Bitcoin, it gets scarcer and scarcer because every four years, those 10 minutes, the amount of Bitcoin that's issued out by the protocol halves.
52:23
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
52:23
SPEAKER_00: So a couple years ago, it was six point summing bitcoins.
52:26
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
52:26
SPEAKER_00: Then the halving came, which happens every four years automatically by the protocol.
52:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
52:30
SPEAKER_00: Now it's spitting out 3.1.
52:32
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
52:32
SPEAKER_00: The next halving will be 1.6.
52:35
SPEAKER_01: 1.6.
52:35
SPEAKER_01: 1.55.
52:36
SPEAKER_00: And at four, and so then the last bitcoin will be mined in 2140.
52:40
SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
52:41
SPEAKER_00: See, it gets scarcer and scarcer.
52:43
SPEAKER_00: It is the scarcest thing humanity has ever experienced.
52:50
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so now it will only be 21 million of them.
52:53
SPEAKER_01: Now I get how it gets to the Bitcoin miner.
52:55
SPEAKER_01: Now, me, I'm not a Bitcoin miner.
52:57
SPEAKER_01: So how do I get the Bitcoin?
52:58
SPEAKER_01: I need to purchase it from the Bitcoin miner.
53:00
SPEAKER_00: Let me explain that.
53:01
SPEAKER_00: So what people are doing today is because of the scarcity.
53:05
SPEAKER_00: Now remember in our DNA, we love scarcity.
53:08
SPEAKER_00: We love scarcity.
53:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
53:09
SPEAKER_00: Because scarcity is where I can store my value.
53:11
SPEAKER_00: Scarcity is where I can contrast what's happening.
53:14
SPEAKER_00: And if I can get something scarce, it's desirable.
53:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
53:17
SPEAKER_00: And we store things in the things we desire.
53:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
53:19
SPEAKER_00: So Bitcoin is the ultimate place to store your value.
53:22
SPEAKER_00: Why?
53:24
SPEAKER_00: When you can get it, we'll talk about how you get it in a second.
53:26
SPEAKER_00: But when you have it, it's digital gold.
53:29
SPEAKER_00: It's a digital store value.
53:31
SPEAKER_00: The government can't take it away from you.
53:35
SPEAKER_00: They can't switch off the Bitcoin network.
53:37
SPEAKER_00: They can't influence it.
53:39
SPEAKER_00: They can't make more Bitcoin.
53:41
SPEAKER_00: It's immutable, it's sovereign, it's divisible, it's fungible, it's global, it's decentralized, it's sovereign, it is independent of there is no the amount of computers, the amount of Bitcoin miners that secure and issue our bitcoins in the world, we've crossed the Zeta hash mark.
54:01
SPEAKER_00: What that means is if you took all the computing power of Google, Microsoft, Apple, OpenAI, you took all of those computers together and you tried to attack the Bitcoin network, you wouldn't put it away.
54:14
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
54:14
SPEAKER_00: That's how it's the most secure network that we've ever seen in the history of humanity.
54:19
SPEAKER_00: It's never been hacked, never been compromised.
54:21
SPEAKER_00: Its computing power is unrivaled.
54:24
SPEAKER_00: It's completely immutable.
54:26
SPEAKER_00: Putin can't switch it off.
54:27
SPEAKER_00: Putin and Z and Trump can't switch it off.
54:30
SPEAKER_00: They can't do anything with it.
54:32
SPEAKER_00: No general in Africa, nothing, can switch it off.
54:36
SPEAKER_00: You take these properties to a Zimbabwean, they get Bitcoin like that.
54:40
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
54:40
SPEAKER_00: A Ghanaian, like that.
54:42
SPEAKER_00: A South African, like that.
54:44
SPEAKER_00: You take it to a USA guy, you've got to explain it to him for a while.
54:47
SPEAKER_00: A European, you've got to explain it because their currency is stronger, but so it takes them a while.
54:52
SPEAKER_00: You walk in El Dorado Park, you talk Bitcoin to anyone, it takes me two to three minutes, they get it.
54:57
SPEAKER_00: What?
54:58
SPEAKER_00: I can move it across the world anyway, I can own it, I can put it wherever I want.
55:01
SPEAKER_00: No one can take it away from me.
55:02
SPEAKER_00: It gets scarcer and scarcer and scarcer.
55:04
SPEAKER_00: So the value keeps going up over time.
55:06
SPEAKER_00: I'm in.
55:07
SPEAKER_00: So any African, I'm in.
55:09
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
55:10
SPEAKER_00: We've never had that on the African continent before.
55:12
SPEAKER_00: We've never had pristine money.
55:13
SPEAKER_00: So how do you get this?
55:14
SPEAKER_00: So the way Bitcoin was originally made, um, the way it's architected, to get it, you had to earn it.
55:22
SPEAKER_00: So you had to put up a miner, a Bitcoin miner, and let it run, and then you'd earn Bitcoin.
55:28
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
55:28
SPEAKER_00: Then someone with the Bitcoin could send you the Bitcoin in a wallet.
55:31
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
55:32
SPEAKER_00: So I cut your hair, you send me the Bitcoin.
55:35
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
55:35
SPEAKER_00: Then I get Bitcoin.
55:36
SPEAKER_00: But we then integrated it with the fiat world.
55:39
SPEAKER_00: So now we have exchanges.
55:41
SPEAKER_00: Like in South Africa, we got Luno and Vala.
55:44
SPEAKER_00: Internationally, we got Kraken and Coinbase.
55:46
SPEAKER_00: These are companies that attach to the Bitcoin network that will take your money out of your bank, your fiat money, your USD, your Zoom dollars, whatever, and they'll keep it in a money wallet.
55:56
SPEAKER_00: And then you can go on their exchanges and go buy Bitcoin from other people.
56:00
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
56:01
SPEAKER_00: And then you take your fiat money and you buy Bitcoin.
56:03
SPEAKER_00: And then you have Bitcoin in a wallet on the exchanges.
56:06
SPEAKER_00: Then you can take the Bitcoin off the exchanges and have it on a memory stick.
56:09
SPEAKER_00: You can remember your passphrases.
56:11
SPEAKER_00: You can, I mean, people, refugees, are leaving countries and their wealth is in their heads for the first time in the history of humanity.
56:19
SPEAKER_00: Ukrainians, when Russia went in there, thousands of Ukrainians left Ukraine.
56:24
SPEAKER_00: They went to the bank, and the bank said, sorry, we don't have your money.
56:28
SPEAKER_00: It was a bank run.
56:29
SPEAKER_01: Because there's nothing you can do, yeah.
56:31
SPEAKER_01: Nothing you can do.
56:31
SPEAKER_01: Your money is controlled.
56:32
SPEAKER_00: So a lot of them converted into Bitcoin.
56:34
SPEAKER_00: They're left with a few clothing items, and they went through immigration customs, etc., and their money was in their head.
56:41
SPEAKER_00: A million dollars was in their heads.
56:43
SPEAKER_00: They got to the other side and they had Bitcoin.
56:45
SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
56:46
SPEAKER_00: That's so so Bitcoin is now, and so for us, it's perfect money.
56:52
SPEAKER_00: It's pristine capital.
56:54
SPEAKER_00: And when you have that, everything changes.
56:56
SPEAKER_01: So I can either earn Bitcoin by being paid Bitcoin for the work I've done, or now you're saying through the fiat companies, I can I can trade Bitcoin any other currency.
57:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you can buy it and you can own it.
57:10
SPEAKER_00: And its performance, it's the best performing asset for the last three years, five years, eight years, ten years.
57:17
SPEAKER_01: So how are some people losing money to Bitcoin?
57:21
SPEAKER_01: I don't understand that.
57:22
SPEAKER_00: Because people try to trade it.
57:23
SPEAKER_00: There's a difference between okay, so people always say Bitcoin's volatile.
57:28
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
57:28
SPEAKER_02: That's why that might be.
57:30
SPEAKER_02: That's volatile.
57:30
SPEAKER_00: It goes up and down.
57:31
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
57:33
SPEAKER_00: It's a young thing.
57:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
57:35
SPEAKER_00: It's a young thing.
57:36
SPEAKER_00: And what we see happening is it was, you know, cypherpunks owned it, and then you know, some wealthy technology people got involved with it.
57:44
SPEAKER_00: And now businesses are getting involved.
57:46
SPEAKER_00: Now banks are starting to, now nation states are saying they can use it as a national reserve currency.
57:52
SPEAKER_00: So it's quite interesting to see how these big, big people.
57:55
SPEAKER_00: And and with these changes come the fluctuations.
57:58
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
57:59
SPEAKER_00: But if you take a look at Bitcoin's volatility, from the day it started in 2008 to now, it looks from there to there, if you draw a straight line, it looks like that.
58:08
SPEAKER_00: It outperforms every single asset in the entire world.
58:11
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
58:14
SPEAKER_00: But if you go zoom in, you'll see over here it's done that, done that, done that, but it does this, does that all the way up.
58:21
SPEAKER_00: So if you can dry the roller coaster, you need to hold it.
58:24
SPEAKER_00: Hold it.
58:25
SPEAKER_00: So they call it HODLET.
58:26
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
58:26
SPEAKER_00: So that was something that was a mistake.
58:27
SPEAKER_00: Someone said hodl versus hold, and now we say it's hold on for dear life.
58:31
SPEAKER_00: Huddle.
58:32
SPEAKER_00: But I mean you hold your Bitcoin.
58:33
SPEAKER_00: And what I like, I tell my kids, um, you if you're gonna buy Bitcoin, um, you hold it for no less than 48 months.
58:40
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
58:40
SPEAKER_00: For four years.
58:41
SPEAKER_00: If no one has ever held Bitcoin for four years or more and lost money, it just always goes up.
58:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and if you start understanding the underlying protocol, if you start understanding how broken the world is around us, then you understand the opportunity that Bitcoin has.
58:54
SPEAKER_00: And in Africa, um, it's so exciting because we're seeing circular economies emerging in Africa, right?
59:00
SPEAKER_00: We see Bitcoin Ikassi, uh Kylicha.
59:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm seeing in Ghana, I've seen in Kenya the largest slum there, that everyone's starting to use Bitcoin now.
59:10
SPEAKER_00: And what we see is a few things change when someone um starts using Bitcoin.
59:14
SPEAKER_00: First of all, is when your money is stored and it doesn't debase, you know what happens?
59:19
SPEAKER_00: You get more dignity, you're proud, you see a future, you see hope.
59:23
SPEAKER_00: You start to move different, you start to move different, start to act different.
59:26
SPEAKER_00: So we're seeing that in the townships.
59:28
SPEAKER_00: Second thing that we see is um the quality of services go up.
59:32
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
59:33
SPEAKER_00: Because when a merchant has to sell you something and you have perfect money, for you to impart with your perfect money, that service has got to be real high quality.
59:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you stop buying Timu and Sheen rubbish, and you only buy qualitative things.
59:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so immediately townships, the amount of waste drops.
59:51
SPEAKER_00: So characters change, waste diminishes, crime and gangsterism don't have a reason to exist anymore.
59:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
59:59
SPEAKER_00: Because people can focus on their hope.
1:00:01
SPEAKER_00: So, for example, in um Bitcoin Ikassi, they've got those surfer kids, an NGO for black kids that want to surf.
1:00:08
SPEAKER_00: And what's very exciting when I talked about them, that we're gonna see the first black professional surfer coming from that whole initiative.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_00: Why?
1:00:16
SPEAKER_00: Because those surfing kids, when I spoke to Harriman that overseas, I said, What?
1:00:19
SPEAKER_00: Tell me.
1:00:20
SPEAKER_00: He said, You know, those surfing kids, if they were on Tsar, on South African RAN, they could never compete on a global basis.
1:00:27
SPEAKER_00: The Tsar just is too weak.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_00: So when he is even if his earnings are, so that kid would have to go wash cars, clean gardens, beg, etc., build up his money so he could surf when he has time and then buy a ticket to go compete in Australia.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_00: But on Bitcoin, he gets paid in Satoshis, which is the decimal of Bitcoin, Satoshis.
1:00:47
SPEAKER_00: He gets paid in Satoshis, he can surf, he can focus on his surfing.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_00: And his money doesn't get weaker, which means he can start competing on a global scale because the money that he's earning is not being debased, which means he can comp he can pay for the Australia entry ticket.
1:01:02
SPEAKER_00: He can go to Hawaii and pay for the ticket, he can pay in the United States for the ticket.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_00: See, when you have hard money, you can do what you love.
1:01:08
SPEAKER_01: And this is why when you talk to an African about Bitcoin, they get it.
1:01:12
SPEAKER_01: Because we've suffered for so long broken money with broken money.
1:01:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:01:17
SPEAKER_01: Where you are working as hard as somebody else from another country, but your money is not worth as much.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_01: So it makes you value hard money like Bitcoin more.
1:01:28
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:01:28
SPEAKER_01: Because it means wherever I am, whatever I do, I can earn the same amount of money.
1:01:34
SPEAKER_00: Spotter.
1:01:35
SPEAKER_00: Spotter.
1:01:36
SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't get debased.
1:01:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:01:38
SPEAKER_00: No government can take it away from me.
1:01:40
SPEAKER_00: No government can weaken it.
1:01:42
SPEAKER_01: How is that?
1:01:42
SPEAKER_01: How is that protected?
1:01:44
SPEAKER_00: It's the decentralized nature of it.
1:01:45
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:01:46
SPEAKER_00: So you get home tonight, you can go buy a Bitcoin miner, a little piece of machine.
1:01:50
SPEAKER_00: You can plug in a network cable and a power cable, you switch it on, and it mines Bitcoin for you.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_00: No government can switch it off.
1:01:55
SPEAKER_01: So then how is this selected?
1:01:57
SPEAKER_01: You said every 10 minutes, one Bitcoin miner gets 3.1 Bitcoin.
1:02:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, somewhere in the world.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_01: So how does that happen?
1:02:04
SPEAKER_01: When is if I get a Bitcoin miner right now, when is it my turn to get it?
1:02:09
SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's random, it's completely randomized.
1:02:13
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:02:14
SPEAKER_00: You never know.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_00: But example, uh, let me go a little bit deeper down the rabbit hole.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_00: So we've spoken about the money side of Bitcoin.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_00: The beautiful side is the Bitcoin mining side.
1:02:23
SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you why the Bitcoin mining side to me is more interesting and where it becomes fire wheel Bitcoin.
1:02:31
SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm working right now, I've got a company.
1:02:34
SPEAKER_00: Um, I'll say the name, it's called Bitmac.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_00: Stealth Mode doesn't even have a website.
1:02:39
SPEAKER_00: I've got a billionaire on board with me, um, co-investing with me, got an incredible engineering and uh team.
1:02:46
SPEAKER_00: And what we're building out is one of the largest Bitcoin mines in the entire world.
1:02:52
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:02:52
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:02:53
SPEAKER_00: So the reason we can do this is the following.
1:02:56
SPEAKER_00: Those machines that power Bitcoin mining, they're called ASICs ASICs, those machines have the ability to take gigawatts of power and mine, and you have the ability to switch them off instantaneously.
1:03:09
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:03:10
SPEAKER_00: And switch them on instantaneously, and they'll take a gigawatt again.
1:03:12
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:03:13
SPEAKER_00: And because they're capable of doing that, we can offer services that stabilizes our national energy grid.
1:03:19
SPEAKER_00: The problem with electricity in the world today is that we lose between 30 and 40 percent of all the electricity that we generate globally.
1:03:29
SPEAKER_00: Transmission lines, um we make too much, so the demand-supply issue.
1:03:37
SPEAKER_00: Um they call it the duck curve.
1:03:39
SPEAKER_00: So in the morning, on the duck's head, we're showering, we're making toast, lots of energy.
1:03:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, then we go to work, no energy we're utilizing, or very low.
1:03:50
SPEAKER_00: Then we come home again, then we shower, and we cook, and we air fry, and we do all those other things, and then it goes dead again.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that is shapes like a duck.
1:03:58
SPEAKER_00: Okay, they call that the duck's back, and that's the duck curve.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_00: That's the collapse in the amount of energy demand during the day.
1:04:05
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:04:06
SPEAKER_00: Now in South Africa, we had a big energy problem.
1:04:10
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:04:10
SPEAKER_00: So ESCOM would make lots of energy in the morning, and then we had load shedding, right?
1:04:15
SPEAKER_00: So they said to everyone, you can go put solar on your roof.
1:04:19
SPEAKER_00: Businesses, you can deploy solar, etc.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_00: So everyone did.
1:04:22
SPEAKER_00: So what happened is our duct curve used to be very shallow.
1:04:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:04:26
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly the duct curve went voom all the way down.
1:04:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:04:29
SPEAKER_00: So the frequency on the grid of providing that electricity collapsed.
1:04:34
SPEAKER_00: So it becomes erratic.
1:04:35
SPEAKER_00: So they have to slow down all the turbines in the morning, and then they have to boot all the turbines back up again from 5 p.m.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_00: That's not sustainable.
1:04:43
SPEAKER_00: So what happens is they run the turbines the whole time.
1:04:45
SPEAKER_00: Else the machines break that make electricity.
1:04:47
SPEAKER_00: Those hydraulic engines, those things that spin that make the electricity, they can't slow them down.
1:04:53
SPEAKER_00: They're so big, monstrous.
1:04:55
SPEAKER_00: If you slow them down, bring them back up to the right revolutions of spinning, they break them.
1:04:59
SPEAKER_00: So they keep them running, and you know what they do?
1:05:01
SPEAKER_00: Because there's no demand, they curtail the energy.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_00: They put rods in the earth.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_00: They put rods in the earth and they disperse the energy.
1:05:08
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that crazy?
1:05:09
SPEAKER_00: That's crazy.
1:05:10
SPEAKER_00: Now it's accelerating, it's accentuating that problem because now we've got enormous amounts of wind power in the Northern Cape, enormous, massive solar farms.
1:05:21
SPEAKER_00: We got hydro, we've got geothermal, we've got all these alternative energy projects.
1:05:27
SPEAKER_00: What happens to the duck curve?
1:05:29
SPEAKER_00: It goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper.
1:05:31
SPEAKER_00: But the problem is we can't get the energy from source across our current transmission lines to distribution.
1:05:40
SPEAKER_00: Our transmission lines have never been upgraded or maintained properly.
1:05:44
SPEAKER_00: So now ESCOM's come out and said tender, tender, tender, help us upgrade our transmission lines, deploy more transmission lines to get the energy from there to here.
1:05:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:05:53
SPEAKER_00: Big problem.
1:05:54
SPEAKER_00: We don't have transmission lines.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_00: Now, the beautiful thing about Bitcoin miners when The demand drops in the morning, you know what Bitcoin miners do?
1:06:03
SPEAKER_00: They grab okay, they eat okay that access energy, and when they then they monetize that excess energy, they keep the stability of the grid.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:06:12
SPEAKER_00: See?
1:06:12
SPEAKER_00: That's what we do.
1:06:13
SPEAKER_00: And when we keep the and also we go to the point you need A6 machines to do this?
1:06:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the machines go in and the machines mine.
1:06:20
SPEAKER_00: And the beauty, because they have the ability to take so much power and be switched off and switched on again, um, you can take them to a solar farm where there's no transmission lines, plug them in right there.
1:06:31
SPEAKER_00: You have a 3G, 2G connection, and you can mine Bitcoin right there, and you can monetize your point of source that funds your transmission lines.
1:06:40
SPEAKER_00: And that's what's happening in Africa.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_00: In the Congo, um, big hydro plants, bitcoin miners attached to them, they start making money, and the money funds the build-out for the transmission lines.
1:06:51
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:06:51
SPEAKER_00: Um, flared gas, we're talking to the Mozambicans, we're talking to Angolans, we're talking uh Nigerians, where methane burnt up into the atmosphere.
1:07:01
SPEAKER_00: You take that methane, you burn it 100%, convert it into electricity, bitcoin miners eat that and make money out of it.
1:07:07
SPEAKER_01: So, how do the Bitcoin miners eat up the energy?
1:07:09
SPEAKER_01: Can you explain that?
1:07:10
SPEAKER_00: They use the energy.
1:07:11
SPEAKER_00: They use the energy, they use the energy in a very novel way.
1:07:14
SPEAKER_00: They have the ability to take all the energy instantaneously and be switched off again.
1:07:18
SPEAKER_00: That capability is very unique.
1:07:21
SPEAKER_00: Um, so you can do demand management with them.
1:07:24
SPEAKER_00: So you can set settings.
1:07:25
SPEAKER_00: If the grid goes down, then they start releasing the energy that they use.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:07:30
SPEAKER_00: Um, or you know, so that from a demand response perspective, they're incredible.
1:07:33
SPEAKER_00: So they stabilize the grid, they can outsource, you can put Bitcoin miners in a container down there, and you can make money already.
1:07:42
SPEAKER_00: So they are accelerating renewables, they're stabilizing energy grids, they're monetizing so you can mature your grid and upgrade your grids.
1:07:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:07:51
SPEAKER_00: And that's what's happening in Africa.
1:07:52
SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
1:07:53
SPEAKER_00: That's Bitcoin mining.
1:07:54
SPEAKER_00: That's when you have hard, a hard protocol.
1:07:57
SPEAKER_00: And that people say, well, Bitcoin takes up too much energy.
1:08:01
SPEAKER_00: Well, good.
1:08:02
SPEAKER_01: Because we need energy that, like there's energy that is being wasted.
1:08:06
SPEAKER_00: That and also energy is truth.
1:08:09
SPEAKER_01: True.
1:08:10
SPEAKER_00: And so when someone truly has to understand Bitcoin, that's why I said Bitcoin, you need to understand economics, history of money, energy, physics, um, technology.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:08:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, all of those things put together, and that's why it's such a fascinating rabbit hole.
1:08:25
SPEAKER_00: And that's where I'm all my energy is focused in this right now.
1:08:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, now you personally are Bitcoin miner because you're putting energy.
1:08:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
1:08:33
SPEAKER_00: So I love it, and I love what it means for our people.
1:08:35
SPEAKER_00: And just to take a big step back, what I love about it is AI.
1:08:40
SPEAKER_01: I was going to ask you about that because you've mentioned fire, the wheel, Bitcoin.
1:08:46
SPEAKER_01: You didn't mention AI.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, AI.
1:08:48
SPEAKER_00: It's for me, AI um has some fundamental challenges.
1:08:52
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:08:52
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so AI um repudiation is a big issue with AI.
1:08:56
SPEAKER_00: Is this real?
1:08:57
SPEAKER_00: Is this real?
1:08:59
SPEAKER_00: Is it not?
1:09:00
SPEAKER_00: Um, is this the real person?
1:09:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:09:02
SPEAKER_00: That authenticity requires authentication.
1:09:07
SPEAKER_00: And the only network in the world that can provide you the proof of work, true, truth, it's Bitcoin.
1:09:14
SPEAKER_00: So the combination of Bitcoin and AI is so clear that AI is going to need Bitcoin from an authentication perspective.
1:09:20
SPEAKER_01: How?
1:09:20
SPEAKER_01: So how will Bitcoin authenticates AI?
1:09:23
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, you could just have a key.
1:09:24
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:09:25
SPEAKER_00: You could say, um, is this thing the truth?
1:09:27
SPEAKER_00: The verifier.
1:09:28
SPEAKER_00: This could be a key, it could be an unlock, it could be a transaction that unlocks the truth, it could be a lot of things.
1:09:32
SPEAKER_00: But essentially, when you tie all this creativity and this innovation to truth, suddenly you don't get what you have with AI at the moment.
1:09:40
SPEAKER_00: So AI is a truth problem at the moment.
1:09:42
SPEAKER_00: Is this the truth?
1:09:43
SPEAKER_00: Is this the real person that I'm looking at?
1:09:45
SPEAKER_00: Is this how do I authenticate this?
1:09:46
SPEAKER_00: How do I know this is real?
1:09:48
SPEAKER_00: The only way you do that is with an authentication there.
1:09:50
SPEAKER_00: And Bitcoin's an incredible authentication there.
1:09:52
SPEAKER_01: What's your what's your opinion on the thoughts where so many people are scared of AI taking their jobs, taking their livelihoods?
1:10:00
SPEAKER_01: Do you think that's a possibility?
1:10:03
SPEAKER_00: Again, what I love about AI is not dissimilar from Bitcoin because AI makes you go very big into and very deep into like the anthropological anthropologic, anthropological and paleontological history of mankind.
1:10:18
SPEAKER_00: So you kind of go back to work and what work is and what a job is.
1:10:25
SPEAKER_00: And it's so interesting.
1:10:26
SPEAKER_00: Like today, when you meet someone, you go, you say, Hey, what's your name?
1:10:29
SPEAKER_00: It's I'm Stafford.
1:10:30
SPEAKER_00: And the first question is, What do you do?
1:10:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:10:32
SPEAKER_00: So what we do is so tied to our identity and who we are.
1:10:35
SPEAKER_00: But what we do is undergoing a constant metamorphosis.
1:10:40
SPEAKER_00: And if you just go back to the year 1900, in the year 1899, 1900, you know the term child labor didn't exist.
1:10:48
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:10:49
SPEAKER_00: Didn't exist.
1:10:52
SPEAKER_00: When you were six, seven years old, a cigarette was shoved in your mouth, and you went and went into the farm, you went up into the chimney in London because your body was small and you could fit, you could go into the mine because of the shaft size, you could go into the clothing factory.
1:11:06
SPEAKER_00: Kids worked.
1:11:08
SPEAKER_00: Six, seven-year-olds, that was labor.
1:11:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:11:11
SPEAKER_00: And if you go look at the pictures, go take a look at human labor, the year 1900, Google and put images on.
1:11:17
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna see kids that are dirty, kids that are put down in mine shafts, kids that was work in the year 1900.
1:11:24
SPEAKER_00: That was jobs that had dignity.
1:11:26
SPEAKER_00: When you answered that question, what do you do?
1:11:29
SPEAKER_00: You answered with that type of work.
1:11:31
SPEAKER_00: And you considered that work, and you were proud of that work.
1:11:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:11:34
SPEAKER_00: And you were proud of your labor and the values of that.
1:11:39
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you go back to the year 1900 and you find a farmer plowing, you stop him, you tap him on the shoulder, you say, Hey dude, do you have a second?
1:11:48
SPEAKER_00: He goes, Yeah, what?
1:11:48
SPEAKER_00: You go, can I tell you about a yoga teacher?
1:11:51
SPEAKER_00: You'll tell you, piss off.
1:11:54
SPEAKER_00: Can I tell you about a Michelin star chef?
1:11:56
SPEAKER_00: What are you talking about?
1:11:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:11:58
SPEAKER_00: Right?
1:11:59
SPEAKER_00: See, this is what we need to accept as humans.
1:12:02
SPEAKER_00: That would we the fear of the work that's going to be taken away from you, ask yourself, does that work?
1:12:09
SPEAKER_00: Is that work really what you love?
1:12:12
SPEAKER_00: Is that work truly the expression of your creativity and your passion as a human being?
1:12:17
SPEAKER_00: Most of labor in the world today is stuck just like most of the labor was in the year 1900.
1:12:24
SPEAKER_00: Most of the labor in the year 1900 was agriculture.
1:12:28
SPEAKER_00: 98% of the world's population worked in agriculture in the year 1900.
1:12:33
SPEAKER_00: Today, less than 2% of the world's population.
1:12:37
SPEAKER_00: 98% of us worked chasing calories in the year 1900.
1:12:42
SPEAKER_00: 98% of us in the world don't do that today.
1:12:46
SPEAKER_00: How incredible is that?
1:12:48
SPEAKER_00: Right?
1:12:50
SPEAKER_00: So we went from plowing the fields for food, chasing calories on mass as a species, to mission and chefs, master chef TV shows, hors d'oeuvres, things that if you measure them, waste time.
1:13:09
SPEAKER_00: They're stupid.
1:13:11
SPEAKER_00: If you look at them individually, what's a master chef?
1:13:14
SPEAKER_00: What's a master chef show?
1:13:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah what's it just what are you talking about?
1:13:18
SPEAKER_00: See, we got taken out of the fields and we were given new skill sets.
1:13:22
SPEAKER_00: So in the year 1910 to 1915, farmers go look in Wikipedia, the history of the high school movement.
1:13:31
SPEAKER_00: In the year 1910 to 1915, it says that a bunch of farmers in Iowa, I may have the state wrong, but then a bunch of farmers in Iowa and the United States said this is enough.
1:13:40
SPEAKER_00: They took their kids out of the factories, out of labor, and they put them into a building where they were taught skills.
1:13:48
SPEAKER_00: They were taught how to read and write.
1:13:51
SPEAKER_00: That was the beginning of the high school movement.
1:13:53
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:13:53
SPEAKER_00: And in less than, I think, 10 to 15 years thereafterwards, more than 80% of the kids in that addressable age group went to schools and were taken out.
1:14:02
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't governments, it wasn't institutional.
1:14:05
SPEAKER_00: It was a bunch of farmers that got sick and tired of seeing their six, seven, eight, nine, ten-year-old kids dying in the fields of labor.
1:14:13
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:14:13
SPEAKER_00: And they took them and they gave them skills that, in many people's opinion, that time was a waste of time.
1:14:19
SPEAKER_00: Why must the seven-year-old learn to read and write?
1:14:22
SPEAKER_00: He must plow.
1:14:23
SPEAKER_00: Why must the seven-year-old read and write?
1:14:25
SPEAKER_00: He must go into the factory and weave the loom.
1:14:28
SPEAKER_00: Why must see, this is what happens to us.
1:14:32
SPEAKER_00: I believe 98% of us are caught up in the world today doing work that's not what we love.
1:14:39
SPEAKER_00: You go to a person out there in this hotel, the lady that cleans this hotel room, do you think she loves this?
1:14:44
SPEAKER_00: Do you think the receptionist of the hotel truly loves it?
1:14:46
SPEAKER_00: You go across the road, you see the car guard, you see the security guy.
1:14:50
SPEAKER_00: Most of the world is caught up doing work that they do not love.
1:14:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:14:54
SPEAKER_00: We need to free ourselves from the fields.
1:14:57
SPEAKER_00: We need to move into a world where we don't measure what we do in time and efficiency and productivity.
1:15:04
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:15:06
SPEAKER_00: We need to do work that wastes time.
1:15:09
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:15:09
SPEAKER_00: We're built for wasting time.
1:15:11
SPEAKER_00: We are not built for efficiency, productivity.
1:15:14
SPEAKER_00: Those are the things that the machines will inevitably do because they can do it better than you.
1:15:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:15:20
SPEAKER_00: More than you.
1:15:20
SPEAKER_00: They don't need maternity leave.
1:15:21
SPEAKER_00: They never get sick.
1:15:22
SPEAKER_00: They will constantly do that.
1:15:24
SPEAKER_00: So, what is our role moving forward?
1:15:26
SPEAKER_00: It's to waste time.
1:15:28
SPEAKER_00: I was involved in a project in Seattle years ago where a guy, um, I'll quickly make the story short.
1:15:36
SPEAKER_00: We put up we put a robotic arm on a pick and place a product arm on a on a conveyor belt thing.
1:15:41
SPEAKER_00: It's a years ago.
1:15:42
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:15:42
SPEAKER_00: And um, we put it in between the workers, and we went back a week later, and we found the thing broken, smashed in the corner.
1:15:50
SPEAKER_00: And we looked on the CCTV camera footage, we're like, what's going on?
1:15:53
SPEAKER_00: Why was this broken?
1:15:54
SPEAKER_00: We've picked up that this guy the next day came to work with a baseball bat.
1:15:58
SPEAKER_00: We see him talking to everyone, and they're dancing.
1:16:00
SPEAKER_00: And then he goes to this thing and he hits it with a baseball bat, and everyone's like cheering, yeah.
1:16:04
SPEAKER_01: Why?
1:16:05
SPEAKER_01: Because it was more effective than them.
1:16:07
SPEAKER_00: Than them.
1:16:08
SPEAKER_00: So we sat down with him, the main guy.
1:16:10
SPEAKER_00: I asked him, I said, Why did you hit this thing with a baseball?
1:16:13
SPEAKER_00: What's well, why?
1:16:14
SPEAKER_00: And he said, This thing is gonna take my work, my job.
1:16:17
SPEAKER_00: Then I said, Okay, tell me a little bit about more about yourself.
1:16:21
SPEAKER_00: I found out that he's brilliant at uh a particular Spanish instrument that he plays, and he does tutoring, he loves math tutoring on weekends.
1:16:30
SPEAKER_00: When I started the conversation with him, towards the end, I realized he actually hates his job.
1:16:33
SPEAKER_01: So then why are you trying to hold on to it?
1:16:36
SPEAKER_00: Because he's caught up in a broken money system.
1:16:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's caught up in an economic lie.
1:16:42
SPEAKER_00: Most of the world is caught up in an economic lie.
1:16:46
SPEAKER_00: Our time and energy is debased outside of our control.
1:16:50
SPEAKER_00: We do work that we should not be doing.
1:16:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there is so much latent human potential that we still have to unearth.
1:16:58
SPEAKER_00: I love AIs, I love robotics, I hope they take all the jobs away.
1:17:03
SPEAKER_00: But when they do, we do need leadership to reimagine.
1:17:09
SPEAKER_00: When we gave the ATM to banking, we didn't lay off all the tellers.
1:17:16
SPEAKER_02: No.
1:17:16
SPEAKER_00: When the automated teller machine was put into banking, people lost the job of sitting on their asses all day and putting thick paper wads through glass panes.
1:17:27
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:17:28
SPEAKER_00: That's and they would have fought for that job if they were just taken away.
1:17:31
SPEAKER_00: But what happened in banking was we didn't just lay them off and put the machine in.
1:17:36
SPEAKER_00: We reimagined what that human being could do.
1:17:38
SPEAKER_00: We took that human being away from doing that, we put them in front of a keyboard, a mouse, a screen, connected them to a mainframe, and we built a whole new portfolio of financial services.
1:17:48
SPEAKER_00: So we freed that human being up and gave them more purpose by combining them in a symbiotic way with a machine to deliver a service that was previously unimaginable.
1:17:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:18:00
SPEAKER_00: That is an analogy and a metaphor.
1:18:02
SPEAKER_01: So that means we are inventing the new future.
1:18:04
SPEAKER_00: So what we need to understand is AI can be used to disintermediate.
1:18:12
SPEAKER_00: AI can be used in a dystopian way.
1:18:15
SPEAKER_00: AI can't take all the jobs away.
1:18:18
SPEAKER_00: But if it takes the jobs away, it won't be because of AI.
1:18:21
SPEAKER_00: It will be because of a lack of imagination on behalf of leadership to see a new way, to dream up new services.
1:18:29
SPEAKER_00: So if we do see doing more with less, that's an economic disability.
1:18:37
SPEAKER_00: We need to see us doing more of what was previously thought impossible.
1:18:42
SPEAKER_00: And with AI, we can do that.
1:18:43
SPEAKER_00: Human machine, symbiosis, a machine and a human combined, it's a beautiful thing.
1:18:50
SPEAKER_01: Right now, just from your conversation, it's like I have a better picture of what the future could be.
1:18:55
SPEAKER_01: Because from what you are saying, AI could help us to imagine a better future where we do things that we love.
1:19:02
unknown: Yes.
1:19:02
SPEAKER_01: And then we get paid for doing these things that we love.
1:19:05
SPEAKER_00: In perfect money.
1:19:06
SPEAKER_01: In perfect money.
1:19:08
SPEAKER_01: And then now you don't get so scared of doing it.
1:19:10
SPEAKER_01: So if you're somebody who's been working in finance and you hate your job, but deep down you always wanted to be a painter.
1:19:17
SPEAKER_01: Now you could just be home and paint and get paid in Bitcoin.
1:19:21
SPEAKER_00: And if you paint and you love what you do, yeah, you know what?
1:19:25
SPEAKER_00: We feel that love.
1:19:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:19:27
SPEAKER_00: And we'll connect with it in a human way.
1:19:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:19:30
SPEAKER_00: And when we're connected in a human way, we'll reward you.
1:19:33
SPEAKER_00: Right?
1:19:34
SPEAKER_00: Because that the authentic we the world is seeking authenticity.
1:19:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:19:38
SPEAKER_00: The world is seeking real.
1:19:39
SPEAKER_00: So if you can move away from this work to doing a job that you love, you're going to express that humanity, that love, and you're going to get rewarded in perfect money.
1:19:49
SPEAKER_01: And I think one thing, one thing I personally believe is that AI is going to raise scarcity again.
1:19:55
SPEAKER_01: You know, most of the time, when something becomes so common, the rare becomes more precious.
1:20:01
SPEAKER_01: There you go.
1:20:02
SPEAKER_01: So for instance, I can prompt any painting in AI right now.
1:20:06
SPEAKER_01: And when it gets to a point where everybody is starting to prompt all the paintings in their house and everything, that rare human painting, which is flawed and has that humanity in it, becomes more valuable.
1:20:20
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
1:20:20
SPEAKER_00: It's the Japanese thing where they take the bowl that's perfect and they drop it on the floor and they print it together, and then in the floors, they they seal it with gold.
1:20:28
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
1:20:28
SPEAKER_00: And in that alchemy of imperfection is the beauty.
1:20:31
SPEAKER_00: And that is exactly it.
1:20:33
SPEAKER_00: Perfection is not beautiful.
1:20:35
SPEAKER_00: Perfection is not human.
1:20:37
SPEAKER_00: Humanity, the character of humanity, is an alchemy.
1:20:40
SPEAKER_00: It's not having a perfect marriage.
1:20:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:20:43
SPEAKER_00: It's about having a flawed existence, but you keep working on it.
1:20:47
SPEAKER_00: And that alchemy makes it have dimensions and scars and beauty and stories.
1:20:52
SPEAKER_00: And when you're old and you sit together, that's the beauty of that.
1:20:56
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't the perfection.
1:20:57
SPEAKER_00: Perfection is not who we are.
1:20:58
SPEAKER_01: Perfection is boring, I think.
1:21:00
SPEAKER_00: Perfection is boring.
1:21:00
SPEAKER_00: Perfection is clinical.
1:21:01
SPEAKER_00: Perfection is not what we desire.
1:21:03
SPEAKER_00: No one are we want realness.
1:21:05
SPEAKER_00: We want human.
1:21:06
SPEAKER_00: We we when the CD came along, the Blu-ray disc, the CDs, etc.
1:21:10
SPEAKER_00: We what did we miss?
1:21:12
SPEAKER_00: Putting the needle on the vinyl.
1:21:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:21:14
SPEAKER_00: And the snap crackle pop of the imperfect sound coming to the speaker.
1:21:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, in music, one thing we do is we add flaws.
1:21:20
SPEAKER_01: So for instance, you can record a guitar, and you know, now because the the cables are so good and everything, there's no noise in it.
1:21:28
SPEAKER_01: So after recording the guitar, we add noise.
1:21:31
SPEAKER_00: There you go.
1:21:32
SPEAKER_00: There you go.
1:21:33
SPEAKER_00: So I do think the future is a beautiful future.
1:21:36
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a more human.
1:21:37
SPEAKER_00: And technology, in a weird way, inversely shows us more of our humanity.
1:21:45
SPEAKER_00: I a developmental psychologist, um, I mentioned this when I was in Babwe the other day.
1:21:49
SPEAKER_00: A developmental psychologist and I were on a radio show um not too long ago, and she said to me, Because technology remembers perpetually, and we are creating perpetual digital information shadows.
1:22:02
SPEAKER_00: She said to me, it's quite beautiful, she says, a perpetual memory is a paralysis to society.
1:22:08
SPEAKER_00: If you can't forget, you cannot progress.
1:22:11
SPEAKER_00: And she said, as developmental psychologists, they've never understood that.
1:22:15
SPEAKER_00: They never understood how important forgetfulness is.
1:22:18
SPEAKER_00: The ability to forget.
1:22:20
SPEAKER_01: So that's my start afresh.
1:22:23
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
1:22:23
SPEAKER_00: And and we need that.
1:22:25
SPEAKER_00: And so technology, because it's of its perfect memory, is allowing now.
1:22:29
SPEAKER_00: But the problem is we have Gen Z's.
1:22:30
SPEAKER_00: And the problem with Gen Zs is a few problems.
1:22:32
SPEAKER_00: The Gen Zs that have emerged now, they've seen the 2008 financial crisis.
1:22:36
SPEAKER_00: So Gen Zs don't care about a bank.
1:22:38
SPEAKER_00: My two Gen Z's in my house don't care about a bank.
1:22:42
SPEAKER_00: They don't like a bank.
1:22:43
SPEAKER_00: They don't see why you put your money in a bank.
1:22:46
SPEAKER_00: They don't 2008 financial crisis is very real in their heads.
1:22:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:22:50
SPEAKER_00: Second thing is um they see more value in the ethereal than the real.
1:22:55
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:22:55
SPEAKER_02: True.
1:22:56
SPEAKER_00: They don't want to wear nice clothes or brands, they want the nice sneaker in the metaverse.
1:23:01
SPEAKER_00: They want the NFT in there.
1:23:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:23:03
SPEAKER_00: They see more value because they can do something with that.
1:23:05
SPEAKER_00: Um, big thing with them is privacy.
1:23:08
SPEAKER_00: They're the most privacy-violated generation in the history of anything.
1:23:11
SPEAKER_01: They don't even know it.
1:23:12
SPEAKER_00: The first time they walked, is in Facebook.
1:23:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:23:16
SPEAKER_00: First time they ate, is in Facebook.
1:23:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:23:18
SPEAKER_00: The first time they went to school, Facebook.
1:23:20
SPEAKER_00: All the way through to them graduating university, first time ever.
1:23:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:23:23
SPEAKER_00: And then none of that data is theirs anymore.
1:23:25
SPEAKER_00: You and I, we go to our mom and dad's house, our photographs are in a file, in a drawer.
1:23:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:23:30
SPEAKER_00: Theirs is in a social media container, and their parents just clicked, clicked the end user license agreement when they installed the app.
1:23:36
SPEAKER_00: They didn't read.
1:23:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they don't know they don't own it.
1:23:38
SPEAKER_00: They don't own it.
1:23:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:23:39
SPEAKER_00: And so they're the most privacy violated.
1:23:41
SPEAKER_00: But what we see with them is an example with my kids, they're anti-technology.
1:23:45
SPEAKER_00: I've seen that they flick away from it.
1:23:47
SPEAKER_00: They're not addicted to it.
1:23:48
SPEAKER_00: They recognize it very quickly.
1:23:50
SPEAKER_00: They want more human connection.
1:23:51
SPEAKER_00: They want, you know, they they they tell me to put down my phone.
1:23:54
SPEAKER_00: They want to see me more.
1:23:56
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what technology requires today.
1:23:59
SPEAKER_00: It requires more humanity.
1:24:00
SPEAKER_00: And I say that a lot in my talks, in my keynotes, as much as it is about technology today, it's more so about humanity.
1:24:06
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:24:07
SPEAKER_00: It's that we need human connection.
1:24:09
SPEAKER_00: Human connection is the new tangible monetary opportunity.
1:24:14
SPEAKER_00: It's not to have a call center with an AI that answers everything, it's to have a human being answer augmented by all these species of artificial capabilities to give you a human experience that you've never had.
1:24:26
SPEAKER_00: You're speaking to someone that can help you in every way.
1:24:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:24:29
SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't that be amazing?
1:24:31
SPEAKER_00: Not a machine.
1:24:32
SPEAKER_00: Not someone that prompts you.
1:24:34
SPEAKER_00: That's the opportunity.
1:24:35
SPEAKER_00: Everything you can now make things more human.
1:24:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:24:38
SPEAKER_00: If you make a human machine symbiotically combined.
1:24:41
SPEAKER_01: So we have to skew AI more towards making the human better.
1:24:45
SPEAKER_01: And in that way, if if we target that kind of trajectory, what happens is everyone can live their dream and be better.
1:24:53
unknown: Yes.
1:24:54
SPEAKER_01: Let's say you wanted to be uh, you know, I always say in the past, when you want to do any one job, it's difficult because if you don't have enough money to pay so many people to get it done to do their parts for you, then you can't get there.
1:25:08
SPEAKER_01: But now with the AI tools and everything, one person can live their dream and use AI and computers and technologies to make themselves better.
1:25:18
SPEAKER_00: But people say like that, like what you just described, a lot of people say this, and it's very skewomorphic and it's wrong.
1:25:24
SPEAKER_00: They say, like, one person is capable of now doing all of these things because they can employ all these AIs and they don't need a big team.
1:25:31
SPEAKER_00: It's it's the thinking is wrong.
1:25:33
SPEAKER_00: It's actually anemic and it's not thought through.
1:25:37
SPEAKER_00: It's it's like when Instagram was bought by Facebook.
1:25:41
SPEAKER_00: Um, I think it was for like six billion or whatever, and there was like six people in the company or four people in the company, I can't remember the numbers.
1:25:47
SPEAKER_00: At that more or less at the same time, Kodak declared bankruptcy.
1:25:50
SPEAKER_00: And people were like, see, Kodak has got 300,000 people, a huge distribution, this thing has six people.
1:25:55
SPEAKER_00: Kodak declares bankruptcy, see technology is taking jobs.
1:25:58
SPEAKER_00: But what they don't understand is like for Instagram to exist, all the telecommunications infrastructure, all the databases, all the phones, yeah, all the mobile apps, all of that resulted.
1:26:09
SPEAKER_00: I would argue that Instagram incurred 10 times the jobs that the staff count was inside of Kodak.
1:26:17
SPEAKER_00: Similarly, if one human being can use all these people to make the service and not have a big team, you know how much work goes into AI.
1:26:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:26:26
SPEAKER_00: You know how big the data centers are.
1:26:28
SPEAKER_00: You know how much equipment needs to be made.
1:26:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:26:30
SPEAKER_00: You know how many plumbers, electricians, and all the infrastructure in AI requires so much human labor.
1:26:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:26:36
SPEAKER_01: So when I say that, I don't mean to say it will take away from people.
1:26:41
SPEAKER_01: I just mean to say each person can become supervised in their own right, and then they work together.
1:26:47
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:26:47
SPEAKER_01: So let's say, for instance, yes, I've always wanted to be an accountant.
1:26:51
SPEAKER_01: I love money, I love everything accountant, but I'm not good at marketing, I'm not good at design, I'm not, I don't know how to push myself out there.
1:26:59
SPEAKER_01: Now I can have my accounting firm, which is backed by all these services, and then somebody else out there just wants to paint.
1:27:07
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't know how to understand um maybe so many different things that he needs for his painting.
1:27:12
SPEAKER_01: He can use AI to do all that, and he can hire this accounting firm and work with him.
1:27:16
SPEAKER_01: Spotter.
1:27:17
SPEAKER_01: So both of them are super in their own right because of the tools.
1:27:20
SPEAKER_00: Now put the Africa lens on there.
1:27:21
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that exciting?
1:27:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:27:23
SPEAKER_00: People, average age 19, two billion people by 2030.
1:27:28
SPEAKER_00: All of this artificial cognitions combined with perfect money, yeah, with all this latent human potential, all the resources that we have on our continent.
1:27:38
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
1:27:39
SPEAKER_00: I I just I can't wait to see the next 10, 15, 20 years.
1:27:43
SPEAKER_01: The future is exciting.
1:27:44
SPEAKER_00: It's exciting and it's optimistic and it's amazing and it's incredible, and it finally it is.
1:27:49
SPEAKER_00: And there's the time before 2008, and the time after 2008.
1:27:54
SPEAKER_00: So before 2008, there was no Bitcoin.
1:27:57
SPEAKER_00: After 2008, so Bitcoin was
1:28:00
SPEAKER_01: Born out of the crisis.
1:28:02
SPEAKER_00: Out of the crisis, yeah.
1:28:03
SPEAKER_00: The 2008 financial crisis.
1:28:04
SPEAKER_01: So necessity is the mother of invention.
1:28:06
SPEAKER_00: There you go.
1:28:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean, and some technological aspects, the financial crisis is mentioned in the protocol itself, in the ledger.
1:28:13
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:28:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:28:14
SPEAKER_00: He's referencing the bailing out of the banks.
1:28:16
SPEAKER_00: True.
1:28:16
SPEAKER_00: Inside of Bitcoin.
1:28:17
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I am very excited.
1:28:19
SPEAKER_00: I there's nowhere else in the world I want to be.
1:28:22
SPEAKER_00: This is an exciting continent.
1:28:25
SPEAKER_01: Africa is the future.
1:28:26
SPEAKER_00: What I'm doing with Africa Bitcoin Corporation is exciting.
1:28:29
SPEAKER_00: I can get up on stage and I just don't talk about Bitcoin.
1:28:33
SPEAKER_00: I talk about every Bitcoin that we raise equals five African jobs.
1:28:37
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
1:28:38
SPEAKER_00: Alright, so we raise building a Bitcoin balance sheet to have an impact.
1:28:43
SPEAKER_00: And jobs are dignity, they hope.
1:28:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:28:46
SPEAKER_00: They're all of that.
1:28:47
SPEAKER_00: And I I love it.
1:28:49
SPEAKER_00: I see our continent.
1:28:50
SPEAKER_00: I see our people.
1:28:51
SPEAKER_00: And you know what one thing that was very fascinating?
1:28:53
SPEAKER_00: Machankura is uh is an app or service that people use to um uh spay in Bitcoin over SMS and MMS based Bitcoin buying and selling it on SMS on SMS, it's called Machankura.
1:29:08
SPEAKER_00: And I I spoke to the founder of Machankura, I said to him, he lives in Pretoria.
1:29:12
SPEAKER_00: I said to him, What's the number one thing you notice when people start adopting Machankura?
1:29:18
SPEAKER_00: Um he says, you know, in in in Kenya and Ghana and all these places where they start using Bitcoin on their phones, on feature phones.
1:29:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he says one thing he notices when with the young people, they don't leave anymore.
1:29:31
SPEAKER_00: They don't leave their villages anymore.
1:29:32
SPEAKER_02: Okay, true.
1:29:35
SPEAKER_00: They don't need to leave.
1:29:35
SPEAKER_00: And you know what happens?
1:29:36
SPEAKER_00: He says they culturally go deeper in.
1:29:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they go into the history of where they're from, they go deep into the instruments and the drums and the this and the that, and they go deep into their who the identity.
1:29:47
SPEAKER_00: He says that's one of the the most transversal resultants that he's noticed.
1:29:52
SPEAKER_00: That immigration, people leaving the African continent, like we see going on dinghies across the Mediterranean to get to you know greener pastures, yeah, it's broken money, man.
1:30:03
unknown: True.
1:30:04
SPEAKER_01: It's broken money.
1:30:04
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that ironic that technology is going to make us more human?
1:30:08
SPEAKER_00: Yes, at all.
1:30:10
SPEAKER_00: And that's and the reason is it's not make us more human, it will unveil what makes us human.
1:30:16
SPEAKER_00: True.
1:30:17
SPEAKER_00: So as much as it is about technology today, it's more so about humanity.
1:30:20
SPEAKER_00: It's it's yes, you can stream the concept live over YouTube or whatever, but you'll pay so much more to be in person, to see the guy sweating, yeah, to feel the crowd singing.
1:30:33
SPEAKER_00: Um, you'll you yes, you can get a copy of the album, but you'll pay more when it's signed.
1:30:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:30:41
SPEAKER_00: You'll pay more if it's signed in person by the band.
1:30:45
SPEAKER_00: Human connection.
1:30:46
SPEAKER_00: Human connection.
1:30:47
SPEAKER_00: If presence, immediacy, authenticity, these are the monetary aspects that we're moving in into the new world.
1:30:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:30:55
SPEAKER_00: Because everything will be replicable.
1:30:57
SPEAKER_00: You'll be able to copy everything.
1:30:59
SPEAKER_00: And because you'll be able to copy everything, because you'll be able to replicate everything, because everyone will be this, because everyone will become a doctor, and everyone will be able to do this.
1:31:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the human connection will be your differentiator.
1:31:10
SPEAKER_00: And if people can realize that, it's very powerful.
1:31:14
SPEAKER_00: Very, very powerful.
1:31:15
SPEAKER_00: And I'm investing in businesses that understand this.
1:31:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm investing in perfect money for Africa on the energy side um and on the adoption side.
1:31:26
SPEAKER_00: Um, on the AI side, um mentoring a lot of uh executives specifically because I think it's very important that we make sure that our our blue chip executives in Africa understand that they should not do more with less.
1:31:40
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:31:41
SPEAKER_00: That's dangerous.
1:31:42
SPEAKER_00: The problem that we have right now is we have a fitness function in our economy that rewards um executives with operating margin.
1:31:51
SPEAKER_00: So doing more with less people gives them big bonuses.
1:31:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that's dangerous.
1:31:56
SPEAKER_00: So the fitness function we need to change.
1:31:58
SPEAKER_00: We need to show executives that it's not about doing more with less, it's about doing more of what was previously thought unimagined.
1:32:04
SPEAKER_00: That's the burden.
1:32:06
SPEAKER_00: Because AI is a superpower, but it's kryptonite, it's inequality, and we need to be real careful because in today's age, my biggest fear I love that saying, and I read it somewhere.
1:32:20
SPEAKER_00: It says that we believe in the divine right of capital today, just like we used to believe in the divine right of kings.
1:32:30
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
1:32:31
SPEAKER_00: Let me say that again.
1:32:32
SPEAKER_00: Today we believe in the divine right of capital just like we used to believe in the divine right of kings.
1:32:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:32:38
SPEAKER_01: We need to be real careful, very careful, very careful, and I think because we do have new kings and queens, and yeah, it's not based on royalties, it's billionaires, trillionaires.
1:32:46
SPEAKER_00: We'll see trillionaires in the next decade.
1:32:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, billionaires, people, immense wealth concentration.
1:32:51
SPEAKER_00: So, what are we gonna do?
1:32:52
SPEAKER_00: Universal basic income.
1:32:54
SPEAKER_00: Don't know.
1:32:55
SPEAKER_00: I I don't know.
1:32:56
SPEAKER_00: But look, I I but I'm still very optimistic.
1:32:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I'm optimistic for Africa, I'm optimistic for what we are capable of doing.
1:33:03
SPEAKER_00: I'm so optimistic for the young people.
1:33:05
SPEAKER_00: If anyone's watching this, um, your biggest responsibility is to relearn.
1:33:10
SPEAKER_00: Relearn, learn, relearn, learn.
1:33:12
SPEAKER_00: That's the new way.
1:33:14
SPEAKER_00: Do you want to go to university?
1:33:15
SPEAKER_00: That's okay.
1:33:16
SPEAKER_00: Um, but man, you don't need to.
1:33:19
SPEAKER_00: The tools, education is free now.
1:33:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:33:22
SPEAKER_00: The Harvard, the Princeton's, the Stanford's, the Yales, you can now get it on a smartphone, right?
1:33:29
SPEAKER_00: On a prepaid contract.
1:33:30
SPEAKER_00: You can have the same level of education.
1:33:31
SPEAKER_00: You now have tutors that are infinitely patient that will teach you any skill that you want.
1:33:36
SPEAKER_00: You're going into a world of extreme abundance.
1:33:40
SPEAKER_00: Intelligence is now a commodity.
1:33:42
SPEAKER_00: You pay for intelligence per minute.
1:33:44
SPEAKER_00: It's extraordinary.
1:33:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:33:45
SPEAKER_00: It's like electricity.
1:33:47
SPEAKER_00: It's insane.
1:33:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, when people say, what's the future of technology?
1:33:50
SPEAKER_00: Is it more technology?
1:33:51
SPEAKER_00: I always say no, it's the dissipation.
1:33:53
SPEAKER_00: It's when technology disappears.
1:33:55
SPEAKER_00: And when I meet technologists and all these kids that want me to invest in their companies, all they show me is like the pretty mobile app or a new piece of technology.
1:34:03
SPEAKER_00: I always ask them a question, how do you make this technology go away?
1:34:05
SPEAKER_00: And they always get stuck on that.
1:34:07
SPEAKER_00: But if you if you take a look at like when when electricity was invented, when electricity had its impact, is when it disappeared.
1:34:14
SPEAKER_00: The first time electricity was monetized wasn't Tesla and those guys.
1:34:18
SPEAKER_00: No.
1:34:19
SPEAKER_00: You paid a penny to go to the state fair, to go to the tent behind the tent to go see Tesla's arc.
1:34:26
SPEAKER_00: The first people that made money out of electricity were hackers.
1:34:29
SPEAKER_00: The guy with the nose ring with the ponytail at the state fair, at the circus, he'd tell you, come with me.
1:34:35
SPEAKER_00: And he puts you in, you go there, you walk out the tent, and your hair was raised.
1:34:38
SPEAKER_00: You paid a penny for that.
1:34:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:34:40
SPEAKER_00: That was the domain of the few, the mystical.
1:34:42
SPEAKER_00: Then rich people got involved.
1:34:44
SPEAKER_00: In downtown Manhattan, people slept with the lights on because it was a display of their money.
1:34:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:34:51
SPEAKER_00: Affluency was depicted with ambiency.
1:34:54
SPEAKER_00: Then, because they hired all these hackers to make electricity in their houses.
1:34:57
SPEAKER_00: Then the houses were being burnt down.
1:34:59
SPEAKER_00: It was smelly, it was loud and noisy.
1:35:01
SPEAKER_00: And then the government got involved and said, no, no, no, we're going to create an electrical grid.
1:35:05
SPEAKER_00: We're going to put this on this like a cloud, like cloud computing.
1:35:09
SPEAKER_00: We had an electricity grid.
1:35:11
SPEAKER_00: And then the electricity disappeared.
1:35:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:35:14
SPEAKER_01: No one cares about electricity as a thing itself anymore.
1:35:16
SPEAKER_01: It's just in the background.
1:35:18
SPEAKER_00: There's lights here.
1:35:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:35:19
SPEAKER_00: We switch it on.
1:35:20
SPEAKER_00: You have electricity on your wrist.
1:35:22
SPEAKER_00: It's electricity in things.
1:35:23
SPEAKER_00: It's everywhere, but it's nowhere.
1:35:24
SPEAKER_00: And technology is the same.
1:35:25
SPEAKER_01: I mean, like, internet has disappeared.
1:35:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's everywhere, but it's nowhere.
1:35:29
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the maps.
1:35:30
SPEAKER_00: Remember when you used to get lost?
1:35:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:35:32
SPEAKER_00: How did you get from point A to B?
1:35:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:35:33
SPEAKER_00: You took out the map book.
1:35:35
SPEAKER_00: The map book.
1:35:35
SPEAKER_00: Remember you bought a car with the map book.
1:35:37
SPEAKER_00: And then what happened after the map?
1:35:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, it was a military device, that Garmin with the thick aerial.
1:35:42
SPEAKER_00: It was a GPS, like special forces fighters used it, right?
1:35:45
SPEAKER_00: It was triangulation of satellites.
1:35:48
SPEAKER_00: After that, it was the Garmin device in your aeroplane, etc.
1:35:51
SPEAKER_00: And then what happens?
1:35:52
SPEAKER_00: Now you got a Garmin watch.
1:35:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:35:54
SPEAKER_00: You got you got what's the next big jump for Geo?
1:36:00
SPEAKER_00: It's it's the self-driving car.
1:36:04
SPEAKER_00: It's when Geo executes, not with an app, not with triangulation, but when you get in the car and you say, take me to Taco Bell.
1:36:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:36:13
SPEAKER_00: And the car drives, takes you to Taco Bell and brings you back.
1:36:16
SPEAKER_00: You didn't open up an app.
1:36:18
SPEAKER_01: You don't care how to check this and everything.
1:36:20
SPEAKER_00: People say payments.
1:36:21
SPEAKER_00: Like everyone tells me, like, look at this new way to pay.
1:36:23
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna tap our phones, we're gonna do that.
1:36:25
SPEAKER_00: What was the experience with Uber?
1:36:27
SPEAKER_00: What made Uber incredible?
1:36:28
SPEAKER_00: The fact that you could call a cab?
1:36:30
SPEAKER_00: No.
1:36:30
SPEAKER_00: The fact that you could get in a cab and just get out.
1:36:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:36:34
SPEAKER_00: You paid without paying.
1:36:36
SPEAKER_00: Isn't it amazing?
1:36:37
SPEAKER_00: And the cab went away and you got a text message you paid for the ride.
1:36:40
SPEAKER_01: That's a very interesting analogy.
1:36:42
SPEAKER_01: So basically, technology matures when it disappears.
1:36:45
SPEAKER_01: Disappears.
1:36:46
SPEAKER_00: I have an Amazon Echo, those little cylindrical devices that you can speak to.
1:36:50
SPEAKER_00: You say Alexa.
1:36:52
SPEAKER_00: When I catch an Uber, I speak to Alexa.
1:36:55
SPEAKER_00: I say Alexa, Uber.
1:36:56
SPEAKER_00: When I'm tying my shoelaces, she says, Hey, it's a piece of BMW, da-da-da.
1:37:01
SPEAKER_00: Is five minutes away.
1:37:02
SPEAKER_00: He's outside, she tells me he's outside.
1:37:04
SPEAKER_00: I run outside, I jump into the Uber, I talk to him, I land up here at this location, I get out.
1:37:10
SPEAKER_00: I didn't open up an Uber website, an app, my phone, anything.
1:37:13
SPEAKER_00: I spoke transportation into existence.
1:37:16
SPEAKER_00: I spoke my destination into existence.
1:37:18
SPEAKER_00: The new interface for technology is sensory.
1:37:22
SPEAKER_00: It's understanding weight, temperature, listening to your voice.
1:37:25
SPEAKER_01: And soon we can think it.
1:37:26
SPEAKER_00: So well, Neuralink, yes.
1:37:28
SPEAKER_00: But but I when I watch Farid Sakaria and CNN on a Sunday, and I like his book recommendations, I sit back, I say, Alexa, Amazon.
1:37:36
SPEAKER_00: I say the person's name, I feel my pocket buzzing.
1:37:40
SPEAKER_00: This is literally three to five seconds, I look up and it's in my Kindle app.
1:37:43
SPEAKER_00: I spoke a book into existence.
1:37:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:37:45
SPEAKER_00: I don't pay, I don't check out, I don't go to the website and open up an app.
1:37:50
SPEAKER_01: You didn't dial out to get internet.
1:37:52
SPEAKER_00: I spoke it into existence.
1:37:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:37:54
SPEAKER_00: See?
1:37:55
SPEAKER_00: In history, this happens all the time.
1:37:58
SPEAKER_00: When things go away, then it has its impact.
1:38:00
SPEAKER_00: When the 90s, early 2000s, you went home with a keyboard, a mouse, a tower, a screaming modem, discs that you fed into the tower, a printer connected with a cable.
1:38:10
SPEAKER_00: Fast forward to today, you walk in, you pick up that glowing rectangle of glass.
1:38:16
SPEAKER_00: It's got no keyboard, no mouse, millions of applications.
1:38:19
SPEAKER_00: You give it to an 80-year-old granny, she knows what to do, give it two and a half-year-old child knows what to do.
1:38:24
SPEAKER_00: See, when things dissipate, when they coalesce and they go away, that's when they have human impact.
1:38:31
SPEAKER_00: Then it's when it's transversal.
1:38:32
SPEAKER_00: And that's the opportunity.
1:38:33
SPEAKER_00: It's not to build technology that is visually engaging, it's to build technology that they can execute relevantly, consequently, becomes like a part of our lives.
1:38:45
SPEAKER_00: That's that's the future.
1:38:46
SPEAKER_00: So all this robotics, and that's okay.
1:38:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, all these apps, I'm like, yeah, whatever.
1:38:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm looking for technology that can invisibly execute.
1:38:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's the stuff.
1:38:55
SPEAKER_00: That's when people adopt it, that's when people love it because it's magical, because it's invisible.
1:38:59
SPEAKER_01: Stephanie to do something for me.
1:39:01
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:39:01
SPEAKER_01: Imagine there's an African young man, young woman watching you right now.
1:39:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:39:07
SPEAKER_01: And they're scared for their future, they're looking for what to do next.
1:39:11
SPEAKER_01: If there's a way you can like reach through the camera and drop one mindset shift for them to set them on the right path to become a mastermind and own their futures in Africa, what would it be?
1:39:23
SPEAKER_00: I'd say the following.
1:39:25
SPEAKER_00: And it's gonna sound real simplistic, but it's really powerful.
1:39:29
SPEAKER_00: I think the first thing is buy a book called The Bitcoin Standard, read it.
1:39:35
SPEAKER_00: You can get it for free online.
1:39:37
SPEAKER_00: Read it.
1:39:38
SPEAKER_00: Understand money.
1:39:41
SPEAKER_00: Um the Jewish community, the Muslim community, the Greek community, these are communities of people that teach their children money.
1:39:53
SPEAKER_00: They teach their children the business.
1:39:55
SPEAKER_00: If you notice how good they are at it, Jew boys are really good.
1:39:59
SPEAKER_00: You know, Islam guys, like we call them here in South Africa, where I grew up, they're good because their dads and mums at the dinner table teaches them business in that.
1:40:07
SPEAKER_00: Broadly speaking, in the African culture, colored culture, um we don't get taught this.
1:40:14
SPEAKER_00: We are financially illiterate in many ways, which means we land up being workers for these other folks.
1:40:23
SPEAKER_00: Financial literacy is very powerful.
1:40:25
SPEAKER_00: It is powerful to understand money, to understand how money works, to understand how money breaks, how money compounds, how money aggregates, how money aggregates value, loses value.
1:40:37
SPEAKER_00: You need to learn money, understand money.
1:40:42
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says the root of all evil is the love of money.
1:40:46
SPEAKER_00: It's the love of money.
1:40:48
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so it's but you gotta understand money.
1:40:51
SPEAKER_00: How do you start?
1:40:52
SPEAKER_00: Go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole.
1:40:54
SPEAKER_00: The Bitcoin rabbit hole, at minimum, is going to teach you the history of money, the world, how world money works, how society works.
1:41:02
SPEAKER_00: It's fascinating, it's interesting.
1:41:04
SPEAKER_00: No one will not enjoy it, no matter what you want to be.
1:41:07
SPEAKER_00: If you're an artist through to a mechanic, through to a technologist, the history of money is a beautiful subject.
1:41:12
SPEAKER_00: It's amazing and it's important, and our people need to understand it.
1:41:16
SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, is teach yourself money.
1:41:19
SPEAKER_00: Um, use the AIs to teach you money.
1:41:22
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:41:23
SPEAKER_00: Right?
1:41:23
SPEAKER_00: If you're lazy, you don't want to read, etc., open up Chat GPT, Claude, Groc, Gemini, Perplexity, all of these tools.
1:41:32
SPEAKER_00: They're free.
1:41:33
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:41:33
SPEAKER_00: They're free, they're completely free.
1:41:35
SPEAKER_00: And let that thing teach you money.
1:41:38
SPEAKER_00: And then let that thing teach you all aspects of what you love and how to build a business around it.
1:41:43
SPEAKER_00: That's what I would tell.
1:41:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it sounds very simplistic, but you can build a multi-million dollar business in 24 months, no matter where you are on the African continent today.
1:41:55
SPEAKER_00: Because you have access to perfect money that is frictionless, that's fluid, it's globally accepted, and you can trade with it globally.
1:42:05
SPEAKER_00: That's extraordinary power.
1:42:07
SPEAKER_00: You can sit in the slums of Uganda and you can dream up of something and you can make it purchaseable on a global scale.
1:42:14
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:42:15
SPEAKER_00: Second thing is you can ideate your business with a hundred thousand PhDs at your back and core.
1:42:22
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
1:42:23
SPEAKER_00: That's incredible.
1:42:24
SPEAKER_00: You mentioned it.
1:42:24
SPEAKER_00: I have the capability to call an account and I can do that.
1:42:26
SPEAKER_00: You can do that now.
1:42:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:42:28
SPEAKER_00: You actually can ideate and build a business because you have access to hundreds of thousands of artificial cognitions.
1:42:35
SPEAKER_00: That is extraordinary.
1:42:36
SPEAKER_00: That is that redefines everything.
1:42:38
SPEAKER_00: Just like it, like the card changed, right?
1:42:42
SPEAKER_00: We went from a horse, we sat on a horse and was all about horsepower and all of that.
1:42:47
SPEAKER_00: And then we moved, we discovered electricity and all that, and we moved to the combustion engine.
1:42:51
SPEAKER_00: Then we sat on our asses, and we had access to 500 horses, 500 horsepower.
1:42:56
SPEAKER_00: Today, fast forward, you've got 500 minds in the car.
1:42:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a self-driving car, right?
1:43:01
SPEAKER_00: So that's 500 cognitions in the car.
1:43:03
SPEAKER_00: That redefines the car, that redefines everything.
1:43:05
SPEAKER_00: In Africa, we need to move from the horse, we need to move from the hydraulic engine.
1:43:10
SPEAKER_00: We have the opportunity now to cognify.
1:43:13
SPEAKER_00: Just like we electrify, we can now cognify.
1:43:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:43:17
SPEAKER_00: And cognification is the unleashing, it's the emancipation of the young African.
1:43:22
SPEAKER_00: If you are 19, 20, early 20s, poverty is no longer the excuse.
1:43:29
SPEAKER_02: True.
1:43:29
SPEAKER_00: You have all the power.
1:43:32
SPEAKER_00: All the access.
1:43:33
SPEAKER_00: You got access to so much they can teach you in your native language.
1:43:37
SPEAKER_00: You can become anything you want to become.
1:43:40
SPEAKER_00: What people think about it this way: Alon Musk can't buy a better iPhone than anyone in Ghana.
1:43:48
SPEAKER_02: True.
1:43:49
SPEAKER_00: Alon Musk can't get a better AI than anyone in Kenya.
1:43:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:43:53
SPEAKER_00: Alon Musk can't get a better internet than anyone in Nigeria.
1:43:57
SPEAKER_00: Think about that for a second.
1:43:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:43:59
SPEAKER_00: He can't.
1:44:00
SPEAKER_00: And he's the richest man in the world.
1:44:02
SPEAKER_00: See, the world's flat.
1:44:04
SPEAKER_00: It's flat.
1:44:05
SPEAKER_00: So if you want to do something in healthcare, if you want to do something in that, but what I would tell every young person is understand money, understand what these cognitions can do.
1:44:14
SPEAKER_00: But the main thing I want to tell young people is find your conviction.
1:44:19
SPEAKER_00: Find that thing that truly drives you.
1:44:22
SPEAKER_00: That purpose.
1:44:24
SPEAKER_00: It's your conviction.
1:44:25
SPEAKER_00: Find your conviction.
1:44:26
SPEAKER_00: When you find your conviction, it's it's an extraordinary thing.
1:44:30
SPEAKER_00: You can change mankind.
1:44:32
SPEAKER_00: You can change humankind.
1:44:34
SPEAKER_00: You can have a global impact when you find your conviction.
1:44:37
SPEAKER_00: Find it.
1:44:38
SPEAKER_00: Find that thing that has human impact.
1:44:40
SPEAKER_00: Find that thing that will drive you.
1:44:42
SPEAKER_00: It can be driven by you were sexually abused and you want to create a service for victims that are.
1:44:48
SPEAKER_00: You can do that.
1:44:49
SPEAKER_00: That could be your conviction.
1:44:52
SPEAKER_00: Your conviction could be something where you don't ever want to live like your parents in poverty, and that drives you, then let that drive you.
1:44:58
SPEAKER_00: Find that thing, that trauma.
1:45:01
SPEAKER_00: Find your trauma.
1:45:03
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:45:04
SPEAKER_00: And harness it and grab it and make it an engine.
1:45:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I love this one guy, he's called Michael Saylor.
1:45:11
SPEAKER_00: He says, like Bitcoin and technology, all these things are like fire.
1:45:15
SPEAKER_00: He says, when we discovered fire, the normies ran away from the fire.
1:45:18
SPEAKER_00: They were scared of the fire.
1:45:19
SPEAKER_00: They worship the fire.
1:45:20
SPEAKER_00: They were scared of the fire.
1:45:22
SPEAKER_00: He says, Henry Ford took the fire and he put it in an engine.
1:45:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:45:26
SPEAKER_00: Elon Musk takes the fire and he puts it in a rocket and he makes us interplanetary.
1:45:32
SPEAKER_00: Take your fire.
1:45:33
SPEAKER_01: And put it into something.
1:45:35
SPEAKER_00: Take your fire and let it drive.
1:45:36
SPEAKER_00: Plug it into an engine and let it drive you.
1:45:38
SPEAKER_00: Just like what I'm doing with AltVest Capital.
1:45:41
SPEAKER_00: It was just a financial services company that deployed loans for SMMEs.
1:45:46
SPEAKER_00: Beautiful human impact story.
1:45:48
SPEAKER_00: Amazing.
1:45:50
SPEAKER_00: We took Bitcoin, the fire, the thermonuclear weapon, and we took it and we crunched it and we put it into that engine.
1:45:59
SPEAKER_00: Now we have human impact at scale globally.
1:46:03
SPEAKER_00: That's what it can do.
1:46:04
SPEAKER_00: So take your trauma, take these assets, look at it this way, plug it in and let it drive you forward.
1:46:10
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we need.
1:46:11
SPEAKER_00: We need people driven by conviction.
1:46:13
SPEAKER_00: We need people that are independent of the victimhood.
1:46:16
SPEAKER_00: There's so much in Africa to complain about.
1:46:19
SPEAKER_00: There's so many things that are wrong.
1:46:21
SPEAKER_00: There's so many things to point out.
1:46:22
SPEAKER_00: But if you stop for a second and you look on the other side, we have more resources than anyone has in the entire world.
1:46:29
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
1:46:30
SPEAKER_00: Human resources, natural resources, atmospheric.
1:46:33
SPEAKER_00: No one can touch us.
1:46:34
SPEAKER_00: Our rivers, our lands, our minerals, our people, our everything.
1:46:40
SPEAKER_00: We have beautiful, untapped cultures.
1:46:44
SPEAKER_00: We have history that's still yet to be discovered, that has great monetary value.
1:46:49
SPEAKER_00: We've got wildlife.
1:46:50
SPEAKER_00: We've got, I mean, we've got everything.
1:46:53
SPEAKER_00: Everything.
1:46:53
SPEAKER_00: And I think if we can, as young people see that, take these tools, I think we can we can ignite an African renaissance.
1:47:04
SPEAKER_00: I think it's an emancipation.
1:47:07
SPEAKER_00: And it's gonna start with each one of us individually taking these tools and working on the things that we love that will have global impact.
1:47:15
SPEAKER_00: And I'm very excited about that.
1:47:17
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
1:47:17
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
1:47:18
SPEAKER_01: You make the future seem so exciting.
1:47:20
SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm always a positive person, but I'm now even more positive after this conversation.
1:47:25
SPEAKER_00: Just remember the optimists is what drives us forward.
1:47:28
SPEAKER_00: The world is 51% optimistic.
1:47:31
SPEAKER_00: 51% of the world is made up of optimists, and the 49% is the pessimist.
1:47:36
SPEAKER_00: It's that 1% that drives humanity forward.
1:47:39
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I always like to believe that people are inherently good, not inherently evil.
1:47:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that is true.
1:47:45
SPEAKER_01: That's why good always works.
1:47:47
SPEAKER_00: Yes, always.
1:47:48
SPEAKER_00: Light, no matter how dark.
1:47:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:47:51
SPEAKER_00: Make it darker, the light shines brighter.
1:47:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:47:54
SPEAKER_00: That's Africa, man.
1:47:55
SPEAKER_00: It's dark, it's dumb, it seems hopeless.
1:48:00
SPEAKER_00: But our light will always be so hopeful.
1:48:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:48:03
SPEAKER_00: And our lights and our darkness, and we need to grab that light and let it power us because we can.
1:48:08
SPEAKER_00: And don't wait for foreigners.
1:48:10
SPEAKER_00: Don't wait for no all that.
1:48:11
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
1:48:12
SPEAKER_00: Don't blame anyone.
1:48:12
SPEAKER_00: Grab it and let's do it.
1:48:14
SPEAKER_00: It's our time now.
1:48:15
SPEAKER_00: Africa can now rise.
1:48:17
SPEAKER_00: Now.
1:48:18
SPEAKER_00: Now.
1:48:18
SPEAKER_00: Because it's got perfect money, it's got artificial cognitions, it's got all the human talent.
1:48:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean, its latent potential is extraordinary.
1:48:27
SPEAKER_00: So I'm very excited.
1:48:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:48:29
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
1:48:29
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
1:48:30
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
1:48:30
SPEAKER_01: This has been so powerful.
1:48:32
SPEAKER_01: I hope you watch it now, they have enjoyed this.
1:48:35
SPEAKER_01: And I really hope that the same way this conversation has enhanced my mind, it's also taking you one step closer to becoming the mastermind that you were meant to be.
1:48:45
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
1:48:46
SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Rishi.
1:48:46
SPEAKER_00: Thanks, thanks for having me on.
1:48:48
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for being on.
1:48:50
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for watching this episode.
1:48:52
SPEAKER_01: Now, the Mastermind's dream is about building a community of people who have the right mindset and are ready to take their success into their own hands.
1:49:02
SPEAKER_01: So do me this wonderful favor subscribe and share with anybody out there who you believe you want to see have the right mindset to succeed so that together we can all become the masterminds we deserve to be.