Thanks. I’m gonna take a seat. Just so this feels more like a conversation, the most important thing you’ll need to know about me is I’m a dad. There was a story earlier that somebody talked about being a parent and the concerns that you have. And it’s interesting because in 2015 I read this peer to peer white paper about Bitcoin and I was an oil and gas executive at the time. And I was like, this is really cool. It’s like data containers that I can trust what’s in there.

So I could put joint ventures in there, I could put mineral rights, I could put land title, I could put all this different stuff because I have a trusted database. And then I realized it would probably get you suicided by a Rothschild because it basically blew up the banking system. There are these organizations that are the arbiters of trust and we rent this back from them. It required server rooms and, you know, cobalt and all this different stuff for the bank to be able to know that your money, when it comes to me, you can’t take it back. You’re not spending money you don’t have, et cetera. So everybody looks at sort of digital assets. Crypto, like that’s the thing that’s sort of top of mind, especially with the current administration.

But when I explain to people, I work a lot with politicians, so I’m on the board for the Minnesota Blockchain Initiative, I’m on the public private partnerships director for the Puerto Rico Blockchain association, and I’m on four different federal blockchain associations. A lot of what I do is I think we need to take a step back and move slow. I like what Blossom said about we need to. We’re in a different time here, so we’re being a bit more intentional about the problems that we’re solving. And when you look at blockchain, I try to explain it to people, especially with politicians, because a lot of times they don’t know what they’re talking about. So I use my hands. I say there’s the Internet and there’s PayPal, there’s blockchain and there’s bitcoin crypto, right? That’s the money part of the infrastructure, the data layer. What blockchain does is allows people to digitize trust, right? I don’t have to trust who I’m working with. If I’m doing sort of transactions, I don’t have to trust the data that I’m accessing because I can tell if it’s been, you know, adjusted or moved. Or there’s something that happens.

And so it allows us to trust at distance in math, right? Because math just works. So there’s all these people that looked at these tools and started saying, okay, what are problems that we can solve? And people who solve problems are the people who understand the problem. You talked about being a parent of someone with a special need and you understood that problem viscerally, right? It was very important to you. We have 90% of the planet lives on less than $38,000 a year. 90% Of them live on less than $25,000 a year, 90% of them live on less Than $10,000 a year, and 90% of them live on less Thank $10 a day. As we move forward and the world gets far easier to see, right? You can hop on to social media and you can see what’s happening anywhere and everywhere. We’re aware of all these problems, right? And it gives this sort of feeling of malaise that everything is chaos. What I try to remind people is that the only thing that you can really affect is what you can reach at arm’s length. And so I work in 35 different industries at this point, and it’s people who are solving real problems using blockchain technology. And the one thing that I’ll start with here is because were talking about philanthropy.

In philanthropy you have, when you give the money, sometimes you don’t know where it’s going to go, right? There’s been a lot of research about organizations that the money goes in, right? You can use the Haiti. They raised like $5 billion in Haiti to build homes. And they built five homes that. I didn’t misspeak. Five. Okay, where does that money go? Right? So people are like trying to do the right thing. We’re trying to donate, we’re trying to help, but what is happening? What’s the traceability? And so people looked at this data infrastructure layer of distributed ledger technologies and said, okay, we can now give our money and I can know exactly where it’s going to go. I can tag it to say, I want this to go to building affordable housing. I want this to go to funding food banks or communities. I’m working on a project right now. We’re building a decentralized Instacart. So if you’re a rancher or a farmer or a grower in a certain area, you can connect directly with people who want to buy these foods and they can set it up like a csa, right? They can help you pay for all of the inputs earlier. And then you can buy over time. And so having that data, you know, okay, we don’t have enough spinach or eggplant or whatever it is. And we’re testing this out in Arizona, where, right. Not a lot of green growing area. So the farmers who are good at farming don’t know how to market, don’t know how to be on social media because they’re out in the field. You can’t do both things.

So what’s happening is there are a lot of people that are innovating and some people are kind of building solutions and then looking for problems. But there’s a lot of people who are very aware of a problem and then they’re building the solutions for the people that share that same problem. I was having a conversation earlier about the ASL AI and there’s these first principles where some people want to solve computer vision for self driving cars. There’s a joke the other day that Uber put out something that, “You’re going to be able to save money on your Uber because you’re going to walk a couple blocks to a vehicle that runs on a certain route and somebody put it underneath.” Uber just invented the bus.

And so there’s these technologies that like, we’re coming up with these great ideas, right? I was reading a tweet the other day and it was a founder in Africa. I work with the African Chamber of Digital Commerce. And she said that somebody in, I believe it was Nigeria created a payment app that works offline because in some of these countries the Internet doesn’t work all the time. So the VC was on the call with them and they’re like, you know, how much money did you raise? And they’re like, nothing. I built it with $200. The VC was off the call in five minutes. He’s like, it’s not scalable. Then like a couple days later, the same person who was sitting in the call with them noticed that a Stanford student just raised $3 million for an app that reminds you to drink water.

I jumped into the digital asset space because I was like, “This is great. We can do a lot of cool things, right?” I would send these guys to the middle of nowhere in Texas and they would have to go through old dusty court records to find out if somebody actually owned the land and actually owned the mineral rights. And I was like, once we have all that information, we put it on chain, then we can verify that forever. Now we can reference it. And then I jumped in and it was like synthetic derivative pump and dump meme coins everywhere. People raising money for things that were like, not actually solving a problem because it was like, you know, it’s an unregulated stock market. So that happened for a while. You talked about it in your timeline. And so there was this thing where, like, everybody was creating new tokens to do certain things.

And then, you know, I would look at these business plans and I would be in these due diligence meetings and I’m like, “Okay, what’s your revenue model?” They’re like, “What? We were going to raise money and our valuation’s going to go up.”

“When you do the thing that you’re gonna do, the problem that you’re solving, how do people pay you so that you make more money to give the investor back more money?”

And they’re like, “Well, we’re gonna raise more money and the token goes up.” Okay, we’re gonna have a problem here. So as I did that, I started coming across these very few people who were like, talking about building things that solve problems locally, right? They were like, “I don’t need to raise VC money because a venture capitalist wants to 100x that money, right?” They want to put it into a hundred companies because five of them are going to become billion dollar companies and they’re going to make all their money back. But we have an opportunity here. There’s companies like Bit Give, which is allowing people who’ve made money in digital assets that are younger and want to be able to give back like they never thought they’d be worth 5 million or $10 million. And they’re not going to change their life because of that, but they’re like, what do I do with it? So they’re finding ways to give it to philanthropy.

We’ve got a product that we’re building right now. We’re working with credit unions, where you can basically plug into a credit union so people can hold digital assets inside their credit union, where it’ll say you’re checking your savings and then your Bitcoin and your stablecoins. The stablecoin legislation just came out. People are aware of this new way to use this, but they’re trying to figure out, what can I do with the money? And so we’ve built a program where you can take your digital assets that you’ve made and you can collateralize them so that independent business owners who want to sell their cleaning company, right? You’ve got 50 employees right now. 25% Of companies in the United States are owned by private equity. Okay? They’re coming in and they’re buying these companies, a lot of times what they’ll do, one of the revenue models is they will sell the real estate that is paid for and then lease it back to the company. This is happening in senior facilities and hospice and nursing and hospitals. I mean, there are rural hospitals that are closing everywhere because of these models.

So what people are doing is they’re saying, how can we affect our community locally? And so they’re taking money that they’ve made and they are using it as almost a personal guarantor to now underwrite so that those 50 employees who probably don’t have $10 million, they can partner with a credit union and say, “Hey, we’ll put up $2 million worth of our Bitcoin and we’ll call it a clear safety deposit box, right? So I’m going to park it here. It’s going to underwrite, de-risk the investment.” And so now those 50 employees can buy it from the business owner can exit and you can take the business owner’s share and pay down that note, right? So we’re able to invest really close to where we live to protect these businesses that can stay there to do philanthropy where we can say, “Okay, you care specifically about housing, right? There is a huge 40% of real estate in the world is not occupied because it’s held as a place to park money. So we don’t have a housing problem like we have. We have a asset inflation problem because people are using it to park money.”

Somebody made the joke about eventually they’ll get older and die. And I said, you know, people always ask me like, “What’s going to happen in the future? And I was like, well, these politicians will eventually die and we’ll get some new people and then things will start to change.” You don’t have to wait for those things to happen. Because if you have an idea or if you have something that you want to build, you can do all of the things that used to require large amounts of money to do because only the enterprise tools could handle it. The Oracles, the AWS, like the big systems that you had to be a multimillion dollar company to be able to afford. People are building these now open source, right? They’re putting it on new infrastructure so that you can innovate and build a business where you can have a rewards program where you can say, “I care about part of my business funding a local food bank.” And so everyone can see that 10% of everything. You were talking about it. Every month, when people pay to get their windows clean. Right? Every month they choose an organization to donate to. Right? And you can show that.

And now there’s a place on chain where you can track and show exactly where the money’s coming in and exactly how it’s being spent. I want to encourage people and say that you don’t have to build something huge to solve a problem. You know, being in blockchain, I always use the term “block by block,” because if I can make sure that all of the people in my neighborhood, somebody’s car has broken down, or somebody’s out of work because they’re hurt, or they haven’t gotten a job after COVID, I can help make sure that their kids get to school, or I can help make sure that their kids, when they get off the bus, have a place to stay that’s free instead of having to pay for childcare. If you can innovate and find a way to impact people that you care about.

It drives me crazy when I meet people who don’t know the names of their neighbors. I live in a row house, right? A townhouse. And so literally, if the neighbor’s house is on fire, my house is on fire. And so if I don’t know their name or they don’t know mine, and they’re like, hey, you can’t tell somebody that there’s immediate danger, right? So we have this. There’s a great book, it’s an older book called “Bowling Alone.” It’s by Robert Putnam, and it talks about this loss of community.

And I explained to people that we live in this sort of digital age. You know, I was just at the zoo with my daughter, and I’m watching the animals, and they’re six inches from you, but there’s this piece of glass that they’re on the other side of, so I can’t actually interact with them. We’re constantly interacting with other people through this glass, and so we’re not able to feel like the community is real. It’s like the digital NutraSweet of connection. I can watch you get married. I can watch you have a kid. I can see that you lost your parent. I can see that you lost a job. But instead of actually participating and communicating and hearing that from someone and hearing the emotions that celebrating with them. I’m a spectator, right?

So technology is amazing, but you gotta be reminded touch some grass, hug some people, work with people around you and ask people, like, what they need. There are people on your block. I guarantee you there’s somebody on your block that has started a side hustle. Right. Maybe they’re cleaning houses. Maybe they’re doing one of those dog poop businesses that is like new millionaires are popping up everywhere because people don’t want to pay to pick up their own dog poop. Like it’s a thing, right? I met a guy, he’s making like 5 million bucks a year because he started a dog poop cleaning service. If you can find out what your neighbor has to offer and you can use your dollars locally, the statistic is that if you spend your money locally, 85%, that dollar stays local. Right?

Money is supposed to move with velocity inside of community. The reason that we’re going away from cash is because if I give you $100 and then you go to the store and they give them $100, and then they give that hundred dollars to their daycare lady, it stayed $100. But if I do it with a debit card, 2.5%, and then debit card again, 2.5%, and then debit card again, 2.5%, right? All of a sudden now the bank has just made that $100 dollars theirs instead of us being able to do commerce with one another. So the thing that I would say is look at technology as a tool in the same way as a knife can make you the best meal you’ve ever had, but it can also kill you. Right?

There are these super tech people that are like, hey, the whole world is lonely, so we’re going to create them AI friends. What if we shut off the video games or the computer and we put them outside with the neighbor’s kids at the park? That might help, right? It’s easy to get disheartened when you’re looking at what is happening everywhere else. And all of these problems are purposely designed to show us that they are so big that we believe that the only people that can fix it is the government or the UN or our good folks at the WEF or they want us to think that they’re going to take care of it. We are a species that is only here because were able to collaborate as a group. Chimpanzees cannot go over 150 in a troop, otherwise it turns into warfare. Humans can go bigger than 150 without killing each other sometimes, right? Mexican wedding? Maybe not, but, you know, depends on where it’s at.

But if you have a business and there are people who are using new ways to pay, like Bitcoin or Ethereum or Stablecoins, bring that into your business because you may access another type of Consumer. If you’re raising money for philanthropy, give yourself a way to access a younger generation of people who are using digital assets and have access to them. I want to remind everyone here that when we speak, I can hear and feel the vibration from your voice when we’re in the room together. When you do that on Zoom, when you do that on FaceTime, it’s not the same if we can remind everybody that we are all human.

The quote that I use a lot is by, he’s the Nigerian Minister of Technology and he told the story of he was watching this military parade when he was a kid and he asked his mom, who is that? And everybody around is like, you know, don’t even worry about it. That’s not us. That’s not where we come from. And he said, was he born of a mother? Then we’re the same. We’ve probably only got about five or ten more years where you will still be born of a mother because they’re going to make tiny robot human babies. But because we’re not there yet, my kid, one of the books that we read is everybody poops if you can recognize when you’re othering someone else because of what they wear on their head when they pray, or who they choose to love, or where they go to church or where they go to school. I have some two friends, they always make fun of each other because he’s like, oh, you’re android guy versus an Apple guy. And I’m like, guys, that is the most ridiculous way to sort.

But technology gives us these unbelievable ways to sort down to the most minute detail that’s on purpose. Because we are really easy to control when we’re each an individual. We are very hard to control when we go back to World War II and every neighborhood had a victory garden because we needed to be able to eat. Find a place and something you care about and go in and give your time, energy, effort, your skill, your expertise. Consult for a non profit. Help younger people. You guys were talking about mentors earlier. I read a story about a CEO who has every executive and like higher level has a mentor that’s under 40 in the business. Not a mentee, a mentor. Because my lived experience as someone in their mid-40s is different than some of the founders that I meet that are in their early 20s, right. They’ve grown up on video games and computers and all that other stuff. I’m like that older generation where I remember Atari, but I also had computer labs in school, right. So we kind of were able to close that gap by being able to have conversations where when we used to have the way that was old, people would move into the house, and then all of that knowledge would be given to the parents, and that support was given to the parents, and that knowledge was given to the kids. We can do all of these things, and we can leverage technology to make those things easier to do.

I’m working with an AI program, and what they’re doing is they’re taking. It was started by a single dad, and we’ve all lost friends very young, and we’re like, how do we put our knowledge in that we can give to our kids so that they can have it when we’re gone? And so the whole point of this is to be able to put in your family history, your family knowledge, all the things that you want so that your kid can access it later when you’re gone. Those are really cool. If you have a way or a skill or a concern, find someone around you that has that same concern and partner together. There’s sort of an old proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We have to continue to remind ourselves that, like, I travel all over the world. I work with people in every single time zone in 50 countries. I have to remind myself that the most important thing is being with my daughter. And every night I’m home, I put her to bed. And connecting with my neighbors and asking if their kids want to go with us when we go to the park. Right.

Go out of your way to make yourself more human, because the technology is going to continue to infiltrate our life and make it so much simpler for us to not have to connect with one another. Blockchain and cryptocurrency gives us the ability to do transactions all over. I know people doing businesses that run not with anybody in their neighborhood. Right. So they don’t do anything with any of their neighbors. They work with people in other countries, and that’s great, but then you have to come back and be where you live. And my reminder to anybody in technology is that, hug somebody, just be nice. Kindness is not digital. It can be, but kindness is person to person, peer to peer. Blockchain and cryptocurrency allows us to do business peer to peer. Let’s get back to doing kindness and connection peer to peer. So I’ll end with that.