#11 - Clawing Back From $250K Debt at 20

so you take five thousand bucks from textbooks you invested you get a run up up to sixty thousand what happens from there august the sixteenth two thousand and seven happened there the stock market is now down twenty one percent faulty three percent what in the world happening on wall street in the blink of an eye i have never seen a six hundred point loss who knows where this is going to end up completely wiped out the dow traders are staying they're watching an amazement i don't blame them there's apple's under pressure yahoo down eight and a half percent cisco six and a half percent every day they're pounding what it started an america last year there's no spread to every part of the world man and i woke up that morning and everything was in the red and my account was down about seven eighty percent some ridiculous it was the worst day on the wall street since the crash of nineteen eighty seven and that means life as most americans know it is about the change in some cases dramatically within four or five months was about a quarter of a million in the hole alright i just sat down with alex sv or angry alex as he's known in the bitcoin world and we talked about a whole bunch of things ranging from bitcoin itself his story trading stocks and ending up quarter million dollars in debt as well as how he you know got out of the hole built himself back up made his first million and what he's doing in the crypto space today pretty fun conversation i think you'll enjoy it okay thanks for coming man i appreciate you came you came a long way i like to think you just came for this podcast i do you know i know there was also that other little conference at bitcoin twenty nineteen conference going on no no i just came for this that's swear so this is gonna be an interesting one because so far the people i've talked to are people that i know super well like it we hang out on the weekends we blah blah i met you five minutes ago and you came highly recommended so i said okay let's do it let's chat and the thing that i find interesting is i know that you're pretty heavy in the bitcoin space mh and so we'll talk about that but i just wanna know a little bit about you first what's the tl on on on your life story so what's give me the give me the give me the one minute version first and then i know we'll go touch on unless the one minute it's good and then we'll just end the podcast that can also work done shortest podcast history the tl went to uni really economically strong dropped out thought i was a genius on the stock market i got taught a few lessons in the g doug mo way out of that door knocking but like a successful business when i was twenty two twenty three made my first meal then got taught another lesson from government mismanagement of money lost a lot of money there sort of went on this random sa barrack i said they're never gonna do business again i became a hippie how we talking i met silent retreats yoga yeah that kind of stuff exactly i went did yoga i when and did like medi all that stuff but before it was kinda like cool this is yeah before jack do do yeah yeah exactly so about seven eight years ago and then and then yeah while i was in in the states i spent a bit of time in venice beach and up in san francisco i sort of i i ended up going to singularity university for a couple days for like a little short thing there thought text the way to go went back muddled around in tech built a few little software things and yeah and then i ended up down the bitcoin rabbit hole about three and a half years ago and and never alright so came back so we're gonna go through each of those in order because i think that's the way to do it but so how old are you thirty one i look under thirty i'm thirty one as well oh really i look older i think i have the last startup up when i started i was fresh twenty four years old baby faced and now i have this like g beard and gray hairs and all kinds of things the shit ages you meant like if you if you think i've got a slight baby face now if i show you my photo when i was twenty just before i'd gotten down the path of running businesses i look six right yeah i saw a picture of obama yeah before and after and i was like damn yeah they got to him yeah dude it it kills you man no one gets out of alive alright so so you went to the university you said you dropped out well which university were you going to you university university of wall gong so it was kinda like oh i've been to wall and going i went to a party in the university of wall and gong a epic night so wall owns like a party school i mean that that was my rationale right so it was the one offering me the lowest scholarship but it was the beach and it was girls yeah perfect okay cool so you you had your priority straight so you go there you're studying what are you studying civil engineering so engineering okay cool and you dropped out why why drop out no this is gonna sound arrogant but i i just thought everyone was idiot i was like they're not here to study engineering because they wanna do engineering they're just here because they got the appropriate final year of school results and that that's that was sort of dis so i was like i wanna do more i wanna be better so i took that money that i had for the scholarship that they gave me to buy textbooks i was like fuck i'm gonna do two things i'm gonna beat everyone with no textbooks and i'm gonna take that money and i'm gonna trade derivatives your textbook money yeah basically and it wasn't much it was like five grand but within six months i turned it into like sixty so like from a percentage return standpoint i i thought i was and how how do you even know what a derivative is at this time i i i was on as six dot com dot a u trying to learn how to trade shares and and my family was like totally anti that gambling this that so i kind of ran away from home did my own thing right and and yeah i i i literally just self taught myself that the first trade i actually placed was not a derivative it was it was this small company called g g it was like some genetic bull crap that i got sold by this broker mh and and it was this was back and days before your you know online trading became you know mainstream and yeah i lost money on and i was like this guy's an idiot so i i just went and did my own thing and i was just trading options and warrants and what was the goal the goal was like i wanna get rich or what were we trying to do i'm gonna make a million by time i'm twenty and i'm gonna go back to my family improve i had this vision in my head that i'd turn up on their on their front door with a ferrari and i'd be like told you so you know nineteen year old kids spring kind of amazing how much motivation people have of proven out people wrong not man i know know what your parents think you were today gonna do they they thought you were just you know if i up or what do they think look they all wanted me to be a civil engineer they wanted me to you know because because i i didn't live with my parents at the time either so like my parents at split when i was young so i sort of moved out and went and i live with my grandmother and my uncle so and my michael was very patriotic and he wanted me to be civil engineers so then we go back to eastern europe to mass where i'm from and then we would like sort of build a town there and all all this sort of stuff and i mean it was really yeah i and it was really appealing when i was young but i i i read i read rich dad poor dad and some other book when i was like sixteen seventeen sort of made me view the world a little bit i wrote book yeah it was was a good book okay so if if somebody hasn't read that book what was the epiphany you had when you read i i think that eb side the square was really important and and just figuring out which side of the quadrant yeah you want it to be on yeah the the way the way i understood it over the way you know just explaining it if you are lazy and don't wanna read the book is there's these four boxes that you can belong to ease like employee which is everybody sort of knows and and in fact society sort of steer you to it's like you know go go to school we'll get a degree so you can get a good job yeah you wanna go from a good job to a great job so that's the e bucket yep then there's these sort of like a self employed which is basically like doctors lawyers that sort of thing civil engineers that the that's exactly where my family wanted me to be and so considered you know it's like a better version of a job yep and then you get to sort of business owner which is good because at that point you're not trading hours for dollars mh you're you you own some entity and but you still have to operate it and you still own it a better quadrant to be in and the last one i and this is the goal you know the story of rich dad poor dad is that his real dad who he calls the poor dad yep tells him go get a job yep and his rich dad which is his friend's dad is making all this money and live a different lifestyle and does seems to be working less and earning more yep and so he was looking at him like how do you do that yep and basically it was you take the money from a business you own and you jump into the eye bucket you start investing and then your money makes you money which is even better than you you you know your hours or your idea is making your money and so i think when you read that book you sort of can't help but put yourself one of the buckets and ask yourself you know do i wanna be here correct and he paints pretty good picture where you're like hell no i don't wanna be in any bucket but the the eye the there and well and that's why i think that was the the thing that drove me down thinking about the stock market i just wanted to you know investing exactly in my infinite wisdom at the time right i'm and i that's what i'm gonna do right and here here he we so you take five thousand bucks from textbooks you invest it you get a run up up to sixty thousand mh what happens from there august the sixteenth two thousand and seven happened there i must i still remember the date because i woke up it was a it was a week before my birthday about a week before that i placed all these trays and i thought i was this is it you know i'm gonna make i i lever the hell up you know if my trades go the right way i won't be a millionaire by time i'm twenty but i'll have about a quarter of million yeah and i woke up that morning and everything was in the red my account was down about like seventy eighty percent something ridiculous amount and i was like sitting in there like refreshing the fucking page thinking there's something and what had gone wrong what was the issue i i remember if it was best earns or lay or some something like that but one of those collapses happened right and then the entire market tanked and i was i was levi long financial kids sitting in australia who know trading textbook money derivatives ends up feeling the burn of something happened in wall street and i had no idea right right i had no idea because the way i was trading at the time was i was just i didn't give a shit about the companies or the macro situation or any of that or or or all i looked at was these charts yeah and i was just swing trading and i was just looking at things if they were too over extended i'd go i'd by put if they were too under extended i'd buy a call option and you know if they were breaking out of a patent or something i'd i'd go long or short or whatever the case was and and and that's house and i mean the i'm listening to a book now called thinking in bets by i think any duke or whatever name is book player yeah that's it exactly really really good book and she talks about the idea of resulting which is confusing a good decision with a good result yeah and and looking back on it that's what i was doing i i was thinking i'm a genius i don't know how to make money right you know this is how this is how it works so then on the way down what did i i just doubled down the whole way until i lost everything and then i you know got some loans because i had a okay history of trading so then i then yeah within within four or five months i was about a quarter of million in the whole so i kind of went the wrong way so how old are you at this point well i just ten twenty yes so you're twenty years old quarter million dollars in the whole yep this is not the game plan this was not the game plan i wanted to i wanted to drive up in my ferrari to my parents house and tell them i made a million bucks before twenty and instead down accordingly million bucks so what's what does that realization like when you wake up that day but you know think out knock on wood i have not felt that yeah i felt a lot of things but i haven't felt that yeah well i mean that morning when you know the the chaos started happening i remember walking around this because i was living in this little shitty apartment because i was putting all the money on the on in the trading account and i walked around and i kicked the hole in the wall and i was like oh fuck i need to pay for that as well and fix it so that's sort of my memory of it i was like woke up shit and kick the hole in the wall and felt worse and and yeah and just i mean i i just think i was in reactionary mode for the next three or four months just trying to like you know i i couldn't fathom how and and i mean this is one of the the downsides of paper right is that you don't appreciate it as much mh and and you know i was running around trying to figure out how to get back to where it was you know and then you know i i remember as i was going below the zero mark i was like oh i wish i could just get back to zero you know like i was i was thinking in my head i i don't want the sixty you know the the sixty grand that i made not even the twenty grand that i made just give me back to zero and then when you know i got down to a hundred and i'll be like be happy if i just lost fifty right and then all the way down until like well this is have you ever have you heard chris ak tell his story about you know chris saga sort of legendary investor now you know he was he has i think probably the best early stage investment portfolio of all time like he has uber instagram in there he has oh my god a whole bunch of companies kick kick kickstarter in there he's got maybe eight of the billion dollar companies that came out during that era in his portfolio yep but he tells a story where he did almost the same thing went to law school started trading stocks and you know at one point he had lever his way up to where he thought he was gonna be up about twelve million bucks mh and he had turned a few hundred thousand dollars into twelve million dollars and then in the course of about a week swung down to negative four million dollars and from there like claude his way back and he has his great line which you remind me of which was i've never felt richer than when i had zero dollars of net worth like when he got out of the debt yeah and got back to zero he's like i've never felt richer yeah and guy's a billionaire now so like is that kind of dude yeah the contrast man that that there's nothing like that sort of contrast it was the same so my my reaction you know despite being initially very reactionary was you know i then dropped out a uni and i looked for the first thing i could do to make some money and i i got myself it's called an ab b inn australia which is kinda like you i i went into the s bucket so i i got myself my own little business number yep and i went in door for any company that would have me and i just went in that there was one that i did or basically all the work for was selling pay television in australia door door sales basically daughters or sales and and maybe this was also inspired by port ed i don't know but know i was very introverted but it was the only thing i get on short notice that i could make some money straight away without having skill without having to do anything and so how does that work because i've i've i never met anyone who actually did door to door sales so what happens you you wake up you just drive to a neighborhood or work you come to the office in the morning at about nine o'clock you've got so door door companies are effectively two types of businesses they they do sales and they do recruitment okay because they have the highest turnover of any kind of business you can imagine right because you can more submission right that's it well it's not only you need more salespeople people but everyone leaves after for the first two weeks basically it's only a rare few that actually stick it through i see because it's such a shit job if you you could go out and work all day and get nothing but it's a really good primer for business and i think that's why you know k talks about it in his thing which is you can go out and you get paid for the result not for the time you put in it right and cs so you got go to the office at nine o'clock you know people are recruiting and then you know you as if you've been there for you know long enough and you're a good enough salesperson and you become what's called a leader and you know all the sort of stuff that when you started what was it like you you go there what happens i went there i'm like fuck do we do now and then you know there's some dude coming in training salespeople in the morning and then sort of rev have everyone up by about eleven am we got out we get a map this was sort of before we add smartphones gps shit and you know get sort of you you draw out you you mark out with a text sort of the blocks that each person has and then you know we all go out and you're not allowed to step on each other's turf you know we all had our own turf and we'd gone you know knock on doors and it was just luck of the drug and did you what's the sales pitch so knock knock i opened up oh did what would did you say i think the reason i was successful was because i never i never had the same pitch so what they what they taught us there was you there was this five steps this eight steps principle of you know smile and this and this and this and this is how you take people through it i i threw all that shit out the window smiling yeah yeah exactly now but i i spent some time really digging deep on like neuro linguistics nlp and all that sort of stuff and i managed to go to robins conference you just around the time when just before i lost everything like the last bit of money i had i went to a robins conference and then i paid for a an nlp certification i saw a practitioner thing so i use that and and that is all about not so give us an example how do you how do you use that in a sale i i'd knock on the door and someone would say get the fuck out of here you know and i'd be like i'll get the fuck out of here in a minute and i i would match their tonality match the speed at which they said something and and i'd say something that would shock and they like what and i'd be like yeah at me and then they come to the door and then i'd start a conversation i i'd i used to use a lot of body language so instead of standing face to face i'd lean on the door to the site so you know it's slightly more on their side and and then just ask them about themselves or i'd i'd pick something out about you know what they're wearing or you know the the neighborhood that they were on exactly and i i'd open up so it was all it was had nothing to do with the product and and i got to learn this in the early days about sales having very little to do with product because i didn't have the tv i didn't know it was on the channels i didn't know any of that shit i just could pick things out and just talk really quickly and build that the key thing was to build rapport inside thirty seconds so so i'd yeah match their body language match doing a lot of mirroring and matching at the door with with whoever the person was and be suggestive in the process of letting them letting me inside the house and and that was sort of the key as soon as you got inside the house it was game over you could you could make the sale gotcha yeah so what sort of thing gets in the house what do you hey got some water the water was a big one fuck it's called out here it's hot out here can use the bathroom right but so they were sort of like the the the sneaky tactics but then also when i was younger now i'm and old ugly fucker but when i was younger i was kind of half good looking yeah and and and that used to always work so most of the people ended buying off me were were mom's gotcha yeah cool and i and i really played up the sort of the the sun sort of card right like hey how you doing you know okay alright sweet so you you start selling were you good at it there it sounds like you're pretty good at dude i i within three weeks was the third best in the country and i was living on some dudes lounge you know paying twenty bucks a week rent and and my sort of motto was i'd i'd carry two cans of tuna in each pocket so four cans of tuna i would only eat if i sold something and i would sprint between doors because then i could get the doors faster and did you wanna eat like warm tuna in your pocket so was that like a my i didn't give a fuck i was just like i'm getting the sale then i get to eat and yeah my my my my cost of food budget daily was four dollars because it was a dollar a can tuna right and i just funneled everything towards paying paying the debts off yeah and during the day would knock on doors and at nighttime i would read and study economics markets and what what the hell did i do wrong and how is i so stupid to have lost so much money right and so how much were you making in doing daughter sales two grand a week yeah and the and the average person would make about four or five hundred right so like i was about four times above that so you start paying off the debts and you sounds like you sort of because you got humbled you started looking at the science of business and the you know how how this thing works how do you really make money reliably and repeatedly correct and what was what came out of so so that period ends what happens after well i i ended up so i i don't know for my for somebody else for a little while and then i was like why am i building this guy's business i kind of moved myself from the s to the b if we're gonna use this mental model and then i set up my own sales company and then i got a lot a lot of people that were selling under me that i would get a come off if i train them mh and they came in work for i gave better commissions and all this sort of stuff and we started competing with that company and we did really well because i just had a different style a different method of teaching people to sell and all this stuff and we got a hands on more products and and yeah and then like i i went from leaving that place with two or three people that came follow i me to about you know within within six months we had thirty people running around door knocking for me and you're selling the same thing tv or something we we're selling like a little bit of tv we're selling this car wax stuff and then and then that was sort of the segue that i i said i wanna sell things that more meaningful so we looked at renewable energy so selling solar systems that was a real culture shock because you know going from selling forty dollar product at the door to like hey you wanna give me twelve grand for a yeah good the fuck you get out of here right and even the charming yeah good looking sun yeah is is not gonna do good job i'm selling that one i i remember that the first couple weeks of trying to do that zero sales like and i'd never in my life gotten zero sales like more than two or three days in a row like the and i was so disillusioned i was like fuck this ain't kinda work with you gonna be stuck i fucking yeah dude i was we're gonna be stuck selling shit to people for the rest of my life like and then i it just happened over four like four or five sales just came back through like from people who are thinking about it all in one day and and that was like hundred grand in turnover mh i was like holy shit and and and that sort of changed it for and then from there i transformed that sales company into actually because the the solar companies that i was selling for again i have this recurring theme in my life i felt they were incompetent you know i was like i can do this better right and so i went and met with different suppliers with installers and and because i also had a engineering background i was able to dis design the systems like bespoke for people's houses and and so we went for quality of a quantity and and and we built a really good business about so by the time i turned twenty two and a half twenty three roughly that man i'd i'd everything was paid back i'd made my first million i had about thirty staff across three different states we're were turning over maybe you know in a really really good week maybe half million a week at about a ten twenty percent margin so so we're making good money that's really good business yeah and so so this answers the question of the podcast right so the the podcast this podcast is a promise where i basically said i'm gonna go study the rich yep because from a young age i've wanted to be rich mh i know a lot of people wanna be rich and i know that the there's two things that come out of when you talk to rich people you you do understand strategies tactics tips those sorts of things you know more than that you hear the stories and the ups and downs and the yeah started from not knowing anything and just worked my way forward so i want those stories to come out and i appreciate you telling yours but this is this answers the question right how did you make your first million and for you it was you were selling all the panels yeah seriously and and and we we got a really big boost from the government so so they came in and they started handing out rebates to everybody and i mean in typical government fashion incentivizing the wrong layer of the stack like what they should have done in hindsight was they should have gone in incentivized manufacturers or importer or whatever to bring the stuff in and as a result that would have trickled down to the consumer via you know natural competition they instead gave the money to the consumer and then what ended up happening was all of these morons who had never been anywhere near solar didn't understand electronics that they were literally just either random electrician or even roof or even just morons had never had a job before became solar companies and we went from being one of two companies our entire region to being one of thirty in like side x amount of months and so i mean that ate into margins and things like that but what what the you know and this is what i call the next big lesson of my life yeah because don't trust the government it's how are under to the crypto part yeah very very shortly is they it it was june i think oh man i think two thousand two thousand twelve i can't remember it was eleven twelve thirteen it was one of those years and they sort of made an announcement in june that that they realized that this thing had taken off like way to way too fast in terms of what they are anticipating and they said alright anyone who hasn't done their installation by the end of this month which is three weeks away misses out on the rebate and so from a consumer perspective they're gonna miss out on all this money so everyone went apes shit like i mean that day that they announced that like i sold like i think probably a million and a half worth of systems on the phone in my fucking desk i didn't even get up like i just called through everybody and just closed closed closed closed it was the best day of ever had and i thought fuck we had just made at killing like you know we're high five each other we're like you know all we gotta do now is install these over the next three to six months and i mean whilst the sole industry wouldn't go away like it'd be subdued this would give us enough to you know manage our our way through so everything was all good so we went ahead and the and the way it worked was basically the customer would pay half the money up upfront and the government would effectively pay the other half in about you know two three four five six months later whenever you know the all the certification all that sort of stuff went through so we got the money up front we would basically carry the the cash flow until we got that money in margins were about you know say at that point in time because of the the competition was probably about a thousand bucks a system so we're were waiting on all this money and then when it came time to pay the money the government was like we're gonna give you all fifty cents of a dollar and we're like what and like overnight every job that we done just became negative yeah it became negative and like it was a fucking kick in the nuts like i was lucky because i was like trying to build an empire here so i i hadn't spent money on stupid shit so i was had enough money there to like pay everything out where i had made some mistakes was i bought a half a container of leds led lighting because i thought that was gonna be the next big it didn't need rebates and everything and that was sort of half paid for and i was sitting on dock in china i didn't have the money to pay that up so i kind of burnt a hundred and fifty grand there i had a half built gym because i was trying to sort of get into the twenty four seven fitness craze at that time as well mh and and we couldn't finish the gym because we didn't have enough money and like so i was lucky some senses because i had enough sort of cash to to sort of wind up the solar business but then i didn't have enough so so i kind of had to make this decision of what i was gonna keep what i was and and what i was gonna try and do anyway about about a year and a bit of torture ended up shutting everything down and i kind of had a little bit of money left this where you went on the spa this is where i went on the sa so just before i went on sa i'd i'd put the balance of my money because during this entire time of running this business and building this business i i didn't take my eye off the ball with respect to the markets and what was going on there so i was very very early in gold and silver you know studying austrian economics and understand how money works inflation and q and all this sort of stuff and so i i could see that the us dollar was gonna get pumped and that you know we needed something it was a prudent decision to invest into some more sound sort of money so i bought a shit load of gold and silver and my brother and i made a lot of money out of that like with that that sort of saved my ass during that period and that's little sort of what funded my sa mh and yeah i i came to california spent some time here i was in venice beach california for a little bit i was experience saw some interesting things yeah and i've said talking parts of bodies yep but basically and i was actually living right on the boardwalk for about a month and i couldn't handle it after like that month like the it was this cool loft it was like funky and shit and it was know when i got there it was like typical tourists you know like came to venice i thought i muscle beach gold gym around the corner i i was in heaven and i realized it was such a shit hole one night i remember walking back in from the from the boardwalk there was some dude inside my fucking apartment and he's like sitting in there like shaking on the floor i'm like the fuck you doing and he's was like you got some money man and i was like get the fuck out of my apartment like i was it was like the weird thing because like that kind of stuff doesn't happen australia right welcome to america i know man i was like holy crap so yeah man and that sa bad was like a interesting period so you you when you came in you handed me this i'm looking at this thing if you're listening you can't see it obviously but says this says breaking news blockchain is dead and it looks like this is a this is real is a mock newspaper what is this is this your business plan like i see i see an ad for your company at the end but but what i looking at because this looks kinda genius but i don't know what it is alright so about this what you're were giving away at the conference it is not not this conference though i add another conference did this conference i gave it away to a couple people because i had a few printout outs left but basically at a conference early this year i'm sort of known as either angry alex or contrary and alex back back in sydney scenario or back in brisbane or australia or whatever you wanna call it and and that's because i generally have a very contrary viewpoint to to norms that i find stupid and and one of the latest norms that i find stupid is this whole blockchain chain thing yeah the norm that i found stupid before that was crypto and ico so there's this there's is capital raising conference called wholesale investor that happens you know that they did they do multiple events and they basically get invest companies we're looking to raise capital in front of you know wholesale high net worth angels etcetera funds right so you get the opportunity to get up on stage and pitch your your business and as part of that some of the more well known people in three get to also do it what's called an educational session mh so you know this this little publication actually started the year before which was i got invited to speak at that event and it was right during the ico craze right everyone was making money off icos and we consciously made a decision not to fucking do an ico with amber because i just found it fraudulent stupid moron and every other word i could give it because people are effectively using the narrative of what bitcoin is which is about creating symmetry in society and being the money of the people they're using that sort of narrative to print money and do what the bankers just did in writing you know do that just to dump you know you're worthless tokens on people that pissed me off so much so i was like we are categorically not doing that so i got up at conference well so i i wanna i wanna pause for seconds because i wanna have a i wanna test the contrary in alex or what was the first one angry alex alex here i was thing okay so so for people who are listening i wanna hear your views okay on a couple of things i'm gonna give you the prompt you give me the answer kidding prompt is why should i care about bitcoin the world needs a bit of form of money and fundamentally if money is the basis of society the current form within which we know it is is fucked up okay cool how's is it fucked up what's wrong with money today money is owned and controlled by a few and if we look at money as a form of communication we you know we all believe in freedom of speech we should all believe also in freedom of owning and doing you know what we want with money because it is a fundamental form of human it it's a it's a it's a tool of human collaboration that's what money was designed for and you cannot have a collaborative cooperative complex society without having money and so in today's day and age the the way the way money works is it's owner control by the few who are the here the the few is like the central banks and basically sovereign nations that that's that's the lever that they use to basically run society and we all know that society has some fundamental problems you know you don't have to walk far in san go to see some issues right so in business you and i know we go out and we set up a business we do something if we fuck up or if we get it wrong the consequences you lose money you go bankrupt you you have a negative consequence if you get it right and you do well and the stars align you know you're lucky in all this sort of stuff you get a nice payout something good happens in government and central banking and you know that sort of side of the world and this is the as that you get when you own money when you own the world's most important resource if you make a good bet and you invest and you do the right thing you make a bunch of money if you fuck it all up and you do dumb shit like two thousand eight or if you're a government and just print your way you know into as much debt as you want it doesn't matter guess who pays for it everybody else so it's all the power without the consequence zero consequence so there's no so what what happens is you get this as symmetry in society where the very few the rent seekers is effectively get to do whatever the fuck they want in zero consequence and the the rest of us we either pay for it in taxes or through a hidden tax of inflation you cannot do that in a sound money type society something that would could potentially be built on bitcoin and here in america you know inflation is not we're not right it's three percent a year that sort of thing what if i'm in american i'm sitting here saying what's the big deal money seems fine money's never did me wrong i don't have enough money but but money itself is not sort of dream i think most people don't feel the consequences of what you're talking about but in some countries that's different so like give us an example of well i mean country where venezuela hard you people have heard about that i mean i i don't have my wallet here but i've got like a venezuelan like i've got a hundred million you know all or whatever it so like like a bill yeah yeah it's it's a bill exactly right and what happened there a government area that's hyperinflation is a function of the loss of confidence in the currency of a of a jurisdiction which that's a nation stay whether it's what whatever right now i mean in in the in the world we live in the jurisdiction is always the nation state effectively so money's is supposed to be this thing that performs three functions store value medium of exchange and a unit of account now when people lose confidence it loses the first one that idea that it's that it's a representation or a store of value and if it loses that the fact that it's a medium exchanger unit account basically goes out the window and people don't trust it in anymore they don't want to hold it because what it's supposed to do like you would rather than hold goods or you would rather hold anything else other than this worthless paper mh and and that happens more so in countries that you know have weak governments or a weak social system or you know all that sort of stuff it hasn't happened in a place like the us i don't think it's likely to happen here because of how entrenched the us dollar is i mean maybe not for another fifty or a hundred years right so that's sort of not the argument but i wanna touch on the thing that you mentioned how you know three percent inflation so i mean i think m two money supply inflation like six percent but irrespective it's an amount that not many people feel that much but a friend of mine puts it calls a crystallize life force it's like we in society as human beings we perform work or we add value it's the it's you know by inputting energy of some sort into the world and what that's measured in is this unit which we decide to call money and then we trade this unit around and that's how we build society right that unit it doesn't make sense for that unit to just depreciate for some you know nonsense because it's it's if you go and work for twenty years and you've saved that money the money that you worked for at the beginning of that twenty years is now worth less in purchasing power if you compound that three percent it's worth about sixty percent less than it was when you began but is your work technically worth less sixty percent than it was it's not and i was talking with this lady who was not a bitcoin we were talking about all sorts of stuff and she sort of brought up trump and all this sort of stuff and and anyway i kind of you know got me down the bitcoin rabbit hole and she she mentioned to show and i think it's seth seth ro is he the dude that those those funny guy yeah the funny guy yeah so it's can't remember if it was him or someone else but it's a netflix showing it's like a parody of star trek okay and and the you know they're all on this ship and and they've got that machine that can replicate anything right and you know whether it's a you know wallet or this or that whatever they want so they have abundance but the only thing they cannot replicate is the value of the contribution to their you know mini society because that's the you know that that's the one thing that's unique that's the one thing that's fundamentally scarce so when she said that i was like holy shit you you have just basically described what money is that it's fundamental the the basis of what money is it's something that cannot be replicated cannot be diluted and it's it's a measurement of work it's a measurement of energy and and what bitcoin represents is this uni you know unit that cannot be compromised or confiscated or you know or changed by any particular party with you know asymmetric power right and as a result we can map that directly to the input that human beings put into society so the only way in a sort of bitcoin den system let's say in the future that's what it looks like or at least parallel economic system that's sort of run on bitcoin the way only the only way to get ahead in a world like that would be to add more value or to put more time in mh that's it and and that's how an economy should function exactly not rent seeking right okay i'm i'm with you on all those things part of why i'm interested in big bitcoin but i like hearing it from you and so you've got this app that's is coming out or already out it's it's already adam australia already called amber yep and tell us tell us about amber because i think it's pretty clever it's there's there's like an equivalent app like that for free fiat currency but it looks like you're doing it for for crypto cryptocurrency bitcoin specifically but tell us what is amber really simply i believe that everybody should be buying and holding some bitcoin at the moment because when when a new asset emerges there is incredible upside so you know and what you wanna do is you wanna if if you picture i'll i'll give you really good example to picture bitcoin that there's there's gonna be twenty one million bitcoin you know and that's sort of like a fixed upper limit it's infinitely divisible which means everyone can hold some at some point in time but the the upper limit is fixed so if you look at it kind of like the planet there's so much land it's kinda like holding some territory in bitcoin is like holding some territory in the physical world right so so you wanna accumulate now while the fucking thing's cheap you you don't wanna hold minimal territory you know in a hundred years from now when you know everyone's got a large chunk so what amber does it helps you dollar cost average into bitcoin by you know you you download it your link bank account and you forget about it and you you've got options whether you wanna just do spare change or whether you just wanna do a recurring sort of buy but it effectively just purchases an amount of bitcoin you know from as little as five bucks a day whatever it is and it stores it for you in cold storage so this is for the person that says i'm interested in bitcoin mh i don't have a ton of money to go buy you know ten ten g's is worth bitcoin right now yep to a as of today's price get you less than one bitcoin correct so i don't have a ton of money to go go invest in this but i'd i i don't wanna sit on the sidelines i like to be in the game correct this is about accessibility and so you're trying to put people in the game by saying do no work just download the app yep and it will passively say the spare change use cases i buy something you know let's say for for five dollars and sixty cents yep and it can round up and take the the last forty cents and buy some bitcoin with it correct so that's one thing you can tell it to do yep cool you'll just accumulate a little little by little every time you're buying something just round up the spare change you kinda would've have forgot about anyways correct the other thing you can do is set up a recurring buy five bucks every monday type of thing yep that gets you in the game and so you're trying to help the person who is interested but on the sidelines today get in the game well there's three main reasons it's too risky it's too volatile it's too hot mh so we we alleviate all of those you know v volatility is smooth and out via dollar cost averaging that's what it does so so what happens is when your dollar cost averaging when it's when the price is you know exorbitant high you're buying a little bit less when it's exorbitant low you're buying a little bit more right particularly in emerging classes they're all over the place so so for if you're not a finance or dollar cost averaging just means you don't have to time when's the right time to buy correct you're just always buying a little bit exactly so as things swing you're sort of you're writing the ups and downs smooth out the the the problem of trying to time the market which nobody can so it's about so you named nailed it there so it's about time in the market instead of timing the market so so the only thing you gotta do in that sense is you've gotta look for opportunities which have long term upside and ideally you wanna look at the opportunities with not only long term upside but with asymmetric upside so bitcoin is the only asset that i know of today that is likely has an opportunity to be worth a hundred we don't have many of those today unless you're a chris soccer and you can get yourself time testing exactly yeah yeah so the most you can lose is know the five bucks you put in correct but the most you can gain is thousand times the five bucks exactly that's the a you're looking for exactly right and that's how most people should invest so after all the years of trading and all the years of stuff that i've done if i just dollar cost averaged into things that had some asymmetric upside i would be a hundred or a thousand times further ahead than i am now instead of trying to be a genius and try and fucking trade my way through right okay well that's the wisdom alright so how's the app doing it people we're using it great man so we we've we actually what's today today today's friday so it's saturday australia mh so we we just finished their public beta yesterday which is so we we go like fully fully live on monday next week and why only australia went out at the rest of the world it's dealing with a product like bitcoin it's you know it it's lesser a tech problem well that there's the tech problem of connecting to the bank and getting direct debit services because you know banks inherently don't like their bitcoin because you're you're pulling money out of their system into a new economic system so number so so they're not very friendly number two is you know governments don't like it so they're like you know make it jurisdiction difficult so you know compliance licensing and all this bush is different in every single place like we might not even come to the us because here you guys have a different set of rules for every single state mh it's a complete nightmare so you know we might just like skip over to your friends in canada and give them the service they get all the now alright so see man so it's that's sort of the the later land gotcha and so the price today is what like we we looked it up on our uber right over here is twelve it was twelve thousand i think three hundred sixty one yep i know you're not trying to time the market mh but i'm curious what you think the price trajectory looks like do you think this is a temporary rally do you even care about the price how do you think about the price because everybody's focused on the price price price yeah correct look i i try and be a little bit more long term in my view viewpoints right so everyone has this tendency to gamble so there's there's a popular website called bit max which lets you trade leveraged versions of our bitcoin you know long and short and all that sort of stuff and i've had a plan on bit max you know i started with one bitcoin got down to zero to bitcoin traded my way back to one bitcoin and you know i've like been like i ain't touch that shit anymore yes it's just unnecessary right so so so short term i i don't think it matters like if i had to take a guess i'd say short term probably a little bit over extended but hey i could be wrong you know i might i personally think in the medium term or during this wave or during this run up we'll probably see bitcoin peak somewhere between hundred and fifty to two hundred k maybe even more us and then it'll probably correct from there so we're probably gonna see another man it'll correct from there probably to twenty and then we'll probably do another run up you know during the next cycle four year cycle that it hasn't you know it might go to million now things are never that clean but if you can sort of anticipate like a broad brush of cycles are i i think this round right now bitcoin is cheaper shit mh and what's what percentage of your own personal net worth are you putting in bitcoin i lost all my bitcoin in a boating accident okay alright but but it was traditionally traditionally speaking it was about tommy man doesn't listen to this podcast yeah yeah yeah i was probably closer to seventy percent oh wow okay so i'm very bullish yeah yeah okay yeah somebody's got people about this right dude there's a lot of people out there who will will will say all the right things and then they put you know two percent of the net worth and they're already rich so it's a sort of that's a nice to have sort of proposition and that might be the correct conservative way to do it but for most people that is correct exactly yes this so i i believe so i think the the level of so i don't look at bitcoin as a risk asset i actually look at as a risk off asset so so but that just comes from my level of understanding of what's actually going on here and and that that that's the same as someone who might say i investing in uber in you know the first couple years was a risky thing to do whereas the people who understood a work close to it had a very different view and a very different picture of that so those founders obviously had a much larger stake so to them it was a it was a risk not being a part of it so so i i think that the the the more you peel the onion and the closer to to the core of what you're involved than you get the the more that profile changes so for people don't understand it one or two or three percent that's enough you know but for the the more you understand the more you'll find that you wanna put more into and what have you noticed australia versus silicon the opinions on bitcoin because you spend time at both places yeah do you do you feel like it's the same viewpoints or do you see anything drastically different look i haven't been back here for a while so and and this week was obviously skewed because because twenty nineteen conference who who goes to that is that guys like wearing a bitcoin outfit like is it the is it the the nuts or or was actually a really good turnout so there was i mean know you had like blockchain capital there that they're sort of like one of the first fund of coinbase base and things like that so you know had everyone from vcs they they had they had snow tele in alone so that that was really cool where he living nowadays i don't know that i mean he he's not gonna trying to tell what region of the world do you think he's living in i know he's he still in russia or something i don't know i don't know but i mean that was really cool so that they had that they had speakers from like you know all different startups ups in the in the bitcoin space people that are working out lightning and all there was so much happening there and it's it's really interesting to be like being in the bitcoin space right now is like being part of this cool club there very few people know about and sort of tying it back to that little newspaper thing that i gave you is you know i i got up and i opened that talk so so that that little newspaper started off as a talk that i was supposed to give and that was the second talk at this whole investor thing like it was a year after the first talk that i gave her a bash the shit at ico the second talk they were like oh can you not do what you did last year because you you know scared a bunch of people away telling people that ico was scams and i was like well was alright and they're like well you were but can you and i said alright at this time i'll be nice so this time i got up and i said blockchain was a lot of shit that you know bitcoin is where it's at not this term blockchain which is just this ep term that someone's picked out of the fucking hat that has nothing to do with anything and they've sort of made it seem like blockchain can give you security and when those two functions come from something like bitcoin which is an ama inauguration of the blockchain architecture along with economics game theory incentives dis incentives networks and all this other stuff that you don't get so i got up and i i said you know the i i had peter deals quote on the on the screen i said you know what truth do very few people agree with you on and kind i i told the organizers that the talk was gonna be entitled you know how lightning is gonna around what blockchain promised but then i'm i got up and i said the real name of my talk is blockchain is dead the future is lightning and mind you this is a blockchain conference where people are raising money for blockchain companies right so yeah that that's angry alex and country and alex at work but i think and that the contra bet which i'm i'm personally like sold that is gonna win is that bitcoin and the layers built on bitcoin much like the internet and the layers that were built on the internet aware the game is at not in trying to build and the analogy that i give to people is trying to compete with bitcoin is like aol trying to compete with the internet mh the the companies that succeeded were the ones like google nets etcetera who built on the internet which was this really dumb basic packet routing network and it didn't do anything except for route packets of data and it didn't give a shit what was on that data it was the value added service and the businesses and the layers that were built on top of that where everyone converged to use the internet same thing gonna happen with bitcoin bitcoin is this really basic basic is maybe not the right word but this really robust fundamental network that routes value and it unstoppable at routing value you cannot stop it you can't turn it off you can't turn it on it's that that's what it does it's this autonomous no one knows that network no no one no one controls exactly so it routes value the same way as the internet routed data and what's gonna happen is people are gonna realize that hey i can provide the service of what traditionally a bank with hundreds of millions of dollars of resources is required to like what what a bank needs to do to provide a simple service of a freaking checking account and the ability to send money to your friend requires hundreds of millions of billions of dollars of infrastructure i could provide the same guarantee of funds and the same guarantee of send store receive that a bank can with a little app that we can build with a cup underground love it like tell me that's not revolutionary like and and and people are still here running around trying to look for the killer app on blockchain the killer t at the point it came exactly in the bundle that was the zero to one moment yes we're and and now so and that was sort of my argument and that sort of in that paper there i i make this whole argument i sort of display what blockchain was what's promised for blockchain and then i talk about how that's a broken promise and that you know out of all the stuff that came out of the ico craze like ninety nine percent of it was all just bullshit like you know autonomous drone powered you know token that's gonna wash your clothes and make you rich overnight right all this shit but there might have been one percent of the stuff which made sense that stuff is gonna be built on bitcoin it ain't be built on his design blockchain chain it makes sense there's really i'd say three schools of thought there's the let's let's give four schools of thought school thought number one what the hell is bitcoin people who just don't our sand yet too fuzzy you have a concept cool that's where a lot of people live number two bitcoin is snake oil mh this is and everyone you know even warren buffett charlie mu are are out there saying this thing it makes no sense it's po scheme yep stay away from it it's poison yep number three is where i think you and i live which is bitcoin is the thing bitcoin is the killer application of this technology breakthrough we had this this computer science breakthrough which enabled a really amazing thing which is like you said we can route value as easily as we route data and packets for the internet now we can route money the same way and money can be something that's says open secure and control uncontrolled by a single entity mh in the way that the internet is mh and then there's a group of people that say blockchain not bitcoin and i think that's where where where you were you stepped in and said no yeah i've i also feel like that's sort of the it's the hedge stance it's the stance that says i i don't wanna be anti this whole crypto thing but i don't wanna be in on bitcoin and then price and the the money making side of it so i'm gonna i'm gonna just sit on this technology side because that's safe who can argue with the breakthrough technology that sounds smart and that sounds safe that those are the people who say it's all about blockchain not bitcoin and i think that the two are paired together they're bundled in as you said where blockchain made something like bitcoin possible and something like bitcoin is a huge breakthrough and should be sort of you know i'm gonna actually push back on one of those things it's actually not blockchain that made bitcoin possible it's bitcoin that made blockchain possible because see the the word blockchain never even existed in it's not even in the white it's not even there so so bitcoin is actually and and this is technically correct it's actually a time chain it's got nothing to do with being a blockchain it's just that a a group of bankers who missed out on bitcoin and we're bit about it came up with the name of so kind i i think the r three consortium which sort of you know had a bunch of banks and all this sort of stuff came up with the term blockchain in twenty twelve about four years after bitcoin came okay i didn't know didn't even exist you're saying forget all the noise bitcoin is the thing it's the thing there's nothing else here and if you were i'll give you the last minute of the podcast to basically speak to you know there's a lot of people that gonna listen to this mh some of which already are in the bitcoin game some of heard of it and some never heard of it i would say their ears are yours if you had a minute to just say anything to that group of people you know what would what would you tell them because you have the chance to reach a lot of people and and share a little bit of what you believe to be true okay whether you're as a fe believer as me that you know the the the system needs to get better and we need to bring some more s and whether you've gone down that rabbit hole and you really believe in bitcoin whether you're on that side of the spectrum or whether you know you think it's okay and you don't really give a shit or even if you're even further on the spectrum you like the current system the way it is you should still buy some bitcoin because of the that it represents that contrary and bet i didn't give a crap where you are holding some buying and holding some is actually game theoretically sound because if you don't you're just gonna end up in the bucket of having been left behind and if you do and you only do a little bit so if you just manage that percentage depending on which part of the spectrum you're on you do it intelligently that the worst case is not so bad you will have lost a little bit and life will go on depending on where are in the spectrum but if it does happen do that this changes everything so it's it's kinda like buying a domain name twenty years ago just buy one yeah maybe the internet wasn't gonna be anything right alright this is not investment advice that is not investment advice yeah yeah all all the normal disclaimers listen man i appreciate you coming in it's pretty fascinating conversation like i said we we had never met before and so for me i liked hearing i really liked hearing in the story of the ups and downs trying to try trying to make a quick buck got you know got burned mh learning sales and building a real business the hard way and then getting burned on the at the mercy see of of the government who changed their mind and how that led you to pick bitcoin i think that's a pretty cool pretty cool story and i think that for a lot of people you know some of the stuff that we talked about may may go over their head may may not understand a lot of the terms yep and for them i would kinda just ask you what's a good like what's a good starting point or resource when you do wanna go down the rabbit hole where's the door okay where you where's the surface of that hole where what's a good what's a good place for somebody to start there's a couple good places if you like listening to podcasts there's one of my favorite ones is dude called marty bent and matt o o'neill it's called t so tails from the crypt it's really really cool like conversational sort of podcast they they do a show every week it's it's really really cool so that they're based up in new york so that's one if you wanna if you wanna learn more about the the the economics element of it particularly austria economics there's a friend of mine calls to file la rivera he he runs the podcast there that's if you prefer podcast if you prefer reading i mean you i'm gonna toot my own horn here i i do a lot of writing on medium i've got quite a decent following i'm right for h so i'm one topic quinn riders on hacker where can people find you so i just wanna hear more from you where do they find you just find me on twitter so at alex sv my name is spelled different so it's a l e k s sv v e t s k i so alex sv so on twitter you'll find me on medium as well or if you just google my name you'll find me it pops up all over the place so a lot of my resources i've done a a a couple long form articles and the probably two you wanna look for is homo sapiens evolution money in bitcoin that sort of is journey of you know how we started and sort of you know why it's important so that sort of sets a good foundation and then i do why bitcoin matters and in there i sort of talk about how they they have some similarities to talk about society evolution all that sort of stuff but then i talk about the fundamental tenets of money and why this is a better at a superior form of money so that's those two if you wanna read that publication online so we've got a online that sean has the last printed version that i ever did for that event right so it's still a draft that's a three day job there but i'm we fixed that up it's online it's bitcoin times dot news any aws got it don't w so yeah so that that's all the resources i think i hope that all helps great i appreciate you coming on the show bro thanks fred really appreciate it alright