Ep 27: Building an ecommerce business to facilitate nomadic world travel and developing gaming assets in virtual worlds

Sean Tierney: 00:02:59 Alright, everybody. Welcome to the nomad podcast. This is Sean. I am here with Miles Anthony. Miles is a partner at Flux Capital, founded a cryptocurrency and digital asset venture fund that backs projects and coins comprising trustless, permissionless distributed systems. He’s building blockchain based game assets. Previously built an electronics e-commerce business, a web development firm, a suite of high frequency cryptocurrency trading algorithms and an Ios game application. He leads teams in technical product development, distribution and automated these ventures to generate passive revenue. Miles is a graduate of UCLA with a bachelor’s of science in mathematics and economics. Welcome Miles to show. Hey Sean, thanks for having me. Awesome. All right, so let me kind of tee this up here and let people know how we met each other. So we met at Kinnernet, which was I guess last weekend about a weekend ago.

Miles Anthony: 00:03:54 Yeah. I just, I think my first memory of you at Kinnernet it was when you went up and explained your your, your skateboard. That’s like a snowboard. And I was like, all right, this guy and I are going to, we’re going to get along. Yeah, I did the I think they call it the gadget of fun. Yeah. Basically just they asked everyone in the crowd to come up and show a gadget and so happen to have a picture of you snowboard look. So fun. I gotta try one of those sometime cause I love snowboarding. Sweet. Let’s take it out after.

Sean Tierney: 00:04:23 All right. Yeah. So you did a bitcoin talk there though. That’s how I first heard you speak. And that’s where I said I got to talk to this guy because we’re very much on the same page, but let’s start there maybe with the talk, like what, first off, why did you hold that bitcoin talk at Kinnernet?

Miles Anthony: 00:04:40 I thought it would be cool to hold a bitcoin talk just because I feel like the technology is getting to a point now where it’s becoming more mainstream and something that was just kind of a, like a small bubble, in 2017 and crash in 2018 is reaching a point where the technologies is becoming validated by not only small developer communities throughout the world. But also the biggest corporations like Facebook.Even someone like JP Morgan is making their own coins. So I think right now, I think it would, it was good to have that talk at Kinnernet because I feel like a lot of people are both interested in it and it would affect their lives directly. Like in the near future.

Sean Tierney: 00:05:25 How do you, like pretend I’m a third grader, how do you explain this stuff? But, to someone like my parents, like for instance, who just really don’t understand what it is, like how do you describe it on that level?

Miles Anthony: 00:05:37 Okay, well let’s start with just a blockchain in general. I would say, I would just describe that as a public ledger. That’s distributed. So, which, what that means is a bunch of computers that are just keeping track of transaction history and account balances and different blockchains have, different ways of doing that UTX so’s versus account base solutions. But I mean, that’s all jibberish for that, for a third grader. But I think at the end, at the end of the day, it’s all essentially trying to keep this ledger of what, what has gone on in the network um the transactions and as a result of being distributed, it provides security. So now no one party can attack the network or compromise the network in any way. And when you say trustless permissionless distributed systems, talk to me about the trustless and this aspect of it.

Miles Anthony: 00:06:29 Trustless means that you have to assume that every individual party as part of this network doesn’t trust one another. So, and then, and then the network should still function. So for example, someone sending a transaction of Bitcoin doesn’t have to trust a miner of Bitcoin to carry on its transaction. And so, I mean there, there’s trust, there’s non trustless electronic cash, which would be paypal or bank transfers. In that case you’re actually trusting the centralized institution to carry out your transaction. Which I think, I mean, even though these centralized institutions like paypal and your banks, banks that you use for wire transfers do a good job, relatively good job of carrying out the transactions that you want at the end of the day, like they can censor you, they can prevent you from doing what you want.

Miles Anthony: 00:07:27 And so I think these, these distributed trustless systems like bitcoin or ethereum are very powerful because you don’t, you don’t have to rely on any other person or any other corporation or government to like do what you want. And then, so what was the second? Permissionless was the second permission this year. So to explain permissionless, it’s essentially, if you just examine the word, like without permission, so that, that essentially means in this context that anyone can participate in the network. For example, anyone can become a bitcoin miner and ethereum miner if you have the correct hardware. And you have a place to set up electricity and everything. Anyone can join the network and then become a minor and then validate all the transactions. And also anyone can create a wallet. It doesn’t, you don’t need to have any permission from any institution or company to do so.

Miles Anthony: 00:08:21 This is kind of the opposite of a permission to blockchain, which is people refer to them as private blockchains. The most obvious example of this would be the Facebook Libra, blockchain that’s was just announced like last month to become a node in their network, which essentially means to, to mine, and validate transactions on their network. You have to have permission from Facebook or Libra, a foundation. And to do that, they’re selling spots for 10 million USD for that. So you know, think the crypto community in general, that I interact with the most I’d say is, is not really Libra is essentially creating a centralized kind of construct with the blockchain architecture because you, you still have to apply and like they can like, say no if you, if you want to become a validator of the network.

Miles Anthony: 00:09:15 I mean, I guess my question there is like, why even blockchain at that point? Why not just a big database under that? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a great question. I think at the end of the day, what they’re, what they’re making I think in general could be a little a step forward and progress in terms of in comparison to just like a centralized database because these central massive centralized multibillion dollar international corporations are essentially like going to balance one another five. It’s kind of like has a checks and balances type of like design or is supposed to have that, but because it’s permissioned and there’s only, right now there’s only currently 28 spots there are sold, which sounds completely just centralized. I think you bring up a great point. I think like it’s really not that much better than than just having paypal or something like in any other corporation.

Miles Anthony: 00:10:07 Just handle all your transactions. Yeah. It seems like to some extent just the technology, the name blockchain gets thrown around because it instantly kind of like AI instantly. As soon as you tack that onto anything and someone’s raising money, it’s like, absolutely, people want to have something to do with it. But it’s also kind of like, well, does it really need to be a blockchain or could this just be a database? It’s a massive buzzword. Yeah. I think Facebook is trying to frame it as a blockchain or the Libra foundation is trying to flame frame it as a blockchain to get investment. And it’s obviously one of the biggest buzzwords of the last decade and it’s going to be, I think, going to the next decade. And so I think it’s on their part, they’re trying to, they’ve already gotten these 28 different corporations to, to verbally commit $10 million each.

Miles Anthony: 00:10:51 So it’s like, I think it has worked and I think they’re trying to add even more spots to that from their perspective. I think it’s somewhat of a good pitch to these big corporations that want the user data from this massive corporate blockchain. So, I mean, we got here a little quicker than I expected. But what is your feeling on Libra is a just as a platform versus bitcoin? I think initially I, I totally hated it. I thought it was some, I was disgusted. Like coming from like a crypto kind of maximalist more maximalist background and like have having studied of bitcoin and ethereum white papers and even built applications on ethereum. I saw Libra as something that wasn’t really aligned with my ethos of the stuff that I both like am interested in and like enjoy investing in.

Miles Anthony: 00:11:47 But, and then, after awhile of thinking about it, I do kind of, I wanted to see like their perspective and like what, what their pitch was and understand what their pitch was to the average user that maybe doesn’t necessarily care about the same things that I do. I wholeheartedly believe in user privacy and, not giving your data over unwillingly to large corporations that monetize it. Even though initially like I wasn’t a huge fan of Libra to say the least. UI did do some research and I saw that there’s certain, there’s certain things that it provides like an end user if it becomes widely accepted and used. If there are certain PR services that it provides a user that the current banking system like in the US or Europe or internationally in general, isn’t able to provide people.

Miles Anthony: 00:12:39 So in that regard, I think it’s definitely a compelling pitch, but at the end of the day, I think that this is too much power to place in these massive corporations hands. And I only can hope that these, the balance of power between these, like corporate blockchains and currencies versus like the government issued currencies will, it will kind of balance each other out. And because this pitch is so compelling for you to the unuser of being able to transfer digital money anywhere in the world for minimal fees I hope that the banks that kind of back and run like the current financial system worldwide will kind of try to step up their game and cater to to this type of use case because they really aren’t right now. But yeah, this is, this is kind of something that we got into like with, with this kind of three pronged, this, this three-pronged kind of choice that users I think will end up having in the future with the money they use.

Miles Anthony: 00:13:42 It’s going to be, traditionally right now it’s the government issued money that everyone uses for your goods and services within countries. And I think that this has been a great system for a long time, liberated a lot of people when, when banks were introduced a few, a hundred a hundred years ago. And so I think that the dawn of this, this new technology, I feel like it’s kind of an aging system and it’s not providing the people with what they, what they need it for. And so now Sean and I, we were talked, we talked about this last week. There’s two other systems that are, that are kind of re risen to power now and like have made a pretty compelling pitch. The challenge this original government backed currency, which is corporate or corporate currencies, which is Libra. And then also public blockchains, which is bitcoin and ethereum and Monero. And so I think going forward, I personally obviously am a huge fan of the public blockchains and user generated networks like this, like bitcoin and ethereum. And I’m narrow. I think there’s going to be a massive kind of war that, that unravels over the next decade between the three. Because the government currencies, they’re not going to give up their power like willingly.

Sean Tierney: 00:14:57 So can we talk pros, cons for a second? If we were to assess those three that you just laid out, the, the decentralized basket of things like Bitcoin, the corporate interest, so Libra and I don’t know if maybe ripple would be considered one of those, but like the centralized, controlled ones and then obviously like government Fiat based money. So obviously pros, cons of Fiat, the pro is that it’s just like so pervasive and it’s used everywhere and it’s very easy to deal with. Cons. It seems like things like inflation and censorship basically like you can, your bank can be shut down and you know, Julian Assange gets all of a sudden the credit card providers decide that he’s not getting money anymore. So like his thing’s holes shutdown. So I get that. What is a pro of the corporate money? Like why does that need to exist or what’s, what’s good about it? I guess

Miles Anthony: 00:15:51 I’d say the pro of the corporate money isn’t really realized quite yet. I think that obviously, knowing that I’m a proponent for public blockchain and decentralized money I’m trying to kind of just this, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But I think to be like, to be completely honest, the pro of the corporate money would be just to kind of leverage this massive network that Facebook or even like in the future, say Google launches a coin or Amazon launched a coin. I think being able to leverage this massive network of users that they already have. And for example, in Facebook’s case, they have whatsapp, Instagram, even like at bunch of different companies that have applications that billions of people around the world use. And being able to just, just integrate a digital currency into those platforms so people can transact.

Miles Anthony: 00:16:40 And and it’s, it’s very cliche, but to bank the unbanked like in certain, in certain countries where the g, the u s the the local governments don’t have a reliable means of identifying their people and, and to a point where banks won’t bank them because they, they don’t qualify through the general, like KYC procedures of those, those banks, these types of people you know, that might just have access to a smart phone are now able to have money and be banked, which is, which is extremely, a huge step forward in their, in either their way of life. So I think in that case like a corporate crypto can’t actually add a lot of value to like two people like that worldwide. But the value that it adds to people kind of like within Europe or US or countries with already established banking systems, I don’t really see the value that it adds to the, those, those markets. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 00:17:39 Yeah. Well, it seems like for sure usability wise, like they had kind of already control the user interface to all these different people, right? Like Facebook Messenger. I don’t know how many billion people have that, but in terms of making it very simple to use almost kind of the way I think of like Venmo, it’s so simple to just use that to pay someone really quickly and it just works. Exactly. So maybe that’s the pro is the usability of it, but the con it’s still obviously prone to this censorship resistance aspect. And then data tracking I imagine is just a huge con in this scenario.

Miles Anthony: 00:18:11 Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think when, when like examining this kind of Libra design, I feel like people need to understand that also, your bank knows all your transfers. So it’s like, I, like right now, like your credit card company knows everything you’re buying, your bank knows everything you’re paying, paying off. So I, I think it’s, it you’re already being, kind of tracked essentially, but they don’t have the full picture in the way that

Sean Tierney: 00:18:37 They don’t also know what webpages you go to and what like your interests are and all your friends are and all that.

Miles Anthony: 00:18:43 Exactly. So yeah, I think this is a huge step in the wrong direction in terms of, in terms of privacy. And it is kind of interesting that, Zuckerberg decided to drop this paper. Now B especially with is with the whole debate that’s going on within the US especially. I know you’re a pilot could pass a few laws like, like within the last few years with regards to our, yeah. But the u s has kind of behind on that there is a dialogue though that’s starting about that, that people are realizing that these companies, there are, these massive tech giants are monetizing their data without their will. I think to be honest though, I think having lived in the u s last 24 years or for the almost 24 years before I started, no, I’m adding a bit. I feel like most people like don’t really understand this and, and maybe don’t even care. So I think so it’s interesting discussion to be had in terms of like in a democratic society because I feel like even though people you know that are, that understand the, the system, like obviously hate it, hate the Leroy offering, but you know, most people don’t even care. And if, like you said, Sean, if it provides better user experience and usability for sending money, then maybe people will use it.

Sean Tierney: 00:20:02 Well, I think there’s going to be room, like you said in your talk, there’s going to be room for all three. It’s just gonna be a question of like those boundaries. If we think of it like now this is like the land and there’s three warring countries essentially is those fronts move back and forth. It’ll be interesting to see like which one wins the most land and frankly like I could see the corporate money winning the lion’s share of this. I, it was, there was an interesting letter, I’ll link to it in the show notes, but I saw it was a letter from, I think Congress, the u s congress basically begging Libra to stop where, or at least pause their effort until they can get their head around what this is. Because I don’t think they fully understand the implications if this is backed by a basket of currencies and now it’s becomes they’re essentially redrawing the boundaries of a whole

Miles Anthony: 00:20:48 New type of country essentially. Absolutely. The multinationals essentially become the countries at this point. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s kind of interesting though. I feel like the u s government currently is in an interesting position because they want to preserve their like power, which is through the u s dollar and being able to control the supply of that and use of it worldwide. But also I think they do realize that if they clamped out on Libra too hard and that might hinder innovation. And I think a lot like some of the congress men and congresswoman like working on this this case, one to strike a balance between not regulating too much because there are, they, I feel like they are afraid that other countries, like perhaps China will create a Libra and then it’ll be utilized by people worldwide and that will totally throw off the power feed.

Miles Anthony: 00:21:39 All the, yeah, exactly. So I think they’re, they’re trying to balance this. They’re in a weird, they’re, they’re in a really tough position I think. I think, I mean, ideally you, I mean you, we would, we don’t want to live in a world where the Chinese backed, like government crypto is something that, that everyone needs to transact, yeah, that’s not something that I would be comfortable with really. So especially with the, the pastwith what’s been in the news recently about like the data, how the data is treated, treated over there. So, yeah, that’s like not really aligned.

Miles Anthony: 00:22:13 Yeah. Yeah. Well, so what is, why is this important? I guess like again going to the audience that is like my parents listening to this, they’ve only ever known Fiat money. So introducing this concept of digital cryptocurrency that’s not backed by anything, but then all these people are trusting and for some reason and why is this important? Why, why you even take notice of this people is, is if like as famous as Warren Buffet have dismissed it already and said that this is a fat and this is like clearly just thin air. It’s not based on anything. And yet it’s real. Like why, why in your opinion is this important to take seriously? I think it’s really important to take seriously because it’s the first time in history that anyone has built something that’s indestructable essentially like because of the decentralization and the automation of the entire system and the fact that you can mine it anywhere in the world as long as you have Internet connection and electricity in the hardware, like adequate to mine.

Miles Anthony: 00:23:17 It’s, it’s extremely powerful. And not to mention that there’s a plateau of, of supply. It provides one of the most compelling, in my opinion, alternative assets like available to investors right now. With stocks doing just soaring over the last decade real estate swearing over the last decade. I think right now a lot of people are discussing kind of a pullback at some point soon. Well we’re seeing gold spike of right now. So that’s kind of the early warnings of exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that a lot of people say bitcoin is kind of like a digital gold essentially because it is that alternative asset. So but to answer your question, I think people should, should care about it because it’s not going away by design. It’s not going away. It’s, it the f the pure like economic and like mathematical, like design of this system is, is such that it will survive any downturn, any like massive bubble and any burst of the, of the bubble.

Miles Anthony: 00:24:15 Like, it’s, I could go into like a little bit deeper into like the economics behind it, but essentially the, it doesn’t matter what the prices of Bitcoin as the price goes up more miners are incentivized to mine it and then that in turn makes it harder to mine. And so it’s more expensive to mine. So like the price to mine it and the actual price of the bitcoin essentially move like in unison, I, in my opinion, the now we’re kind of like breathes in a way. So it can cater to like any type of economic conditions of price or supply or, or demand. So I think because of that, I think that these people that say Bitcoin is gonna die at, like, it just doesn’t, I just don’t see any scenario where bitcoin dies and unless like the world is actually ending. So I think because of that, it’s one of the most compelling kind of pitches in my opinion. For something to like, just hold for awhile. It’s currency to hold. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 00:25:10 So on the indestructable topic, could bitcoin ever be shut down? Like in the way that China has the firewall and they can block certain, protocols and you know, entire IP blocks and all that from getting in. Can bitcoin ever be shut down at a border, like at a protocol level or, or will people always be able to access it? As long as the Internet is running,

Miles Anthony: 00:25:33 People will be able to access bitcoin as long as they have a connection. It doesn’t necessarily mean to need to be like onto the internet. They could have just like a remote connection to a server that they are running. Like it’s some, some area or outside that specific firewall. Yeah, countries can try to ban it and countries can try to, like for example, India recently they’re like fed equivalent called RBI Royal Bank of India, I believe, banned banks from doing business with crypto exchanges and crypto exchanges are the on the on ramp essentially into this new like financial realm. Because you can take your, in India’s case, like you take your rubies and you can buy bitcoin with it. And then once you have the Bitcoin, you can essentially send it to any other bitcoin wallet.

Miles Anthony: 00:26:21 So it’s kind of like the exchange serves as this on-ramp. And so RBI in India shutdown or essentially tries to try to shut down the crypto use by banning banks from doing business with exchanges, which prevents people from depositing onto their account and buying the bitcoin with their rupees because they have to do that via bank transfer. So essentially they’ve kind of clamped down on it. But anywhere, anywhere in the world, there’s always some liquidity in OTC markets which are over the counter markets, which essentially are people trading cash for bitcoin. And like there’s a one way you get it, something small and then we meet and exactly. And because of the, I mean, that’s only possible because it’s a decentralized, anyone has access to it. You don’t need for you to transfer it to someone. You don’t need any permission or account with, with any company or website. You can just send it from your wallet to their wallet. And in this case you do it like in person. I, I wouldn’t recommend doing this. It could be like a little sketchy, like in certain scenarios, but the fact of the matter is like, it’s accessible, you know? And there, there are markets.

Sean Tierney: 00:27:31 What’s interesting too though is it’s, it’s antifragile in the sense that the more that they tried to clamp down on those on-ramps, it would seem that it’s gonna then drive the demand of those, those OTC markets to the point where people will service those markets. You know what I mean? Like, so an entire secondary market will spring up to service that demand that’s clearly there because they’re blocking it there. They’re clamping down on it. So it, it, it does in a lot of ways, like not just the network breeds, but like the transact doors who are using the network will breathe with it to facilitate it.

Miles Anthony: 00:28:04 Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It’s it is interesting to see like these governments kind of clamped down because yeah, the, it lives bitcoin lives on, you kinda touched upon earlier, this is only due to the decentralized nature. It’s like no one, no one entity or a group of developers or any corporation is responsible for this. And right now in the news Libra is getting a lot of fire from the the u s government because they have an address to send papers to. The US government would send papers to bitcoin if they could, don’t get me wrong. It definitely would happen, but it just, it’s, it’s impossible. Like you don’t know, there’s no like centralized bottle at this point. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I think that is going to be a huge challenge for Libra going forward too, because they have, there’s a direct line from the US government, even Donald Trump tweeted like about Libra, like saying that they should need to get a banking charter or something. Like, I think they’re able to address that project directly. I think at the end of the day going to be a huge problem for them. Sure. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 00:29:12 Cool. Well, let’s, we’ve been talking about the use of blockchain specifically for a monetary purpose thus far. I know, let’s, let’s Kinda change gears because blockchain is just their technology. There’s other things you can do with it. Can you talk about the Dao? So the decentralized autonomous organizations, things like etherium and whatnot?

Miles Anthony: 00:29:32 Yeah, yeah. So so I’d say the second wave of, of blockchain technology after like this first wave of currency or people refer to it as like at first of blockchain was currency. I think the second wave was led by Ethereum, founded by Vitalik Buterin and a few other developers and promoted by Joe Lubin, everything. But they, they essentially figured out a way to decentralize computation. And so what that means is,uinstead of validating transactions on a blockchain and keeping track of transactions and account balances, they figured out a way to have each computer participating in this blockchain network, running code, running computer code. And what that essentially means is that you can build all types of applications. So to develop on a theory,uthey use a,ua language called solidity,uwhich is turning complete, meaning that it offers full functionality for, for programming applications.

Miles Anthony: 00:30:30 It’s very similar to Java script in terms of the actual coding. But because of this like step forward developers are now, we’re now, we’re now able to develop all types of applications and one of which is what you brought up, the dao decentralized autonomous organization. There’s a few projects kind of working on in this space, but essentially what a dal is trying to do is create, create a voting mechanism for pseudo to anonymous parties to kind of make decisions and like serve as kind of like an n like a business entity in a way. But traditionally business entities are, have to be kind of tied to a certain jurisdiction. You know, when you register an LLC, like in the u s like you have to choose like which state and in each state has specific like laws and taxes and everything.

Miles Anthony: 00:31:25 And you can, obviously go overseas in different countries in, in Europe and Asia and like, they each have their different kind of rules. But what the DAO kind of allows you to do is create like this organization unit that’s kind of outside of entity, government jurisdiction, which I think it’s really at its infancy right now because right nowthere’s, there’s been a lot of discussion on decision making even in like these massive crypto projects like ethereum or bitcoin even. And a lot of the community, I think right at this point kind of feels that making decisions off chain is more efficient and effective or still, but I think there are certain projects, are trying to like move this decision making like on, onto the blockchain.

Miles Anthony: 00:32:10 I personally, I kind of feel like it’s, it’s the technology is such at a, at its infancy right now that I do believe that Dallas are a great idea and I think that it’s extremely powerful and it’ll serve like a massive purpose and, and generate lots of value in the future. But I think right now it’s definitely tough to like to create these designs for like a one size fits all in terms of any organization because, because there hasn’t really been a precedent of like one that’s like extremely effective yet. Yeah. Well I mean, seems

Sean Tierney: 00:32:39 Like any technology you typically want to do it manually and break it enough times and see what you don’t even know. You don’t know yet. Like learn all the nooks and crannies of the whole space and then you automate it and you codified into an app and it seems like we’re just, we’re still at that level where we don’t even know what we don’t know yet. So to build that thing at this point is pretty speculative. Exactly.

Miles Anthony: 00:33:03 Yeah. I think it will have a bright future though. I think like, you know, that’s something I think that’ll become big maybe in a decade or two.

Sean Tierney: 00:33:11 So this analogy just came to me, but tell me if this is valid. So if people can make the mental leap to understanding this notion of a distributed trustless ledger that is bitcoin in the sense of money, then that’s essentially like a spreadsheet that’s decentralized, that everyone has that same spreadsheet tracking the ledger. Right. So then to move to almost what like what’s web to web to Oh, was to the old web, but to move to this new platforms like a theory IOM that’s essentially just like instead of a spreadsheet and that we’re not talking to a full computer, you can like virtual pure.

Miles Anthony: 00:33:46 Exactly. Yeah. They refer and Ethereum’s case it’s referred to as the EVM, which is a Durham virtual machine. Basically the way it works is you can code any type of application and then submit it to the, the EBM and then your, your applicational will be run by a certain node in the network, which is which maintains like the whole permissionless trustless nature of a bitcoin blockchain, but like allows you to do much, much more with that kind of construct. Because it doesn’t matter where you are, who you are, you can code on ethereum without permission. And put it, put it forth to the network and people can interact with your, with your application sooner and anonymously. Just by sending whatever is required, like for example, ethereum to that specific applications address and to interact with it. Yeah, I think that’s ex that’s extremely powerful.

Sean Tierney: 00:34:40 Yeah. And so like cloud one. Dot. O might’ve been like Amazon. You see two people being able to leverage this big set of utility based cloud computing resources and they put their application up there and it just lives there. But that’s still centralized. It’s running on Amazon servers. All the same problems that we just said about money that exist in that scenario exists for that application. But this is really almost like a decentralized Amazon AWS. Is that the best way to think of it? Yeah,

Miles Anthony: 00:35:06 Yeah. Essentially, it’s that sort of, I think ethereum is trying to become I think that there’s definitely a lot to be said about what, how far they are and becoming that. I think like right now, I mean, that’s, that’s obviously their goal, but right now the main focus in within the ethereum community is scaling. I mean, that’s kind of the case in any blockchain community right now. For example, the theory, I’m only can process 15 transactions per second essentially is going to be a world decentralized compute. But I think it’s baby steps they’re, they’re going, they’re moving that, but it’s very slow. And I think, to be, to get to a point where like a theory IOM can compete with AWS, I think it’s going to take a while. But I mean, I think it’s very possible and I think that something like that is extremely compelling for anyone to build on and anyone to use.

Sean Tierney: 00:35:56 Right? Yeah. Well in the same way that it’s like bitcoin and I don’t know the number, but their throughput of transactions is something even last I think like seven or seven or something. Yeah. So in the same way that they can’t compete with visa is true transaction volume, but they’re fundamentally a completely different things. So it’s kind of not even a fair comparison to make. It’s just, yeah, it’s how people like it’s one access to rate them on right now. But like same thing with this, this is just a completely distributed way to do applications. So yeah, it’s, you know, inherently Amazon maybe right now is centralized, therefore it has the advantage, you know, like they control the environment so they can make very nice clean way of ways of doing things and whatnot. But like this is just a fundamentally different way of doing computing. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, so we’re nerding out a bit here, so I don’t want to lose everyone. Well we’ll just put a bow on the, on the crypto stuff. For the average person listening, like, can you explain what a wallet is versus an exchange? And like what the average person should know if they wanted to get involved with this stuff. You know, if they wanted to put some fraction of their net worth into something like Bitcoin, like what is the role of the exchange? What is the role of [inaudible]

Miles Anthony: 00:37:11 Wallet? Yeah. Okay. I, I’d say to answer that question. It’s important to define kind of what is the difference between like a centralized exchange and a decentralized exchange in the case of a centralized exchange that the way that essentially works, the technology side works is you deposit your money or your like us dollars or euros or, cryptocurrencies onto this platform to trade. And in doing that, you’re giving your money, you’re trusting the exchange and the centralized exchange that you use. That’s custodial, that’s what it’s called as custodial. That means that they take your assets and you’re obviously trusting them that they’re not gonna get hacked or steal your assets. Massive exchanges like by an answer, BitStamp and Coinbase or as functional essentially like this. And they’ve, they’ve had a pretty good history of, of not getting hacked.

Miles Anthony: 00:38:06 I think Binance actually got hacked recently, but they have a pretty strong history because there are these massive corporations that are able to like have solid security and they have like a massive reputation uphold, but at the end of the day you’re trusting them with your money, which I think I personally don’t like holding my cryptocurrency on centralized exchanges. That being said, decentralized exchanges are kind of this new idea that’s kind of gained it. They’ve been around, but I think they’ve to a point now where they’re much more usable from like a UI, UX, like standpoint. And just in terms of like on Ethereum, I think they’ve gotten to a point where like, I, I personally like, like using them more than any other exchange type of exchange. There’s definitely some drawbacks. For example, like the main kind of decentralized exchange that like I think does a great job on a theory, Emma’s Khyber network and you can trade it.

Miles Anthony: 00:39:02 Basically the way it works is you can s as you send your cryptocurrency from your own wallet, extends it to like this automated contract on ethereum and then swaps your currency for another cryptocurrency back to your, to your wallet. So I guess like to, for, to fully understand that, I would have to explain what a wall it was, but, but essentially you’re not with, when you use a decentralized exchange, you’re not trusting any like company to hold your, your money, which I think is the whole point of cryptocurrency in general. So leading to of what a wallet his wallet is, it’s comprised of a public key and a private key essentially. And so when you have like a wallet on a theory or, or Bitcoin your public, he is like this string of numbers and letters that represents your your address for people to like send you no money to you.

Miles Anthony: 00:39:53 And your private key is something that you should never obviously share with anyone, but that’s how you sign transactions to validate that you are who you are. So to give out your public key is, is good for people that want people to send them cryptocurrency. But, you should always keep your private keyto you, extremely safe. So yeah, I guess that kind of explains on a very basic level what a wallet is. But wrapping back into the decentralized exchange, kind of talk, a decentralized exchange allows you to trade directly from your wallet. So there’s like, it no point on those tokens sitting on someone’s like, well, I have the private keys to your tokens. Exactly. Exactly. And so it’s safer. So, but yeah, I mean the, the, there’s, there’s definitely some drawbacks of decentralized exchanges.

Miles Anthony: 00:40:47 Like currently the one that I had brought up Khyber is only on a theory. I’m so you only can trade ethereum token. So you only can go from like ethereum to like say any other ERC 20, which is all the tokens built on ethereum, which is a good amount of tokens, but it’s definitely not like, you can’t trade into bitcoin on, on that. So if you want to buy Bitcoin, you currently still kind of are limited to decentralized exchanges in a lot part. I think there are some projects that are trying to kind of create this decentralized architecture for exchanges with other blockchains. But a huge problem is interoperability right now and being able to link like a bitcoin blockchain, ethereum, blockchain in a trustless manner. So you don’t, there’s no like part of that bridge that where you’re trusting like a a to, to complete that transaction. Got It.

Sean Tierney: 00:41:41 Custodial is the key then. So it’s when they have the private keys that control your coins, it’s similar to a bank in that the bank can get robbed, they can get and they can run away with all that and there goes your,

Miles Anthony: 00:41:54 Exactly. And I think that that’s, that’s super important to know, Sean. I think the comparison to a bank that parallel is like, is, is so accurate because I think there’s a lot of these services that are popping up now that are custodial wallets and their whole pitch is they give you interest on your crypto. There’s a few big ones that I, that raises like several hundred million dollars recently that are doing quite well and they even like Coinbase I think is has a custodial PR product where they’re giving interest on, on your, your money. But I mean, personally I just think that this totally just goes against the whole point of, of Crypto, which is kind of digital cash. So I mean, I guess that at the end of the day, like people can decide whatever they want with their crypto, but something that was created so that you can kind of control, like be the custodian of your money digitally. To put that in like a recreated bank con like institution, it just doesn’t make any sense to me. Right, right, right.

Sean Tierney: 00:42:54 And I think it’s also important to distinguish between when we talk about getting hacked, when people say, Oh, Bitcoin was hacked, bitcoin, the, the, the blockchain has never been hacked. Right. And it’s got like a, whatever the market cap is today, you know, that is the bounty of hacking bitcoin. If you can do that, you stand to make up crap, ton of money. So like Mt. Gox and finance and these exchanges that have been hacked. That’s the analogy here is that those were essentially banks and someone broke into the bank and stole all the money that was in that bank, but no one has counterfeited bitcoin, you know, no one has broken them. The monetary instrument that has been acquired.

Miles Anthony: 00:43:29 Exactly. I think that’s really important to know. Yeah. Because I think every exchange it gives, bitcoin kind of a bad rep for people that don’t really understand it. Like, to a point like where that you were explaining. But yeah, I think, anytime we exchange gets hacked it’s because of the mismanagement of the private key, which is essentially a hacker gains access to that private key string that I was explaining kind of earlier on the the wallet kind of Spiel. What that allows you to do is just transfer money on someone’s behalf. And I guess, that kind of, I could wrap that into, in terms of wallet management. Like you would if you’re trying to hold up your pro currency on, on your own wallet, your own Custodial Wallet, I would recommend holding it on a hardware wallet because that story’s your private key offline. That’s, I don’t know if if people were familiar with that, but essentially it’s kind of looks like a USB drive and it’s, you plug it into your computer when you like want to send crypto or one, you’re not trying to send crypto. It’s totally offline, totally not connected the Internet. So that’s like the safest way to to store your crypto hardware wallets. Yeah. Good tip.

Sean Tierney: 00:44:37 All right, well I, I want to chronologically back up one layer cause like the, the way that you got here was that you had built an ecommerce business in college. Can you talk about what that business was and how you built that?

Miles Anthony: 00:44:49 Definitely. Yeah. So yeah, between my second and third year at UCLA, I built a electronics e commerce business that focused initially on just portable power banks. I saw a huge market opportunity, especially within the u s because there was a huge kind of dichotomy of the cheap, cheap ones that you find an Amazon for like 20 bucks versus the high end ones that you’d find at the apple store, which is, which like, for the most part, it was led by Mofi for like a hundred or a hundred plus dollars, sometimes even like $130. I kind of thought that there was like a market for the mid, mid range product that was, well-branded like sleek, very portable, but also a little bit cheaper than the $120 a mophie’s. And so I, I had one co-founder,uwe were part of this,ulike accelerator program at UCLA called Startup UCLA, where they, you kind of pitch your idea and they gave you a small grant to start your,uventure over a summer.

Miles Anthony: 00:45:55 And they don’t take any equity. They just give you advice and provide you with mentors and everything. So it’s a great program that Kinda got us off the ground. Got Us like with an MVP and we, my cofounder and I to test our products and market, product market fit. We just took our products and like went down to the streets on the boardwalk in Santa Monica and like had like a square reader card and we’re just, we’re just like be those annoying guys that are just trying to sell their product and to random people on the street. I know, I don’t know the legality of it, but I, I thought it was a great experience because we got to see like what their concerns were. So that, that’s kind of how we got started. And then, over the first year we automated a lot of, a lot of the business we set up like a fulfillment center. We set up we optimize the product upon.

Sean Tierney: 00:46:46 Actually before you get to the optimization, what did you learn from those in person? Face to face conversations. Cause that’s actually a really unique thing. And I feel like rarely do people in something. As like removed as E-commerce, selling power bricks that you didn’t have to do that, but like what did you learn from those conversations? I mean, initially we just were like, we got a small grant and we like spent all of it on like our products and then our branding and stuff. So like we wanted to make, like our initial goal was to just make back more money than we, than we, than we had initially. But I think in, in turn of doing that, like we, we learned a lot. It was like you had to completely like put your self in the shoes of the some random tourists that I was approaching on the boardwalk. And

Miles Anthony: 00:47:30 In my case it was super easy to pitch a portable charger that has built in cord for iPhone and android. So like essentially anyone can, anyone could use it and like immediately. And so part of the demo when I would pitch the product would be like, I would just be like, let me see your phone, I’ll just plug it in. And then immediately start charging. And so like it was a pretty easy pitch, but you definitely had to like work a bit to get the sale. And I think I had no sales experience so up until that point. So I learned a lot in just how to like kind of cater the pitch to serve different types of, of people and what people what, what kind of features they were more into and why they would want to buy it as opposed to like allowing their phone to die or something.

Miles Anthony: 00:48:15 You know what I mean? So it’s are just buying one not on Amazon. Yeah. So yeah, what the value prop was to the different people. Exactly what the messaging need to be. Exactly. Yeah. Cool. Okay. So sorry I cut you off, but then you said you start to automate and optimize it from there. Yeah. Yeah. So we are at this point, it was by the end of the summer we sold a bunch like in person, which is like totally not really the protocol for ecommerce businesses. But did you make back your, yeah, we made back plus profits so then we could reinvest it into the, into the business. And we obviously realized that like our mentors in the UCLA program were like, all right, this is not scalable. You guys can’t just hire a bunch of yourselves and go sell these on the streets.

Miles Anthony: 00:48:59 Like you have to use the internet and technology to, to increase your sales and automate it. And I had no experience with automation or anything. So like this was a huge learning process for me. But over that first year or so we were kind of struggling. Like we’d only probably did like one, we got to a point where we were doing like one sale a day, like online, which was like our, our product was, we had one version that was like 30 bucks in one, one it was like 60 bucks. So like it was not that much revenue at all. And then about a year after we founded the company, this is like the summer of between my third and fourth year at UCLA, my cofounder. And I figured out like SEO and the power of just appearing high on search results on Google.

Miles Anthony: 00:49:42 And getting on Amazon and like, and appearing high on the Amazon search results for certain keywords. And I think that that, like, it was honestly, it was kind of like overnight our success like went from like one sale a day to like 50 sales a day. And then obviously after that it was it was like a gradual increase, but I remember the day it was actually kind of, it was actually really weird experience cause I had been working on this project for like over a year and there was definitely times where I kind of like thought it was like not gonna work and not gonna be this automated revenue stream that I had envisioned. But I think, yeah, I think the, just like the kind of the perseverance over that year kind of finally just clicked this one day.

Miles Anthony: 00:50:27 And we were, we showed up really high on Google after doing a year of pretty much of SEO optimization. And we did it ourselves too. Like we didn’t hire, we didn’t hire like a firm or anything. Like we just were trying to hack it ourselves and which I think is the best best way to do it. If you’re if you have the time, obviously formal cs training, like you just kind of found yourself in this scenario and had to figure stuff out. Right. That computer science training or, or where you were studying computer science at UCLA. I taken a few programming classes, but my, my co founder was a computer science. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, he, so he, he was a little more technical than I was, but but yeah, I mean I learned like a little bit more computer science like along the way.

Miles Anthony: 00:51:10 And I think, I think it’s, that’s actually one thing I definitely do forget looking back, if I had studied computer science, I think I would have, would be in a much better place now as opposed to math. But I mean, I enjoyed, I enjoyed like applied mathematics. Like it was, it was definitely like definitely to teach you to think logically, just kinda like computer science does in a way. But yeah, so yeah, my co my co founder was cs. Cool. Yeah. Cool. And so this effort basically gave you the nest egg to do what you’re doing now? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I ran, we ran this like throughout our, my senior year and my cofounder senior year at UCLA ended up hiring two other students, like younger to help out with everything, tried to automate everything as much as possible.

Miles Anthony: 00:51:55 I expanded into like, even like B2B, like sales outlooks and yeah, got to, got the business to a point where like, it was pretty much automated and making revenue every day to a point where, after we graduated from UCLA, we didn’t necessarily have the pressure to like get like a traditional job like most of my periods were we’re doing at the time. Which kind of gave me the freedom to like, just try a bunch of other things. And like, I think that, this experience definitely not only taught me a lot about automation and passive like cash flow and passive revenue streams, but also it, it allowed me to just just try other ways of doing, recreating just projects that just shoot off cash. And I think the more you have the better, obviously.

Miles Anthony: 00:52:46 So I think that that was my goal going forward is just create a, like as many of these as possible. Yeah. And so can you talk about what you’re doing and you can be decidedly somewhat vague about what you’re doing today. But yeah, I think it’s fascinating. So just hoping you can share a little bit about this whole decentralized game assets thing that you’re working on. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. so I think the way I got into Crypto, like after, like the summer after I graduated after I doing the ecommerce thing was I mean, and one other cofounder, we’re just building trading bots. And we did like just automated trades through the exchange KPIs. And at this point, like it was right when like the 2017, like, upswing

Miles Anthony: 00:53:26 Was kind of taking place. Like they’re MRD kind of like went up a bunch like earlier in the spring, but this summer was when bitcoin was really taken off too. And because of like the volatility of the markets, like there were so many discrepancies of like if you had exchange, if accounts on different exchanges, you could arbitrage like different one exchange for another like significant significantly. Yeah. And you had to just run it constantly. You, I mean it’s not like a constant arbitrage, but like one, like one whale on one exchange, like would ma like fill an order book with a massive buy and then like the price of that exchange would like shoot up and like the prices of another exchange would stay down. And so then yeah, there’d be like these temporary arbitrage opportunities. So we kinda just tried to do that. And then once, once we, I think that’s kind of common for any one getting into crypto.

Miles Anthony: 00:54:11 Like they kind of get in initially for the trading aspect and like speculative asset aspect. But then the more I like I went to a bunch of crypto conferences, I remember that summer with my cofounder and we started to like really research and he was computer science as well. So I, I started to research kind of what the technology was behind bitcoin and behind ethereum. And then, yeah, and then so about like a year ago, two to six months ago, we started, or no, before that, we started with like a funds between me and like two other co founders to just invest in projects that we thought were compelling and thought had the potential to perform really well. And we were lucky though, cause we, we, we did this, right during the 2017, like massive like bull market of crypto and all coins.

Miles Anthony: 00:55:01 So I think doing that obviously kind of reinforced my idea that like, I could keep doing this. And which was, which is good because I kind of just kept up with it. But then obviously in 2018, the market crashed like very sharply downward. And so that was essential. That was very humbling to what you mentioned though. Like the game assets. I kind of thought that after this like market correction investing in a bunch of projects that did well and didn’t do well like over over the last two years. I’d say like about six months ago, I, I kind of thought that I wanted to holistically look at the crypto space and just kind of see like what like areas there were to make passive in like revenue from just to like, so I could create, recreate like my kind of like the ecommerce business, but like in a new realm.

Miles Anthony: 00:55:51 And I kind of realized that the only real businesses like in crypto that were profitable were exchanges and games, like are decentralized games, a game, assets or, and then obviously trading. But like that wasn’t, that’s not, you know, that’s not like, you know, you can have a really loud yeah, it’s not reliable. Like over time. Like you can just absolutely get destroyed some months, you know? And everyone does every tray, even professional traders, I’ll go get destroyed like a lot of the time. Yeah. So I think like, you know, six months ago I thought that the exchange market was like pretty like saturated in my opinion. So I thought that like game gaming would be like an interesting like area to explore and

Sean Tierney: 00:56:33 Well it seems, what’s interesting about gaming is it’s immune to downturns. Like people are always gaming. Yeah. Like you name the sector or whatever type of gaming you’re talking about, but there’s always people entertaining themselves. So I think it is interesting for that. It, it’s, it’s not going to track the highs and lows of the market. It’s going to be pretty consistent.

Miles Anthony: 00:56:52 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that’s, that’s a great point you bring up because you know, if you, if I’ve actually tracked a lot of the gaming company or Gaming Cryptos performance in perspective, like to the whole market and compared to a bitcoin or ethereum, they do kind of follow them inversely, you know, in a lot of ways. Like it’s interesting. Yeah. So like some days when the market in general has a massive downturn, like the gaming cryptos will, you know, spike up a little bit so that, yeah, it’s a great point. I think it does have like a pretty high beta. I think it’s what it’s referred to as like the inverse. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That, that was another reason why we wanted to explore gaming from kind of our funds perspective was, is because we wanted that kind of diversification with like a separate type of asset within crypto.

Sean Tierney: 00:57:43 That’s awesome man. Well, I, I think you’re going to be the virtual real estate developer that everyone wants to talk to you soon. So Kudos. Hopefully. Yeah, let’s see what happens. All right, one last line of questioning and then we’ll break into a, this breakdown thing. So Kinnernet what were your thoughts on that event to completely change gears?

Miles Anthony: 00:58:03 Problem? Yeah, it was, it was amazing. Yeah. I’d never been to a cadet before. I thought it was like a really interesting community of people that were brought together over the most, like compelling issues that anyone wanted to talk to. And W W was cool about it is like, it’s to give everyone, I could the background, I don’t know if people know, but it’s basically this conference where it’s decentralized in the sense that anyone going to the conference can like put on their own talk or, or you know, discussion or just lead like an hour of everyone’s time and everyone kind of puts their ideas on the board initially so everyone else can plan out, you know, which, which talks they want to see at which time throughout this whole weekend. And I think because of that, like, you know, some of the most interesting talks like or I or subjects get put on this, this board. And that’s, that’s it’s kind of what brought Shawn and I together to talk about a lot of these issues. And now I’m here on this podcast. So I think it’s a great, it’s a great experience for anyone. You know, I’m interested in some of the most like cutting edge topics, I would say. Nope.

Sean Tierney: 00:59:07 I would agree. It was a, I had been to bar camp before that. That was my one on-conference experience. But this was very much similar in terms of decentralized, like you’re saying. But yeah, I think it’s, it, it, it draws a lot of the interesting people out of the woodwork. So something like this and it is by nature participatory, so you have to lead stuff and you have to cook for people and you know, go show your skateboard or whatever, you know, you have to like actually participate.

Miles Anthony: 00:59:35 Cool. That like, I mean, I’m a massive nerd, so like I, I love like a conference like this where I could go and just nerd out with like people for a whole weekend and talk about not only just cryptos like I obviously was excited to talk about crypto stuff, but I went to like a, like a like discussion on like stem cells. And I went to a discussion on, you know, Paul, like American politics or like, you know, stuff like all over the, all over the map, you know, and like, and I went to your session on podcasts even been. Yeah. And so I think, you know, anyone interested in any of those types of types of things would just, you know, we’d have a great time and I think that I would definitely want to do it in the future. Again,

Sean Tierney: 01:00:11 I was in a talk that was envisioning what would a constitutional convention for Mars, but Mars Republic looks fascinating, right? Oh No, it was, it was amazing. She’s bummed I missed that one. But yeah, I just thought it’s basically thought experience experiments in novel situations about things that are going to confront us and you get some really brilliant minds of a lot of diverse perspectives just contributing. So it’s fascinating.

Miles Anthony: 01:00:36 Yeah. I had one, I remember I attended a conference, a session that was like an AI government that has like such a high ubi because they sell everyone’s data. And obviously I was like, I don’t really want this. But it was like an interesting discussion because like, you know, if some one of the kitten editors like thought of it, thought of the idea and you know, made a pretty compelling pitch as to why that would be possible. Yeah. You know,

Sean Tierney: 01:01:01 Not the players that I want to live. Yeah. You test that. Yeah, exactly. Cool. so actually I take, I lied, one last line of questioning. So you know, you were living in La, you’re now nomadic at this point, traveling, like where have you been? Like how has that experience been?

Miles Anthony: 01:01:19 Well, it’s been great. Yeah. So I, after I went to UCLA, I grew up in San Diego and then went to UCLA, lived there for like like about a year after or a little bit less than a year. But I have, I had like a place in la for a little more than a year, but recently got rid of it because all of last year I was half halfway, no matting. And now I’m now I’m full now I’m out in the, over the course of the last year and a half, I’ve been all all over the place. Like mostly for just meeting with early stage like crypto teams and trying to collaborate or invest in their project. And I really liked working with smaller teams of just strictly developers. Like, cause that’s like all crypto is at the, at the, you know, the genesis of any new project is just a bunch of coders.

Miles Anthony: 01:02:02 And so I loved meeting with, with teams all over the world. Like the places I spent the most time in were Bangalore, India. I think it’s a, you know, an interesting market for that because the cost of living is so low that you can have, you can start projects there that, you know, have like a t, like I’m pretty large team of developers for like so, so much cheaper than the s especially like la or San Francisco or in New York. So I’m, I spend a lot of time there and probably like a total of like three and a half months there, over 2018 spent some time in Hong Kong since the time in Singapore. Prague a good amount. Barcelona, like Lisbon. Yeah. So a little bit in London. Even I even found myself in one project actually, I, I found myself in Ethiopia, which was like a very interesting experience. So yeah, all over the place. And to answer your question, yeah.

Sean Tierney: 01:02:56 Have you noticed, is there any cultural differences programming wise or thought wise in terms of how they approach projects from these places? Or are they all fairly similar in terms of how they are thinking about this stuff?

Miles Anthony: 01:03:08 I think there’s definitely a lot of differences. I mean it’s, it’s similar in the, in the sense that they’re all just kind of trying to create like technology that’s utilized by whatever market that they’re aiming for. A lot of projects like, like India want to serve like the u s market. But I would say, you know, each team like through throughout like these different locations in the world kind of has a limited worldview of like what the market is for their product B or project or platform or whatever based on like where they grew up, you know. And like, I think obviously you can read the news and watch TV and everything and try to like understand like what people actually want and need like in these different areas of the world that you know, are much larger markets than just like your, the town lot of these people grew up in.

Miles Anthony: 01:03:56 So I think it’s really important to travel like a nomad and kind of experienced these different like you know, these different locations and how like, what, how people kind of live their lives, you know, because that, that’s how you really understand like what people actually need, you know? And so I think like from location to location to answer a question, I think from location to location it’s very, I feel like the worldview at that point is very limited. And I’m not just saying like international, like people in the u s are like extremely limited as well, even though the country is massive because like a lot of people don’t ever leave. Right. So it’s like, I think like my point is I think nomadic is in just traveling in general is like really important to understand. Like markets,

Sean Tierney: 01:04:38 Oh 100% agree with you. I had written about this concept, or at least what I was envisioning or how I call it, parallax and parallax in the sense that you know when you take an object and you take a view of something and then you move five feet to the right and you take that same view, you’re getting a stereoscopic different angle on it and it allows you to position it against the background that might be fixed and that object is in front of it. And so as you move around the world, I feel to some extent the same factor, like the same phenomenon as at work, you know, in a cultural sense in that you just like things that you assumed were fixed or not actually fixed. You’re like, you’re like, oh wow, like toilets work and like the think

Miles Anthony: 01:05:18 Differently about money and you know, food represents something different to this culture and there’s just all kinds of things that you just assume are one way that are not. Exactly. Yeah. So I agree with you. I think they’re like understanding how markets work and what they truly need. That is a really interesting insight and I 100% agree with it. Yeah. It’s interesting. Some, some areas like, you know, just there’s, there’s entrepreneurs out there that take up idea from one area and just bring it into a new, just clone it. Yeah. And like they’re very successful. Like I, I, I, I connected with a guy about a year ago and that, that runs a VC firm based in London that just just does that for Europe. Like he just takes like ideas. Some of us, I’m like Asia even like, and just brings them and then like focuses on like a specific area of Europe and then just starts it. And yeah, and it’s like extremely successful and they don’t even have to come up with any ideas themselves. Like they just like take one. That’s a good idea. And obviously, you know, there’s a lot of legal hoops to jump through these different jurisdictions, but sure. You know, he’s extremely successful from doing that. I think the guy who started red bull did that. He was in like Vietnam or Thailand or something. And he’s just,

Sean Tierney: 01:06:27 How’d this taurine based drink into? Like his eyes were just like, oh my gosh, this give away. Yeah. Gave him wings. So. Cool. All right, well, so at this point I think this is a good time to wrap it up. I am going to transition into this kind of rapid fire round. I call it the breakdown. So are you ready for the breakdown? Yeah, I’m ready for the breakdown. Break down baby. What is one book that has had a profound effect on you? [inaudible]

Miles Anthony: 01:06:54 I’d say Dale Carnegie’s how to win friends and influence people. I think that that one, I mean it’s, I read it so many times, it’s very cliche to say in this type of thing, but I think it just at the end of the day, anything you do or you’re interacting with people and understanding people is like, it’s going to help you in anything you do in life. I think. So I think that would, you know, I would say that has the biggest effect on me. Good choice. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 01:07:15 What about what is one tool or hack that you use to, you know, it could be software, it could be just just any kind of hack that you use to save time or

Miles Anthony: 01:07:26 Automation? Yeah, I think just like coding scripts in python to just automate like a sales email outreach or you know, mail merge, stuff like that. I think automating as much repetitive Labor that you can like through either, you know, coding it, you’re making your computer do it or you know, just outsourcing for cheaper I think just frees up your time. So I think that’s, if anyone can figure that out, I think that, you know, the, the possibilities are really endless for their productivity at this point. Is Python the language that you would like if you had kids, would you tell them to learn python or what, what in your opinion, where do you start if you want to learn one thing? Coding was, yeah, I would say python is a good place still at start. I think c would be a good place to start too.

Miles Anthony: 01:08:07 But like python is good for just like general, like automation on, on your computer, you know, just like files and you know, doing with like CSPs. Very quickly. So I think in terms of like my use for that, that was, that was like the main use case. But I think that if I had kids, I would tell them to learn solidity, which is javascript essentially. Because I think that is going to be, there’s going to be so much opportunity for people to, to apply that and that is the language of etherium that the smart contracts are exactly that. That’s, that can be just streamlined by just learning Java essentially, which is like General Java script is just general web website development. So I think, you know, knowing that would be, you’ll, you’ll be set. Java script kind of seems like the Latin of, I feel like there’s a lot of stuff that has kind of spawned off of Java script at this point. So that’s a great parallel. Yeah, it is essentially the Latin of, of of web. Nice.

Sean Tierney: 01:09:01 All right. What about, what is one piece of music that speaks to you lately?

Miles Anthony: 01:09:05 Hmm, that’s, that’s an interesting one. Or it could be an artist with a song or an artist I recently saw. I mean, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’m a huge fan of live music. I think like being at like a, any performance is way better in my opinion than, you know, just listening on like a, your, your like Spotify or apple music. So I try to see as much live music music as I can. I just recently went to a music festival and like south of Lisbon called Super Boxy, Barack, which is, which is great, but actually I just saw Mumford and sons. I think that was in Lisbon actually. It was, it was like a month or two ago. I was in Lisbon prior to this current time. And that was like a really, really con like, cool concert to go to. Especially, like with, with a, you know, a Portuguese crowd because, you know, it doesn’t matter, you know, where you are in the world when you see these bands live that are, you know, performing their songs. Like people are singing it, no matter what language it is, it’s in. So I think, I mean, to answer a question, I don’t have like a specific piece of music, but I’d say like, just the live music in general is like so cool to me because it, it’s kind of like a, a, a universal language. Almost nice. Doesn’t matter where you are. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 01:10:14 Well Mumford and sons too is, yeah, nice choice. We if I can find it, I’ll link to it, but we, my old band would, did I had cover of that a lion man, one of their songs. No Way. Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah,

Miles Anthony: 01:10:25 That’s a great song. Alright.

Sean Tierney: 01:10:27 So this one is a bit of a curve ball, so take your time as you need to think about it. But this is actually Peter teals question. What important truth. Do Very few people agree with you on [inaudible]

Miles Anthony: 01:10:38 Important truth. So, so something that I think is like a truth that no one very few people agree with. Yeah. I would say this would probably have to go to in the realm of like the decentralization talk. I think privacy and like decentralization obviously is very, very important. But I feel like a lot of people don’t, you know, obviously know the implications of not, not having decentralized systems and, and, and not being private. So I think I would say, yeah, that’s probably one main one that I I would say is that most people don’t with me on it because I think it’s just a lack of education I think for the majority of the public.

Sean Tierney: 01:11:18 And so the truth being the importance, like decentralization is important. Is that true?

Miles Anthony: 01:11:23 Yeah, I think in the digital age it wasn’t important like before the Internet, but I think like now like with this constant like flow and free flowing of, of information and like these, these massive giants like trying to suck up as many, as much as many pieces of information as they can to monetize it. I think because of this, like decentralization and privacy is like really important going forward. Not just for like me in particular because I’m not sure. I mean there’s that classic saying like, I’m not trying to hide anything. Like that’s, I’m, I’m truly am I gonna, you know, I’m not, you know, trying to specifically hide anything from anyone. I’m just saying like, the, the idea in general I think is important that people can’t be exploited for the data. Yeah.

Sean Tierney: 01:12:05 Yeah. There’s a great for the people listening, this is a common argument. People say if you have nothing to hide, then you should have no problem with being surveilled. Right. And that’s a terrible argument and I’m not going to go into why, but just all I’ll link to it. But privacy is inherently a right and it’s important and we need to protect it. Right. So, totally agree. All right, last question. What is, if you could go back in a time machine to your UCLA dorm, when you’re here, when you’re just starting to work on that business what is one piece of advice you would give your 1920 year old self?

Miles Anthony: 01:12:42 I would say don’t blow as much money on partying.

Sean Tierney: 01:12:49 Yeah,

Miles Anthony: 01:12:50 No, but yeah, it is like, I would say like looking back I mean I was fortunate enough to have cashflow like when I was in college, so I definitely was spending it on like, you know, going to Coachella and stuff like that. And I don’t regret it but I just, it just irks me to look back at those days and just see like bitcoin at like a hundred dollars and then it’s at like 10,000 or near a 10,000 today. It’s just like that like spending like, you know, $1,000 on a trip or something back then, like could be like, you know, a ridiculous amount of money today. So I think it’s really important. I obviously am a very big proponent of like enjoying life and like experiencing cool things. But I think like saving money is also important. So I would, I would advise myself to save a little bit more and invest a little bit more. But yeah, I mean I had a good time.

Sean Tierney: 01:13:38 You are so far ahead of the curve when I think, I don’t know how old you are, but I’m guessing 23 or 24 man, when I was that age, you’re very far ahead of the curve of where I was at. [inaudible] No, but I think that’s good advice. So just a basically a squirrel away

Miles Anthony: 01:13:56 And tried to save a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Cause I mean even if it’s just for your own projects, like right now, like, you know, I’m glad I did do that. So a certain extent, cause I, you know, have some ammo and some fuel for, for my ventures right now, you know, and so I think, you know, you never know what’s to happen. Like I, we lost like, you know, 90% of the value that we supposedly had in 2017, like in 2018. So I think just taking some off the tables, putting some away and something that’s more safe is like always a good thing and you can’t like kick yourself for doing that ever in the future because like, you know, you’re thinking ahead. So I think that’s important. Cool. All right. Well Dude, thank you so much for being on the show or listening. Let’s say someone’s, you know, working on the next greatest thing and they want to get in touch with you. What’s the best way for someone to connect with you? Yeah, I would say they could just shoot me a message on linkedin. I think it’s, yeah, go ahead. I think that’s, that’s why I don’t really use Twitter too much. But yeah, I think, I think linkedin would be perfect. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Awesome, man. Thank you so much. Thanks, Sean. I appreciate it. Yeah.