Author Michael Smorenburg of 'In Code we Trust fame' among 15 other novels shares his insights about macroeconomial factors, explaining crypto to earlier generations and how the crypto asset classes are one to bank on. Michael brings jargon free insights while simplifying complex topics and situations.

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MACCRYPTONOMICS - MICHAEAL SMORENBURG

Participants:

JP ( Host)

Michael Smorenburg ( Author of 'In Code We Trust')

00:22

JP

Awesome. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome welcome welcome to this episode of diving into crypto. This is JP from AdLunam, Inc. Bringing you everything about Web3. For those of you that know about the show, you know what I'm going to say next on this show, we talk about the insights, the journey, the strategy of the movers, the shakers, the candlestick watchers in the industry. And today we have a very special guest who I'll introduce in a second. Before we begin, though, ladies and gentlemen, please remember a few hygiene announcements.

00:59

JP

Any thoughts expressed on the show belong to that of the speaker and is not to be construed as financial advice. In event we do have a technical glitch and we are unable to and the room gets terminated or what do you call these things? Yeah, if the chat room gets terminated, we will send a link back on our channel at AdLunam, Inc. And to bring everyone back onto the show. All right? So don't panic, don't pull out your hair. We'll be right back with you with a new link so that we can dive right into crypto like we do on the show. Right? That being said, ladies and gentlemen, our speaker today is Michael Smorenburg. Okay, I hope I'm saying that right. Mike, you did.

01:43

Mike

You did, you nailed it.

01:45

JP

All right. Okay. And he is an entrepreneur who is obsessed with blockchain. As I've said before, Michael is and Michael has extensive experience in various businesses. He's a serial entrepreneur as well. I'll let him dive more into his journey. But remember, ladies and gentlemen, that he has extensive knowledge about blockchain and he's going to share some of that with us today and also talk a little about what thoughts he put into this latest book that he's released called In Code We Trust. Mike, welcome to the show.

02:24

Mike

Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much.

02:29

JP

Okay, Mike, let's get the show on the road. So tell us a little about yourself at this time.

02:35

Mike

All right. Born in the mid 60s in Cape Town, South Africa. If you've never been down here, you're missing out. It's gorgeous at the tip of Africa. It's sort of a little piece of the French Rivera. I studied business, became an entrepreneur straight out of college, and I've never really looked back. I've never had a salary in my life. Don't know what it is to have a salary. Certainly not a silver spoon either. I had a couple of businesses and then I moved over to California. I married an American, and there I did various things. I consulted, I wrote a couple of books, and I eventually patented an online marketing system which I managed to get funded in the VC markets. And literally the day we took our business plan to market, the .com began to bomb. We were in free fall, climbing furiously. We managed to hang on to it for about three years and ultimately got swallowed in that mess, which is sort of where crypto is right now.

03:32

Mike

I seem to have a pretty good timing for it. And quite strangely, while I was in America, I discovered I'm actually African. And it sounds strange, but I'm as African. I'm as African as an Australians are Australian, or an American as an American, and I really long to be back home. Africa has got an amazing feel to it and this is where I really wanted to be. So I came home, I started a security company, I did quite nicely with that and I divested into the hospitality industry just in time. Well, first of all, we had a tremendous drought down here and that kicked us in the crown jewels and then went straight into COVID. So, yeah, as you mentioned, I've written quite a few novels along the way. And then in COVID well, we'll get into that, I'm sure, but in COVID, my journey into crypto really began.

04:21

Mike

So that's me.

04:24

JP

Thank you, Mike. Thank you for that. I'm curious to understand, though, I know that you've briefly said that because of COVID you jumped into Web3, but could you tell us a little about that moment at which the switch flipped and you thought, hey, you know what? Web3 is the place to be for me?

04:42

Mike

05:31

Mike

And then, of course, long came COVID and were all locked down, particularly in South Africa. We had a pretty hard lockdown. We were literally not allowed out of the houses for quite a long time and I was going crazy and the one thing I could do was get online. So I then remembered that I had this little investment and I started to dig. And the more I dig, the more intrigued I became. I'd studied economics and I'd enjoyed economics. I really enjoyed the topic, but it seemed very stuffy. It was kind of guys in suits who drove black Mercedes. And I'm not I'm a beach bum. I live on the beach. I'm a beach boy, and I'm an entrepreneur by nature. But all of a sudden, this blockchain space was populated by young people. And what's more, the people in the suits didn't seem to like them and that really turned me on.

06:24

Mike

So that seemed like a really good idea. And then I suppose if we had to get anywhere nearly well, we can dig a little more into that. But I'd read a lot of books on economics. One of them was picnics on Vesuvius and the Great reckoning by a guy called Lord William Mogg or something. And then another one called Creature of Jekyll Island which really painted a terrible picture of the fractional reserve banking system. And clearly were in trouble in this world of ours. And that intrigued me and I started to think maybe crypto is the answer. Yeah. So, yeah. Living in South Africa is very interesting. When I was when I was a kid, we used to 75 South African cents could buy $1. Right now it cost you about 18 rand to buy one dollars. So we've lost 25 times in as much as the dollar.

07:26

Mike

08:20

JP

Sorry, go ahead. Yeah.

08:21

Mike

Just more to in terms of sort of what flipped me and what really turned me onto that the more I dug, the more I realized that there were really smart people out there who also thought it was the answer. And the first one I think I stumbled across was Michael Sailor and then Raoul Pal. And they spoke to me on a level that really resonated with me because Michael Sailor is an engineer, Raoul Pal is a macroeconomist and I really resonated with that. That, to me, made a heck of a lot of sense. So that gave me the confidence to really start pursuing it.

09:01

JP

Understandably. As a matter of fact, I was thinking the same way when you mentioned how the value of the house had tripled with each sale and went up exponentially. There's just so many questions that arise around that, starting from real estate as an asset class to what can you see as your absolute returns over that over a particular period of time. And at the same time, people look at crypto in almost the same way, right?

09:30

Mike

Yes, they do.

09:33

JP

10:01

Mike

Well, I think that still goes on to this very day, and there's plenty of ponzi in crypto. So what we really need to do is there's a huge spectrum here. Let's begin with blockchain. Blockchain is a way to design a database so it self protects itself, and anything that needs to have good protection in terms of databases is a very good fit. I hope nobody can hear that. They seem to be doing road work outside. Anything that needs to be protected in a database is a really good fit. So that means everything from licenses to identity to what would you call it? Ultimately, money is the ultimate database that needs to be run. Databases are typically got single points of failure, and up to 30% of a budget, of an It budget is normally spent on trying to protect that information. Well, blockchain just does that by its very design.

10:58

Mike

I don't think we've got time to go into the design of blockchain here, but I'm sure most people have studied and have got a fairly good idea of how blockchain works. So blockchain just really works as that, but because it's relative, once you've got the designer blockchain as we've got, it's relatively easy to design or to create a new token. And the result is, I don't know what the count is, it's 20,000 tokens or something. And very much like the very early days of the web, a lot of them are complete garbage. In fact, most of them are complete garbage and a lot of them are ponzi's. I think we're seeing FTX unfolding with FTT, it's looking awfully like a ponzi at this point in time. That's not to say that the currencies we use every day aren't actually ponzies when you dig down into them, but nevertheless, the question then is the ponzi?

11:49

Mike

Well, the dog coins are certainly ponzi. In my book, Doge has got the protection of Elon Musk, who's going to use it for whatever he's going to use it for, and that's about the only one that I can think of that's probably going to emerge from this. Okay, there are plenty of ponzi, but crypto itself is not a ponzi.

12:16

JP

Okay- of course, like you said, right? Almost 20,000 coins that are out there. We don't know how many of them actually have value. And that's the whole point. And then when you have a bull run, you have enough and more people thinking about a get rich quick scheme, which they would then mar with the idea of, okay, we can do this with crypto, right. Giving everybody a bad name.

12:50

Mike

If I may just say on that note, that just leads us straight to the what is the value of crypto? On that note, i mean that just leads us to what is the value of crypto. So once again, we have to just forget everything else but the top ten tokens. And those top ten tokens are typically doing something they typically have got doing some kind of a job. So if you take Bitcoin and you ask the question, what's the value of Bitcoin? Well, what's the value of the swift banking system? The swift banking system takes days and days to move money around and it costs a lot of money and there are a lot of fees to be paid along the way. Well, crypto and Bitcoin's, Bitcoin's infrastructure can do the job of the swift banking system. You can use the rails instead of the swift banking system.

13:36

Mike

So what's the value? Well, the replacement of the swift banking system to start with.

13:43

JP

Yeah, exactly. And having that position obviously creates that intrinsic course of value, which most of us don't see because we don't even see the financial system for the most of us, right?

13:54

Mike

Exactly. And that's the irony that people will say, but I don't know how it works. Well, you don't know how the financial system works either. You're just used to it. And that's where it just really comes down to the individual in terms of at every level, a person's just got to upskill themselves and there's really plenty of information. I mean, there's just so many great YouTube videos out there if you don't want to read and they're great books on the topic if you do. They're courses all over the place and a lot of them are free, actually, unlike forex trading and so forth, where if you want to do a course, it'll cost you a king's ransom if you want to do a course on crypto. And it's exactly the same, frankly, better information. I did a forex trading course just to see how it went and I was quite appalled, to be honest.

14:41

Mike

It was not up to scratch of what the crypto guys are doing for free.

14:49

JP

Right. Yeah, it's spot on. And considering that it's a new system, even those that have spent years, that seem to have spent years in the financial system seem to be what's the term? Not just flabbergast. Right. But they're often confused about how the models work and at the same time okay, I'm not going to go off on a tangent, but, you know, at the same time, they're trying to find correlations between the two, use the same strategies but they obviously just don't work exactly the same way.

15:17

Mike

Yeah, and going off on a tangent is very easy in this field because it's a deeply complex field, and also it can do so much that it's very hard not to go off on a tangent. I do it all the time.

15:35

JP

I have to ask you, though, I can already hear in your tone that you're very passionate about what you're sharing with us today and also the thoughts that you have and the small arc that we've covered at this point about the journey that you've had in. But what really gets you passionate about not just crypto, but I'm certain, blockchain and Web3 as a whole. That is something that you've had some time to study, to understand more deeply. What gets you passionate about that?

16:06

Mike

Well, to a large degree, it's decentralized, and that means there are no single points of failure if TCP IP came out and made the web possible. But you can just use it for free. Nobody can buy a share in TCP IP. It's just a protocol. Whereas in Web3, it's actually structured in such a way that our world is underpinned by finance. Everything costs money, and there's a profit motive to all of it, and Web3 has got that baked in. So you're really building Web3 allows you to build anything you want to build on top of a financial structure, on top of a financial infrastructure, should I say. And what's more, a person can without having to go to a stockbroker and buy in shares. If I want to go and buy a premium share Tesla, it's going to cost me $200. And I've first got to get my rands into dollars before I can buy those $200 and I've got to go through a brokerage or something, whereas I can just do that.

17:08

Mike

If I do a little bit of study and I find projects that make sense to me that I think of the future, I can own a little piece of them by buying their tokens. Of course, it is a caveat. MTOR these are the early Wild West days, you know, when South Africa had a gold rush in the 18 hundreds, and there were plenty of little towns you've never heard of that had no particular criminal element. But of course, around places like Barbitan, the hills were alive, crawling with criminals. Why? Well, there was value there was gold there. And we're in the same situation here. We've got all the hackers in the world are trying to kind of break into wallets and defraud one. And in fact, that is just proof positive that crypto has got that much value. So that's not a negative on crypto.

17:58

Mike

That's just human nature, that people will go where the value lies. Yeah, no, fair enough.

18:09

JP

I mean, in every place that you have that value, in every place that you have something that's created that has either wealth value or some store of money of sorts, you're going to have a criminal element or a criminal bent of mind that's going to want to take it without having to earn it.

18:28

Mike

Sure. And speaking of which, we've all, for obvious reasons, we like to deal a little bit in cash because it's got tax advantages. Shall I put that? Euphemistically. But the problem was, perhaps living in England or America or somewhere, you've got less, but living where I do cash is a bit of a liability, because at some point in time, you're going to have a home invasion and you've got a safe full of cash. And that's a situation I found myself in at the end of COVID because we didn't know where COVID was going in the beginning. There could have been food rights, we had no idea. I put a big wad of cash into my safe and that was all great while were in lockdown, but we came out of lockdown and all of a sudden people had free movement and we get it's a dangerous place, this tip of Africa.

19:13

Mike

And then I heard a friend of mine told me there was an ATM, a Bitcoin ATM, around the corner, and I went around to the ATM and I quietly slipped all my cash away. And now I've got not just the advantage of having an empty safe wherever I travel in the world, I've got that money with me, I've got it in any currency I want it in. And, yeah, ironically, I will get to that later, I'm sure, but I'm actually busy rolling out ATMs all over the country as well as a business.

19:50

JP

Fair enough, fair enough. So, Mike, I have to sort of pivot a bit at this point, because I understand your crypto journey, I think the audience does that as well, but I'm certain that many of us are curious in the room because it may also be an aspiration for some of us. Right. What made you think about being a writer? I mean, you told us you were a businessman, you told us that you traveled to another continent, you set up a business day, you were successful, you said you want back home. But writing is, of course, a very different animal, if I may say. What made you think about doing that?

20:27

Mike

21:12

Mike

I bought a little spiral, bound a pencil, and I started to write. And in ten days, I wrote a 400 page novel that it was quite a weird, cathartic experience because it just kind of poured out, and I was just amazed at the story that came out of its own. It felt like I had nothing to do with it. Well, that got me to in America. I tried to get it published and discovered just how hard it is to get published. But along that journey, a book publisher said, what are you doing here? And I said, Well, I'm looking at setting up a consultancy teaching people how to buy businesses. And she said, now, that's a book I could sell. And she ended up writing a book on how to buy a business. And then my agent down the road asked me what I know about sailing.

21:54

Mike

22:50

Mike

23:43

Mike

You're probably not going to make a lot of money out of it, but it does open doors, and it's very cathartic. If you've got the spirit to do it.

23:53

JP

Well you've just described it as being something therapeutic, and I'm certain that a lot of us that may still be feeling the backlash of the COVID lockdown can use this as an outlet. I mean, most people, of course, today may take to blogging, but the more you outpour, the more connections you make, the more that it heals you, I would believe.

24:13

Mike

Absolutely true. Really true. I can highly recommend it. Yeah, fair enough.

24:19

JP

Okay, so I want to shift focus now. I mean, I want to bring this a little more focus to the fact that the last book that you I wouldn't say the last book that you wrote, but the latest book that we know about In Code We Trust, right?

24:31

Mike

Yes.

24:32

JP

Tell us a little more about the book and what inspired you to write that one, because I'm seeing it. I see what it's about, but I really wanted to dive into you. What's the motivation behind it?

24:44

Mike

Sure, absolutely. Well, it started out with, my poor long suffering brother has to suffer the worst end of all my balmy ideas. I'm always writing to him, and I think he's sick of me. He doesn't really answer, and he's a bit older than me, and he's a very astute businessman, much more astute than me. I'm a good entrepreneur. He's a very good businessman. There's a big difference. I've been trying to tell him about this thing about crypto, and he's 71 and he's like, this is crazy stuff. So the more I try to tell him that there's so much information, I started to write it down. Then I was paddling out. We were out at sea paddling surfskis and was a very wealthy friend of his. We were chatting and he said, you know a bit about crypto? I said a little bit. And at the time I knew a little bit, but I didn't realize I couldn't express it yet.

25:34

Mike

So he invited me around for lunch. And when I arrived for lunch this was sort of 18 months, two years ago, I arrived for lunch, I walked in and there were sort of ten guys sitting around a boardroom table, and they were all captains of industry and highly qualified people. Jeez, I got a fright of my life. I wasn't expecting that. And I was up on they were streaming me off to America to somebody on that side watching. Anyway, they asked me three questions. Now, if you asked me those three questions today, I could rattle them off easily. But I was just flummoxed, and I got home and I felt so bad. They said, you did great, and I knew I did badly. So I sat down and I started to write out the answers and one thing led to another. I wrote the book.

26:17

Mike

So really, if anybody's ever read Bill Bryson is not a scientist, but he wrote the best science book, one of the best science books ever. And he's precisely because he's not a scientist, because he can talk to regular folk. And the problem, from what I can tell, is that the blockchain experts, the techies, the financial guys, they talk a different language, they can't talk to normal people. And I'm just a regular guy. So I just wanted to make a story that's not just correct and accurate, it's compelling to read. I wanted it to read like a thriller novel, but be absolutely accurate. And then just sort of one of the cornerstones as well is I also noticed crypto tends to be a young person's endeavor. And of course, our families are made up of young people and old people, and the older generation are sort of looking at their 20 something kids and they think these guys are going to squander the family fortune.

27:21

Mike

As soon as they inherited it's gone. It's off into crypto. So I really wanted to create a bridge within families because I've seen it happen where there's tension between sort of the parents and the kids. I want to create that bridge and write a story that the older people would find compelling and can understand and read and just get everybody on the same page. That was, for me, quite a big deal. Yeah, I could probably keep talking for hours, but we don't have hours.

27:53

JP

That's quite a story, Mike. And I think that also, given that you've chose to script the story in that fashion, right. To bridge families together in many ways, that is specifically what people would want to understand. It's a very real situation. It happens across continents, happens across cultures. I know it happens across families. There's enough and more people, enough, more psychological reports that speak exactly about the same thing. So hats off to you for choosing that specific area to cover.

28:28

Mike

Sure. And another thing is, if you're fortunate enough to live in a country with a strong currency, if you've got the Dollar, Pound or Euro, Yen or whatever, that's great. You don't really feel the quickening as we do out here on the fringes. Everything that's imported is just going it's just running away from you. You can't keep up. So you're looking for a hedge to kind of anchor into. So I just really wanted to speak to that market as well in terms of they, as I say, not just understand, but be motivated to read.

29:05

JP

Certainly. So, Mike, I think from here, one thoughts that is taking off when you speak about how Bill Bryson and I absolutely loved A Brief History about everything. It was a fantastic book. I still have my copy. When it comes to creating that sort of art. Right. Obviously he's speaking. To normal people. He's creating education about things that most people will find boring. Right. Or most people who the experts, like you're saying, are not able to explain in layman's terms. Now, at the same time, when it comes to crypto education, from your point of view, what are the top three things that people should know about so that they are intrigued or their interest is peaked?

29:55

Mike

When it comes to well, I think the first and most obvious thing is that the legacy financial systems all is not well. As I said earlier, I don't believe that we have inflation. It looks like inflation, but in economic terms, I don't think it really is inflation, and therefore you can't really use the antidotes to inflation to fix it. What am I talking about is inflation is defined as more demand for less supply. The world went into lockdown. There weren't more people flying. There weren't more people hiring cars and going to restaurants and consuming. There were much less. And yet the stock market boomed. So what went on? Well, the governments of the world printed money, pumped money into the system. Supply and demand says the more you put in, the less it's worth. If you and I have got an appetite for two oranges and there's only one orange, the price of that orange is going to be high.

30:55

Mike

If somebody dumps ten oranges on the table, the price of per orange is going to be going to go down to 10th of the price of one orange if there was only one. That's really the first issue to understand is that all is not well in the legacy financial systems. Sorry. Okay. Yeah. I think the second thing that's important to understand is that there's a big difference between value and price. The price of Bitcoin has soared to astronomical levels, and now it's crashed to I wouldn't even say very low levels, because after all, two, three years ago, Bitcoin was $3,000 or $6,000, and it's three times that now, which is still extremely well performing. But there's a big difference between value and price. The price of Bitcoin, you can look at it up at any moment. The value of crypto is Bitcoin, and crypto is quite something else.

31:53

Mike

So I think one of the things people need to understand about it is it's just the magnitude, the hash or the computing power that keeps Bitcoin as the safest. What's the word I'm looking for? You can't counterfeit it, you can't double spend it. So it's the safest of all systems, the infrastructure, 100x the size of google. So if google were to turn their significant computing power into hashing for Bitcoins, they would only change the market by 1%, the crypto hash by 1%. Sorry, I'm not making myself very clear. And kind of related to that as well is just this issue that I think most people don't realize that it's very fractionalized. A Bitcoin might cost $20,000 but each Bitcoin has got 100 million satoshis. So even with our lowly South African rand, one South African cent will buy three satoshis. So you can get in, whereas you really can't get into other assets quite as easily.

33:12

Mike

You need a lot more money to get in. Actually, I think I really gave you two, didn't I? Yeah. I suppose my final thought on that is just without being too much of a prepper, if things go really bad, I'm talking about not the governments, I'm talking about the ordinary people of Russia. The ordinary people of Ukraine have got themselves caught into a horrible situation where lots of them have had to flee or they've seen their currencies take a pummeling and so on, or they can't buy foreign and make foreign payments. Well, at least if crypto, at least you get to understand it. You don't have to be deeply invested, but at least if you understand how it works, it's just a little bit of an insurance policy for the future. You just never know what's coming over the horizon on the day that there's a mushroom cloud and you have to go in the other direction.

34:09

Mike

Wherever you land that evening, you need a hotel room and rent a car or something. And it's just nice that it's sitting in your phone and you manage to get through customs without being shaken down. You can't do that with land, you can't do that with gold, you can't do that with shares. Yeah, so those would be my three things.

34:29

JP

Awesome. Thank you. All right, so that being said, I want to rush to the next two questions, because I know that we're coming close to the end of the show, but that being said, so we've spoken about somebody's interest to be piqued to dive into crypto, right, sure. At the same time, you have people that have been in the system for a while and whatever that quantity of time that file is. Right. But they also want you to exit because maybe they don't have the appetite or whatever. Right. For whatever reasons. But what are some of the things that people actually forget about staying committed in the industry and tend to quit too early? So what are some of the things you would say to them, Mike?

35:15

Mike

Well, look left. Just have a look at how many times this has crashed and come back. And in fact, that sort of, if you will, the evolution of it is almost Darwinian. Why it's so valuable? Is it because it just keeps surviving and the value of it just keeps growing. In fact, as I said, the difference between price and value is price. You can look up right now at the second down to the penny, but what's the value? And the value is roughly dictated by the hash. The hash is just how much computing powers out there working with it. And that is just a graph that goes from bottom left top right. The adoption is getting bigger and bigger. It's never been counterfeited, it's never had a double spend. So this is a powerful system and it's just a case of look left and just remember whatever crashes have occurred yes, it crashes 80%-85% and it comes back hundreds and thousands of percent stronger.

36:19

JP

Spot on. Yeah. And I think that's a great takeaway. Right, ladies and gentlemen, this is an absolute gem. Whenever you're confused about, hey, should you stay in crypto, should you stay in this industry, just remember to look left because the more that you do that, the more you study it, the more you understand that the volatility is just part of the game. Right?

36:40

Mike

Yes.

36:41

JP

Okay, that being said, Mike, I have to ask you from your point of view, right, what is the biggest threat to crypto as it stands today?

36:52

Mike

Well, I mean, lack of education just to start with, straight out of the gate, lack of education, which leads to a lot of things. The incumbents, the financial sectors and the governments of the world are losing their grip and they're going to just keep confusing and keeping people as under educated as they can about the space which will then open the door for their CBDCs, their central bank digital currencies, which are the devil in my opinion. CBDCs they will like to muddy the water and try to make you think that the CBDC is sort of a better Bitcoin. It's not, it's garbage, it's centrally controlled, it's money that they can always reach into your wallet and it's the antithesis of a Bitcoin. So that certainly is one of the biggest threats. The difficulty of working with DeFi which will hopefully improve all of the scams that dog our space, which is just really proof that we've got a lot of value here.

37:55

Mike

38:49

Mike

39:18

JP

It's never going to catch on. Exactly. But, yeah, you're right, Mike. I think when you think about it more right, the more educated that can get, the more you begin to understand it. And when you truly educate yourself about it, that's exactly when it starts to make sense. There's so many angles rather the deeper you dive into it, there's so many angles that you have to consider where that value comes out.

39:40

Mike

39:57

JP

Well, that certainly takes a lot of effort. I totally understand because when it comes to educating people about crypto, about Web3, about blockchain, that's exactly what we're trying to do on the show. Create that education, create that awareness, get people to understand that there is an industry, it works like this. It doesn't work like anything else we've seen before. And despite the fact that it's technically young in comparison to some of the other industries, there still is a lot of value for those of you that are looking to step in.

40:28

Mike

Absolutely. So, yeah. Well, I'm glad I could be a little bit of grease in the wheel that moves us forward.

40:37

JP

Awesome sauce. Okay, Mike, I have to ask now at this point in time, I want to come back to your book in Code We Trust. The beauty about writing a book is the inspiration is one aspect, but there are also always a series of stories that weave it together right. That create that ha moment about, hey, you know what? This one, two and three begins to work.

41:03

Mike

Right.

41:04

JP

So I'm curious to understand, right. Are there any stories you'd like to share about where you saw, for example, and Web3 is a community, but where you saw, for example, that the getting together of people, the getting together of thoughts and of ideas in a particular space, how would you say began to inspire you when it came to writing this book?

41:32

Mike

Well, I think one of the first ones was when I took my little water cash over to the ATM. I had to stand in a queue and the people that stood in front of me in that queue shocked me. They were guys in bibs, in orange bibs down in South Africa. We've got something called car guards. And to large degrees, sort of, they're literally unemployed people who will stand there and guard your car. If you pay them, then they don't break into it. And a lot of them are we've got about 5 million foreign workers in South Africa who are remitting their money back home. And as we all know, the remittance costs can be anything from 15% to 50% depending on and the queue I stood in was behind these guys who were sending back their stipends back home and they were using the Bitcoin rails to do it.

42:19

Mike

So they were bypassing the banks and the traditional remittance companies. So that was my first real wake up call, that this thing's got real legs under it. This is not just something that we speculate in like Beanie Babies. It really works. And then just what came out of that as well is somebody who read my book has made me our chief commercial officer of a very big venture, which is very exciting. And we're rolling out ATMs all over the country and into the continent, and we've got another really big development, which we will be at liberty talk about in about two, three months time. But it's huge. It'll open up crypto into the whole developing world in a way that I've never seen done. So it's very exciting.

43:12

JP

Well, I'm glad you shared that with us, Mike, because now we're excited as well, and we are certainly going to look forward to those events. Hope you can announce them as early as earlier, of course, so that we can wait in anticipation for those.

43:27

Mike

Fantastic. And then one of the things just on a personal level that happended for me, as I said, books open doors and some of your viewers might have seen something called Crypto Banter. It's one of the biggest YouTube daily shows, and I'm lucky enough to go and sit in their office, so they tolerate me and it just allows me to rub shoulders with a lot of great people in the industry and a lot of young energy and it's very exciting. So, yeah, I can only highly recommend moving into the space. This is the very beginning.

43:58

JP

Well, when you do meet them next, please shout out from JP to Random Man and Sheldon the Sniper. I love those guys, including Miles and Kyle. Absolutely awesome guys. Shout out to crypto banner guys.

44:11

Mike

Thank you. I'm hoping that we can get them around for dinner in the next week. We were muttering about it, so I feel very privileged.

44:19

JP

Awesome, awesome, awesome. I think that would be a great contrast to the last meeting you had with your brother and those other business people. I think that this would be a more exciting conversation.

44:31

Mike

45:14

JP

Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, not enough of people speak about their failures. More of them will just out about, hey, this is the wins that I've had. But it's very real when you bring your failures into focus like that.

45:26

Mike

Yeah, I was in the office that day that he lost it, and he was a man. I mean, he took it. He didn't swear, he didn't scream, he didn't get crossed with the staff. He took it on the chin, went, okay, and that was properly big money. And he did a show on it, and he said, this is what happened. And he laid it out, and really, he said it changed his life because he'd forgotten that he was a businessman. He'd started to think of himself as an investor, as a passive investor, and he reckons he's made all the money he lost back again and again. I'm not breaking confidence. That's what he said on the show. So go watch. It worth watching. It's very motivational. And go and watch Sheldon's. How Crypto Saved my life. You'll get the tissues ready. You'll need them. It's beautiful.

46:15

JP

It is indeed. Indeed. Both those shows speak exactly about the journey, which resonate with a lot of people. A lot of it resonates with me as well. So I like the fact that they're just not about, hey, you know what? This is what it is. And this is where we're on cloud nine, because this is what we're doing. And this is a high kind of lifestyle. It's more down to earth, very real, and that's what I appreciate about those guys.

46:49

Mike

I sit in that office every day and I watch them, and a lot of people say, these guys are scared. Whatever. I promise you I'll watch those guys, and they are straight up and down. In any business, you can bend things to look bad. Those guys are solid.

47:05

JP

Like you're saying right? When it comes to business on that front, you've seen enough of millionaires and billionaires having to lose fortunes, technically overnight and still be able to hold their head up high. And that does take a lot of. It takes a lot of grit. It takes a lot of character. Thank you. Yes. That's exactly what I was looking for, a lot of character to be able to continue the next day.

47:36

JP

Yeah. All right. Okay. So that being said, speaking about continuing the next day, Mike, I got to ask for the audience in the room. Tell us a little bit about your personal philosophy and what keeps you going.

47:50

Mike

Phew. Yeah. I'm a person. I don't like people say, what are your beliefs? I try not to have beliefs. I try to have understanding. So everything in life I either try to understand, and if I don't yet understand it, I just say I don't understand it. My philosophy is a very simple philosophy. The world's a simpler place than we make it out to be. Yeah. I'm not a very philosophical person. The whole thing of beliefs, I just see beliefs, belief as being a fairly weak emotion. I think it's an intellectual cardis. My whole philosophy is just understand things, dig in and understand them and say, I don't understand until you do. And I think we humans are pack animals. We herd animals. We easily manipulated by leaders and media. And I think the antidote to that is just putting in the hard work and learn all you possibly can.

49:13

JP

Yeah. Amen. Those are certainly words to live by, tough to follow, but they certainly shape you if you can follow them.

49:22

Mike

Yeah. Because otherwise you just get led around by the nose.

49:29

JP

Amen. Amen. Amen. You got to start thinking for yourself and be independent that way. Use that noggin.

49:35

Mike

Yes, sir.

49:39

JP

All right. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, we have come to the end of our show, but we're going to take a few questions. I know that some have been sent in. We only have time to take in one, maybe two questions. So if you've sent them in already, then fantastic. My team is going to pick them up. I can already see one that's coming from KJ. What it says is, how can I explain crypto to my parents when they think I'm wasting my life on this stuff? Like, this is a perfect question for you, or rather, you're the perfect guy to answer this question.

50:15

Mike

51:16

Mike

Why? Most governments I mean, apart from a few governments that have been successful with their currency, most governments have been abysmal, and this is money. In fact, the subtitle of my book is a revolution governed by rules and not by rulers. And we just really entrenched in thinking that our money should be run by our rulers and in fact, every day you wake up, you've got to trust your government over and over again. Every time there's a shift in government, there's a shift in policy, whereas Bitcoin is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And it's international and it's global and it is the future. Put in the study, and I did cover that a lot in the book, and it's very hard to cover now at the end of an interview. But the answers are there.

52:08

JP

Okay, so trace it back. So effectively trace it back to the point at which you had an inseparable concept of the ruling body, so to speak. Whether it was the kings at the time or governance at the time, the church at the time-.

52:30

Mike

You broke up.

52:35

JP

Which actually allows- and understand shifted. The power of that ability shifted from this one centralized source to everybody having access to it.

52:51

Mike

Exactly. That's really what's going on here. Unfortunately, for people who have not yet spent the time just to understand it, they dismiss it out of hand and they're making a bit of an error because you have to understand things. Don't just believe things. Get in there and do the work.

53:14

JP

Okay. All right. On that note, Mike, we've come to the end of our show, but thank you so much for spending this hour with us. I can't imagine it's flown by so quickly. This is certainly a conversation I believe that we should have again at some point. It's worth me making the trip over to South Africa and hanging out with you to continue conversations like this.

53:37

Mike

Absolutely. Please, anybody, whoever's coming to South Africa, give me a shot, look me up.

53:43

JP

All right, that ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being on the show today. And thank you, everyone, for logging in. We'll be back next week at the same time with the new show Diving Into Crypto. Remember, on Tuesdays at the same time as we logged in today, we also have our show, The Future of NFTs, hosted by our co founder Nadja Bester. And this speaks about everything to do with NFTs, the utility, and what the future is going to be. So, ladies and gentlemen, thank you once again for being here. Cheers.

54:17

Mike

Thank you.