Episode 63: PlannerDAO and the DeFi Space in 2022 with Adam Blumberg

[00:00:00] Ben: Welcome to the alt asset allocationpodcast, exploring alternative investment opportunities available to theeveryday investor. Here's your host Ben Lakoff.

Hello, and welcome to the all to asset allocation podcast.Today's interview is with Adam Blumberg. In this episode, we discuss allthings, decentralized finance or defy.

We've discussed defy a few times already, but Adam is taking aslightly different approach. He's building planner Dow. So I'm just going toread the tagline, empowering financial professionals to make digital assets anddecentralized finance or defy accessible to all investors. He's gettingfinancial advisors and these fiduciaries over the line with defy and why it'simportant.

And using that to help educate the masses on why it might makesense to allocate a little bit of their capital to divide, or at least. Notignore it. This is a really good episode on what defy is, where it's been thetimeline, why it's important, talked about regulation and of course, where itmight be going before you listen, please don't forget to like, or subscribe tothe podcast or even better leave a review.

If you're watching this on YouTube, hello, please subscribe tothe channel and or give the video a thumbs up. It's really helps more peoplefind the podcast and keep this thing going 2022, I'm going to ramp back up tothe podcast. Don't worry. It's back. I've been really busy building chargedparticles amongst other things.

So excited to get this thing going in 2022. All right, AdamBlumberg on defy. Enjoy Adam. Welcome to the all tasset allocation podcast.Excited to have.

[00:01:46] Adam: Great to be on. And we we've beentalking about this for a while and it's good to be on here. See you chat aboutsome defy stuff.

[00:01:53] Ben: This is a long time coming indeed.

And actually, you're, you're one of those, you know, internetpeople, internet, friends, that I was fortunate enough to eat meat last year inreal life, you know? And it's like, this is the funny thing that will becomemore and more common that you know, somebody for over a year, years, and thenfinally meet them kind of in real life.

You know, like I knew I'd like you, you know,

[00:02:17] Adam: from our discord messages, if youremember the funny part, when we met at M con I, I texted you and I said, areyou even here? And you said, I'm right now, And you were like three seats over,oh

[00:02:28] Ben: yeah. Also the joy of people using, youknow, pixelated images of their profile pigs kind of forget what their actualface looks like as back.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, yeah, I'm excited to have you on today andtalk a lot about what you're spending a lot of your time on which is defy. Butbefore we get into all of that, let's start off a little overview of youbackground, how you got into crypto and there

[00:02:55] Adam: sure are they always, the origin storyis fun to start with, right.

Find out where we're coming from. So I in addition to, youknow, a few other I guess careers, I had one in, in the. Technology. I actuallystarted my career, my working world, working life out of college at Intel. So,you know, heavy into technology. This is way back in the, in the late ninetiesand then came all the way back to I had an it company that I sold.

And then I got into financial services in 2009. I have a abusiness partner in Enron and we started our own registered investment advisorhere in Texas in we met in 2012. We started that I, I think in 2014 or 20152017, I got into to crypto. And I always say like the, the story of how I gotin is, is, you know, sad, funny, all of that, all of those things, because Iliving in Houston, Texas, We unfortunately had hurricane Harvey.

If anyone remembers it, this biblical flood, my house was oneof them that flooded. And we ended up, we had about 24 inches of water in thehouse, ended up selling the house, taking the insurance money, taking whateverI could get for the house, which was obviously well below what I paid for it.And we, we were renting for a while.

So I had all this cash piled up, not quite knowing what to do.And at the same time, my partner, Ron starts telling me about Bitcoin andcrypto. And I give being the typical financial advisor. Oh, that's all crap.It's, you know, I don't believe in any of that. When I say it's all crap. Theonly thing I knew of was Bitcoin.

Right? So finally he convinced me, just go buy some, just gobuy someone point-based. So I went to Coinbase and I said, did you know, thereare three of these things, which one do I buy? And so in my naivete, I boughteith only because I saw Bitcoin had moved up to $5,000 in eith, was it like 199? And I was like, oh, well, surely the other one's going to $5,000.

I mean the obvious and I can buy more of it. So why wouldn't Ido that? So I did, and then I got introduced immediately to a market that is 247, which means every eight minutes, I would check Coinbase to see what it wasworth. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and check all, all of thosethings. Didn't tell my wife, I was doing this by the way.

Didn't tell her, this is what I was spending our inner, ourinsurance money on. And eventually Ron said, did you know, there are actuallythousands of these things. We can go trade them. I was like, oh, wow, wellobviously we should do that. Then of course I have no idea what they are, butlet's go do it. So we went on to Binance and Bittrex and started tradingagainst Bitcoin and yeah, have good 24, 7, 365.

I'm looking at charts. I'm signed up to all those crappy pumpand dump telegram groups that I didn't realize were pumping num telegram groupsand, you know, trying to trade and make more bid point. And at one point, mywife, we were getting ready for bed and she said, I have to ask you something.Are you having an affair?

I said, I don't know. What, what do you mean? She said, well,you, you just stare at your phone all the time. You don't even talk. Sometimesyou're in the middle of the night, you're on your iPad doing stuff. She saidthe other day, you went upstairs to change clothes and you were gone for 45minutes and you came down looking at your phone.

So are you chatting with having an affair? And you know, I kindof laughed about it. And then there's this really quick thought of like, maybeI'll tell her I'm having an affair because there's therapy for that. And thereis no therapy for, I took our insurance money from our flooded house anddropped it into fake internet money.

And now I'm trading it 24 7. But. All that being said, I toldher and she asked me a little bit more and that's what kind of sent me down therabbit hole to say, I have to go learn why there's thousands of these things.Why, why should there be all of these different cryptocurrencies? It doesn'tmake sense.

They have odd names. And, and I don't really see anyone talkingabout them except in these pumping number groups. So let me go figure it out.And that sent me down the rabbit hole of learning blockchain technology at thetime, which I was really excited about. It just, it just made so much sense,especially being in the financial world, seeing all the inefficiencies in thefinancial world, it just made so much sense to me.

And this was well, this is like early 2018. So there was nodefy at the time. There was my thought was we're going to use blockchaintechnology for shipping and for construction companies. And for obviously, youknow, home title is the most obvious one and insurance. I had all these greatideas for it, which no one cared about.

And then. Fast forward to 2019. When, you know, I was, we wouldtalk to people about crypto, but still had our financial service practice. AndRon said, why don't we start a YouTube channel where you just get on thewhiteboard and explain stuff? And I said, I didn't even know you could do that.Like, what is I assume you have to ask you to, if you can have a channel and hewas like, no, you didn't actually create a YouTube channel.

So figured out how to do that and started explaining howblockchain and crypto works. And just from the perspective of the financialadvisor, not trying to get anyone to buy it and then, you know, eventually whatit became was we, we shut down our RIA to try to teach other financial advisorsabout crypto and defy and how it works, because we feel like once morefinancial advisors learn, then more people are going to be comfortable makingcrypto part of their portfolio.

And eventually as we I'm sure we'll talk about in here, Ben,eventually it's not just making it part of their portfolio. It's making it partof their funding. It's making defy part of their financial life in terms of,this is how I hold money. This is how I bank. This is how I earn income. And sothat is what we really want advisors to understand.

And advisors honestly control hundreds of trillions of dollarsof wealth worldwide. And we want to help them understand crypto in defy so thatthey can start helping their clients. So that's where that's kind of where weare in the course of all that created a course, a certification and a Dow forfinancial advisors called planner Dell.

[00:08:45] Ben: Yeah. And that's precisely why I wantedto have you on, I mean, I very, very intelligent approach, hard, not the mosteasy, but going after aria or IAS as the trusted authority to what, what youshould do with your money and kind of getting them over the line. Hey, defy.Isn't just this thing, this flash in the pan, it's here to stay.

This is what it is. This is pulling back the curtain a bit. Soreally, really awesome. And just wanted to comment that, like, it's amazing howmany people. Believe that, you know, air quote, being in crypto means tradingand they don't really get past that. Kudos to you for actually like fullfalling down the rabbit hole and like experimenting with all of these things.

Because a lot of people don't quite get past that initial humpyou know, they get burned or whatever, and then it's off to the next shinyobject, I guess.

[00:09:37] Adam: Right. And, and that's actually someinteresting to talk about Ben that I've talked about, you know you know, with afew other people, is that for the first, for the last few years, Trading andprofits and the investment and, and you know, the value or the relativevaluation has consumed the entire narrative, right.

Of, of crypto in defy. And even in that even goes into NFTs,right? It's been all about the narrative around the value of NFTs. And those ofus kind of on the inside know that it's, it's so much less about the value ofthem. It's so much more about the infrastructure that's being built about thefact that we're, we're really seeing what ownership looks like or what custodyor control looks like.

And we're trying to build that. And the NFT boom is reallygiving us the, the funding. I say us like I'm building anything. You're the onebuilding stuff, right. Is giving you all the ability to, to grow thatinfrastructure. And that's really the important part. So again, the, the value inthe investment has really taken over the narrative, but was being builtunderneath is, is really.

The important part and it's exists. It's so analogous to theinternet, the beating of the internet, where it was so much about the value,the companies that went public and what they were worth, and people trading thestocks. And ironically, because of the internet, there was each trade whichallowed you to go trade the stocks that were about the internet.

And, and then, you know, once the values fail, once we hadthe.com bust and everyone said, oh, well, that's, that's over. You realize, no,the infrastructure was being. And then we got the internet. Like we really gotthe internet, you know, closer to what we see today. So w whether the, the, thevaluation and the investment is very much the, the narrative that's happened sofar, but it's really the infrastructure that's being built.

It's fun and exciting and important. And that's what we want totalk about. And present,

[00:11:28] Ben: and number go up is a very addictivegame, but these bubbles and are good, and that allow a massive influx ofcapital that really allows people to be innovative and truly build these thingsthat can be core infrastructural pieces that are so crucial going forward toallow for that next, like more sustainable boom.

That's for sure. With defy, let's just start, I've done a fewpodcasts probably right in the heart of defy summer last year, but how do youexplain it to newbies? Like, what's, what's kind of your definition of defy andwhy it's important.

[00:12:07] Adam: I think, well kind of the definition ofdefier, how, how I explained defy is all the things the ability it starts withkind of peer to peer transactions, right?

If I, if I'm going to let you borrow money, right? I'm going tolend Ben some money. And right now we can do that. You and I know each other, Itrust you. You say, look, I have this great business idea. I look at thebusiness plan and I ride, all right, Ben, here's a hundred thousand dollars todo with it. What you want.

Now that a hundred thousand dollars was maybe sitting in mybank account not doing a whole lot, you know, earning virtually nothing. I getit to you. You can do something with it. It's good for the economy. It's goodfor you. It's good for me. It that's, that's a much better system. Now ourrelationship doesn't scale, right?

I can't go find a million bins. You can't go find a millionpeople that happen to have money to let you borrow. That's where banks came infor years. Thanks for that. Go-between I put my money in the bank. It staysafe. You go to the bank and you say, I have an idea. I want to borrow somemoney. And they decide if they're going to lend you the money.

I have no purview or no interest in that relationship. And forthat privilege or for the bank doing that, they, they take a fee, right. Andthat fee is they charge you 8% to borrow the money. And they give me 0.01 andthey keep it. In a nutshell. So imagine now we don't need the bank and I can goto you, but I don't have to know you or trust you, but we use computer code tomake sure that you're going to pay me back and that my money is safe.

And I earn that interest. So that 7.99% the bank was earningnow goes to me or goes to me, plus, plus this little bit of code that's, that'shelping to run it. That's essentially defined right? The whole financialsystem, our entire economic system is all about getting money from where it'sleast efficient, towards most efficient, right?

My investing is taking money that is not efficient for me andgetting it into a more efficient process or a more efficient system. And sothere's so much of that trust and so much of that we can outsource to code. Andthat's what decentralized finance is about. It's how can, how can we make thatthose relationships scale?

In a way where we don't have to have an intermediary that hasbuildings and people and advertisements on TV and all those things, becausethat's, what's costing money. We've needed that for a while. Now we can all, wecan take code and replicate a lot of their processes. So why shouldn't we dothat? Why shouldn't we evolve that way?

And so it ends up being just a combination of technological andeconomic evolution. It's exactly. It's exactly where we should be. At thispoint. We have the technology, the economy has evolved. Why, why shouldn't weput the two together? So I don't know if that's a very succinct definition ofdefy now.

It's a really good one though. I appreciate it. It helps. Yeah.I mean, for me, it, it helps break it down and make sense a little bit thatit's just taking this peer to peer relationship we have in scaling it, using,using code the same way we scaled chat, the ability to chat with each other,talk to each other, using the.

Right. It's not a whole lot different than that. I have, youknow, thousands and thousands of online friends. I don't know any of them forthe most part until I meet them. Cause they're sitting three chairs down fromme at a conference. It's true.

[00:15:23] Ben: It's true. Which was a damn fantastic conferencetoo, by the way.

The con guys do it again. I actually it's in September of 2021.

[00:15:32] Adam: So it will be there again. Yeah.

[00:15:34] Ben: Likewise. Okay, so it's great. Greatintro. What defy is kind of why it could be important. Let's go through liketimeline. What has been like these core pieces that it have existed so far? Youknow, what have we done?

Where potentially are we going trends that are emerging, thingsthat you find interesting, you know kind of overall state of the market

[00:16:00] Adam: defined. So it's interesting. And I, andI appreciate it because the way I think to step through it, and this might takea while and you can stop me in the middle if you want, and we can shell, butyou, you know, first you had Bitcoin and the idea of Bitcoin was again, likedon't, don't let banks necessarily always be the intermediary because theycause all this friction and they add all these fees and look, in all honesty,we have the technology to not have to do that anymore.

But the technology meant that we had to get people to connecttheir computers and process transactions. And in order to do that, we had tocreate an incentive and the incentive could not be dollars. It had to besomething that we created that didn't go through the banking system. And that'swhy Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency was created to incentivize people, to processBitcoin, the network that's it.

And Bitcoin, the network was successful enough that some peopledecided we can do that, not just with transactions of value, moving back andforth, but with. So now we can create a, essentially a mega computer and we canpay people to process the mega computer to be the mega computer. And thatcurrency that we had to create was called a theory or eith I guess, ether,ether on the Ethereum mega computer.

So I connect my computer, I help run it. I get paid to do thatright. And if I turn mine off, you're still running years and millions of otherpeople are still running theirs. So the computer's going to just going to keepgoing and we're all getting paid. And again, the currency was created to givethe incentive because without that currency that was created, then, then thetechnology ceases to be efficient.

If we have to use dollars than the technology ceases to beefficient. So we had to go down that road, Bitcoin had to be successful. It wasa theory. Them had to come out. Eve had to be used. People had to startbuilding on it. And the beauty of a theory of course, was it was so opensource. It was so open.

There was no, like, this is exactly what you're going to dowith it. They just set it out there and said do with it, what you will let's figureout. Let's be very organic and figure out where this goes. Right. And in allhonesty, like crypto punks came before defy. So we had NFTs before we haddecentralized finance applications.

But then the first thing we saw that we had to have was a stablecoin, right? Like if you're really going to run this, you can't be running. Youcan't have programmable money that moves up and down in value, 10% within a fewhours. Right. You and I can have a contract that goes longer than 12 minutes.If we're going to use something that has, that is volatile as our program willmoney.

So we had to have something that was stable, that was worthroughly a dollar because that's what we all use. And so maker came out with dieand die was successful, but all of these, like way to test and make sure thatthe pillars were successful, right. And dye was pretty successful for a while.It held its dollar for a long time, for the most part and did so in a way whereit didn't have to ask permission from any banks, this isn't like USD.

So you had die that that is a stable coin worth, roughly adollar at all times, but done through incentive mechanisms. And then. From die.We had to move on to lending protocols. That was kind of like, kind of the nextone. So you have compound and you have all of a, and you know, you did havesome peer to peer lending protocols, honestly, Dharma who just got acquired.

They started out as a peer to peer lending protocol first,which I thought was going to be the coolest thing ever that I could, you know,I could lend people money using this protocol and it never really took off.Right. But then you had. Compound and obey that have taken off and you realize,oh my gosh.

So we can, like, the bank is actually not a company anymore.It's just code. And it's working. Like, it just keeps working and working andworking. And even when it doesn't work, if, if any of them get hacked orwhatever, like now there's insurance. Okay. So nexus mutual creates insuranceand says, we're going to take out all the pieces.

We're going to disintermediate by going, what are all thelittle pieces of insurance? What are all the little pieces of banking? We'reall little pieces of investing that are centralized with some entity. And canwe figure out a way to get people, to give people the incentive, to do thosethings on their own.

Without having to have the insurance company go raise a billiondollars to offer a particular insurance product. Can we go put that billiondollars inside this box? And if anyone needs it, then we have it to, if we haveit for. What's the incentive, what we need to give them some incentive wherethey're going to earn something and we need to keep it safe.

Okay. So that's what it is. It's just a series of incentivesand liquidity. So defy has just been in a series of, of incentives, liquidity.What are we doing with it? Let's create more incentives and more liquidity.Some of them have gone down some relatively bad roads, right? The, the intensekind of liquidity mining and, and you know, yield farming, I think is not, wasnot always good for the defined ecosystem.

Because it, because it put the focus so much back on how muchyield I'm earning and not am I building a system? Am I building an ecosystem?Am I building something that people are actually going to use in the future?Not just try to earn a thousand, a a thousand percent APR. And so where we arenow is look, we have stable homes.

We have we have a lending really good lending protocols. Wehave really good insurance. We have really good exchanges, decentralizedexchanges, the ability for you and I for, for us to exchange tokens, withouthaving to know each other and without having have a centralized entity, theseare all important parts of the, of the economy of the global economy that arebeing rebuilt using decentralized infrastructure in there.

And it's being it's happening so fast. It's happening in singlyfast. Now we're building governance structures in Dows and now we're, you know,and then, and FTS is all about control and ownership rights more so than it isabout art. You know? So like all these systems are, I say, slowly being built,but they're being built and they can be tested so quickly because it's allcode.

And because it's all decentralized and because, and because weknow. If there's a hacker and exploit, it's going to happen really fast. We cango patch the holes really quickly. Yes. Some people are going to get hurt inthe process, but we're iterating through really quickly. You can patch theholes fast, right?

So we get to look at all this history of the, of the globaleconomy and how it built up relatively slowly, because we didn't have thetechnology to connect as quickly. And now that we do, we can go, all right, we,we see what's been done. We see what we need to build, and now we can build itin hyper-speed because everyone's already connected.

And because, and because for the most part on a lot of thedefy, we don't have to ask permission. There's no KYC, AML on most of it.Right. You just connect your wallet and go, and let's throw out some incentivemechanism and a liquidity pool and see what. You know, and, and look at it. Andthe code is all audited.

Everyone can audit the code, but the beauty of it is the reasonwhy we can iterate so fast is because no one has to go create the database. Noone has to go by database space and build a database and build a network. Thenetwork's already there running. It's incredibly inexpensive, honestly, to youknow, to go build a protocol, to go create something on this, because if you doyour incentives, right, you have access to the quiddity.

The network has already, they're running, being paid for byeveryone else who's running it. So it makes for that incredibly fast iterationthrough the, the economic system. Now we just have to get to a point wherepeople are educated enough to use. Right.

[00:23:24] Ben: No. And you bring up a really good point.I mean, you talked multiple times about the speed and velocity of change andinnovation in this space.

So I think that's very important because it's 24 7, like yousaid, it's global. So you know, we go to sleep and then the other side of theworld wakes up and starts working on these things and you can kind of iterateso much more quickly. And then, like you said, you have the ability to align incentivesand incentivize this.

So there's a monetary gain potential as well, but this reallylends itself. And I think back to you going up to change your shirt and comingback 45 minutes later, glued to your phone. I mean, there's, there's a lot ofFOMO in the space, right? Because you are focused on one little piece andeverything else doesn't stop.

It's actually accelerating exponentially as well. So I'd becurious how you Like separate signal from noise and kind of deal with the hyperspeed at which the whole space is moving at any point in time.

[00:24:29] Adam: Well, I wish I had a really good answerand I wish I had done it well to this point because I would be incrediblywealthy had it had I actually, you know, done that and focused on something thiswhole time, but what I have focused on and what I, what I've learned throughlearning enough that I could teach other people is that there's so much goingon.

And if I'm going to FOMO into everything, I'm going to lose it.Every one of them, because I don't know enough about any, any one of them. Ican say that the, the people that seem to have made it, they have done reallywell thus far in the defy space. And when I say, well, you know, I probablymean financially well, right.

That that's how kind of we judge it are the ones who have foundsomething that they're really passionate about and focused on it and built itor invested in it. And we can find all sorts of those examples. And just likein any other industry, they seem like they're overnight millionaires. When inreality, they probably had to go through some period where it was working 20hours a day, or it was not seeing the family, or it was foregoing some of theirlifestyle where it, where it looked like it was really dark.

And they were, you know, maybe door dashing at the same timethey were coding or something. And then whatever they were doing. They finishedit, it hit, they launched whatever it is. And all of a sudden now they'rethey're successful. And there are so many of those stories. And once thosepeople get successful, then they get to invest in other stuff.

And it looks like, oh my gosh, they're all over the place. Butin reality, they, most of them focused on one thing that they were reallypassionate about and maybe they looked at what else was going on, but theydidn't say, oh, I'm going to put some of my time and effort there, my time andeffort there and my money over here, because then it just draws your attentionaway from what you're really interested in passionate about.

And what's going to make you successful what you're trying tobuild. I mean, you all at, at charge particles, of course built what you builtbecause you had to be focused on, he said, this is a good idea. We're gonnabuild it. We're gonna focus on it. And you continue to build and iterate. Andthen you have others that are building applications using it.

And you go, I'm sure you go, wow. We didn't even think of that.That's really cool. Let's go. Let's help that those people right there. I mean,I know. That we're very much into, you know, metaverse and NFT like two yearsago before it was anything. And now all of a sudden they, they look likegeniuses. And, but I know, I mean, look back at them two years ago and theywere just trying to get anyone to talk to them about it.

And everyone thought they were crazy. And now, you know, herethey are looking like the smartest people in the room, which they're incrediblysmart people. They just had a passion behind something that wasn't. W we, we weren'tready to accept it yet. Right. We, we weren't quite there. So you know, kind ofan answer, you know, roundabout answer to your question is you look across allof it, but then if you want to get in like, find something that you're reallyexcited and passionate about and either a project of your own or a project ofsomeone else's and, you know, jump in.

And yes, there's a bunch of other stuff going on, but try totry to have some sort of blinders on and go, what do I have to do today to keepmy project moving forward? And when w if I have time left, I'll, I'll look atothers.

[00:27:35] Ben: Yeah, absolutely. And work hard for 10years to become an overnight success. And I'll just put out a PSA to listenershere that if you're an unsure, like what your passion is in the space, likestay curious, jump into a lot of these.

Discords ask questions, contribute. Everybody's looking forhuman capital and people that are passionate. Maybe you don't know what it isyet, but crypto is this all encompassing umbrella at this point that you couldprobably find your niche and whatever it is you're passionate about. There's a,there's a community of builders and people out there also very passionate aboutit.

Building

[00:28:10] Adam: something magical and along those lines,then, you know, people, you don't have to be a programmer. You don't have to bean economist. You don't have to, any of those things, you just have to you justhave to be passionate, wanting to learn, interested, open mind, all of the, allof that. And there are so many opportunities.

Within crypto and defy right now that have nothing to do withcoding and nothing to do with economics. These are projects. I mean, these are,these are kind of like companies and they need people who are good at certainthings. They need people who are good at customer service or, or a good atmanaging other people or, or treasury management or something like that thatare just going to work hard and learn about it.

That's what these need. And so there's so, so much opportunityfor anyone who wants to get in and you don't even have to know that muchcrypto, you can learn it. Oh, absolutely.

[00:29:02] Ben: I mean, you just need the aptitude tolearn, right? It's like everything is learnable and if you're passionate about,about it, you'll make up for it.

That's for sure. There's, there's a lot going on. Defy ingeneral. There's a lot of like emergent trends. I'd say like recently or goingforward, where do you kind of see the overall defy space going? What, what kindof is most interesting to you within the defy world overall? Right now?

[00:29:32] Adam: So a few of the things that are reallyinteresting to me that I'm kind of excited about is I am really excited,honestly, about a lot of real world assets coming on chain.

And the, the, the notion of those real-world assets on chain.So we've seen some, some announcements and things from like centrifuge youknow, bringing some real-world assets on chain with, with maker and , which isreally exciting because now you're going all right. We are going to use realestate and other assets like that as collateral to borrow on chain, you know,and that is really exciting.

There was a bank SOC gen in society's general, as I'm told it'spronounced in France that, you know, tokenize $40 million worth of mortgages,and then use that to borrow 20 million die through maker. I mean, that's thoseare big deals because now that that's. And four is utilizing this blockchaintechnology to denote ownership, which is essentially what an NFT is, right?

A security token, anything like that, it's denoting ownershipand then saying, okay, once we've done that, now we can utilize the technology.We can utilize smart contracts and, and go borrow money, do what the economy issupposed to do, which is move money to where it's most efficient. And, and wecan do that using wallets and using web three and defy.

So real-world assets coming on chain in a way that they're partof defy, not just in a way where we, you know, you have a security tokeninstead of LLC interest or something, it's more of banks and companies likethat using, you know, taking real-world assets on chain to, you know, becollateral in, in Ave or maker or you know, borrow die against it or somethinglike that's really exciting because now you have an asset.

You're gonna have a really tough time liquidating that asset.Like it's not, it's not like real estate goes to zero, right? Real estate.Doesn't go to zero. It's always worth something. So we don't have that issue ofall of a sudden this protocol could be hacked. And all the collateral you haveusing that protocol's token goes to zero.

You don't have that anymore. If you have a building, a buildingas a building like a building, doesn't go to zero. There's no protocol that,that does that. So that to me is maybe the most exciting aspect and couple thatwith something like maple finance that is basically bringing, you know, takingdefy money and lending it out in somewhat of a traditional finance way.

It's saying we're still going to go through somewhat of anunderwriting process. But where we get the pool of money is going to bedecentralized finance money. And we're going to create a protocol that allowssomeone to go lend that out, to essentially be an underwriter and go lend thatmoney out.

That's pretty exciting as well. So, so to me, those are reallyexciting. And of course, you know, I'm biased, but getting more, having moreand more in the traditional financial industry, understanding, wanting to learnand wanting to help clients w whether those clients, whether they'reaccountants wanting to help clients or financial advisors or lawyers or bankersthat is really exciting to me as well.

So it's a lot of it is bringing traditional finance real-worldassets into the crypto space, because then we go beyond this idea of fakeinternet money that people say, doesn't have a value because we created anothing to, okay. No, no, this, this token that I have actually represents thatbuilding over there.

Therefore, you know, now it's not fake anymore. Now I'm. I'm justcollateralizing this, and we're denoting it with money and the money came fromsomebody else and you're, you're opening up more participation and moreopportunities and more yield and all those things like that to me is what'sreally exciting this year.

[00:33:22] Ben: Yeah. It reminds me of the Paki McCormickarticle recently, I forget what, what it was called, but I'll link it in theshow notes somewhere, but it was the whole premise was like, it's justpractice. Like constitution Dow raising $40 million to buy a physical copy ofthe constitution in three days.

Is that changing the world for the better? No, but like, doesit show that an internet mob can raise a substantial amount of money over thecourse of a few days? It centered around some specific goal, like buying theconstitution? Yes. With all of these you think maker? Yeah. I take my Heath andI put it in a vault and I take out a loan on it.

Like, is this the killer app? The final form? No, but thatmechanism of collateralizing putting something into a. Like vault and thenpulling a loan based on that that's going to be used with real assets at theend. And then these permissionless borrowing lending, like, is that the finalform? No, but is it this crucial building block as we go forward where realunderwriters have to actually use this and there's some sort of permissionfinal form, who knows, but this is, this is the joy of innovation and having abunch of really smart people, kind of picking up these little practice thingsand run with them.

That's for sure.

[00:34:42] Adam: Oh yeah. That's all exciting. And, andyou're right. It's it's practice, right. We're running through it with internetmoney so that when the real money comes in or ready. You know, w we've we'veplugged up all the holes and we've made it, you know, we we've made it safer.We've you know, figured out what the selling points are.

We figured out who's going to use it, how to make it easier touse. I mean, you and I both know, it's not w once you get in, it's still noteasy, like bridging assets to L to not that easy, you know, figuring out whichLTL you're going to use. Not, not very easy. So it's still not easy to use,which of course has one of the objections, but you're right.

It's just an, I guess, package. It's just a practice right now,trying to build out what will be the real financial system on top of thetechnology. That again, just makes it more. Yeah.

[00:35:35] Ben: And to be clear, both of us I, I believe,believe that this is real money, you know this crypto thing that we spend allof our time in has real value that's hopefully that that should be abundantlyclear with what both of us are doing.

That's for sure. But I'm also commenting on the, the, thedifficulty. I think this is part of the. The appeal at this time. I justbridged over to Phantom, which is like an alt a L one. This defy flourishing ofactivity is now bleeding over to these other alternative late layer ones, likea competitor to Ethereum, or like a layer two on top of Ethereum.

And I mean, there's like 45% yields on stable coins on some ofthese things. And it's, it's not easy for most beginners to get there, but ifyou get there there's some pretty good arbitrage, pretty good opportunities,you know, in these kind of more efficient inefficient markets. Definitely thedifficulty is a bit of a feature at this point.

I think.

[00:36:42] Adam: Right. It, it's definitely a feature isdefinitely part of it that if you can get your money over there, then there'ssome great deals to be had. But to be honest, Ben, like looking at it from a,either a traditional finance perspective or just a person who doesn't get itperspective, you go, okay, seriously, how can I make 45% of my dollars on an,on something, a dollar something's gotta be fake.

There's gotta be a rug pole somewhere. Even if I didn't knowthe rug pulled nomenclature, I'd color, rug, pool, buy something. Someone'sgoing to take my money somewhere. And what we really have to be careful with,what really worries me is we all, you know, talking a defy stuff, look over atraditional finance.

And we talk about how there's this huge moat that's been builtbecause of people with money you get to make. Right. Like they, it's so easy inthis country. And in most developed countries, if you have money, it is so mucheasier to make more money. You have so many more opportunities. You don't needliquidity as much.

You, you know, you're an accredited investor. Like all thosethings, you have more opportunities. And the B the, the initial ethos, theinitial beauty of defy was you didn't need that. You didn't need to be one ofthe ones with money. The worry is now the moat is different. The moat is youhave to be one of the early adopters.

You have to be a technologic, technologically savvy. Now to beone of the ones that are in all the money. And of course, once you do that,you've earned it. And now you, you don't care that the fees, the gas fees onether, so high, you're totally willing to do, to spend $300 to make 300,000. Sowe have to worry about not building the same.

Right about not not having that and still maintaining that,that ability for more participation and more inclusion. So it does, it worriesme sometimes that the, that there's such a technological mode and that if youget to know a lot of the discourse we mentioned, get in the discourse, learnabout this.

If you, if you want to, you know, really learn and really getinvolved and figure out where your career is going, but you and I both knowit's also hard sometimes in those discourse. I mean, it is some intense talkabout crypto economics and token economics and what to do with the treasury andstuff. It gets hard sometimes.

And if you're not very happy and CFA,

[00:38:52] Ben: and I don't understand half of thesethings, sometimes the like financial, well, this is the thing about crypto,right? It's not just like understanding finance economics game theory, like allof these aspects roll into a tokenized community which is, which is what makesit so interesting.

And to add to that, Discord is a disaster. Like you there's somuch noise and you'd be you'd be plugged in 24 7 and still miss a lot ofthings. That's for sure. Yeah. All right, so I'd be remiss if we didn't talk abit about regulation. We're talking about earning double digit returns on stablecoins, which is pegged to the us dollar in this alternative ecosystem thatdoesn't have KYC that doesn't have AML.

Walk me through current state of regulation, where it is whathas happened significantly. Whatever you feel would be helpful here.

[00:39:51] Adam: I think the state, well, the state ofregulation in the U S can be summed up with this. Bitcoin is not a security.Everything else is. That's kind of the current state of, of regulation in the US Bitcoin is on a security.

Everything else is kind of up for grabs. And we used to sayBitcoin and ether, but it seems like Gary Gensler recently has said, well,maybe it's just a security too. So it, it would be really helpful if therewere. Regulatory guidance. We keep using those two words together, regulatoryguidance. It'd be really helpful if the regulators could say, here's what we'regoing from here on out.

Here's what we're going to consider securities. Here's what,we're not the problem. So many of the problems come from the fact that as muchas either regulators or some attorneys who whomever wants to say, well, thisfits into this bucket of regulation that we've had for 80 years. It doesn't, itabsolutely does not Bitcoin crypto, anything defy for the most part does notfit in the buckets we've had in the past.

And part of the reason is because not only can I put my moneyin some of these cryptocurrencies and some of these digital assets assets, butI can also send them. Right. I can hold on to them custody wise, and then I cansend them to you as payment. You can say, look at them, you want me a thousanddollars.

You can give me a thousand USBC, a thousand dollars worth ofbeef, a thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin, whatever it is. Well, how do youregulate that? Is it, is it regulated as currency? Like a bank would be, is itregulated as a security? So that falls under the guise of the sec. Is itregulated as a commodity, which is CFTC wants to do so since we're not surewhat it is, all the, all the regulatory bodies all want to regulate it.

But they can't all regulate it. We can't have it be subject toall these different regulations because it'll never move. So we have thoseissues going on with everyone trying to figure out who regulates it. Of course,there's, you know, the us government wants to get in on it because of tax taxpurposes.

They want to tax it. But they don't even know what to tax hadit. I mean, we have issues already that says that, where if I have, if I boughtBitcoin for a thousand dollars and I paid you $2,000 worth of Bitcoin, well,that's a capital gain too. So I paid you for something you gave me the $2,000worth of value.

And yet I still have a capital gain on, right. I mean, that'sa, that gets to be a problem from a, an investment standpoint, from a financialservice perspective, who's going to be the custodian, but you know, custody isso different. So I I'm talking very roundabout way, but the honest answer is,as I've said, Bitcoin is not a security.

Everything else is up for grabs from a regulatory standpoint,because. There, it doesn't fit neatly into any boxes that we currently have.And so there's going to have to be thoughtful regulation from, and this is forthe most part coming from Congress, they're the ones who make the rules.Everyone else just enforces them.

So I mean, not to bang on them, but when was the last time somethoughtful regulation came out of Congress, right? And th those are not exactlythe people that, you know, for the most part, they're not exactly the peoplethat get crypto, they get defy and they tend to be very protectionist. They'revery protective of the U S and the power of the U S and the value of the U Sand that a lot of that power and values in the dollar.

So how do we protect the value of the dollar? You mentionedstable coins. Well, they've, they've said they've intimated stable coins shouldbe regulated like banks. Okay. Well, again, doesn't fit neatly into a boxbecause how do you regulate a decentralized protocol? Like, how do you regulatemaker? Which, which creates.

Right. It doesn't it, there there's no pro there's no companyyou can go regulate. So how do you do that? Other than to say no, one's allowedto use it, but then, okay. I have a defy wallet. How do you regulate that? So Ithink part of the problem is who has purview over it? What is it, whateverwe're going to call it.

And then as we've said, some of it goes above and beyond thetokens you invest in. It's the system, it's the protocols, it's the economicstructures that are being built. How do you regulate those? So a regulatoryguidance would be helpful at least in terms of tokens. And what's a securityand what's not a Hester.

Pierces has said it would be great if we had some sort ofsandbox and give protocols a three-year time period, to get to some sufficientlevel of de-centralization before we call them a security that would be reallyhelpful. But look on the other side, in the absence of regulation, while thegovernment kind of hems and Haws and, and goes back and forth, Everyone in defyjust keeps building, right.

It just keeps getting bigger and bigger and more money comes inand more protocols and, and all that. And then maybe it gets to the point whereit gets so big that they can't overregulate it. So they just go, all right,we're going to create a whole new, a whole new body to regulate it, but it'sgoing to be regulated on its own terms.

It's going to be regulated for what it is, which is adecentralized economic structure, not fitting in any boxes we already have.Cause it's already gotten to.

[00:45:00] Ben: Oh, and the boxes that were created inthe 1940s, thirties, and forties are pre 19 feet for sure. To to use for this.You mentioned some potential clarity that might be helped, but like, if youcould wave a magic wand and change something within this defy space that wouldhelp accelerate kind of the clarity on, on this, what would that look like?

[00:45:27] Adam: I think that if I can ask regulators todo something that would give us some clarity, it would be clarity on whatconstitutes in, in the crypto or in the defy world. What is going to constitutea security. Okay. What is there some, can you give us guidance, even if it'sdifferent from what we've had in the past that says a protocol can launch atoken.

It is not a security for the first couple years, and you have Xamount of time to become sufficiently decentralized and define what that means.And then, and then if you have not, it's a security and we have to give us domake some retroactive penalties or you are then, you know, a sufficientlydecentralized token, you can go on trading and everything else you do.

That would be incredibly helpful because there are so manypeople, you know, we work with financial advisors all the time. And the worrywith financial advisors is what if I get my clients into some, some token andall of a sudden, the sec decides it's a security and has to be delisted fromCoinbase or wherever.

And, you know, they, they get sued and all of a sudden myclient's investment, you know, goes to zero. Because the sec said theirsecurity and suit them. Like that's, that's not fair. Therefore I'm not, I'mnot going to put my client in. Right. That would be, you know, one of the mosthelpful that I see that could be a a quicker hit, right?

The rest of it, stable coins are a big one, too, man. If theycould just let stable coins go and, and give some guidance as to what, what wecan utilize as a stable coin and actually transact with it, actually, you know,have stores except you know, retail stores except stable coins and such, thatwould be incredibly helpful because then all of a sudden the USBC or the dye Ihave in my wallet, I could use that to pay for my.

[00:47:17] Ben: A hundred percent. No, I think that's,that's good stuff. Well, I think this is a good transition into what you'redoing with planner dowel. I mean, there's a lot of hurdles involved withgetting people over the, over the line with what defy is and while it's whyit's important, but then even more so talking about regulations, for sure.

But with financial advisors to get them comfortable enough tosay to their clients. Yeah. This is something that I think deserves like asecond look. But I just want to read like your tagline on planner doubt,because I think it's quite powerful, but empowering financial professionals tomake digital assets and de-centralized finance, defy accessible to allinvestors, which is super, super powerful.

So walk us through planner down where you guys are and kind ofyour near term roadmap, I guess.

[00:48:10] Adam: Yeah, thanks for giving me the thesoapbox to talk about it. We, we started planning it out in may of last year.Steve Larson had the idea for it, and my words to him were, that's such a goodidea. I'm jealous that it wasn't my idea, but it, but the idea was we just needa this is one Dal's, you know, we're just getting really hot.

We said, we need to Dell for financial advisors and we didn'teven know what that meant. We just, I mean, we knew what a Dow was. We didn'tknow what we were going to do with it, but we said, we might as well start itkind of before someone else does, we, we didn't know where I was going to go.We just knew we were open enough to be organic about it and say, let's figurethis out.

We ended up giving the certifications of certified digitalasset advisor that designation over to the Dow. And that was kind of the firstthing that the dial had. Right. It was like 15 of us plus. We had the CDAA inthere and we said, we're going to manage the CDAA, the certified digital assetadvisor designation, much like the CFP board manages the CFP or, or one ofthose we're going to do that.

We're going to find other education partners, that kind ofthing. We said, okay, that has some value. We're going to figure out how to usethat, to get money into the Dow. And the way we do that is people have to takethe exam from the S from the planner Dow to be a certified digital assetadvisor. They have to pay to take the exam.

And by the way, they pay in cryptocurrency, they pay in USB-Cor die to take that. So it goes directly in our wallet. Well, what we havefound one, we have a, we just hit over 700 members in the Dow that we startedin may. It's a Dow of essentially financial advisors. So the tough part is it'sa bunch of people who are not crypto.

So when you jump into any discord of any other doubt out there,it's a whole bunch of crypto native people that totally understand getting paidin tokens and stuff. These are people who in ours that are not necessarilycrypto native that we're gonna, that we're having to build this. But I thinkit's better for us because this is what more dowels are going to be.

More dowels are going to be people that are not crypto native.Right. If that's a structure that continues forward, if it's a governance orit's a corporate structure that continues forward more than likely than not thepeople that come in there are not going to be very native in crypto, in defyfor the time being.

So we're, we're kind of blazing that trail, I guess. And it'sreally not very easy, but it's also nice because we don't have anyone sittingthere in the, in the Dow, in the chat we have going, you know, when token orwhen moon or it, like, they don't care about that. They just go, okay, let'sjust go build some cool stuff.

What are we going to build? Well, we have the education piece.What else can we do with all these people? All these financial advisors joinedtogether in a room around, you know centered around a, a treasury and a token,right? Aligning incentives. What can we do? Well now there are so many othertools.

There are so many other services products that we can thinkabout offering because we, as a Dao, don't have to worry about. Revenue minusexpenses equals profit, right? We're a nonprofit, all we're worried. The mainworry is, can we, can we create something that's going to add value to ourtreasury, right?

It's going to add crypto wealth, whatever it is to ourtreasury. And then can we grow it? Can we develop some sort of insuranceprogram, defy insurance program for the people, for the advisors in our groupthat are offering crypto as part of their practice, we can probably figure outhow to do that and have the money go to our wallet.

Can we manage a capital pool in there? Yeah. We could probablymanage a capital pool to provide the, you know, to, to back the insurance. Canwe help create a tool that they can get their clients directly into defywallets? Yeah, we can probably do that. And by the way, we can probably earnmoney, you know, using para swap or Cal swap or something.

You know, there, there are ways that the treasury can beearning where it's. Hey you, the advisor, you have to pay us 50 bucks a monthto use our service pay. So that's some of the, the beauty of it is we can be alittle bit more creative. So, whereas in the financial services world, you gotfinancial planning association of the CFP board or NAPFA or NAIFA or any one ofthese other organizations, the members of those organizations don't get toparticipate in the growth and the value of the Oregon.

Right. Our members get to participate in, they, they joinworking groups. They help us grow. They help be creative. Of course, it's notlucrative for anyone right now. No one makes money at it. But we pay in, intoken and plan tokens that admittedly have no value right now, but maybe theywill eventually, you know, hopefully they will.

But the nice thing is we don't, we don't have to, we don't haveto answer to any investors we can do kind of what, whatever we want, obviously,within the realms of compliance and regulation and legalities, we're doingthings like we're going to have a conference in, in April. And the way what wesaid is, look, we don't want the typical conference.

We want it to be workshops. It's nothing but workshops. Youcome there. If you're an advisor, you come there and, but by the time youleave, you'll learn, you can basically set up your entire practice to advise oncrypto. By the time you leave, that's the goal. How do we do that? We getsponsors to buy our plan tokens.

And that gives them the ability to come talk to a bunch ofadvisors. Right? We can do stuff like that again, because we're centered arounda treasury and a token because the value of the treasury will maybe eventuallyget reflected in the value of the token. We don't have to worry about paying alot of costs and therefore distributing profits to any investors.

And that's tremendously powerful as opposed to either a fullon, you know organization like financial planning association or a for-profitentity, like a company that gets created to sell a product on a monthlysubscription service. Right. We, we see that we can be a lot more creative andhave a lot more value.

We just have to stick to the ethos of crypto and defy. Right.Which is things like we're not taking investors, we're not taking sponsors, youknow, we're, we don't want to be beholden to anyone. Except the dowel members.That's our that's who we are beholden to him because of that. We can beinternational.

We can include lawyers and accountants in addition to financialadvisors. So, man, it's just been a lot of fun and it's, it's been like eightor nine months. We've been doing it. And every day it seems like every week wethink of something cool and new, we launched an index token just cause wecould, right.

Because why not? Why not launch the P Dow index token? And wedidn't, we're not charging anything for it. It's free, but we wanted to see howto do it. And so now within our compliance working group, we have a frameworkand anybody can come in as a, as a member and start going, you know what? Idon't like that framework.

I'm going to make a proposal as to why we should change it.Okay. You can't do that in any other organizations, right. And no otherorganization. Do you, do you take a course, take an exam and then immediatelyget to participate in the governance of the designation you just got. And wegive that option.

[00:55:12] Ben: Wouldn't that be what? Some of theseprofessional designations, right. To have that, that ability that's

[00:55:18] Adam: for sure. You mentioned you're, you're aCFA. Imagine if like right after you got it, you got to go be a part ofdirecting the, the future of the CFA. Oh yeah. You know, you don't have thatopportunity.

[00:55:28] Ben: No, I just pay a little bit every year toput three letters after my name, but to in, in their defense, I certainly don'ttake advantage of all the things I should be doing. That's for sure. For thefinancial advisors out there, or like, what is the, what is your targetcustomer look like for plantar Dow?

What are they interested in? How can they find out more? Talk alittle bit

[00:55:50] Adam: about that. But so, so for plantar Dow,it's really any, you know, financial adviser, lawyer, what will we say isanyone who is a fiduciary? And we don't use a fiduciary in the legal sense ofthe word fiduciary. We'd use it as someone who is at some point, helpingsomeone else with their money, your job is to help someone else with theirmoney or their financial life.

And so that encompasses financial advisors, lawyers,accountants, bankers, anyone like that, you just, you just go to planner,dow.com and hit join in, and you can come hang out in the lobby. You get to bea full fledged member and be part of a working group by being a certifieddigital asset advisor, which means you take the course from an approvededucation partner.

And then once you take the course, you take the exam and youget to come in and help us work. And, you know, help us grow with the Dow isnow my company interacts. Is is one of the education partners. So we teach acourse. So we charge a to come take our course to be a financial advisor,banker CPA, whatever to learn about cryptocurrency and defy from the verybeginnings of Bitcoin all the way through defy, dowels, NFTs, wallets, all ofthat.

We teach that course. And when you're done, you get to go takethe exam if you want to NBA certified digital asset advisor. So those are thetwo hats that I wear, right. I have a company that teaches the exam thatteaches the course, which I still charge dollars for all those things about webtwo. And then I have the managing the education of Ron and I manage theeducation working group within the Dao where we try to, to push the directionof certified digital asset advisor.

Right? And we have other working groups. We have a complianceworking group. That's looking at SMA managers that manages the index token. Youknow, we have an operations working group that manages the inner workings ofthe, of the dowel. So we have groups in there to work on. And so if you want tobe a part of this organization and help it grow and possibly get some tokens aspart of your work, then you come and join in and see what it's like.

Just like we said, early on. If you want to see what'shappening in the, in the crypto industry, go join a group and start working andsee what's happening.

[00:58:03] Ben: Definitely. Well, Adam, I think this hasbeen very, very helpful. We've gone over a lot. One thing that we talked abouta lot is, you know, defy, there's so much happening.

Where do you point, like obviously with financial advisors goin through planner down, but for the average user, who's interested in learninga little bit more about defy. Doesn't know where to start. Where do you, wheredo you point them?

[00:58:27] Adam: I, well, one is I tell people are yourfriend in mind? is a really good one to go follow on Twitter and especiallyYouTube and go watch what he's doing, because I think he's, he's going througha lot of the the, the heavy lifting of here's, how I use a wallet, you know,here's how I, I actually get connected.

I think that's a really good resource. And then you know, otherthan that, I would tell people, just go try it out. Like learn a little bit andthen try a little bit and then learn a little bit and try a little bit and justkeep doing that and doing it with some, some money that you're okay. Losingbecause you very well, might your gas fees at the, at the beginning are gonnaeat you up.

Just if you really want to learn it, you gotta jump in and doit. You got to figure out what it looks like to move your money, to move your,your eith from Coinbase to a meta mask quality. And then what happens when youconnect amount of masks to, to some other some protocol and move your moneythere?

What does it look like when you have an LP token sitting inyour wallet? The, those are the things that you have to just try out tounderstand what it is you have to try, you know, you have to buy an NFT to getwhat it's like to connect a wallet to open, see and see your NFT. Right.Otherwise it doesn't make sense, but when you see it and you go, oh, I'm theonly one who owns that.

That's pretty cool. Like that, that, that starts down the roadof, okay. What, what else is there? What else could. And this is something thatto learn it, you really have to do it otherwise. It just doesn't make nearly asmuch sense. I could explain all my whiteboard all day long, but until youactually try to do it, then you're just not going to be able to, and you can golook at our YouTube channel to interact us on YouTube.

I should, I probably should have mentioned that

[01:00:09] Ben: I'll link that one as well in defy debt.Good, good beginner tutorials. Definitely, definitely highly recommend him aswell. I'd also be curious. So after, you know, spending so much time in defyand with people going along their learning process and obviously being aneducator yourself, what common narrative do you hear that it, you disagreewith?

[01:00:36] Adam: There's the common narrative of it's notbacked by anything and it could all go to zero. And I E we hear a lot of. Whyare there so many cryptocurrencies, you know, w which one is going to be thewinner as if there has to be the winner? There's a lot of the, you know, andI'm giving you a lot of most common things I hear because I, I obviously hear alot.

I talked to a lot of financial advisors and you know, a lot ofpeople in the traditional finance system and I've had, I've, I've really mademyself a rule where I'm not arguing anymore. I'm not, you know, people are justvehemently against it. I just say, okay, that's, that's okay. I don't need toconvince everybody.

It's not my job. It's incredibly exhausting. And it, it's notworth my time. So some of the , there's a lot of it's, it doesn't have anyintrinsic value. And they say they, a lot of people say that about everythingoverall. And what they really mean is Bitcoin, but they don't understand thatall these other cryptocurrencies do have different value.

They're representing. A protocol that earns money that makesmoney, right. Or a protocol that people are using as billions of dollars lockedin. It that's really important if you own stock in a bank that was worth thathad billions of dollars locked to note, that's worth something to you. Theother, the other thing that, that kind of frustrates me is this idea that it's,you know, it's all based on code or it's a fad.

You know, we hear that. It's a fact it's going to go away. Itdoesn't make sense. And my frustration there is look the irony of usingsomething like Twitter or LinkedIn, which is on the internet to complain thatthe next evolution of the internet is not going to make it is not law shouldnot be lost on anybody.

That there was a point where we, you know, there were, therewere plenty of people that said the internet wasn't going to make it doesn'tmake sense. Why do we need this? I can call people on the phone. I don't needto, I don't need to send them a chat or an email all the time. You know, likethere, there was plenty of that going on in the late nineties.

I remember I was just getting out of college and that was thebeginning of Amazon. And, you know, anyone watching this has probably heard mesay this a thousand times, but it was like 1996 when some dude in Seattledecided he wanted to sell books. And it was absolutely crazy to think that Iwas going to put in my credit card, my credit card number to this thing.

And I was going to get a book and like a week and a half andpretty much any book I wanted, you know, week and a half, that was crazy talk.And, and obviously it was going to get hacked. Obviously someone was going togo use my credit card to do something else. And this wasn't at a time when youhad a cell phone that someone could text you and say, someone's using yourcredit card illegally.

It just got used, you know, and all of a sudden it was like$5,000 was spent for somebody to, to buy a plane ticket. So that it'sfrustrating that we've come to this point in the internet and people seem toforget. There's some, there's some natural evolution that potentially goes onhere and we need to, we need to think about that and realize that technology,the economy, everything evolves naturally.

And, and you know, this is just happening. It's just part ofevolution and the, the internet happened like that. And if you don't rememberthen, you know, go back and, and really think about where you were. If you'reold enough in like 99 and 2000 and 2001. And, and remember what happened whenthe.com crash it, the Amazon went from like a hundred dollars to a dollarAmazon stock, and we thought it was dead.

This is crazy. This Amazon thing, by the way, it makes noprofit. And all they're judging people is based on eyeballs. How many eyeballsview, the website or new web visitors and the same stock market people weresaying, it's all crap. And it's all gonna crash and it's not worth anything.And we need to actually sell products for a profit all the time.

And low and behold, Amazon has done pretty well. Right. AndGoogle's done pretty well doing nothing but attracting eyeballs. That's theironly job is get more eyeballs. Right. They've done. Okay. You know, it gavelike apple gave us a smartphone after a while and iTunes and all that was crazyat the time.

And it seems to have, have made it, and we can't live withoutour smartphones and we can't live without buying. We can live without streamingmusic anymore, you know, which was crazy at one point. So just the, the, forsome people, the lack of open-mindedness to say, we don't need that. We'vethings work just fine.

It doesn't, it doesn't make sense because we're naturally goingto evolve this, something that is a more open and better system, which is ourcause we're people. And that's what we do. That's what we do. And I know it'sgoing to happen because that's what we've always done. We've never stoppedevolving.

And I know that because I'm here talking to you on a videophone, right. Which again, in 99 was crazy. Crazy talk in 1999, but here weare, we've been doing it for two years straight, nothing but this right? Exceptfor when you're sitting three seats down from me. Yeah,

[01:05:33] Ben: it's true. I mean, I think of the Crick,Chris Dixon quote that like the, the next big thing probably starts off lookingsilly or like a toy.

And the iPhone was pretty silly when it first came down to itdidn't work the app, like it was very disconnected and now it's it's very muchnot

[01:05:50] Adam: silly. And, and really smart people aregonna figure out how to make it work. Right. They're going to figure out how tobuild cool stuff and the rest of us are going to start using it.

And then it's going to be the point where we can't imagine thatwe ever didn't use that. I can't imagine now calling and waiting for a cab,right. Having someone call me a cab. Now I just use Uber. I go to wherever I'mgoing. And I hit Uber in a car, picks me up in like three seconds. And I payfor the Uber without taking money out of my wallet.

Right with the tip. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And I, and I get ratedfor whether or not I did that and that the driver's going to rate me that'snuts, but it's so obvious and ubiquitous, now that defy is going to be the sameway. And if you don't think it's going to be the same way, then, you know,enjoy it. Just enjoy getting run over by it because you don't have, you don'treally have a choice anymore.

It's just natural evolution. And I like, I have no other way tosay it other than we naturally evolve this way. And I know it's going to gothat way because it always has. It literally always has. We have never stopped.We've never hit the pinnacle of technological and financial evolution becausewe haven't ever done it yet.

So why would we stop now?

[01:07:02] Ben: Yep. Completely agree. Completely agree.Well, Adam, this thing has been packed full of goodies. I'll be sure and loadup the the show notes with a lot of the links we talked about, but where can mylisteners find out about you or planner down? Where, where would you like tosee them send them?

[01:07:21] Adam: Okay. So planner now is planner dow.com.So if you're a financial advisor, lawyer, accountant, banker, whatever, comejoin us there. My company interacts us. We teach the course, the certifieddigital asset advisor course. So if you want to learn more about thedesignation, it's at certified digital.org. My website is interacts us.io.

I'm on Twitter at interacts is eight, which is where I do mostof my chatting around for whatever random thoughts pop in my head. Andsometimes some interesting things about defy. Cool. And I'll

[01:07:54] Ben: wake those

[01:07:55] Adam: great to see you, Adam. Thanks forcoming on today. You've been, thanks so much hope to see you in real life verysoon.

And of course congrats with everything on charged particles.Love that, and we're hopefully a planter Dow is going to build some stuff ontop of that as well. Looking forward to it. Thanks brother. Thanks man.

[01:08:13] Ben: There you have it. Thank you forlistening. Really appreciate your support show notes, transcript links, andmore can be found on our [email protected].

If you'd be so kind, please share this with anyone you thinkmight be interested or get some value from this conversation. If you have anyquestions or comments, please reach out. I'm always happy to hear them. Lastly,if you're on YouTube, please like the video or subscribe to the channel. Ifyou're listening to the audio version of this, please subscribe to the podcastand or leave a review.

This really helps more people find the podcast. And I really.Thanks again and hope you have a fantastic day. Happy investing.