#59 Alex Mashinsky - DeFi and Decentralized Buddhism

0 (0s): No matter what you should never hold all your assets in one place. It doesn't matter if it's your own keys or a company like Celsius or somebody else you trust. Right. So I would definitely break it up between two or three providers. 2 (17s): Hello, everybody. You're listening to Chatting with Candice, I'm your host, Candice Horbacz. Before we jump into this week's episode, we're gonna do our traditional shout outs to everybody. So I wanted to say a big thank you to chase to Paul Fisher and to Ken M thank you so much for those cups of coffee. Seriously. I cannot appreciate all of your support. More. All of it goes right back into the podcast. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This week is another episode that's going into what I'm kind of calling our crypto series. So we have Alex, Mashinsky joining the podcast. If you don't know who he is, he's an entrepreneur. 2 (58s): He's founded eight companies, four were unicorns, which is insane. His newest project is Celsius and he's taking on the big banks. So that takes a very special and very brave type of person to try to turn the banking industry upside down. I really hope that you learn a lot from this conversation that you find the entertaining and that it makes you and start getting involved. So without further ado, please help me welcome Alex. Mashinsky Alex Mashinsky. Thank you so much for joining the podcast today. I've been really fascinated just with like your story. My husband met you at an event in Vegas and had nothing but wonderful things to say. 2 (1m 43s): And then I started doing my own little dive on you and you have this really cool, like kind of fighter go-getter personality, which I just really resonate with. One of the quotes I heard you talk about in a somewhat recent podcast was that you were like ready to get in the ring with these big banks and that you have this punching power. And I'm like, man, I really liked this guy because someone who's going toe to toe with such a big beast must have a lot of confidence and really have a serious mission. 0 (2m 11s): Yeah, no, thanks for the intro. Very few people in the world that willing to pick up the fights with the largest banks in the world. So definitely that's like the Pearl ring. If you compare it to like AMA or whatever, this is you going for the belt. When you try to, when you pick a fight with JP Morgan or with bank of America or any of those big guys, and most of us kind of accept the fact that these people don't act in our best interests, that they are basically stealing from us every day. And we do nothing about it, right? So I keep reminding people, banks are not your friends and you better, you work so hard for your money. You work day and night, right? And then you just let these people steal it from you. 0 (2m 53s): So you're already paying 50% in taxes, make sure that the other 50% works for you instead of you working for it. 2 (2m 59s): So how do you walk someone through that waking up process? Because so much of the information that we've been fed around, what is money? What are finances and how to kind of like level up your position in this world are either dated or, or blatantly false. 0 (3m 15s): So let's go through it. Right? Most people think that the government prints all the money, right? They've seen the printers and the, they see this thing. That's prince dollars and they're like, that's the government, but actually the government doesn't print any money. Right? All the money in the world comes from either central banks like institutions like the federal reserve, which is neither federal, nor has any reserves or banks, right? Banks actually mint money or create money out of thin air. And people will be like, what are you talking about? Banks can't make money. Of course they do. So when a bank gives you a mortgage, they created that money out of thin air, right? You give them 20% deposit and they give you whatever, a million dollars to buy the home. 0 (4m 1s): They just created $800,000. It doesn't exist. It only exists on their, a spreadsheet in their computer. That's the only place that money exists. Just like when a company goes public, let's say Uber goes public. And it's suddenly worth a hundred billion dollars just few minutes ago before it was worth 10 billion as a private company. So where is the 90 billion is created from poof? It just creates other thin air, right? So people have to really, unfortunately they don't teach us any of that stuff in high school or college, you can graduate with PhD in economics and not understand how money works, because it's almost like a w very well kept secret. So most of us, just, again, we go, we have a job, we get a paycheck. 0 (4m 43s): And we think, okay, the company that paid us made this money, but not, that's not true. Either. Those companies just take loans from banks and other places. At the end of the half of the money, it's all borrowed money or it's money. The VCs gave them to somebody else. So it is a little complicated. And because of that, I think all of us have to really spend more time understanding that, or we have to find someone we trust and institution that we trust, who is acting in our best interest. And those are very hard to find because most of these institutions, their entire job, like JP Morgan, their entire job, is to charge you fees and deliver that as profit to their shareholders. 0 (5m 25s): They care about their shareholders. They don't care about their customers. 2 (5m 29s): No 100%. And then that's one of, I think the biggest things about the conversation with the movement movement for like crypto or defy is, is supporting the community and supporting and supporting like the patrons versus the shareholders and the execs, and then these kinds of legacy businesses. So I wanted, before we get into like, what is defy? What is the future of finance? I kind of wanted to dig into your story a little bit, because one of the things I've also heard you say is that entrepreneurs are driven by something other than money. A lot of the times, usually it's something from their past and there's something that kind of sparks this, this purpose for them. So I wanted to know, what was your story? 2 (6m 9s): Like? What drives you to take on this fight? 0 (6m 12s): Oh yeah. Thanks for asking. And, and so I was born in the Ukraine. It's obviously in the news these days, I was born there in 1965 and, and my parents were refuseniks Refusenik were people who were refused to exit that were not allowed to leave the Ukraine back then Ukraine was part of the USSR, the evil empire. And my parents were like, well, now we don't want to live here. We want to go live somewhere else. And the communist party, right, basically took away their job, took away their rights. And basically my, my father was unemployed and, and, you know, we lived in the shack and I have an outhouse. 0 (6m 53s): Anytime I needed to go to the bathroom, remember it was like freezing cold. And I would have to climb up a hill to an outhouse. And it was just miserable. Right. Then it's all because we did not agree. We meaning my family did not agree with the regime. Did not agree with this idea that everybody, you know, with communism. Right? So, so we were very lucky because 1972, the Russia had a very severe famine and Armand hammer and hammer and Nixon. Our president decided that they're going to give Russia wheat 300,000 metric, tons of weeds in exchange for 300,000 Jews who were allowed to leave Russia and Ukraine. 0 (7m 37s): So I was me and my family, you know, we were basically responsible for four metric, tons of wheat. And when people ask me, why did you come to the United States? I'm like, Hey, I owe the America four metric, tons of wheat. They paid for me back in 1972, you know, how much more expensive wheat is now? You know? So people laugh at that, but, but freedom, right. America did this without asking for anything back. They didn't, they didn't sell the wheat. They didn't, whatever. They just saw the suffering of these people. And they said, you know what, okay, we're going to help the Russian people by giving them food. But in exchange, we want all of these, refuseniks all these people who refused the exits to get some freedom. 0 (8m 17s): Right. And, and it's not just me, like, there's a lot of famous people like Sergei, Brin and others, or part of all of that exit from the Eastern block. Right. So, so when I see tyranny, when I see oppression, when I see little guys being squashed by big guys, that's what I'm fighting for, because that's my background. That's why I come from. And, and obviously anytime I see that, I feel it viscerally in my bones. You know, it's not a, it's not like a little thing that, oh, you know, I read in the news that, you know, Russia is doing this or, or somebody is doing that. I lived through that. I lived through that suffering. 0 (8m 58s): So I came to the states, I did eight startups or the founder and four unicorns. So I'm probably one of the very few people in the world that can say that for unicorns, you know? And I just have this unlimited passion and stamina to fight. So my first one, my first company was fighting for voice over IP, what we're using right now, right. Basically taking the power from the phone companies, giving it to all of us so we can talk to each other, no matter where we are in the world. Instead of only allowing the people who can afford to pay $3 a minute to talk to each other, right. And then the transit wireless, which is the company that brought the wifi and 4g and 5g to the New York subways, right. 0 (9m 41s): Last big city with no connectivity on the ground. So if you don't have enough money for an Uber, guess what? You're not going to have any bars on your phone. Let's solve that problem. You know, say 8 million people use that every day. Again, Celsius network is now helping almost 2 million people with financial freedom, with enabling us to save and earn yield, have again, how have our money work for us, right. As hard as we work for it. And it's all taking away from the banks and giving to the people that we Celsius paid that's community over $1 billion in yield. Right. Which is unheard of. And so these all it's, if you look at it, it's all the same path. 0 (10m 24s): It's the same journey, same story. And, and I couldn't be happier to do that because every day people telling me all over the world, you really helped me. You know, you really show me the light at the end of the tunnel. You know, I thought that's it. I'm never going to be able to pay off my dad's or find, find the path to financial freedom or whatever. And here again, they don't educate us about that because they don't want us to know. It's like, imagine if everybody had enough money to live comfortably, right. Who would be working. Right. That's what they're thinking. But here I am, I have several unicorns and I'm working seven days a week. So that motivation doesn't come from, I just need enough money to buy my taco. 0 (11m 5s): The motivation comes, we all have aspirations. We all have passion for something like what you're doing. Right. I mean, you know, and, and you're not doing it because of what they pay. You're doing it because you love what you're doing. 2 (11m 18s): Oh, 100%. I couldn't agree more. It's like if people actually had less stressors in their life, they would probably be putting in more hours for their passions and actually working, like not everyone wants to go to a soul-sucking job just to like maybe pay their bills. So, I mean, of course there's going to be some lazy people. There's no way around that, but I don't think that that's the majority by any stretch. 0 (11m 39s): Right. Just most of us don't get the opportunity to discover what we're good at. And so we're stuck in doing something we don't really like versus doing something we really passionate about where we could be the best we could be. Right. And, and, and having that a little bit of financial freedom allows you to search for the thing you really good at. If you don't have that money, then you miserable and you're like always upset. Then you're frustrated and you take it out on other people. Why? Because you don't have that little bit of cushion that would allow you to search for what you're really good at. So what we tried to do at Celsius is really give you that opportunity to give you a little bit of earnings. 0 (12m 19s): Every Monday, we give you a little bit of money based on how much you have, right. You're earning some yield and you can basically, you get hope every Monday deposited into your wallet. And that's what people need most these days is just getting some optimism, right? Just like, again, the Americans deposited the metric ton of wheat to let, give me hope to escape the tyranny in the USSR. 2 (12m 45s): No, that's so beautiful. And I mean, I couldn't agree more, I think over the last couple of years, and especially with everything that's happening in the news right now, it's like, we definitely need some kind of optimism. And if anything, it's kind of shown us the instability of these centralized systems. So, I mean, if you take the crisis that's happening over in Ukraine and, and Russia right now, it's like in like overnight, there are a lot of Russian citizens that couldn't bank anymore couldn't operate their businesses anymore. And this is because a leader that they may or may not support is committing atrocities. So what does that mean for, you know, like the single mom over there that now can't, can't have a bank account. 2 (13m 26s): So it's like you have these people that have a lot more control over your daily life that you maybe didn't realize was there initially. And we witnessed that in the states with COVID too. It was like, well, you can't do this. Or you can't do that without certain parameters being met. And we see it when it comes to marijuana, like you have this business that is legal in plenty of states, but bang say, Nope, we can't take that money. And actually we might not let you bank at all. And now it's getting to the point where if you've voiced certain opinions, certain political talking heads can't bank anymore. So you're like, well, now my voice can come get me banned from banking. Like who would have thought in America, that could even be a thing. So you start exploring these ideas of decentralized finance. 2 (14m 9s): So for people that don't know, I guess, first let's tackle, what is that? And then how do you know who to trust within that system? Because you seem to see some other hindrances there and we can get into like Coinbase and what happened with Canada, because it seems like, well, is it really decentralized? How do I know? 0 (14m 28s): All right. So it is a complicated topic. So I'll try to simplify it and kind of break it into a very simple things, but really what's happening right now is kind of very similar to the gold rush with it. We had, you know, whatever, 200 years ago, whatever it was, and everybody knows that there was something happening, right. Everybody heard about or Ethereum or defy. And they have no clue what that is. They just know that there is like easy money there or free money there. And why am I working so hard at Starbucks? So why am I working so hard in my job, if there's all this easy money over there, right? But that's not really what's happening. 0 (15m 9s): So let's kind of dig into what what's going on. So first the blockchain, which is the technology underlying, everything we're talking about has been around for 30 years, over 30 years. So back in the days, w w in the early nineties, when I was working on voiceover IP, Scott Stornetta and other people, seven miles from where I was, were in, Belcore working on the blockchain. So very little has happened with the blockchain until 2008. What happened in 2008 and mysterious person, Satoshi Nakamoto, we still don't know if it's a he or she, or they came up with this amazing idea. 0 (15m 50s): They all refer to her as she, how about that? She it's like mother nature. You know, it has to be a female, you know, so creating something beautiful. So she put together all the things that we, we in computer science invented in 70 years, and then added one more ingredient that suddenly completed the magic, completed the recipe, right. And created digital money. Like I was working on digital money back in 2004, 2005. And, and I couldn't solve the puzzle. Right? So for 70 years of computer science, no one has solved the puzzle. We had the blockchain, we had all kinds of other things, but we did not have all the right incentives to create this distributed ledger, this ability to really replace what we have today, the finance system that we have today with something new. 0 (16m 40s): So ledgers come in different forms. So obviously you can have a ledger by just opening an Excel spreadsheet. You, you can have a two-way ledger or double entry ledger, which is what you have in the company or in your bank. Like the entries you have, you and your bank have, are considered double entry ledgers, right? So each one is a deposit and the withdrawal and a credit and a debit and so on. So on here was a triple entry accounting, what is triple entry? And that's the invention of Bitcoin, the foundation of everything we're talking about, and triple entry, accounting saying, you don't need an intermediate. You don't need a bank. You don't need a financial institution to keep your money or do things for you. You can transact with anyone on the planet and people go like, I can do that today. 0 (17m 24s): No, you can. Today. If you want to send money to somebody in Ukraine, for example, you go to your bank, your bank sends it to an intermediary bank. That bank goes to the Ukrainian bank. And the person on the other side has to withdraw it from their bank. Right. And in the meantime, in between, they have to change currency and they have to do this and have to do that. And you pay like 10% in fees, right? What if you could take $10 and send it directly to the person who you want to send money to, right? Just like when you call somebody on the phone, you call their number directly, right? So, or voice use voice over IP use you go directly to their IP address. So that never existed with money, right? 0 (18m 5s): With money. We always needed intermediaries. So triple entry accounting comes in with Bitcoin and says, okay, now everybody has an address on this network, new set of rails, right? Just like the internet was a new invention. Bitcoin is a new invention. It's Bitcoin slash blockchain allow you suddenly to do things you've never been able to do before. Right. And anyone on the planet can participate. No one can be blocked. It doesn't matter what a person or country, or it doesn't matter what your sex or what your beliefs are or whatever. No one can block you from accessing this network, which is amazing. Right? And now it's all about trust. Can we all pile on, on this network and trust it instead of trusting our banks and our financial institutions, or are we going to a, or it's going to be too messy, it's going to be risky. 0 (18m 55s): People are going to lose their money and so on. So on. So what we've seen over the last 13 years, Bitcoin is 13 years old is that some people are very good at it. Keeping keys, knowing how to transact in the blockchain. Some people are horrible at it. They do silly things like trust strangers to help them with transaction. And they steal all their money, or they're sending stuff to addresses that they didn't verify, or they put the password in some place that's not safe. And somebody takes it away from them and just painful to see how much money people lost on the blockchain. Right. But if we can solve that, then we can replace the existing financial system with this new system. So defy or decentralized finance is another evolution. 0 (19m 39s): Another step on top of Bitcoin and Ethereum, these are kind of like the main two main chains, blockchains that are running today. And it allows anyone not just to basically buy a certain asset and move it, but also earn he'll take clones and do more advanced things that normally again, you will only do with your bank or with your financial institution. So, and suddenly that is opening us to do innovation. We can create things just like on the internet. We created tens of thousands of crazy companies, and we got Netflix and we got Amazon. We got all kinds of crazy things that never existed before. Now you can do all that stuff with money. 0 (20m 19s): So if you heard about the Cambridge and explosion, boom, there was like a nature just went crazy and started creating many, many different creatures because nature figured out how to create multi-cell living things. The same thing is happening now with money, money itself, value is not all going to trapped between banks that work with each other, but anyone you can write code, you can write an algorithm or protocol and innovate, create something that never existed before. And many, many people are going to join you because you solve the problem that the banks couldn't solve for you. So that's really what's happening. And a lot of people are rushing in and say, okay, this is the golden rush. 0 (20m 59s): So I'm going to create a protocol or I'm going to provide the pigs and shovels for everybody else to, to build on, on this and so on and so on. And trillions of dollars, not billions, trillions of dollars are flowing in from trad file, traditional finance, into defined C5. Right. And that's really what is so amazing. And we're just in the beginning, like if you think, okay, I'm at the end of the game, this thing has been running for awhile. Banking existed for 700 years. Hasn't changed much. This is the first big change. The first time we went from a double entry accounting system to a triple entry accounting system. So even if it's 13 years old, that's nothing, it's still a baby. It's still a teenager. 0 (21m 39s): Right. So you have to think about it in those terms. So if you don't know anything about crypto in six months, you can become the world's expert in something. If you just put your mind into it and drive your skillset, right. What are you best at and create that version of that specific thing in this new world of finance. 2 (22m 2s): Yeah. And I think there's a lot of advantages to it being in its infancy, but then there's also like that uncertainty that comes with that as well. So it's like a double look like there's like two sides to that coin. So when it comes to what my understanding of like crypto and defy, like a lot of that is to kind of resist censorship and to have sovereignty and like this really big idea of freedom. Like those, that's what I think about. And that's kind of like what got me in the conversation and got me really interested in this space is because I don't think anyone should be able to tell you how to handle your money or where to spend it and kind of like place this morality on your finances. Like, no, you, we, we don't support this idea. 2 (22m 44s): We don't support this plant, whatever it is. So that being said, how do you know that? Where you're putting your money is aligned with your principles in that way? Because what we saw in Canada was people getting arrested for selling a cup of coffee, to someone who then later went to a protest against, you know, the regime over there. So how do I know that like, cause it co Coinbase now it's like anything over a thousand dollars in Canada, you have to disclose. And both people, then they have to approve it. And a thousand dollars is not a lot, a lot of money to have to like go through this process. So I guess part of that is because they went public or maybe all of that's because they went public. 2 (23m 25s): But how do you know that? Like, if you're doing that on another platform, that that platform doesn't fall subject to that as well. 0 (23m 30s): That's a great question. And, and, and it's really getting harder and harder. I think the, the banks, like, like a bear, they're just trying to give us a bear hug and tightened and titled bear hug, hoping that we won't be able to escape. And we won't be able to thrive because banks, banks don't want any changes. They love it the way it is. Right. They make all the money, we take all the risks. It's, it's our dollars. They get to make money on our money and they give it to themselves as bonuses and so on. So, so the there's definitely both the risks that you mentioned that <inaudible> is the wild west and you can lose all your money very, very quickly. We had a week ago, we had a $600 million hack, few weeks ago, we had another $300 million hack, right. 0 (24m 16s): We're we're in, in a second, all the people that were in that pool, in that bridge lost their money. So it's very important that you don't just say, oh, you know, this is easy. I'm just jumping into, straight into defined. I'm putting all my money on this one project that I don't know anything about, but I'm sure it's going to be just fine. Right. So definitely don't do that. Right? So most people have to land on Bitcoin. First, you have to understand Bitcoin. Then you have to understand the theory they have to. Then you have to understand, define again, you can test, for example, defiled, polygon, and network old polygon. With $10, you can put $10 and start playing, right. Start Pope, you know, staking it on the protocol, earning some yield, or obviously you're not going to make a lot of money, but the point is just, you have to really make sure that the machine is well-oiled and that you do the homework and you know how to manage keys and go cross chain and everything else. 0 (25m 11s): But now that you have that experience and that might take you six months, right? It's not like a few hours worth of work. It's a completely different system that has nothing to do with what, the way we manage money today. There's no ATM machines. There's no direct deposits is no checks or online payments. None of that exists, right? It's a completely different system. So you have to learn the new stuff, right? Do you have to become comfortable? And, and at the same time, you have to also follow all the rules. If the government in your country saying KYC, AML, and you're going to a platform that doesn't do that, there is a chance that they will confiscate your assets or that you, that that company will disappear or that they will steal your money. 0 (25m 54s): And so on. So working with the regulated entities or entities that you can trust is a very important piece of it, right? It doesn't mean just because it's regulated. It doesn't mean that it's a bank. It doesn't mean that it's against you. So you really need to do homework like on our company, like Celsius network. Okay. Where are the domicile? I see they have offices in the United States. I see they're filed with fin San and they filed with other agencies. So obviously they're not offshore hiding under some rock or whatever. So all those things are very important in your process of educating yourself and choosing people that you trust. Also, you have to look at fees, right? Sometimes like you mentioned, Coinbase, Coinbase charges, I think 7% to buy coins on your credit card. 0 (26m 37s): That's a lot of money. You will not make 7% waiting a whole year in your bank pay you less than 1%. If you put that money in the bank for a whole year, right? So paying 7% to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum is, is, is not acceptable. Right? So you have to understand that as well. That's why it's important to do small transaction verify. See, okay, what are they charging me? I bought, I bought $50 worth of Bitcoin. What are the fees? Okay. Now I learned who's, who's acting in my best interest and who's not acting in my best because a lot of platforms that don't charge any fees. Right. So, so you really, like you said before, it's two sides of the same coin. You have to understand the fee outside. You have to understand the crypto side and it takes some time to go back and forth a few times. 0 (27m 21s): Right. And then you have to learn about keys. Right? Okay. So, so who has it, do I have, do I hold my own keys or do I trust somebody like Celsius to hold my keys on my behalf? So I don't have to manage keys and so on. So there's a lot is involved. Each country has its own set of rules, right? So I'm sure you have viewers from all over the world. And, and, you know, again, we support, we provide services in 170 countries. So we try to make it as universal as possible. Eh, but there are unique things for each country and some of our services, for example, and not available in some of the countries around the world. 2 (27m 56s): Okay. So when it comes to holding keys, because that's obviously a huge topic for a lot of people, it's like this really great debate. Some people say, if you have a lot of your resources that are locked up in, in any kind of crypto, you should absolutely hold your keys. So like not your keys, not your, not your coins. And then other people are like, no, that's way too much for, to be responsible for as one person, because there's just so many ways to, to lose it or for it to get stolen. And you want to look at a, like a credible company like yourself to hold the keys. So what is that process like? How do you make that decision as, as a holder? Like, how do you say, like, should I hold my keys or how do I know that I can trust this other person with my keys? 0 (28m 38s): Yeah. So it's a great question. And really there's three, basically three chapter first, no matter what, you should never hold all your assets in one place. It doesn't matter if it's your own keys or a company like Celsius or somebody else you trust. Right. So I would definitely break it up between two or three providers. And again, if you want to know how much to put in each bucket, it's very simple. If you're not sleeping at night, that means you have too much in one of those buckets. Right? So that's, that's the measurement, right. But really you, if you're comfortable, if you know how to handle hardware, keys, like, you know, there are many different companies that do that, right? 0 (29m 18s): You can basically put your Bitcoin or Ethereum on the hardware key, put that in your safe. For example, we'll keep it in a bank safe. And hopefully you don't have to touch it. Right? You want that Bitcoin to sit there for a very long time. You don't, if you need to trade it every day or every other day, that's not a good place to put it. All right. So the second option is to put it with a company like Celsius pays you yield. So you give us Bitcoin, we store it, keep it safe. And then because we create the yield on that Bitcoin, we give you most of that yield back, right? So that's the second option. A third option. You go to an institution that is a trust company, for example. And you say, look, I can't trust myself, giving it to Celsius. 0 (30m 2s): Might be a little risky because they're doing all kinds of stuff with my Bitcoin. I just want to keep it with a trust. So yeah, so you have three options and you can just, for each person, it's a different decision. Meaning I would say 99% of the population is not going to be able to manage their own keys. Right. And we've seen that again. And again, and again, just as an example, one of the top 10 chains, right? One of the largest chains, their CTO, chief technology officers has a hardware key and he has like 300 million there and he doesn't remember the password. So if the CTO of one of the blockchains doesn't remember the password, how are you going to remember the problem? 0 (30m 42s): Right. So, so, and you see, you see videos or, or well, on YouTube, you see people like, I know this guy in Ireland who hired like a hundred people to go through a dumpster because right. And he knows he has like $400 million on that computer. And they're digging to find that he's computer from few years ago that he forgot to take the hard drive off and so on. So, so these are the, you don't want to be one of those people, right? So, so you, so therefore you, for 99% of the population, it's either you pay somebody to hold it for you, or you give it to somebody you trust, like Celsius who holds it and earns yield for you, which is, we think is a better option. 2 (31m 28s): Absolutely. I mean, I, I wouldn't trust myself to have all of it on cold storage at all. Like again, I, I saw that video of that poor man, having all these people in this dumpster, like giant, what do you call it? Dumpsite searching for this computer. And I'm like, that would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to all of that. Yeah. So definitely diversify. And I love your calculator that you have on your website. I was playing around with that earlier today. So you can actually see if you put, you know, X amount of Ethereum or Bitcoin into Celsius, what you're going to be making off of that. And I was like, this is really fun. And why wouldn't you keep it here? Because it just makes more sense. 0 (32m 6s): Yeah. And these assets, Bitcoin, Ethereum are the best performing assets over the last decade. Right. So if you thought you were a genius investing in Tesla, investing in, you know, whatever apple Bitcoin did, like a, a thousand times better, right? So it's not like a little bit better. It's not twice as good or three times as good. Right. It did tremendous, you know, a thousand times better than any stock in the stock market. So, and again, it doesn't mean you have to put a hundred percent of your money there just for each person. Again, you have to decide how much do I have in bonds? How much should I have in stocks in real estate, my income, maybe insurance policy and so on. 0 (32m 51s): And then how much am I putting in Bitcoin or Ethereum, right then since all the other stuff is dollar denominated, all of that is tied to your Fiat currency that you live in. If you live overseas, it's maybe tied to your Turkish. Lira would start to your Venezuelan, whatever Boulevard or whatever it's called. And you can wake up in the morning, like in Turkey, people walk up and their currency dropped by 50%, right. Overnight like this in one day. So you don't want that to happen to you. So you want something that is not attached to your currency, not attached. And people tell me, but the U S dollar is so stable. 0 (33m 32s): I'm like stable. Since 1971, we were on the a would that's when we went off the gold standard, the dollar lost 95% of its value. 95%. In the last two years, we printed the, the banks and the federal reserve printed 40% of all the dollars that ever existed that's means inflation of dollars, not the CPI with inflation of dollars 20% a year. Right. Are you, is your salary going up 20% a year? Right? So, so that's what you have to protect yourself against. Again, you're working so hard for this money, right? You exchanging eight hours of your life every day for a paycheck. And then that paycheck, half of it goes to the government and the other half shrinks every day because of inflation. 0 (34m 16s): Do you want to put it in something that runs faster than inflation? Or do you want to keep it in, let it shrink? Right. And people say, oh, I invested in real estate. Real estate is barely keeping up with inflation, you know? And it just, because it barely kept up until now. It doesn't mean it may, we may have a housing crisis again, and, and, and your house may be worth less than what you bought it for. So, so you just need another asset class, you need something else that is not attached to any of these things that you own. And, and if you want to know how much to put in there again, if you bought some Bitcoin and you're not sleeping at night, that means you have too much Bitcoin. And if you bought Bitcoin and you're sleeping like a baby, like your baby, right. 0 (34m 58s): Then you don't have enough. If you're sleeping like a baby, that means you don't have enough. You've got to go and buy some more. 2 (35m 4s): Yeah. It's interesting because when you do compare it to other stocks, it's significantly outperforming, but then you have these like really vocal critics of it. One of my favorites, and I've mentioned him on a couple other people. And like the series I'm doing is Peter Schiff. And his comment section is just amazing because it's like, no matter how well that the coins are doing, he's like, this is all a scam and it's going to go to zero tomorrow. You just wait, I'm going to be right. 0 (35m 29s): Well, he's first his son, his son is a huge Bitcoin and Ethereum supporter. Yes. Yes. And I had a debate with Peter Schiff on, on one of the TV shows on and I called him golden Saurus because he's only love, only loves so anything. It doesn't matter what it is. If it's not gold, he doesn't like it. Right. And, and you can't golden do anything. Gold is out, I think 4% over 10 years, Bitcoin is 10000000%. That's not really a comparison. It's like, what are you talking about? 0 (36m 9s): So it's time for a shift. You know, that's why I told him, come on, Peter, it's time for a shift. 2 (36m 15s): Now I 0 (36m 17s): Want a gold Jones. If you want. We have plenty of gold jokes too, to make Peter Schiff angry. But 2 (36m 24s): Give me a couple. 0 (36m 27s): So I tell him it's, by the way, it's called Kitco news, the name of the TV. So if you just do a search for Kitco news, Mushynski, that's my last name. And Peter Schiff you'll see the, the debate. It was an hour long debate. And so I told him, Peter, you know, the golden rule, buy some Bitcoin Or, you know, it's a golden opportunity. I, I just, I, you know, I went for an hour with every pun possible related to gold, you know? And so, so if you want to watch it, it's, you know, it's right there on the, on YouTube. 2 (37m 7s): I definitely do. And I don't know why, but I just find it so amazing that his son is such an enthusiast. Cause it's like, of course he is like, it's the typical, like rebellious dynamic that you would expect between like a prominent figure father and, and his sons. That's great. 0 (37m 22s): And the same thing with Jamie diamond, his daughter, it talks about Bitcoin all the time. She loves it. Right. And he's like, he couldn't say one nice thing about Bitcoin. So, so it's just a, it shows you that there's definitely a generational disconnect between people will kind of say, no money could be anything. It could be our money, something we created for ourselves instead of something that a government or a central bank created and, and older people are like, no money can only come from what we think it can come from. And, and you know, you'll funny money or monopoly. Money is not real, you know? 2 (37m 59s): <inaudible>. Yeah. And you have to question the people that have been experts for a really long time, because I mean, when we've seen like the last year or two first, it was like, oh no, we're not heading into inflation. That's just, you know, that's just the, all right, just trying to scare you. And then it was like, well, this is why inflation could be good. And then it turned into inflation is actually a good thing. And you just consume too much. 0 (38m 24s): Let's explain. Cause most people don't even know the difference between inflation and deflation. So most people heard this word deflation and they say, oh, it's horrible. It's bad. Deflation is like a disease. What? So let's explain to them what it is. So you have a little bit of money, right? You go to sleep, there's inflation, you wake up, there's more money competing with your money. That's inflation. There's just more money competing with your money was created overnight while you were sleeping, right. Deflation, you go to sleep and there's less money competing with your money. So you don't have to do anything. And suddenly your money is worth more than what you had the previous day. So deflation is good for you. 0 (39m 6s): It's bad for the government. It's bad for banks. Inflation is bad for you, but it's great for the government. It's great for banks, right? So the question is not what is good and what is bad, but the question is, what is it good for, for good for you? Or is it not good for you? And Bitcoin is deflationary. What does it mean? Deflationary? There's only going to be 21 million Bitcoin, 19 million of the 21 already exists. There's only, there's a little bit of mining going on. That's going to create it. But more people lose their keys every day. Then the amount of Bitcoin being created, right? So the total amount of Bitcoin is actually decreasing. 0 (39m 46s): And that is inflation there. I mean, deep, sorry. It's deflationary. I confused myself. Right? Even gold. Gold has inflation right there. Gold mines all over the world. They're digging up new gold. Right? And we don't really know. No one can tell you how much gold is out there with Bitcoin. Everybody knows how much is there, how much is going to be available? Who has walked again, that triple entry ledger that we talked about before, he's viewable to everybody. You don't even need to have Bitcoin to be able to look at the Bitcoin ledger. It's public information. It's immutable. Everybody knows who owns what? Right? That's the beauty of the stuff. Instead of banking, keeping like a secret ledger to themselves, managing the balances of all the people on this planet. 2 (40m 35s): Yeah. And transparency seems to be a huge aspect of a lot of this and a lot of what your company is doing as well. Like I've heard you talk about like, you have patents, but you are proponent of like open source just because it's like, well, we need to get everyone on board with this. If we want to see like a sustainable change and like this shit like serious shift in mindset. Yeah, 0 (40m 55s): Definitely. And, and most of crypto, most of defy is open source. Right? So, so you, one of the beautiful things you can do in crypto is that you can take something that already exists for kids or create a copy because it's open source, add a little bit of ingredients, right? Take somebody else, recipe four for a free Tata and few things. And suddenly you are the best chef in the world. Right? And it's everybody loves it. Your financial creation, they all put money into it. And it's doing very well. Right. That's what we did with Celsius. We created yields. We were the first ones to invent the idea of earning yield on Bitcoin or Ethereum. Right. And all you have to do is put Bitcoin and created more Bitcoin, you put a theorem, it created more theorem. 0 (41m 40s): It looked like magic, right? But that's what banks do all the time. They just pay most of that to themselves. Right? JP Morgan, brags to their shareholders. Every quarter, you can look at the financial statements with STC, right? They brag to the shareholders, right? Look at how much money we made from other people's money. We took all these people. We haven't paid them, almost anything for their deposits. Then we made money on it. Luco, rich. We are, we are amazing. We made $30 billion this year from other people's money. And we gave it all to ourselves, into you, the shareholder, right on, we smart, great buy our stock, please. You know, that's what they do every quarter. Right. And Celsius basically says, wait, hold on. 0 (42m 21s): How about we do the same things banks do. But we give all that deal. All that income to the customer, to the people that actually worked hard for the money. Isn't that what it's supposed to be in the first place. So it's really simple. There's no complicated stuff. I'll just give you another example, right? Let's say again, I gave JP Morgan a deposit a, of, of a hundred dollars. And at the same time you use the chase Manhattan card, right? That's part of the JP Morgan family to charge your credit card. You took a loan from the bank. You're going to pay 25% on your credit card. I gave a loan to the bank, right? So my money was used to pay your purchase on the chase card. 0 (43m 5s): But I'm getting 0.1%. The bank is paying me 0.1% charging in 24%. It's not their money. They'll lend you my money. I'm getting less than 1%. You're paying 25%. How can that be fair? Right? How can that be something that not nobody's screaming and saying, wait a second, let's come up with a better way. How about the two of us give each other a long on the blockchain, you know, Celsius, we'll charge you 9% and pay me 7%. You get instead of 25%, you get the money for at 9%. And I make, I get to earn 7% instead of 0.1%. That's really what this is all about. It's replacing the financial, greedy financial institutions with someone is acting in your best interests. 2 (43m 51s): Yeah. And I've heard you word it like you where you've said, communism doesn't work, socialism doesn't work. And then this kind of version of capitalism is really only serving the 1%. So 0 (44m 3s): Yes, that's why we charged 1%. So we went to our community and said, you want to be part of the 1%. We're going to give you loans and charge you 1%. How about that? Just destroy the banking model. Yeah. And so 25% of the credit card. How about 1% right now? How can we do 1% loan? People would be like, oh, come on, wait a second, 1%. That's too little. We only do asset backed lending. Meaning you have to give us some kind of an asset like Bitcoin or, and then we can give you a dollar loan against it. Right? So, so we don't, we, we, we don't do like unsecured lending on new credit card. It's unsecured because if you run away and don't pay the bill, JP Morgan, and it has to go and find you right then. 0 (44m 46s): And if they can't find you, they have a right of Celsius, holds your collateral. And because of that, we can charge you one 25th of what JP Morgan charges you. 2 (44m 57s): No, which is nuts because I mean, growing up, you would just sign at 18. All of these credit card bills never read the fine print. Then as you get older, you're like, holy cow, this is almost 30% interest. Like this is absolutely nuts. And then they're giving these young college kids, you know, 10,000, $20,000 balances. 0 (45m 17s): Well, the parents will pay. They know their parents will bail them out. Right? So instead of worrying about these kids drinking, I think our regulators should worry about how many credit cards the banks have given these people that is really what's endangering their financial freedom and their livelihood livelihood. I mean, after somebody's mortgage or their rent, the second biggest payment is, is the credit card. And people are paying America. America has $2 trillion in outstanding credit card, debt paying 600 billion every year in interest, crazy sick. Instead of you receiving 600 billion, you paying the banks, the richest people in the world, you paying them 600 billion of your hard earned money, just unbelievable. 0 (46m 3s): Right? So we have to change that 2 (46m 6s): No 100%. And that's why I loved that. You call it a decentralized Buddhism and you talk about giving back to the community and you're like, well, how can you do that? Like how can a company exist and be successful if it's giving away all of its money? 0 (46m 21s): Well, so it's a, it's a great way at first. We are, we're not giving you a hundred percent. We are keeping enough to pay our bills and everything else, but we also benefiting from the size of the community. So just to give you one example, right? Most of us use WhatsApp. What's up for now over 10 years of giving you a free service, right? An app that allows you to talk to anybody in the world for free. They never charged you. Anything for it. Yet the company was sold to Facebook for $22 billion. So how can a free service be worth so much money? Well, the community having a billion users or 2 billion users is worth billions of dollars, right? 0 (47m 2s): Same thing with Celsius. Celsius is worth a lot of money. We were recently raised $750 million at a three and a half billion dollar valuation because our investors said, wow, you guys have an amazing community that these people love you to death. I mean, now, like, they'll go to war for, you know, how did you create that? How did you create this amazing community? And it's because we're doing good because we're helping a lot of people. Right. And you do good first and then you do well, that's our formula. 2 (47m 35s): No, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. And you kind of hope that at that the whole conscious capitalist movement kind of goes there with a lot of things, right. It's not just, how do I get inflated and make the most money possible, but it's like, how do I also add a level of contribution to what I'm doing? 0 (47m 51s): Definitely. Eh, you know, and, and you know, the, the God works in mysterious ways. And the, you know, my parents taught me, right. They were like, listen, giving is receiving. And I remember me being a teenager. I was like, what are they talking about this? So, all right. But when you get older, you realize that there's karma in the world and the doing good does come back to you with a hundred blessings. Right. So, so, and 90% of the people in the world are trying to do good every day. Right? They care for others that they'll give you the last $10. If they see that you're in trouble and so on. So on. So all we did that Celsius is really unite. These people, right? We put them together into a community and said, okay, let's pull together. 0 (48m 34s): Let's work together to make sure that our hard earned monies is earning yield for all of us, right? Because what do we do? We take, we have 150,000 Bitcoin. That's worth several billion dollars. And we landed out to institutions. So banks and institution, large in large financial institutions are paying us. If I by myself, went and tried to lend it to them. They wouldn't pay me anything. Right? If you give your money to Coinbase, they don't pay you a yield. They'll never pay you. But if you come to Celsius, you say, I have $6 billion worth of Bitcoin. Do you need a loan? Okay. Pay me, yield, pay me interest. Then they do pay you, right? So w the P the individual, the power of the individual is not enough, but the power of the union, the power of all of us pulling together allows us to do things that none of us could do on our own. 0 (49m 25s): And we were flipping the model instead of the banks, charging you overdraft fees and inactivity fees and ATM fees. And you name it, any opening, fake bank accounts for you and all kinds of stuff, these banks, I mean, I can't believe how creative they are when it comes to charging you fees, instead of that, we're charging them fees. And this is the first time in history that the average person is ahead on the next big thing. Right? We have Bitcoin, the banks don't have it yet. They're just now getting into the game. When was it? When in the history we were ahead of Goldman Sachs or ahead of bank of America on the next big thing, we're always get to buy at retail. 0 (50m 5s): Right? So here we flip the tables and we are charging them fees, and you get to keep most of that through Celsius. So I just love the model we went together and the banks lose. I mean, how, how could they be any better than that? You know? 2 (50m 19s): No, that sounds amazing. When my husband got back from that conference, he started calling them banksters. 3 (50m 25s): I was like, that's 2 (50m 27s): Amazing. I was like, I've never heard that, but it was something, I guess he picked up while he was there. And I was like, they absolutely are. And we watch these movies, or I, I, the more I'm reading and like getting into all of this, I'm like, this is no different than the mob. Like, this is a shakedown, this isn't an absolute shakedown. So like, what are your options? So I guess when it comes to like that whole crossing, the chasm period, which I feel like is kind of where we're at. Have you seen that video? It's like the viral visual of like, what that looks like. So there's, it's at like this outdoor festival and there's this hippy dude and he's hula-hoop and by himself, and he kind of looks a little bit crazy and everyone's just watching him. And then slowly people start joining him. 2 (51m 8s): And by the end of the festival, like everyone's having a great time. So right now it's like a couple of those weird hippie dudes, hula hooping. And they're just waiting for everyone to jump on board. So I guess when it comes to your comfy company, when it comes to Celsius, like how do you make that transition? Like as seamless, as possible and easy as possible for people to cross that chasm. 0 (51m 29s): Yeah. So look, if you use WhatsApp and it doesn't work great, you switch to Skype or you switch to something else. And it doesn't really matter, right? It's the same thing. So this is no damage, right? But when you, when you deal with money and you trusting somebody with money, and then they make a mistake, or you make a mistake, you lose all your money. There's no recovery. You can not just jump to another platform and start from where you were. So the trust level, right? The amount of trust you need to have with your customers is dramatically higher. Right? And that's really why the adoption for crypto is actually slower than it is for many other things, because it does take a long time to learn all the things you have to learn about this new world. 0 (52m 13s): And then you have to fi figure out, okay, who am I going to trust? Right. Who is the, who is the, who's the party that really is going to act in my best interest and the, can they keep the keys safe? Right. Let's how long they've been in business. Right? The, how much did they pay out to the community? So you cannot we, we proudly display all that information on our website because we've been doing it longer than anybody else. And we haven't had a single hack. We never had any coins stolen from us or anything like that. Right. So, but it definitely, I totally agree with you crossing the chasm is where we are. And actually the guy that wrote the book, I mean that book, as it relates to voice over IP, he used voice over IP. 0 (52m 54s): As an example of crossing the chasm, Jeffrey, a what's his last name, Jeffrey something. But anyway, so, so we're now we crossing the chasm again, but this time we're crossing it with all the money in the world. This is a fight for all the money in the world. And the banks, again, holding us. They're like, Hey, don't go on that bridge. Don't cross. I know if you go to the for, you will never come back. So let's hold you with regulation. Let's hold you with scaring you about the other side, about how bad they are or whatever. But people understand when they look at this and they just ask themselves the simple question that I asked you, like the credit card, how can it be the charge of 25%, but only pay you 0.1%? 0 (53m 36s): How can it be? The banks make so much money and give it to the shareholders and they don't give you anything. If they couldn't pay you five or 6% like Celsius. Well, how they're paying 15% to their shareholders, right? They're bragging about return on capital 15%. Again, all of that is black on white in their filings with STC. So all these things, the things that you have to ask yourself, and we all know, again, we, we all know instinctively that something is wrong with our financial system. The game is rigged that these guys get away with murder, right? And another simple statistics, the top banks in the world in the last 10 years paid 240 billion, $240 billion in fines because of illicit activity and bad things that they do. 0 (54m 25s): Illegal stuff that they did right. All over now. And they come and they call the cattle black like, oh bad, you guys paid 240 billion in fines. Maybe you should just keep quiet. Okay. Just don't say anything. You know, like who's talking, you know, so does not the problem. You know? So, so again, but it's on us. Look, this probably the most important thing I'll say in the entire interview, we can't fix this. We can't fix the banking system. We can't fix the politicians and the governments and everything else. We can't, we're not going to change that. Okay. They have too much power. One of the most powerful lobbyists in the, in the world are the banking lobby in Washington and in London and in, in, in the, in every country in the world. 0 (55m 14s): So here we are creating a new world for ourselves, right? And in this world, the crypto world, we, the people have to decide, are we bringing the bad habits from wall street? Because that's what Coinbase is doing. Crime is not here to help you. Co-invest here to charge you fees left and right. They charge more fees than the banks. There's no bank and they charge you 7% to buy something, right. So are we here to bring those worst habits? Or are we here to create the, you said, decentralized Buddhism, can we help others? And then help ourselves, like again with Celsius, I personally, I have $300 million of my own money on the Celsius platform. 0 (55m 59s): So why am I working so hard for Celsius? Because if Celsius does well, I do, well, I earned that yield, right? So I created the bus, I'm driving the bus and everybody else came up and said, Hey, can we join you on this ride? Where you get paid 7% without doing anything on your dollars. Right? How does I'm like, come on board, you can sit right next to me, earn exactly the same amount. And there's no tickets. You don't have to pay a fair, there are no fees, right? So which model is the better model. If we can create a new world in which we all work together, right. To deliver the future of finance and the banks are the one paying us fees, the financial institutions paying us fees, right. 0 (56m 42s): To get to the finish line. There's no better way. Right. But we all have to pull together. That is really the, the key to being successful, that creating the community, supporting the community, helping the community. Right. And, and that's not easy. That's all of us has to really work hard to understand who's acting in our best interest and who's not, who's doing good. And then doing well. And who's here just to charge you fees and put their name on some stadium and brag about how rich and famous they are. Where, where do you think that company got $700 million to, to pay for that stadium? You paid for it with your fees. 2 (57m 24s): That's a really good point. And on, and you putting that much money into your own company is, I mean, that's a Testament to how much you believe in it. And I think that that's so important in this space because we see so many bad actors again, because it is the wild, wild west. So it's still kind of like, self-regulating right now. I did want to ask. So as you're father of six, and I'm pretty, that's like in your bio, so did something that's obviously very important to you and kind of like an identifier. And you're also this billionaire. So you have like, you're in this like very small circle. I feel like as far as perspective goes to, like, what does, what does legacy mean to somebody like you? 0 (58m 4s): Well, see when you get to be at my age, right? Do you not really thinking a lot about, oh, I want to make more money. Right? So most people, my age break into two groups. One is okay, you know, I've done good, but eh, let me give a little bit back to society. So I'm gonna join the charity or I'm going to put my name on a building, or I'm gonna whatever, go and create publicity. So if people think that I'm a big donor, I'm very generous, right. So I can kind of fix my image. So I would say most of the people in the world fall into that category, I'm talking most billionaires, right? Fall, fall into that category. 0 (58m 44s): Very few people actually focus on, okay, how do I make a world a better place? So like, if you think about bill, bill, and Melinda gates, right. With their foundation and how they're, I think they're an example of somebody who is trying to make the world a better place, eradicate malaria, right? Like to find new medicines, like obviously they donate as well, but they also manage money for many other people and try to get as much of that money to do good as possible. Right. And instead of just giving money to some charity and not actively doing anything. Right. So, so those are, so I'm on the second camp, right? I'm I'm I want to work hard at making the world a better place, leave a legacy, right? 0 (59m 29s): Leave, leave the path for others to follow again, this decentralized Buddhism, the idea of a decentralization, the idea that all of us pulling together as a community, we can create something that acts in our best interests, right? Create that model that hopefully will outlive me and my, my passion. My, my excitement is when I see people all over the world, tell me, Alex, I'm doing so much better. I paid off my debts. I I'm, I'm actually saving. I can see the path I can pay for my kid's college. I bought my mom a house. All right. That's that's what gets me excited. 0 (1h 0m 9s): Right? I mean, every morning I read messages from people from all over the world are telling me these stories, right? And that's where the that's where the energy, the power the excitement comes from. And you could be the most successful entrepreneur in the world. You're not going to have any of those feelings, right? Because you're, again, you creating wealth for yourself. But I think the measurement of success is how many people are you helping around the world? How many others? And again, strangers helped me. Right? Strangers got me, lifted me out of poverty with my parents. Outhouse in, in, in, in turn have seen the Ukraine, right? For no reason, like a, I was just chosen with 300,000 other people. 0 (1h 0m 50s): Given the second life, given an opportunity just like many are doing today right now. You know, we have, we have Celsius people who are working with, you know, who have accounts with Celsius, who are in Ukraine right now, volunteering, right? The two clones to help Ukrainians and so on. And just again, put tears in my eyes about how much good is out there. And all we do want to do is ignite that we want to ignite all of that. Instead of many of us who work for a bank or financial institution or whatever, and just helping some giant company make a little bit more profit for some of the richest people in the world. Right? Because just think about it. When, when, when somebody charges you a overdraft fee, you don't have money. 0 (1h 1m 35s): Your account is negative, right? They charge you $50 for an overdraft fee. You went negative $5. And the fee was $50 who gets up $50. They're richest people in the world who owns a stock of that bank. That is, what's so painful that the poorest people in the world are the ones making the richest people in the world, even more rich. Can we flip that? Can we turn it on its head? Yes, we can. We proven that doing good. And then doing well on the blockchain works better than ever. And the community just, we manage $23 billion, $23 billion. People sent us $23 billion and I haven't met any of these people. 0 (1h 2m 16s): Most of them, I haven't met. Right. But they, they know that there's something good here. And they know that together we can win. And that's why they're so passionate about it. And they want to make this organization, you know, the Celsius network, the biggest thing ever again, we fighting for all the money in the world. So no one pays overdraft fees or inactivity fees, ATM fee, all these things. Bank charge you because you are small because you are poor because you don't have any leverage. You, you're not powerful. Rich white guy. A and, and, and we're here to flip all of that. We have to change all of that. 2 (1h 2m 57s): No, those fee, what was it? Was it Wells Fargo? That was like one of the more recent ones that got caught. They were purposely like delaying deposits in order to charge the, those, what do you call it? The overdraft fees. And again, like who are the people that are getting overdrafted? It's not someone who has buckets of money. It's obviously someone who is living paycheck to paycheck and needs that check to drop on time. Like, whoa, how is this legal? And how is it when it's found out that these malpractices are happening, that there's not like these significant consequences. It's like a slap on the wrist. And then we're still rolling. No one goes to jail. 0 (1h 3m 34s): Wells Fargo got caught exactly what you said. They also open 3 million fake bank accounts and they charge people $20 every month on the bank account that the customer doesn't need. And doesn't want, I had that. I had a more, I have a mortgage with Wells Fargo and they told me, you must have account account without mortgage. And then I found out, I don't have to have an account with a mortgage. And they just charged me $20 a month for that account. And they did that 3 million people. 2 (1h 3m 60s): Wow. You 0 (1h 3m 60s): Know, no one went to jail, they pay the billion dollar. Fine. Well, the money they collected from all these people, times $20 times, several years is more than a billion dollars. So they still made money. Even though they paid the fine, that's not fine. Okay. So when are we going to unbank ourselves? When are we going to throw that away and just do what's in our best interest, right? Go disconnect from the Fiat world and go into the crypto world, right? When are we going to do that? Right. It's all for us. Now. One more thing. That's very important that most people don't understand banks have leveraged, right? You hear about this bank and that bank, the leveraged tend to want to leverage 10 to one. 0 (1h 4m 43s): Guess what? That works in reverse as well. Meaning if a bank has a hundred dollars, they can issue loans for a thousand dollars. But the reverse is true as well. When you withdraw a hundred dollars, the bank has to collapse or eliminate the close loans for a thousand dollars because they don't have the a hundred dollars anymore. So we have, we have 10 times the leverage that people think we do, or 20 times some of these banks are levered 20 X, right? So when you withdraw money from a bank, when you join crypto, you are causing 10 times or 20 times the damage to the banks. And most people think, oh, I'm too small. I only have a few thousand dollars. No, you have 10 times as much leverage as you think. 0 (1h 5m 24s): So. So, so when you leave finance, a centralized finance, and you go into crypto, you are actually causing damage. On the other side, you helping crypto, you're helping the community and you causing damage to the people who has been stealing from you for decades. 2 (1h 5m 39s): Oh man. I had, I had no idea that it worked that way at all. Cause I I'm the same way. I'm like, well, what is my one account going to do? Cause I've been, again, like this deep dive has like lit a fire inside of me and I just want to learn more and more. So we're closing our account with like one of these big banks that we have. And like their manager has been going crazy. And I was actually surprised because when I initially thought I was going to leave and tell her my reasons for leaving that she was not going to care. Cause I'm like, there's so much more money out there in the world than like my small account. Like they're not going to even notice me. And then I just see her kind of in a tizzy, like blowing my phone up for the last two weeks. I'm like, holy cow, I actually did. I affected at least this one little branch. 2 (1h 6m 20s): And then that makes me feel like I actually did something. Whether or not I did. We'll see, but I like played my role. So to speak, 0 (1h 6m 28s): Look, they would not be putting so much effort against crypto if they didn't feel the pain. Right. Bitcoin now has over $1 trillion valuation. Right? So, so it is there. I mean a quarter of all Americans now have crypto in their, in their accounts, right? So in their possession. So why not a for people like You cannot get elected to be a politician, unless you say Bitcoin, three times you can run as much as you want. You can shake hands with as many people as you want. If you don't say the word Bitcoin, you're not going to get elected. I promise you that. So we're there, you know, and again, this is, this is our money. 0 (1h 7m 11s): It's acting in our best interest. Right? All we need to do is the future is here, right? You just got to let go of the past. You gotta, instead of holding to the past, you just gotta let go. There's nothing good there. Believe me. You will. You'll feel so much better when you unbank yourself. 2 (1h 7m 30s): I love that phrase. It's so good. And so, so good. So when, I guess, like we mentioned earlier, because we're dealing with money and it does take that adoption rate is a little bit slower, just because of that trust factor. Do you see a world where everything is, is exchanged in crypto? Like we're not using USD or euros or pounds. And then I guess like, have you predicted, I guess when that happens. 0 (1h 7m 60s): So I'm in the minority on that question. It's a very important question. And I'm in the minority. So I'm saying, and I've been saying that now for five years or longer that crypto, right. Bitcoin or Ethereum, horrible form of payments. Now a lot of other people will tell you, what are you talking about? You should pay everything with your crypto. That's the future. And I'm saying, no, Bitcoin is a great store of value. It's a great way to save, not touch it, sit on your hands, put it aside. Don't look at it even right. But it's a horrible form of payment. Dollars are a phenomenal form of payment, but there are horrible store value. 0 (1h 8m 42s): You put dollars away and you don't look at them. And when you look at them, they're worth half of what they used to work. Let's not use these things for the wrong things. For example, I'll just give you a simple example, right? And a year ago I remember Elon mosque telling everybody, oh, I now accept Bitcoin for my Tesla. You can buy a Tesla for me. You can buy a Tesla from the richest guy in the world. He's willing to take what back then was five Bitcoins and give you a model as one of his best cars ever right today, the five Bitcoins are worth 250,000, right? So the Tesla that should have cost you 50,000 and now it's worth less because it's already a year old. 0 (1h 9m 24s): So maybe it's worth 30,000. If you just kept that Bitcoin, you would have 250,000. So if you came to Celsius and said, look, I have five Bitcoin, give me a loan to buy a car. You would have 250,000 and you will live a loan for 50,000, right? You will be way ahead. Then if you bought the Tesla with the Bitcoin and gave you a five Bitcoin to the richest guy in the world, he's the richest guy in the world for a reason. Believe me. If he's willing to do an exchange of his prize, possession, the model ass for your five Bitcoin, you should think hard before you agree. So my point is, you'll be driving every day. You drive a Tesla, you hate yourself. 0 (1h 10m 4s): Hey, driving a Tesla. It costs you so much money. The coffee cup you bought a year ago, right? Instead of costing you $5 now cost you $25. So is there anywhere on the planet, a person that's not willing to reverse all the Bitcoin transactions that they've ever done? I rest my case, right? I mean, so don't use it for payments. It's not designed for that, right? Just like you don't try to buy milk with your pillow from your bed, right. You don't bring your pillow to the store and say, Hey, here's my pillow. It's only good for one thing. So use it for what it's intended for. And Bitcoin is good for store value. 0 (1h 10m 46s): Right? Take a loan against it or an interest in it. Right. Do all kinds of other stuff. Do not use it for payments. 2 (1h 10m 54s): No, that's very sound advice because that was something I was always curious about too, because a lot of people are saying, you know, the future is going to be using these in for exchange or to replace the U S dollar. I'm like, well, how does that work though? When like, when that volatility is so drastic, it's like the cup of coffee that you bought the night before, all of a sudden is worth a car. And you're like, what did I just do? This was a terrible decision. 0 (1h 11m 19s): Exactly. So you, you get it. A lot of other people don't they want you to transact in Bitcoin and frankly, again, just don't do it, you know? So, so say no, you know, just like that commercial say no, you know, so just huddle Bitcoin, 2 (1h 11m 38s): No amazing Alex. This was so informative. I really enjoyed our conversation. Do you want to tell the listeners where they can follow you, how they can support you, where they can find Celsius and maybe a little bit about your conference that you're going to, you're going to the Bitcoin. 0 (1h 11m 54s): Yeah. Yeah. We have a big, a big booth. I'm going to be on stage with the several times that we doing different things. But look, we, and by the way, we have a weekly show. I have a weekly show. That's an AMA. You can ask me anything on Fridays at 1:00 PM Eastern on YouTube. So just do a search for Celsius network on YouTube. And there's 170 episodes. I've been doing it every fight for four years. So definitely join us there. A lot of Q and a updates about the community. And so on. Also on Twitter at Celsius network, you can also follow me on Twitter, Alex, Mashinsky my last name and what else? celsius.network is the website. 0 (1h 12m 34s): And we're going to be in Miami at the Bitcoin 2022 conference. We have the largest booth on the floor. You can't miss us. And we have a party on Friday and this Friday. And so if you're in Miami, look at our Twitter, there is the address is right there. Come join us, meet the community. We're going to have several thousand Celsius there, sharing stories and talking about doing good and doing well. 2 (1h 13m 2s): Awesome. Well thank you again so much. 0 (1h 13m 4s): Thanks for having me. 2 (1h 13m 6s): Well, before we wrap up this week's episode, we're going to do our reviews where we read one of our recent review on apple podcasts. This one is by Mr. Wolf. The show covers a broad range of interesting topics. The guests come for a variety of backgrounds, knowledge and experience bases in a day and age where it feels like everyone is losing their minds. It's nice to hear conversations about topics that can polarize people discussed so openly and thoughtfully. Candace is eloquent in her speech and approach isn't expletive. She is afraid to share her thoughts and viewpoints during the discussion 10 out of 10. Well, thank you so much, Mr. 2 (1h 13m 46s): Wolf. I appreciate the review. And if you haven't left a five star review in a while, please take a minute to do so. It helps me a ton with charting and the algorithms. So I would appreciate it and like always hit subscribe, like, and share with a friend two or three, if you know anyone that is just as confused as I am with this whole new web <inaudible> crypto world, that we all seem to be finding ourselves in. So I will see you next time. Thank you for listening.