Adam Mastrelli - How IBM is Integrating Blockchain

JohnPaul: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast. I’m your host JohnPaul and this is Digital Gold. Known to many as the Bitcoin Kid, I started my own cryptocurrency out of my parents’ basement back in 2013. The goal of this show is to simplify the crypto world and explore how it changes the way the world thinks about money through conversations with thought leaders [00:00:16] in this space.

[00:00:17] JohnPaul is the founder and CEO of Orm Capital Ventures. All opinions expressed by JP and podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Orm Capital Ventures. This podcast is intended for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions.

JohnPaul: [00:00:42] Today I am joined by Adam Mistreli who has been spent over three years building on IBM’s blockchain ventures and blockchain accelerator which is focused on designing and scaling blockchain networks. He has worked in many areas of blockchain and AI while also hosting a show called Secrets Unlocked, airing on the Smithsonian channel. In between his time [00:00:59] acting and running marathons, he also travels the world training sales teams and expanding their skill sets. Grew by day and professional active by night. Adam, welcome to the show. Man, can you read that intro every time I walk into a room with some really cool, nerdy Star Wars music? That would be awesome. Adam is here.

JohnPaul: [00:01:18] You talk about blockchain? Exactly. Unlike my own superhero in my mind, it’s funny you mentioned that you were using your talk show host voice which I always quite like. As you said, I did this show on the Smithsonian channel where I was a host. It’s basically like it’s called Secrets Unlocked [00:01:37] and it’s kind of like I’m Indiana Jones but I slept at a holiday in Express. So I don’t really know all of the stuff. I’m kind of like the guy who asks all the questions. I’m a little bit smarter than the average viewer on this one. I did this and I keep talking like that in my life. You can hear me. When I say it, we move to the next topic. So my

JohnPaul: [00:01:58] sister basically would like to stop talking like a talk show host. Please stop it. Kudos on you, man. You nailed the intro.

Adam: [00:02:08] I appreciate it. I appreciate it. It’s always fun using that talk show voice. You kind of already hit on a little bit when I was going to get into the first question. But what is the age old question of what do you do slash how do you spend your time Adam? Yeah. And how do you answer that? [00:02:26] Yeah. So basically I kind of break it out into a start with my day job which is with IBM in systems. So I’ve been with IBM for about nine years and I don’t go back before that in a second. But essentially my day job is with IBM systems. And for the last three years that was around the blockchain accelerator that we had in partnership with Columbia University.

Adam: [00:02:47] So since obviously with Watson and since our Red Hat acquisition, we’re starting to talk at an IBM level around hybrid cloud and mixed workloads and all of the intricacies of whether that’s proprietary or Linux operating systems or whatever you want. So we love all that stuff. We’ve been doing open source for decades, right? Whether you’re talking about the Linux [00:03:10] foundation or other types and even hyper ledger, right? Which we’ll get into. So we know what we’ve done right and wrong with open source. But IBM is a very big advocate of open source. So what I do during the day is essentially I’m in sales. I mean, I’m in Biz Dev selling what I believe to be a peerless piece of hardware based on IBM proprietary

Adam: [00:03:32] chip technology that you’ll see is present in the mainframe. And now we call Linux one when we specifically talk about Linux operating systems and workloads, whether that’s usually in this world. Now we’re talking about containers using Red Hat OpenShift or enterprise Linux and stuff like that. But as Sue say, Ubuntu is also on the table. But when it comes to [00:03:52] digital assets, that’s talking about whether you’re doing this on-prem or in the cloud, that’s talking about basically securing those assets and securing workloads and legit code. So we can break into that. But within that systems area, we were doing for the last few years was a lot of the accelerator work. So that was, hey, this is kind of going to be

Adam: [00:04:14] a network business, whether you’re talking about public or permission protocols. So let’s start building out some use cases. And we worked with, you know, we had an inaugural accelerator with Columbia and that was like securitize and IP we and we had different use cases. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t. But that’s what I was doing for the [00:04:32] last few years. And then I started getting a little hungrier for the tech. And I said, let me just go a little bit further into the tech. I love what we do in systems. And that’s where I sit today. So that’s, that’s the day job. I’ll pause. I have a million other things that I’m doing outside of the day job. And oftentimes they intersect, by the way.

Adam: [00:04:50] Of course, I mean, it all comes together and especially with blockchain as it has such a wide range of applications. One of the things I was wanting to see is how are you seeing major companies like IBM, Apple, you know, integrating blockchains into the organization? Maybe how is their perspective changed since the 2017 hype to where we are now? I guess [00:05:09] what is the future of blockchains at these major organizations or within them? Yeah, I think, I think it’s financial services and everybody else. I mean, it really starts to look like financial services and banks and insurance companies and that whole world. And then you start to see everybody else. So we’ll come back to financial services. But,

Adam: [00:05:27] you know, some of the ones you see as far as things outside of financial services are, you know, Walmart with food trust, you know, Toyota, I saw was looking to do something with a digital payment. You could talk about parts provenance. A lot of it is tracking and tracing. So you’re really looking for discovery around tracking trace modules and [00:05:47] then, you know, apply that to different industries outside of financial services. So trade lens, right? Does that for global shipping? That’s the IBM MERSC partnership for global shipping. So I think there’s something to be said for shipping, tracking, tracing products. But these are farther away probably. I think people are running pilots. It’s just, it’s

Adam: [00:06:12] the difference, you know, when you probably talk about this a lot too between the internet and the internet. So, you know, run with financial services globally. And if you then factor in derivatives and all that world, I mean, it’s like, you know, $600 trillion in that world. So I think I think people are playing with pilots, you know, it’s definitely cooled [00:06:32] down since 2017. There was a big pop. And that’s usually run by our consulting division that goes in and starts to do a lot of this stuff. And whether they’re building on IBM blockchain platform, that’s our kind of value added service on top of hyper ledger fabric. Or really, you know, we have a partnership with R3. That’s more financial services. And,

Adam: [00:06:52] you know, candidly, if somebody wants to build on Ethereum, IBM can do that as well. So it really, I think people are piloting. They’re trying to see like, because this is, it’s almost like a nice to have, whereas financial services is completely getting, you know, turned, turned over. I feel like within supply chain and in other areas, it’s kind [00:07:13] of like a little bit of a, well, let’s hurry up and wait. There’s a lot of other efficiencies that people can do just based on consolidation of workloads, right? Like just pure consolidation plays before you even start to do networks, because the network part is the most difficult part, right? That’s why Walmart and those companies go to IBM. They’re like, Hey, IBM,

Adam: [00:07:35] we’re not going to get all those companies. You do it. We pay you $500 million a year, whatever it is, go, go bring everybody together. So that’s the world outside of financial services. Interesting. So these main organizations are coming to IBM to bring together the partners to make this, these blockchain networks for tracking trade or agricultural work. [00:07:55] Exactly, because really in this case, because it’s, you know, everything is on these different levels of decentralization. You know, IBM really, I’ve often said over the past few years when I was really focused on the networks and not into the system so much was I’m a hustler for transaction volume, where essentially, you know, I’m basically like, for instance, securitize is a good example,

Adam: [00:08:19] right? We were thinking of working with them and we had them in the accelerator. And you know, we were trying to talk to them about working on a network and collateralizing debt. And you know, before they were working with IBM, they went to a major bank and they got like four people in the room, right? And low level folks, you know, we come to the table with them and you know, now [00:08:38] everybody at the table, right? Because they’re already our client. So I think it kind of transforms who you get at the table. And IBM has a over 100 year history of kind of working on these systems, even though, you know, from the outside, everybody will, will kind of poo poo it, right? And say, oh, IBM, it’s an old stodgy company. You know, in our DNA is a lot of this restless reinvention.

Adam: [00:09:01] So do you see IBM’s blockchain being used more in the financial space starting off or more in the supply chain and agricultural industries for tracking bird type of things? Right, right. Yeah. So I think right now, based on our, based on our client base, it’s a lot of it you’ll see was a little bit broad, but I would say the [00:09:23] ones that got the, you know, and IBM really does like a lot of these societal good type of use cases, right? So we had one for tracking and tracing coffee, tracking olive oil, farmers, you know, like I said, trade lens, a plastic bank is a really good example of where you’re doing like recycling plastic using IBM blockchain. And keep in mind, IBM blockchain platform is

Adam: [00:09:45] really just like a big managed service on top of fabric. And you could potentially add in other aspects of that. New ARCA is a partner of ours, right? And keep in mind, this is our partner ecosystem as well. New ARCA does voting proxies transformed, which is relevant for blockchain. You know, we did a pilot with Marsh for transforming proof of insurance. And then when you get into like [00:10:09] financial services, now you’re like Marsh, we did a thing with ANZ Bank for financial guarantees, bank loan guarantees, compliance and identity. So I’d say financial services is going to be the big one. But right now, there’s so many other use cases outside of that that IBM. For instance, we did this responsible sourcing blockchain network, which is about tracking and tracing

Adam: [00:10:34] cobalt out of mines, I think in the DRC. So you would make sure that you don’t have conflict minerals, right? That’s a great story. Whereas right now in the financial services area, those banks, the banks insurers are still trying to figure out what they’re going to do. They’re like, well, what, what do we do here? Do we, do we just like, I mean, how do we do this? So I think [00:10:58] we’re there for them. And I think we’re there for them really in an infrastructure setting, whether they use fabric or, you know, Corda or they’re doing, you know, quorum or that I think is really up to the financial institution. And we’ll have a say maybe in what we would recommend, at least from the consulting place. But as far as I go with the systems group, you know, I’m kind

Adam: [00:11:20] of agnostic. A few more that I didn’t mention were like pharmaceutical is a big one, right? You got to think of the big ones that IBM does, right? It’s like healthcare, you know, retail, distribution, financial services. So there’s probably like, you know, media and advertising. So that it will permeate, right? Blockchain will permeate all of these industries in different ways. Because [00:11:43] at out at this scale, it’s all about if you could solve these two problems, forget about financial services for a second and all of those, you know, we talk about primitives and what DeFi means and all that stuff. We’ll get to it in a second. But if you could improve access to data and you which blockchain would do across companies that participate together, even within

Adam: [00:12:04] your own company, right? If you could improve access to data and reliably trust the data, I mean, these are game changers just without using a token. And those two things, I think, can get solved by some of that, some of that activity. So you mentioned fabric and hyperledger. Can you give a quick description of both of those [00:12:23] for our viewers who don’t know what they are? Yeah, yeah, sure. Sure. So the hyperledger project is a open source project under the Linux Foundation banner. Linux Foundation is a big open source foundation. It’s been around for decades. So essentially, in 2014, 1314, you know, IBM was working on blockchain in IBM research. And so how it goes with IBM is usually it starts in research

Adam: [00:12:51] and then it gets either productized or it doesn’t. And if it gets productized, then it’s to market and it starts having sales, you know, quotas and achievements. And now you’re selling a product or service. And blockchain for IBM, encryption in general, right, is not new. So this is back in the 70s that cryptographic algorithm as the first data encryption standard was open source by IBM [00:13:16] in 1977. So like fast forward, 2015, basically IBM says, well, we want to do something with blockchain, but nobody’s going to work on proprietary like blockchain, like they’re not just going to come to then so we have to open source it. So they basically gave away like 40,000 lines of code at the time in 2015, I think. And that that code became what is now known as hyper ledger fabric,

Adam: [00:13:45] which is kind of like the base level modular. You can think of that as the the Ethereum for for enterprises. And we tried using Ethereum, it just didn’t work for certain things. I think at least from a privacy perspective, the best example I gave was like, and here’s why Bitcoin doesn’t work in enterprises, at least from that use case, or really not Bitcoin, because it’s not [00:14:08] programmable. But say Ethereum at its public level would be, unless you started to talk about zero knowledge proofs and things like that, like if the transactions are public, but the identities are private. So you can see where that’s a real problem in the enterprise world with all these regulations. Walmart, A can’t not know who their trading partners are. Like identity becomes

Adam: [00:14:34] massively important. So there’s a project under hyper ledger called hyper ledger indie, which is the identity project. So identity becomes massively important. You need to know who you’re trading with for certain regulations. And then the prices being transparent, meaning Adam doesn’t want JP to see the deal that he’s giving to John Doe. You don’t want to be able to back [00:15:01] back into that’s how Walmart leverages their control over suppliers. They don’t want it to be true. That’s their competitive advantage. So they would never really agree to that. So there were certain things that Ethereum just didn’t quite do at that time. Over time, maybe if you start talking about, like I’ve said, zero knowledge proofs or things like that, it could work. But

Adam: [00:15:23] so that’s essentially hyper ledger is a big banner with different projects underneath it. So fabric is one of them. You may heard of base two, which is the Ethereum version. Hyper ledger burrow is smart contract. Hyper ledger indie is the identity one. I think hyper ledger quilt starts talking about interoperability. And those have that’s the fast hyper ledger is the fastest growing open [00:15:48] source project enterprise ever. So I mean, it definitely has momentum, right? It’s just different than Ethereum and public. And so we’ll start to see these things come together. But over time, that’s kind of what it is. And then the hyper ledger, if you saw, maybe I think last year, hyper ledger joined the enterprise Ethereum Alliance and the enterprise Ethereum Alliance

Adam: [00:16:10] joined hyper ledger foundation. So they’re already talking to each other. So it’s happening. No, I’m glad to see that these two massive blockchains are really organization networks are starting to come to work together to bring that enterprise version and really a more decentralized version, as you mentioned with Ethereum and not necessarily more decentralized, but more [00:16:31] transparent slash blockchain-y, you could say. Exactly. Exactly. You have to understand what this word decentralization is very old shit bingo-y, where you’re kind of like, you don’t know what that means anymore. But the best way to put it is if you have like you, me, for other people that we know in a small group, we’ll probably could trust that group if it’s all within our interests.

Adam: [00:16:56] But then if Adam says, look, I own an NFT outside of this group, trust me that I own it, you’re going to say, you know what, I trust you, but prove it. Prove it on chain. Now we have to bring a public asset into a permissioned network. And that becomes really interesting. So you mentioned hyper ledger indie. And I want to just talk a little bit about that project, [00:17:18] because with the election is going on and voting, do you see an identification system being built on blockchain in the next five years or six or seven years? Do you think this is something that, and what would that identification system be used for? My mind goes to voting as an opportunity to build out one of these decentralized systems or even identification systems. But would you

Adam: [00:17:42] mind talking a little bit more about that? Yeah, I think that, so again, I am not the hyperledger indie expert. There is essentially a whole team that does that. But it’s one of the 12 projects that is kind of incubated at hyperledger. So that is essentially, I agree with you on voting. The real thing is, how do you determine who is Adam that he says he is online and have it be [00:18:10] infallible? And once I’d say three to five years away, it depends. So there’s a thing called the sovereign network that is a little bit, that’s the open kind of, or one of, I’m sure, a lot of people are trying to solve this. But the sovereign network has this in the same way that you would run a Bitcoin node, you would just run a sovereign identity node. And you’re running

Adam: [00:18:33] a consensus to like, confirm someone’s identity or not based on, you know, whatever you do. Like, if you’re going to an exchange, right, they’ll run you through the KYC AML process. The question then becomes, is that accessible on mobile? Can you get hacked on that? I think that’s the real issue around all of that is proving identity, I think will be. And the example I always give, [00:18:58] it’s going to be a game changer for industry. I think voting is a really great one. I think it’s just there’s some certain last minute trust, or not last minute, but very important trust assumptions that need to be ticked off. I’ll give you my good example. So like, when you go to the doctor’s office, still to this day, 2020, I still go to it if I’m going to a different doctor for

Adam: [00:19:19] whatever reason, I still am filling out paperwork. I mean, it’s incredible. I really wish, like, and you go to then your dentist and the new eye doctor, if you’re traveling, I’m still filling out paperwork, right? So having a system where my identity is transferable behind the scenes, and that gets populated, I mean, game changer. So that’s for that. And I think that will be [00:19:42] healthcare is ready for this, it needs it. And we’ll see in a COVID wise, you know, we did that with a thing called trust your supplier, where we basically used our network, a network called trust your supplier. That essentially, you know, there was a lot of small suppliers that had to, like, they’re starting to pivot. Well, now I’m doing PPE. And whereas, like, if I’m selling,

Adam: [00:20:06] you know, red hats on a sidewalk, and tomorrow I want to sell blue hats, it’s all good. Like, nobody’s going to say, Hey, we’re selling red hats yesterday. But if somebody is making a massive pivot at scale, they have, and they’re trying to then sell to Glaxo Smith Klein, they’re working with Lenovo, AB and Bev, whatever, it’s not that easy. So you do need that at scale. [00:20:29] So the first one, so that’s the on the healthcare one. On the voting one, the trust assumption has to be that you can’t get that wrong, right? The fraud aspect on that has to be. And my example was always the old Google phrase, you know, don’t do evil. We are way past that. We are now in the age of can’t do evil. We need to technically prevent people from doing evil.

Adam: [00:20:55] You have to assume, and that’s what, right? That’s what Bitcoin and that whole world really is about is trust and minimization. And you have to have it so that people can’t do evil. And that’s what IBM’s technology, at least on the enclaves eliminates. And I’ll give you another good example. So voting, I’m the wrong man to say, I think it’s coming. But I’ll give you a good example, right? So [00:21:17] we’re familiar with the Twitter hack, right? That happened recently. And so this is, what, the guy got blackmailed, right? Someone on the inside got blackmailed and gave a cloud admin access. We saw this with Page Thompson at Capital One, you know, a year and a half ago, two years ago. And we see it again. And until we, until those platform companies, or really any company,

Adam: [00:21:41] proves to its users that it can’t touch keys, root wrapping keys, master keys, whatever you want to call it. And when insert three letter organization, law enforcement organization comes to your company and says, give us information on JP. And they say, well, okay, sure, we have the cloud admin access. I mean, this is dangerous. So for instance, AWS, you can do that. If a three letter organization, [00:22:07] law enforcement organization goes to AWS and says, we need JP’s information. It’s a national security. You have the cloud admin keys, W like, okay, wow. And whereas if you’re running this and even IBM cloud to a certain extent, if you’re not running what we call, you know, the hyper protect either on cloud, it’s called the virtual server. But it’s really a massive protected memory enclave

Adam: [00:22:30] that doesn’t have, you know, it’s a secure shell, right? It’s a secure technology. It doesn’t, you know, it’s a set of whitelisted API’s IBM physically cannot and does not have access to your data full stop. And I think that’s going to become increasingly important in this world of, you know, state sponsored hacking, etc. So that’s a big, big advantage that I think we see coming to a lot of [00:22:55] enterprises. No, that that is that is huge. Just as you mentioned, you know, improving the access to data, but then also with blockchains being able to to verify that data outside of an organization and with inside of organization instantaneously as it’s occurring, as it’s moving across the chain is really, you know, the power of these blockchains that in my opinion makes so much better.

Adam: [00:23:16] Well, that’s what they’re going to do, right? I mean, it’s already happening with with blockchains outside of enterprise, right? At full decentralization with no people. Great. It already is, you know, you you are on tickswicks, which I want to try out tickswicks, by the way, you’re on there placing a bet. If you lose that bet, your money’s locked up in an escrow. Good luck suing the [00:23:37] computer. You know, you can’t you can’t do that. And the money is locked and you lost. And before that it was it was in a protected enclave. Whereas the centralized companies or the more centralized companies that you and I know of, they’re going to have to do much more. So these really is a big security play. They’re going to have to do much more to prove that they’re needed,

Adam: [00:24:01] what they’re valuable. Because if they’re not valuable at protecting your data, what are they doing? Exactly. What are what are they doing as a centralized source all in your data? Because that’s why I think the problem in the past two years of three years of it is just all these hacks, hacks and hacks and hacks. It’s just like that’s why cybersecurity is such a fast growing industry [00:24:17] right now. Because everyone’s like, wow, we have all this data and we just basically lost it all to the world and now it’s worth less. And it’s really look it’s we talk about this all the time, right? It’s evidenced by that the hack the hack culture is be getting priced into Bitcoin now, because did you see a big move after the KuCoin hack? Yeah. Like KuCoin gets hacked now and it was

Adam: [00:24:40] like not a big deal. Whereas two years ago, three years ago, the price would have tanked of Bitcoin. The difference and this is why this industry is really like amazingly interesting is that if you lose, so for instance, we’re used to protecting PII data. If you are, if you have an American Express card and you are hacked and your data is compromised and there’s a fraudulent [00:25:04] transaction, what does American Express say? We’re gonna solve it for you. Right? You’re not you’re not responsible for fraudulent transactions. Right? So you’re kind of like, I’m good. Whereas it’s so protecting that PII data, it happens, but these are not bearer assets. Whereas if somebody, you know, hacks your bearer asset and there’s no protection, so they have to get it

Adam: [00:25:27] right. And that’s why a lot of the work around the security in the digital asset space is so important. And I think we’re growing up really, really quickly. It’s so fast. It’s so exciting. It’s the best part of my job. I love that. I love to hear that. It’s because that is what I’ve been, you know, been preaching since 2013. It’s like, this technology is going to come in and [00:25:45] change the world. Out of all those projects that you’ve mentioned, Adam, do you have one project that, in particular, you want to dive in a little bit deeper and explain how maybe blockchain made on securing the data or sharing the data 10 times easier on for within my IBM world? Within IBM or with any of the blockchain projects that you might be looking at in the space.

Adam: [00:26:05] That made sharing data easier. Sharing or just like overall, you’re like, wow, this is a great implementation of blockchain. Like I’m, this was needed in a glad we were trying to implement blockchain and make it work using, you know, in this supply chain or in this, in this data transaction or this now. Well, look, I think I’m going to use one that is, [00:26:25] and I want to come back to some other ones, but I think one that is really, tugs on my heartstrings was this thing called plastic bank. And plastic bank is essentially a blockchain. You can think of it like, I think it’s in Southeast Asia. I got to double check my source there, but you would collect plastic locally and you would bring that plastic to a

Adam: [00:26:49] much like, you know, you would do here in the United States where you recycle glass or bottles and you’re getting five cents from that. The difference would be you do that and it goes and it’s tokenized. The value of that, you’re bringing that ocean plastic, right? This is plastic from oceans is brought to this local distributor. They then give you a token representation on your phone [00:27:12] that is unique to you. And then you can use those tokens to pay for services because the upstream companies, the company’s upstream that are buying that plastic, right, that’s cheaper for them. So they’re going to pump money into this local ecosystem so that the people who do that work can pay bills and can do things locally. Why do you need that in a blockchain? Why do you need

Adam: [00:27:35] that as a token? So, and this got me is like, you know, this is a very dangerous area. It’s very dangerous for young women or young people really to be walking around with cash. They just don’t do it. So in that way, you make it very accessible to have somebody’s data be backed up cryptographically on a phone so that even if the phone gets stolen, you can still access your funds and you don’t [00:27:58] have to walk around with cash. And I thought that was just that’s one of the ones that I’m the most proud that we were a part of. And that was a few years ago. And it’s still going on. It’s a great project. So I really like that a lot. No, that sounds like an amazing project. I was just checking it out while you were talking about plastic bank and just seeing how many countries they’re in that

Adam: [00:28:16] this is a great way to incentivize, as you mentioned, people that aren’t comfortable carrying cash and but everyone has a phone so you can send it to them digitally. It’s the token is a way to trust it without that trustless mechanism there. So you can trust the network and the system and you might not have to worry about a bad actor, you know, not paying out for the plastics. It is so [00:28:37] decentralized. It’s all right. Right. And this is a good use case of like a stopping ocean plastic. And when we talk about financial inclusion, you know, that that one kind of gets lost sometimes when where everybody’s pumping prices. And so I really like that aspect of web, you know, poly chain, Olaf and multi coin, they write really nicely about the web three stack and

Adam: [00:29:02] obviously, interesting Horowitz around the financial primitives kind of breaking down into those accessible services for the for the billions of people that don’t do that. So this kind of falls into that same category for me. So you mentioned or as I’m going to take a quick step back and talk about the famous COVID. Yeah. How has that affected blockchain [00:29:24] integration or acceleration at the enterprise level? Is that made companies more excited or because we’ve seen a lot about zoom and you know, working from home and how that progress or that, I guess, phase has been accelerated because of COVID. But do you see something similar with blockchain integration in any way? Yeah, I think it’s going to be you’ll see it in health care. I

Adam: [00:29:46] think in there’s going to be two areas health care and financial services. Again, financial services, I think it’s accelerated because now everybody’s home, right? Everybody’s watching what’s happening with Brian Brooks at the OCC when he wrote that. No, okay, now and that was an existing precedent that he just kind of said, right? It’s just like, so I think it’s really, [00:30:09] you see what Caitlin Long and the SPD, the speedies are doing in Wyoming. So I think financial services, it’s really hitting home for blockchain at enterprise level. You see Jamie Diamond through complete 180 over the last few years, right? JP Morgan now has their own, I think it’s what it’s onyx. That’s their world. So I think financial services, absolutely COVID has completely

Adam: [00:30:31] ramped that up, right? We have our partnership now with R3. They are one of the leaders in the software stack right there on for financial services within enterprises. We’ll do all the hardware and the on cloud, whether that’s on-prem or on cloud. So I think financial services checkbox, like 100% completely ramped it up, like it’s really starting to move, right? They see [00:30:54] the writing on the wall that if those primitives in whether you’re talking DeFi or even CFi, whatever, at that current, at this pace, I mean, what will banks do? What are their jobs going to be? And so they 100%. And I think the other area that you’ll see it really move in is what I mentioned earlier with trust your supplier, which is hospitals and the tracking of either supplies.

Adam: [00:31:21] So PPE supplies, which is what trust your supplier did, and that will be around identity and or, you know, medications or things like that. So those two areas, the problem is that, you know, the healthcare industry is so difficult. It’s really such a complex beast that they’re going to be moving. My fear is that they’re going to be moving a little too slow. Financial services will [00:31:43] move much faster. But I’d say those two areas, it’s really ramped it up. And we’ve had a lot of interest, I mean, from financial services in that space. I mean, people are reaching out asking us all the time, who do we partner with? You know, we partner with Unbound. They do multi-party computations. So right there talking to a lot of financial service providers, non-traditional

Adam: [00:32:04] banks around what that looks like, because everybody will start to have some semblance of access. Because it’s it’s so it’s not only the COVID world, but it’s what happened during COVID that was kind of glossed over is like, what I think I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that maybe Ron Paul was saying, 22% of all of the money that’s been printed in the history of the United States [00:32:28] happened this year. I mean, this is these COVID and unprecedented money printing. People are going to be yield hunting. And what I think we saw with Dave Portnoy coming in and doing the entertainment trading, I think, and that is a big thing that that’s Asia, that’s Asian culture, right? That will for trading. You go over to Asia, it is just it’s more gamified. It’s very much like

Adam: [00:32:55] speculative. Whereas I think the West is primarily more like focused on building companies and this and that. And you’ll see that start to shift a little bit. But what I think is going to happen is that entertainment vibe will start to come over and we’re going to be seeking yield, right? Boomers will start to say, I can’t face this negative interest rate environment. I’m going to [00:33:16] try need to get yield somewhere. I’ll put a percent. I’ll put 5% of my IRA into crypto, whether that’s Bitcoin or and then the more attractive, the younger generation already will start to play these in games. You’re already seeing it. So I think we’ve had a lot of interest from working with our partners, whether that’s again, a metacco, unbound, a main block is a partner, right? They

Adam: [00:33:42] will enable easier institutional trading. So I think it’s big time happening in financial services. And my hope is that it continues in health care because we need it, but a little slower. No, I definitely agree with you on that point about the gamification of yield for the younger generation about how investing is just going to be like, in my opinion, a few years, buying and [00:34:03] selling sneakers, the sneaker game, but for stocks, but for yield assets, for yield generating assets, whatever that happens to be for equity and companies. I hope that’s where we’re going. Because the access to capital or that kind of divide of how hard it was to transfer capital and some of those verification that you’re talking about has made it a lot easier. Bloxion has made

Adam: [00:34:25] that a lot easier. Right. And it makes it completely easier. And now if you use protocols like UMA protocol or a few others, right, that now somebody from China can get access to a synthetic pegged version of the S&P, right, without being an American citizen. This is game changing. So Adam, appreciate all that knowledge on IBM’s blockchain on hyperledger on how [00:34:49] this is changing the world and really changing how enterprises are coming into the space. I wanted to talk a little bit more about your traveling and basically I was reading in your bio that you’re proficient in Italian and Spanish and obviously English, but you can small talk in

JohnPaul: [00:35:04] Mandarin, Swedish and Zulu. My first question is, what made you decide to take up these languages?

Adam: [00:35:09] Because for me, I could barely learn Spanish in school. And then what suggestions do you have for people who want to learn a new language? Is it full immersion? Where does, you know, where is the best way? What’s the best way to learn a language? And why do you do it? Yeah, I, he’s a great, I love this question because travel and really people is kind of like my passion [00:35:27] in different cultures. So I’ve always been like this. So Italian, you know, I am Italian. My, my father’s Sicilian, my mother is Irish and Jewish. So growing up, I wanted to learn Italian. It was kind of like my grandfather’s dream. And then I was like, okay, I could, I think I can learn Italian. I was a soccer player growing up. So I think, you know, doing all of those things

Adam: [00:35:48] combined, I learned Italian in high school. And then I went on an exchange program when I was like 17 and lived with a family. I’m still close with my, my buddy there, him and his wife and kids. I’m now uncle Adam to them. And I still go back every year. So Italian has always been like the main other language. Again, I learned it in school, then I just started traveling and going back. I [00:36:08] still keep up with my Italian. So the answer to your question on how do you get better languages? I hire a teacher. I hire a one on one coach. So I think comedians will, will often have this joke of like, you know, I’m still, I’m like on my third attempt at Rosetta Stone Spanish. I mean, I just don’t find those working. So I, I hire someone and I do just an hour of conversation a week.

Adam: [00:36:33] And if you go, the website I use to find these people is Verbling. So I’ll just go on, find somebody on Verbling that relatively cheap, you know, we’re talking $15, $20 an hour. I can do that, you know. So I do that for Italian. I do it for Spanish. My Italian is much better for tenses. Like I could be do present tense future, past, past remote, subjunctive. My Spanish is good in the present [00:36:58] and good in getting around. So I would never want to be at a business meeting fully in Spanish. It would be I definitely miss some important points, but I can, I can live in, you know, Costa Rica or Spain. And I would be fine. The other, the other languages, like for instance, like Swedish, Zulu. When I lived in South Africa, so I lived in South Africa for a year when I was working on

Adam: [00:37:23] the Walmart account with IBM. And I just, I’m like that. I just like show up places and I never want to rock up and not try to understand, you know, Nelson Mandela was closer. So, closer is the one with the click. You’ll hear that. So that, I felt that was too difficult. I was like, I’m not even going to attempt Nelson Mandela’s language too difficult. Let me just stick to Zulu. [00:37:47] And that was in out of Durban. So it was just like a way for me to, you know, if you, even a few words, basics, good mornings, when I lived in Malawi, it was the same with Chichewa, where I just said, let me just learn a few things. Good morning. Good evening. You know, where are you at the time? When I was in India, I did the same with, with Gujarat in Ahmedabad. And it just really engenders you

Adam: [00:38:10] to the local population so that you’re not just rocking up. And I’m always sensitive to that as an American, right? I know our, our history. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When we’re traveling, we’re always get that those American stairs as you would say. Right. Right. Right. So even a little bit goes a long way. And that’s, and with Mandarin, I, again, I hired a coach and Mandarin is a whole other ball. [00:38:37] I mean, it is, I took like three months of Mandarin, I’m taking a little bit of a break now. I’ll go back to it. But that is, that is a tough one, man. That is a challenge for me. So another question was, you know, you look like you’re traveling almost half, almost half of the

JohnPaul: [00:38:51] year. Did COVID put a damper on this traveling before 2019? Can you explain like, was it just like,

Adam: [00:38:57] because for me, I felt the same way actually was about to go be a digital nomad starting in January and was traveling Europe in January, February. And the next thing you know, it’s like, oh, time to go back to the US and stay here. But I want to hear your story of how that affected you. Yeah. Full stop. Right. I mean, I’m like, so I did, I was digital nomadic for January. Right. I was [00:39:16] in, I went to the Crypto Finance Conference in St. Moritz. I went to Italy before that. I went to Davos the week after some rits and then I went to Austria for an IBM conference. So all the month of January, I was, I was in Europe. I get back in February. I go to Berkeley for a workshop. I come back February 9th and it’s like, and the world is shut down. And I’m like, oh, okay. And so from

Adam: [00:39:41] then on, I’ve been basically, I spent the first three months in New York. My TV show was premiering. So that was good. I got to watch my show while, while drinking with my sister, which was nice over Zoom. That was great. And then the last three months, I, my sister and I went down to Florida to visit my parents. I had their 50th wedding anniversary. And so I’ve been basically in the [00:40:02] state of Florida for the past three months. So it’s kind of been three and three and three. And now, no, no traveling. Save. I did go to see a friend in Charlotte who is having a tough time with health. But other than that, I’ve been nowhere. It’s been pretty much locked down. And talking about not being locked down. Yeah, I miss it too. It’s really a

Adam: [00:40:25] steady split. I want to hear more about this story that I read about about studying in Dubai

JohnPaul: [00:40:31] and dining with the royal family of Ashmott. How did you even get that opportunity? And how was

Adam: [00:40:36] that? It was incredible. So I love this story, right? So I’m in, I’m in Dubai doing a, like, you know, they have during, I did a one year accelerated MBA, because you know, I was an actor who then beak actor and a singer who then went back to business school and then wanted a stamp of a job, right? At IBM, but they’re not going to hire an actor. So I needed. So I went back to business [00:40:59] school. I was like, yeah, but I, let me just, I need a fast business school. So I did like a one year accelerated MBA. And during that MBA, you know, you get like a basic like three, three weeks, two and a half weeks in, in either Dubai or somewhere else. I was like, I’m going to Dubai. Love it. So we get to Dubai and we’re visiting like Adiya, which is the Abu Dhabi Investment

Adam: [00:41:22] Authority. We go to the, you know, the ski slopes. We do the stuff out in the desert. And ends up like a friend of a friend knows this guy who his name is Abdullah Ziz Al-Nayami. And he goes more affectionately by the green shake. So he is basically each, each royal family of F, the, each five of the Emirates has like a royal family. So that’s Dubai, Abu Dhabi, [00:41:49] Shahra, Ajman, and I’m forgetting the fifth, Emre. But so Ajman is one of those towns. And he shows up and he’s basically very concerned with sustainability. We hit it off immediately. We look similar. I’m like, Hey, I have your nose and facial hair. Look at you. So he basically said, who wants to come have dinner? You know, come to a mosque, come have dinner with me and my family. And like,

Adam: [00:42:14] nobody raised their hands. I’m like, you guys are all crazy. I like raised my hand. I was like, I’m in. Let’s go. So we go back to his house, him, his, his children, his wife, we, we go to a mosque, we have a quick prayer, we go back to eat a beautiful home. And he plops like a full, they have like a full goat on the, on the table. And it’s like a goat, like with rice around it. [00:42:38] And they said, who, you know, I guess this is my, my personal, my personality is something along the lines of when someone says, who wants to eat the eye of a goat? Like, right? I was like, I’ll eat it. Let’s go. You know, I don’t know what that is. But I said, when is the, when is the next time that a royal family member from the Emirate of Ajman is going to offer me to eat the eye of

Adam: [00:43:01] the goat in, in his home? And I saw I took it. And so it was just a great night. And we’re still friends. You know, I follow him on Twitter. We share occasional texts and emails. And he’s just a wonderful man who’s been just like a great, great guy to follow. And what he’s up to is really incredible. I’ve introduced him to friends that have done really interesting death rituals with him [00:43:22] in, in, in, in, in Ajman. So yeah, that’s how that story came about. Pretty cool. That’s a great story. And it shows, I think the power of saying yes to those opportunities where you might have to go out of your comfort zone. But they’re just so unique. Yeah. Oh, I feel like most people don’t do that or feel like they’re scared and they don’t want to put

Adam: [00:43:42] themselves in that position of awkwardness. Yeah. I think I have a really interesting view on this that I’m getting clearer on. And I’m actually studying in January to become a death doula, which is essentially some version of you’re familiar with like a doula or a midwife in the birthing world. This is kind of something similar in the death world. So this would be, and I think [00:44:05] what’s happened even during the COVID time is death is hitting us in the face. And we have a death counter on television. And it’s like death, death, death. And I think people are, you’ve seen this pop up with like death cafes and death really is a part of life. And so that I find some version of it, it’s a little heavy sometimes. But I find that like the in those moments, if I really can

Adam: [00:44:29] eliminate my fear of for whatever reason of eating a goat’s eye or like you said, an opportunity to get outside of my comfort zone, for me that association that this is all going to end sooner or later allows me to take an action, whereas maybe if I wouldn’t have taken an action before. So I encourage everyone to get closer to your own death.

JohnPaul: [00:44:51] So Adam, thanks for sharing that great story about you’re taking risks and kind of putting

Adam: [00:44:56] yourself in those awkward positions. One of the things that I want to talk about, and I think a lot of young entrepreneurs have questions with is how do you ensure you’re focused on the right stuff every day when you wake up and you’re working on something? How do you make sure what you’re working on is what you should be doing? And then also how do you build momentum in your [00:45:13] work? Because it seems like you’ve done, you’ve been pretty successful in a wide range of activities

JohnPaul: [00:45:18] from acting to working as a show host to now working with IBM. Can you explain a little bit

Adam: [00:45:24] farther on that? Yeah, I mean, this is going to sound very Steve Jobsian. But you know, his big thing was a lot of like intuition over intellect. And I think there’s a certain version of that that is really very true in this instance, which is you kind of know what you need to focus on. I think there are some things you need to do. It depends on who the person is, right? If they [00:45:49] like working Pomodoro technique, then you do Pomodoro technique and you do like focused 30, 40 minute intervals, right? If you’re if you want to do deep work, you do Cal Newport, and you read Cal Newport’s Deep Work, right? If you for me, I followed a lot of I’m very good with people. And I really like I care about them. And I think I always want to kind of offer something

Adam: [00:46:15] to them. So I would always try to have like whatever you’re focused on during the day. I guess it’s almost like have fun. Like nobody told you not to have fun at your job. Nobody told you. And that’s my personality is like it doesn’t have to be your thing or any an entrepreneur’s thing. But I my thing that I always say to younger people is like my thing happens to be like comedy or my [00:46:38] sense of humor. And I don’t shy away from that to become a business guy. Like I don’t all of a sudden turn off who I am to be to be this other business guy. People will see that we’re entering a big time world of authenticity. We’re entering a world of authenticity of transactions in the Bitcoin world. And that will very much carry over. You can tell when someone’s bullshitting you,

Adam: [00:47:00] you know it, you feel it. And I hope that more people not only able to feel that, but that they’re able to help others do that. So I would say play to your strengths. And then there’s another version of this, which is the David Goggins version, which is improve your weaknesses too. So you know what I mean? You don’t have to like always play to your strengths. But yeah, find find something that [00:47:21] and how do you stay focused? Part of there’s a part of me that is always like, I don’t know how important focus is. I think I’m always like, I almost like challenge focus because I’m like, what does focus mean? Does that mean taking Adderall and sit in the same spot? Like, hope not. Exactly. If somebody defines what focus is, that’s one thing. But I’m almost like a little

Adam: [00:47:43] bit of chaos theory on this, which is go nuts. You get one turn at this. I mean, in my mind, so pursue what you want to be pursuing. And sometimes it feels like work. Sometimes it doesn’t. But there are some things that I like to do. I like, I use a performance triangle, which is very much in integrity. So planning your work and work your plan. So within, when you do [00:48:08] decide a direction that you like, plan that work, plan the work, work the plan. And that would however you want to do that checklist to do list. And then it’s just like checking stuff off. Do do what you know you need to do, do what you would said you would do. Then there’s a second leg of that triangle, which is like, if you feel like you lose power, if you feel like you’re out of,

Adam: [00:48:30] like, if you’re not being authentic or you’re not kind of like believing in yourself, I think it’s kind of like self generation. And that’s basically generating yourself in a way that you want to be like, I’m, look, all right, today, you know what, I’m going to be loving. Today, I’m going to be passionate. Or today, I’m going to listen right now. So whatever those are for [00:48:48] you that get you going, and every day is different. And then the leadership one, and this is the one, I’m a big advocate of this. And it’s really hitting me within the last year, too. You’d mentioned the saying yes part when people ask you, hey, do you want to eat the goats eyeball in the middle of Ajman? There’s also a very so saying yes, I think is helpful. But there’s also a big one

Adam: [00:49:14] is enabling others to say yes. So not being able to not being afraid to make bold requests of people and not being able to make not being afraid to make requests. I think a lot of times I in the past have done a lot of tap dancing, and a lot of selling, and a lot of like getting up, going moving around things. And really, all it needs is, if you’ve ever seen Moneyball, [00:49:39] where the bread pits character, right, gets the answer he wants, and then he hangs up, you know, there’s some version of that is like, don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. And then what’s the worst that can happen? Somebody will say no, they might say yes, but make and make bold requests, put yourself uncomfortably in the area of making requests. Hi, do you know, I am doing xyz,

Adam: [00:50:01] I’m fundraising, do you have, you know, I’m taking on $500,000 in capital right now, is that something you’re interested in? Can I can I interest you in making an investment? Whatever that is, right? I think for your business and for your personal life, making requests of people in a passionate or or insert whatever way you find, I think gives them [00:50:21] the opportunity to support you. And a lot of people have a tough time taking on that support or that acknowledgement. No, I think you hit a couple great points there. One really thing that resonated with me other than that last make big requests and ask, you know, don’t be afraid to get that no, because there’s with 100 nos, there will be a yes, and you’ll find it eventually,

Adam: [00:50:39] especially if it is, you know, what you’re truly passionate about truly working towards, and make sense for both parties and both parties are going to value there. One of the things I think you mentioned was the idea of having fun, the idea that a job does not have to be a place to go and spend, you know, spend hours slaving away, even at a fast food restaurant, you’re still able [00:50:58] to look at the process be enigma by how well the food just comes out, how fast it does, and you know, how that whole organization operates. It’s hard to think like that. Well, it’s not hard to think like that, but it does take the time to be able to step away from your day-to-day task to say, wow, you know, I’m appreciative for what I’m getting here at this job and the opportunity is providing

Adam: [00:51:18] me. But then also, like you said, if you come in with that fun mentality, it’s going to make your growth and you’re learning so much better than what we’ve seen previously. Right, and I mean, that speaks to me, right? I want to be clear. Not everybody, somebody might say to me, I don’t want to have fun. I want to dominate, and I want to do XYZ. Great. I just know for me, the fun and [00:51:37] engagement aspect speaks to me, and I would say there’s a lot of other people that feel that way, but it’s not for everybody. Somebody might say, no, I’m not into the fun thing, I’m into the discipline thing, or I’m into the whatever thing, right? Whatever your version of self-expression looks like. No, you’re exactly right on that. And one of the things that I want to touch on

Adam: [00:51:58] before we finish up today is I found a YouTube episode where you were discussing something brain talk and something called the gray map. Yeah, yeah. My father actually introduced neural feedback into his chiropractic practice back in 2016. And so I’d love to hear how you were introduced to that space of brain learning or brain acrobatics or brain yoga, whatever it is,

JohnPaul: [00:52:19] like when you’re working on your brain. How do you see that working towards the future and

Adam: [00:52:23] what got you interested in that space? Yeah, I love brain yoga. I’ve actually never used that before, but that’s great. I think I’m going to start using brain yoga. So it actually is a personal one for me. I had when I was eight years old, when I was five years old, I was in a bad car accident. When I was eight years old, I had a brain abscess, which means I basically [00:52:43] passed out, vomited, and it started having seizures and was rushed to the hospital. And they told my parents I had an inoperable brain tumor at age eight, and then I had a few months to live. And one doctor, Madeline Olson, stood up and said, look, maybe it’s not a tumor. Maybe it’s an abscess that we can shrink with a cocktail of antibiotics and over the course of a few months. Can I take

Adam: [00:53:08] him and do that? And so long story short, I’m still here today. It shrunk my a little bit the night before I was going off to have brain surgery. And I didn’t have to have surgery. It shrunk by a little bit. And three months later, it was gone. My seizures subsided. And I would just check in at the pediatric neurology unit for the two years afterwards. And so throughout my life, [00:53:33] I’ve always been like a brain person. I’ve always kind of like felt a connection to the brain that whether that’s mental health has been a big one for me, not only my personal life, but encouraging others to demystify that. And then specifically around the brain, this started with a project I just did with Philippe, who you saw. He’s Philippe D’On is a board certified neurologist in the

Adam: [00:53:54] New York area. And I worked with my other friend Courtney, Parnell, who is a wellness specialist out of Austin, Texas. And we basically created kind of this connection between the neurology community and the brain community and the expectant mother community. She’s an expected mother. And I said, I’d love to create a project where expected mothers or mothers who are expecting [00:54:18] get to experience their brain on birth. And if what that means is, you know, in the under the guise of if you remember those old GI Joe commercials, you know, knowing is half the battle, a lot of this is like what’s happening to our bodies and what’s happening to in our in our emotions. I mean, these are very real things that are triggered happening in our brain. And I find that the more

Adam: [00:54:40] I understand what my brain is doing, I’m like, Oh, so wait, what is the corpus callosum? And oh, okay, this is now moving from the parietal lobe to that lobe. Okay, it like for me de- de- mystifies it a little bit. And I feel more confident that not only the things that are going on within me brain wise is not only normal, but everybody else experiences it. And two, [00:55:04] I get to understand what brain fitness means for a healthier, more active lifestyle that just really allows me to do the things that I love doing with the people that I love. So with that now, basically I do that talk show with Philippe on YouTube. I want to pitch a brain show to net geo with Neil de Grasse Tyson or something like that. You know, so the brain is pretty

Adam: [00:55:24] important to me. I continue to work with Philippe. I continue to work with different focuses between, you know, the gut brain health initiative. There’s one down here in Florida. So it’s just kind of been a lifelong passion. And I’m really, really interested to see where we go with it. But yeah, how about yourself? Well, I do appreciate sharing that story. And for myself, [00:55:44] it was just, you know, my father’s really into the health world. And he’s really into studying the brain. And so I’ve been, I guess not really guinea pig, but I’ve done neurofeedback sessions. And I’m really more focused on, on meditation and really setting those intentions during the day and trying to get into the flow state. I actually slackline a decent amount. So started that back. I’ve actually

Adam: [00:56:05] heard about on Tim Ferriss podcast, maybe five, six years ago. And after that, you know, you’re just getting in that flow state where nothing else matters. But that, you know, what’s that one purpose and task, which on a slackline is to balance and to, to can focus on your breath and clenching the muscles that you need to, to be stable on a, on a one inch line, you know, over a thousand foot drop [00:56:26] and hooked up with carabiners or even just underneath the tree. Right. Well, look, and you mentioned, so first of all, it’s fantastic. I love all of that. Send me all of those links. And I’m a big, obviously a huge Tim Ferriss fan. The grain app you mentioned, essentially, grain is, is a thing that I developed a few years ago. It really isn’t like a available app,

Adam: [00:56:47] but right now I kind of put it into your brain on birth course. We did a digital course, basically. You can think of grain as like, so you mentioned mindfulness. So mindfulness, I think often gets conflated with meditation, but really mindfulness is essentially like awareness. And so there are many different ways to get aware or to be in the flow state or kind of approach that, right? [00:57:11] So I found for studying that one of those ways is pattern interruption. And it’s a little bit counterintuitive because in certain respects, like if you’re interrupting Steph Curry, you know, doing his three point shot, you know, you’re interrupting his flow. So that is bad. But in certain aspects for our brain, if we are on either negative feedback loops or certain cycles, you’ll

Adam: [00:57:35] see this a lot with OCD or, you know, people that can’t, and I have this happen too in the past, where I just can’t get off of a certain idea. And no matter what I do, I just can’t get out of it. And it could be months. So basically, I said, well, I just need like fun patterns. So I basically was like, I did this for myself. I said, I think I would like to lay and Tim Ferriss actually had [00:57:55] this suggestion, lay down on the ground, shout at the, you know, wherever you are and shout as loud as you can, I got this, or walk backwards for as long as you can in public with your friend trying to guide you without turning around, or brush your teeth with the opposite hand. Or, you know, you can see where I’m going, right? So these little routine breakers, as we call them,

Adam: [00:58:20] that really just get you into the present moment, because then it’s you’re aware of that moment. So the more you can have like a reminder. So the idea was, have reminders sent to your phone to do these activities throughout the day and gamify it or something like that. No, that’s very interesting to hear. I’ve never thought about that. Like, okay, just walk backwards, [00:58:40] because it’s going to be it’s like almost rerouting your brain on how to look at the normal day to day life. Your brain gets a break. Your brain gets a break from doing whatever it’s doing. Your system kind of resets. It’s like working with a big computer, right? I mean, what are some of the ways that you take an app, draw a picture, write down three nagging thoughts, crumple them up and throw

Adam: [00:59:03] them away. You know, insert, and we have thousands of these across different, you know, arts and entertainment, sculpture, some of them, I wanted them to be fairly immediate, but some of them, you could like schedule, you can say go to a pottery class, or you know, things like that. Things that you wouldn’t do outside your normal day to day that are going to break that unevenness [00:59:24] or kind of break that mundane scheduling that most of us live day to day. And it’s interesting, because you know, neurofeedback, the whole perfect purpose of that is you’re watching an Netflix show, and then it’ll, as you start to just get distracted, it’ll start messing with the audio or messing with the visuals. And your refocus, your brain has to focus on that to pay attention

Adam: [00:59:42] again. And it’s like be present, be in the moment, and that some of those thoughts, those OCD thoughts or ADHD thoughts are going to be, are going to kind of be subsided and make you focus directly on what you’re watching. Right. And the big, the big thing that I took away or taking away from my show and conversations with Philippe is my neurologist friend, is his great, he has this great quote, [01:00:04] which is be the leader your brain so desperately needs you to be. This is like a really empowering concept. You know, the brain feels like this thing that is not part of me. The best way to put this is like if you broke your arm, and somebody says to you JP, how are you feeling? You’d be like, I feel good. I broke my arm, but I feel good. Now, if there’s something wrong with your emotion,

Adam: [01:00:29] or if you feel down, again, this originates in your brain, or if you’re feeling stressed, and I ask you the same question, I would love for you to get this place where you’re like, you know what, I’m feeling a little bit of stress here that’s coming from my parietal low, but otherwise I’m good. But really what we do now is we say, I’m stressed. We associate stuff that [01:00:50] comes out of our brain as being us, but we don’t associate a broken arm as us. That is a piece of my body that is broken. And in this case, maybe your stress levels are a little bit off. That’s okay. You’re still good. Some version of that. I think the identification is a huge portion of how we can view our day-to-day lives and our mental health. It’s very important that we

Adam: [01:01:14] are not associating our feelings as us, and they’re just a moment of time, and that’s how we’re feeling. And that’s okay. Those feelings are, it’s important to feel those feelings on the spectrum from happy to sad and to feel everything in between completely. So Adam, before we jump on, I want to talk about Bitcoin mining, because it’s your goal. We haven’t even talked about that yet, but I want to see, [01:01:36] have you done any Bitcoin mining or have you even explored that? And what is your experience if you have? Yeah, I have not done Bitcoin mining. I probably should have. I have not, which is why I loved your episode on Real Vision. I was fascinated by all of it, even though I’m in hardware. So, for instance, I’ll give you the, so our IBM hardware, we do transactions and people have

Adam: [01:02:01] often asked me, can your machines run Bitcoin mining? And I’m like, those are probably better left for ASICs. But we do, like I said, we do a lot of transactions, right? So, 92 of the top 100 banks, if you Google searches, like we did five times more transactions on our mainframes than customers do in a year on searches. So, we’re good with transactions. So, I really know machines that [01:02:25] do transaction throughput. I don’t know Bitcoin mining. What should I know about Bitcoin mining? I mean, should I be in it? Should I be doing it? I mean, I own, obviously, I own the asset, but I’ve never mind it. And is it too late? Yes. It’s not never too late. I think we’re seeing a democratization of Bitcoin mining or access to Bitcoin mining. Right now, if you wanted to

Adam: [01:02:46] get in this space, there is a pretty high capital intensive between $1 million and up on to get in and get deployed and actually make sense to deploy mining machines. What we’re working on and what a lot of other companies working on doing is making it so that instead of necessarily buying a Bitcoin miner, having to set it up and run it in your house, you could just either buy [01:03:06] a portion of a Bitcoin miner in a running facility that’s already running or just one unit that themselves and kind of reducing the friction on that. But then most importantly, I think in the next probably five years, people will be able to just cuss you their Bitcoin at a custodial solution, which will then be leveraged similar to how we have with Celsius and other platforms

Adam: [01:03:26] to actually mine Bitcoin. So instead of you getting a stable coin and getting 70% of your value, yeah, you actually take that capital and you’ll put maybe 20% of it into mining Bitcoin. So that it’s never a loss to get liquidated, but you actually can secure the network with that Bitcoin and continue to provide security, but then also generate yield on top of your bitcoins in storage. [01:03:46] Yeah, and is that I mean, so the tough, not the tough one, but how would that work? So I want to, you know, staking, I think obviously will continue to become a big thing on, at least on Ethereum. It would it be the risk of me giving my Bitcoin to that type of a scenario as the liquidation loss like you can’t protect me against that. Whereas say I gave my, I staked my Ethereum

Adam: [01:04:11] on, you know, somewhere and I’m getting a return on that is the liquid. Yeah, it’s very similar to staking mechanism. There’s still potential liquidation, and that’s one of the things that people are focusing on, and you know, that lever of, okay, how much yield do I want versus how much risk do I want? If you’re taking that 70% loan versus a 10% loan [01:04:29] on your portfolio, you’re going to be able to, you know, to kind of play those levers. We’re seeing that a lot of people are, you know, in the staking community, you can still kind of get, for a higher risk, there’ll be maybe some clawbacks if the protocol doesn’t work out as well or has some issues with liquidation, especially with the Aave protocol or the Lend protocol. So we’re

Adam: [01:04:48] seeing that it’s very similar to staking, but I expect, you know, as companies work to reduce the friction in the space that more people like yourself that are in the space, love Bitcoin, love blockchain, would actually be able to participate in the process of securing the network without the frictions associated with the physical hardware. Similarly, you know, what IBM blockchain [01:05:05] does in deploying these massive amounts of servers for customers and taking that problem out of the situation or out of the… Yeah, if you look, if you could make that, if you could make that like kind of a turnkey cloud-like solution, I mean, that’s what we did for our financial services ready cloud. I mean, we basically said, you know, companies want the security of the on-prem world,

Adam: [01:05:26] but they don’t trust the cloud. So they’ll say, okay, IBM spent two years doing this with the regulatory bodies and our sister company Promontory, which is we purchased, they do all the regulations. They did that for the state of Wyoming and with Bank of America, BNP Paribah, and now people can leverage what… So if you’re telling me, hey, Adam, here’s… We’ve done all that [01:05:48] infrastructure work. Just give us your keys and you’re protected. I love that. It’s something we’re working towards. Just gonna take some software developers and some capital, but it’s something that over the next couple years, I expect in hope to bring, as you mentioned, the gamification of this space and of any assets that are able to generate interest and generate

JohnPaul: [01:06:06] yield. We’ll hopefully, hopefully see over the coming years. Well, Adam, thanks for coming on.

Adam: [01:06:11] Do you have any other questions or anything else you wanted to talk about before we end up today and close it off? I don’t think so. Just if you need me, Adam Mestreli on LinkedIn and Twitter and not super active, if you want to watch the TV show, it’s called Secrets Unlocked on the Smithsonian Channel. Big plug there. I think I hit everything. Yeah. I mean, just really appreciate [01:06:33] the time and this is great. I loved your episode and I’m really looking forward to

JohnPaul: [01:06:38] hearing the podcast. Of course, Adam. Thanks again for coming on and I appreciate it. Thanks again,

[01:06:43] guys, for watching Digital Gold and remember to mine on. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of Digital Gold. Be sure to subscribe so you’re notified when the new episode drops. Don’t forget

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[01:06:59] Thanks so much for listening and until next time, mine on.