AI, Fintech and Growth Mindset with Zach Anderson Pettet

0:00 Money drives the world. The infrastructure of that money matters more now than ever. If you think AI is about a chat prompt that gets you something scheduled for vacation, maybe The bigger impact, though, is going to be in the world of financial services, in the world of insurance, in the world of this and that. The world is changing and it's going to change Before we know it, it's changing in front of our eyes. If you're curious, if you're scared of AI, if you're scared of.

0:26 Any of these things? If you're excited about these things, jump in. Give it a listen. Before we dive back into today's conversation, I want to share something important. This episode includes a pay partnership with Better Health, a platform designed to make starting therapy easier. I know for my own journey as a leader and entrepreneur that life can sometimes feel overwhelming. There are seasons, severe stress, uncertainty, and pressure build up, and you need a safe space to process it all that severe therapy comes in.

0:45 Therapy isn't only for people facing clinical challenges. It's the space to reflect, grow, and find better ways to suit my stress relationships and has no goals. It takes courage to seek help, but it's also one of the smartest investments you can make in your mental and emotional wealth. That's why I'm proud to highlight Better Health. With Better Health, you see out a short questionnaire and get matched to the credential therapist in just a couple of days.

1:03 If the first match doesn't feel like the right field, you can easily switch therapies at no extra cost until you find someone who should connect with you. Inside the platform, you'll also find tools like journaling and group sessions on different topics that can support your growth. And with over 7000 reviews and a 4.5 Trust validation, Better Help is a platform you can rely on. So if you feel like you'd benefit from talking to a therapist, visit betterhelp.com/contained. That's betterhelp.com/contained to get 10% off your first mother therapy.

1:24 Once again, this is a big partnership with Better Help, and I encourage you to take that first step if you've been thinking about it. Sometimes the best investment you can make these games yourself. Welcome to the King Dems Podcast, where we share the stories of extraordinary people and dissect hot, relevant topics that shape our world. From visionary leaders to trailblazing creatives, we uncover the mindset, strategy, and grit behind greatness. Whether it's business, culture or personal growth, we ask the real questions.

1:55 This. Isn't just conversation, it's transformation. The Kingdom's podcast. Your next breakthrough starts here. Music licencing reimagined your life. Ladies and gentlemen, once again welcome to the King James podcast in diary of the CFO. And today I've got with me fighting out of the United States of America.

2:18 Mcwalkum, Zachary. The Morning 2020 hero pattern. I'm in the ring, I'm ready for it. Let's do this. I'm in the ring, baby, let's go. For the For those just catching up, we've been talking for half an hour and had to force ourselves to start recording finally. Yeah, we've been having too much fun. Exactly the audience.

2:44 We start on Part 1 of the forecast. And that means we have to do a Part 2, but it's going to be really confusing when we go from Part 1 about fintech to Part 2 about MMAUFC and the rest of the world. Wow, OK, so I did. I did do my homework. I prepare a nice little introduction to you. So let's see back in it. First, let me give you flowers.

3:07 OK, let me get come get comfortable and prepared to accept some flowers. I like this. OK, let's go. So today on the Kingdom's broadcast and diary of the CFO, I'm Shield still welcome the true fintech visionary, Zach Pettit, VP of Global Fintech Strategy at Money 2020 and host of the Fintech Family Hour.

3:28 Zach has been instrumental in shaping the conversations that define the future of financial innovation, from embedded banking and digital inclusion to the evolving relationship between technology, money and trust. He's worked with some of the most influential in tech brands and continues to build breaches between founders, investors and vacated in the global in tech ecosystem.

3:52 SAC. He wants to be welcome to the show. It's a privilege to have you on here today. Thank you, my friend, Thank you. I don't know if I deserve all that. I mean, I'm trying, trying to connect the dots, trying to make the world a better place. But I will take it. And it's good to be here with you, man.

4:09 Good to be here with you. It's actually not good to be here with you on my side. It's actually great to be here with you. You're oh, you're a one operator. OK, This is this is going to get competitive. I can already tell. All right, all right. Whoa, you actually we are so many hearts right. We were talking about anything and everything just before we keep the record button, but let's talk about fintech. Right, take it, take it whatever direction you want, man. Like I think you know, fintech is probably fintech, financial services, AI, blockchain, all that's probably where I know the most.

4:42 But you know, we can explore. It's just a subset of of the man, the myth and the legend. But it is just a sub sect at first. You're passionate about something. I'm passionate about AI. I am AI. My parents knew something everybody did not know, like they just had to code it. They knew that I'm actually an endangered species.

5:03 So said, OK, let let's protect this one. Let's not call him artificial intelligence. Let's call him Ademola ACMA. Yeah, Ademola comes Adamola is a little more approachable than artificial. If I if I had to like jump on and be like hello artificial. It's a little different than Hello Ademola. You know, it's like. You see, they they will know there's troubles over there. But this is a little little different. Little different you're I guess.

5:27 I see a real human on the other side of the screen here. Absolutely, absolutely. You know you, you said something about me earlier, you said you noticed, you know the real recognising, real notice that I have a knack for growth hacking. Yeah, what? What is growth? Hacking without AI? Boring. That's my best answer. I mean, I think growth hacking is taking on so many different. Like I think there was a time in Silicon Valley, like Paul Graham, you know, kind of writing the thesis on the idea and especially in like the earlier days of it, that really was was very hacky and not not hacky in terms of like bad comedy or something like that, right? But in terms of like, how can I fit, you know, how can I write A blog post that has 5000 words,

6:14 as in 999 of them are the word fintech and or, you know, whatever it might be. And I think the exciting part about AI is the ability to gain that algorithm is actually going to, if not, if it hasn't already disappeared, it's disappearing. And my hope from that is the the best, like the, the cream will rise to the top, right? So what is it?

6:39 What is growth hacking without AI? My, my, I don't know. My bigger question is what is growth hacking with AI like? There's so many opportunities, so many different things that I think people haven't even considered yet in terms of that, right? Like a death of the search engine, all these sorts of things that like to me, I think the to me, I think it's good content, right? Like if you're putting out good content that's getting the eyeballs, that's getting that kind of algorithmic boost as a result of just the sheer eyeballs, then, you know, when you ask GPTA question or when you ask, you know, cloud a question, you're going to pop up And like, I think it's just one of my favourite Steve Martin

7:20 quotes is be so good. They can't ignore you. I think that's what it is. I love that. I love that, you know, there being about, I think two or three guests on this forecast that have actually confessed that before they reached out and paid for their episode, they checked me up on the client, they checked me up on the TTPT and they checked me up on Brock. And then they were like, the AI's have really great things to say about me and about they're interested enough. That's where they're like, well, he's a handsome man and he's that could get interesting man, the future that could get really interesting when it starts to get a little too personal, you know, like starting to run background cheques and AI and things like that.

8:08 Like, could you, I, I don't blame them, you know, like how would somebody from another country pay money to a guy who's in the United Kingdom to be on the podcast and not do some due diligence? I think it's all the stupid person if we do that. But it's interesting that that's where the due diligence happens, right?

8:27 Because I mean, people have been doing due diligence on podcasts since podcasting, but the idea of going to cloud or going to whatever to do that is especially when I mean hallucinate, like AI hallucination still exists, right? That that might be how we got here is you were like looking for guests and you were like somebody in fintech and then is hallucinated.

8:45 And it was like, oh, Zach Anderson Pettit, he's great at fintech. I'm hallucinating, right? I don't know, You know, we get here interesting ways, but it's. It's going to be. Interesting to see how it progresses. Definitely in terms of like actually helping companies grow, but I think it's going to kill some companies real fast too, because a lot of folks spend a lot of money on Adsense and I don't know if that's going to last that long. I also talked to somebody yesterday. I'm like, well, I wish companies out there knew how much they needed me.

9:20 I I. Think a lot of people have said that sentence. I I just wish they'd know because we like when it comes to AI, any company that refuses to leverage an AI for their growth, it's actually going to be left behind. Do. You think any company actually refuses though? Or do you think most companies just don't know what to do?

9:45 That's my theory. Like, I don't, I don't. I don't think any company is out there like rejecting technology outright. I think a lot of companies are really confused about what to do with these technologies. And that's not just true with AI, it's true with blockchain, that's true with stablecoin. You know, it's more true in financial services I think than a lot of other places because of the regulations. Like there's this really, really cool thing I want to put it in, but I also really don't want to get a consent order in $100 million fine.

10:12 So I'm very, very nervous to put this here because if I do, I might have this, you know, 20% spike in, you know, revenue or 20% decrease in touches, whatever it might be. But I might have to have a really hard conversation with my regulator after kind of thing. So that's, I think that's the to me that that's what I see is people is fear.

10:32 It's it's not even about avoidance or anything like that. It's just pure fear of what it could be. I fear. Fear of the unknown, but you know, there are actually ways around this thing. There are ways around this thing. And of course, if you carry the the regulators along, I have a background in audits, right? Peak for accounts and fans.

10:49 So basically you need to document they honestly, if it wasn't documented, it was not done. Of course you need to do your due diligence. You need to do your RMD, right? If you do your RMD proper issue, you'll be in a good place, right? I think when the when the use of something is unknown, abuse is inevitable. So, yeah, so that's why I like your perspective. Like do they even know what they need to do? They don't.

11:19 I mean, there's like 2024, I think was the year of it was the I should have actually probably written something about this or I'm sure someone did. But 2024 I think was the year of like the board remit, right? It was the every board of every Fortune 500 all the way down to, you know, series B startup saying AI, we must go AI. What are we doing on AIAI?

11:41 It's time for AI. Like every board meeting. It was just a banging AI hammer over and over again. But then they were just waiting. They were just waiting for you and they were just waiting for you. But then that turns around when you have that on high remit, right? Like that has to especially if you're talking about let's say 300,000 person company.

11:59 They say we need to do something with AI. Everybody looks around the room. OK. Well, we all, we all own different portions of of the business. We're all incentivized differently probably for the most part because how often are business, how often are businesses that size actually incentivized to run the same direction, right?

12:19 Very rarely. So then you have these little like fiefdoms that develop, right? And then you got like we're building an AI inside of this that's just going to solve this. But we haven't really thought about like it's like, let's say it's on the deposit side, right? And it's going to do something for know your customer or like identification, but they haven't thought about how that connects to the underwriting side, which I'm hoping they have, but a lot haven't, right? Because those are two different parts of the bank or two different parts of the company.

12:48 So I think that that age of the board remit of 2024 where it was like, do the thing, whatever it is, do the thing we need a press release is turning into 2025, which is where we're actually seeing products, We're actually seeing use cases, we're actually seeing like, you know, Klarna and and open AI doing stuff.

13:07 We're actually seeing, you know, a lot of different things happening in that space that are providing real value. And so, and also it's not just the quads, and I mean we're talking a lot about quad and open AI, but people are, believe it or not, I should give Co pilot and Microsoft their do as well. But people are actually seem to be building really valuable internal AI first engines themselves. And it seems like maybe that's the next or one of the next kind of competitive moats to develop in financial services. I mean, if you can build something like that, that actually connects the dots, right and solves that data silo issue that I was kind of referring to before. So you're getting into some

13:49 interesting territory. Interesting territory. And of course, Speaking of interesting, you know, when you get the Sintech landscape, the world's number one ranked podcaster globally in fintech spaces, Breaking Bads by breaking. Yeah. Wow, that. Yeah, good for you, Brett. I didn't realise that. Congrats.

14:15 So the apparently it's not even my podcast. That's the guy, Brett King. He was an economic advice to Barack Obama. And of course, I think he did some work with the Chinese government as well. Yeah, which is 2 very ironic things to put together in a sentence. And he started moving. I mean, he's an OG. He deserves Speaking of flowers, he deserves some flowers for. I mean, moving I think had a really hard time getting moving because he was he was early, right? Like he chose to start a neo bank before anybody was probably ready for a neo bank and ran into some some tough times as a result.

14:50 But anyways, I think you were going somewhere with the actual Brett King piece, so. You know, Brett King has been on this podcast. Before Oh, well, I would expect so. I would expect so. That's the talker he gets out there, you know, so. You are in good company, brother. Well, you as soon as I knew that Francis and Ghana's coach has been on here, I'm, I officially feel, you know, I feel in, in the company of greatness. You know, I feel like I got, I got, I've been elevated. Shout out to you shout out to practise and guidance coach Dewey Cooper very great guy.

15:25 He he was on episode 50 so PT of his broadcast. Brett King has actually touched on all of these things that he he were talking about, and it's crazy to think about how we actually predicted a lot of these things that we've seen today. That's why he's rightly top 10 futurists. Right, agree completely.

15:45 I think I think Brett's biggest problem is he's too early on everything. Like that's the that's the thing with futurists in general is like there's futurists and then there's entrepreneurs, right? Like or, and then there's futurists and entrepreneurs and you, you put those two things together and I guess you kind of get Elon, which is a whole other thing. But like it's really hard.

16:05 I think it's really hard to maintain this kind of like trying to put together that, you know, the the idea of like the Internet of Things with self driving cars, with the blockchain, with AI and put that all together in your head and turn that into one company, right? It's just, it's too much, right? Especially thinking about like the way that startups are built, Like you start with a thing, right? Like the clarinet just IP owed, excuse me, buy now, pay later. Pretty simple concept at the end of the day, right? You, you buy it, you buy it now, you pay it later. It sounds like a credit card, except just a different structure.

16:45 And now they're, you know, on the New York Stock Exchange. They're the kind of sexiest company on the block. But that's made because they started with that niche, right? Like they were maybe a little early. I think they started in 2005. But think about that Klarna started in 2005 before the actual financial crisis like that that and they stuck with it all in here we are in 2025.

17:10 That's a 20 year success story. That too. I think a lot of people feel like a three-year success story, right? Then just that persistence and that growth. And like now they're talking about being, you know, the bank to a generation, right? And like out of they had a very interesting level as well.

17:27 I had the pleasure of interviewing their CMO and getting to talk about some of their future and how they even think about what they are, I think is really interesting because they, they do not see themselves as a buy now, pay later company, right? They see themselves as the Bank of the future. And but you can't, you can't start there, right? Like you can't.

17:45 We could, could raise $150 million and start there, but that presents a whole other set of challenges. Absolutely. And you know, Brett King said something on the sportscaster set, The bands of today are going to be limited in terms of their capacity to grow based off their what I say these are the complexity of their size.

18:11 So the size is going to be a disadvantage. So you said something about having organisations that have like multiple divisions, right? It's difficult to you make that unified decision. You say, OK, let's go for AI, but you have different pockets of interest. So how do you see that limiting the growth of the banks of today, You know, partnership here you says they would experience, you know this gradual phasing out and you'll see the styles of future like the clients and you know, the digital and agile banks take over.

18:50 One, Brett, love you, but I think I disagree. I think that there's I think there's a a shift that we're seeing right. So this idea of product market fit is the thing that's mattered forever. And that's in 2005, what Clarina like really started to have, right. They had that we have customers that want this very specific thing that don't want to use a credit card, right. That very, very specific coming to 2025. My question is, does product market fit or distribution market fit matter more, right?

19:23 Because if you think about the impact of, so the combination of traditional finance and decentralised finance, Connexis from JPM is a good example, moving billions, trillions of dollars on the blockchain. They couldn't do that if they weren't JPM and they couldn't do that if they hadn't spent billion. Well, they maybe could have done it without spending billions and billions and billions on R&D.

19:47 But also they're the biggest bank in the world and they can spend billions on R&D. So if the if they're able to build something and have the power of the partnership right where JPM, but also we can pull in City, we can pull in the regional banks, we can pull in Standard Chartered, we can, you know, we can create a consortium of banks that are on the same page and able to move money around.

20:09 In a cohesive and safe fashion, all of a sudden you have one of the biggest, highest producing, highest volume products or platforms I guess is maybe a better term out there. So I think it's, I think we're getting really close to a point of partner or die or something along those lines. But distribution from my perspective matters so much more than product at this point, assuming you have a good product. Absolutely.

20:39 I think he he actually does agree what he said because he set us some things along those lines, right. So basically he's talking about if you don't adopt AI, if you don't start to involve yourself in these strategic partnerships, you will experience a slow death. Yeah, that that I agree with. And I mean, you know, I, I do what I can to when I'm in podcast, not make it money 2020 plugs. But like that is the conversation that we are that we had last year and that I think it's a conversation we had last year and this year.

21:18 It's the thing that we're seeing, right? It's, it's actually what people are doing with the technology that's actually making a difference. And the, the geographical piece of this matters as well, right? You're sitting in London, I'm sitting in Kansas City. Very similar cities, obviously, but because in the in the US, here's a fun little quiz. If you had to guess, how many banks do you think we have in the United States?

21:42 Whoa, how many banks That's. Let me just put in perspective, like in England or in the Uki think you have what, less than 50? Something along those lines. I think you should have over 100 in. The US, we have about 4500, yeah. So over 4000. And it was, it was more than that a few years ago. And they're they're either getting bought or dying or whatever it is.

22:11 And it's a lot of it comes from this kind of community bank thing that we have here where, you know, you can drive down the street and you got your local banker and, you know, it's, it's, it's similar to having a personal banker in London. It's just a lot more. It's less posh, right? Like you don't need to have a certain amount of money to have a personal banker if you're working with the community bank.

22:34 I used to work at a community bank. That's where I learned banking. But how do you how do you scale that right? Like you can be a billion dollar bank in perpetuity with a decent UX on a mobile app and whatever and whatever. But what happens when the you like, when the form factor changes? Like when we go from this right to whatever Johnny I've is doing over at Open AI and we're going to have like our next thing is just going to be something around whatever that thing is they're working on like. It's a scary.

23:05 Thing to think for some of those banks that aren't the absolute biggest of the biggest, what does happen because just the form factor change of mobile almost killed so many companies. What happens with the form factor change of going away from a phone completely? Right? That's I don't have the answer, but it's an interesting conversation. Technology keeps changing, keeps evolving, you know, and a person with us be the millennials, we've actually seen that evolution over time.

23:34 You know, it's quite interesting. Think about when we use cassettes. You know, the videotapes, the CDs. Did you have typing class? Definitely Marvis Beacon. Marvis Beacon, brother. The way you position your hands, it's, yeah, it's, you know. It's, I don't think, I mean, I think that's, it's this, it's just so funny to think about some of the things that whether we were taught in school that now are just like kids just do when they're, you know, 6 because they're handed an iPad. Like it's just the world's going to be a very different place in 20-30 years and an even crazier place in 50. So I don't have the answers to a lot of it, but it's going to be fun to watch, man.

24:14 You know, it's just fun, you know, just watching the transition, you know, Blackberries, Nokia, Android, iPhones. Let's see. Let's see what the future holds. We will. Let's we'll, we'll make that part of the follow up. I, I, by the time we do the follow up, maybe, you know, maybe that whatever it is, the Johnny Ivan team we're working on is out in the world and we can actually we can talk about that. Who knows?

24:38 You just never do. I was telling somebody yesterday that technology is the best at the worst speed that happens in mankind. Agree completely. Agree completely. I think we may absolutely be ending ourselves very slowly whilst improving the quality of life dramatically for most of the world, right.

24:56 I mean, that's, that's the other part of the conversation is are we actually bridging the digital divide? Are we getting people what they need to be able to keep up? Or is this going to, you know, create even larger divides? And that's an unanswered question. You just never know. But, you know, you spoke about something about the fear of AI, and I really don't like that because why would people be afraid of me, you know?

25:21 Oh. You're so friendly, why would it come on? Good of me, but there are a lot of profits of doom when it comes to AI. Yes, but I think a lot of these people have seen too many sci-fi movies. I think that's probably the problem, right? But for me, my perspective is I think AI is an assistant, not meant to be the controller, right? So AI is as good as the human who is using it. So I have an, I have a podcast episode, Mark Andrews, he's also in the US.

25:56 He's a tech guru. And I think that that episode is titled Humans first, AI Next, right? So when you look at what you're able to do with AI, let's take ChatGPT for example. Sure. Some people want to do a project or do an assignment or have a query ChatGPT. I look at them, I say, do you know how much I have trained my own type GPT?

26:21 Type GPT is on steroids, bro. And you know. I think a lot of people, people don't know they can do that though. That's the thing you know, don't know. It's education. No, it's education. Prompt engineering is a theme, is a theme on its own, right? And of course, you know, train, training your AI to, you know, do work for you at an accelerator speed and of course, in line with your reporting preference, right? A lot of people don't know and I tell them they're like, some people like to shame you for using AI and like, I don't really care about what you have to say, right? Ask your ChatGPT the same question. Don't go.

26:59 And I'm not asked by all the same question. Are you going to see the difference? And why would you not like I I? I didn't know somebody, do you know what to say? They say wow how come my ChatGPT is so dumb? That's an it. That's a very interesting perspective. I don't know. I mean, my perspective on the whole thing is that I don't think AI is going to.

27:19 So my favourite AI movie is Ex Machina. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but if you haven't, go watch it one. It's beautiful. I'll try. I only see movies based on recommendations. Actually, I'm not a movie person, I'm a music person. It is it is one of the best how AI will impact the world. It's kind of like a it's a movie, but it feels like an episode of Black Mirror.

27:40 And the idea is kind of like, it's like it if it's loosely based on kind of one of the Google founders, probably like a Sergey Brin or somebody like that goes to this private island they're developing. You know, they're developing human like a is around them. Like the whole island is just actually human like a is. And spoiler alert at the end, one of them escapes. It's it's, it's just go watch it. It's it's, it's great.

28:08 But it it is, it is scary. It is really scary to think about. And I think when people watch movies like that or they watch her or they even see some of the news about, you know, people's best friends being ChatGPT, like, I think it either makes you scared or sad. But from a business perspective, I, I, I worry less about this idea that AI is going to, you know, get rid of the workforce or something like that. One of my favourite quotes that I don't know if it should generate.

28:36 I don't, I think it's by now it's kind of just a truism, but I heard it first from Jenny Goldberg, who is at Open AI. Shouts to Jenny, one of the true, true fintech Ogs. She's been through fintechs and then ended up at Open AI and just amazing human. But she actually open, it was like one of the worst. Like one of the worst, not worst. One of the.

28:56 First words spoken at at Money 2020 last year was your job is not going to be taken by AI. Your job is going to be taken by somebody who knows how to use AI right? Like whoever can actually copilot. And like I was talking about, you know, my best friend earlier before we started talking and that man, I mean, I think he does the, the work of three people at least in a single day based on his work with AI. And he's the one that's taught me everything. I know, right?

29:25 Like I, I have to output because of a lot of the work, we do have to output a lot of scripts. I do a lot of kind of creative writing type of stuff. And if I didn't have the tools that I used to do 1 script, I think to do 1 script well would take me at least 2-3 hours. And I've gotten to a point now where I can turn out 12 scripts or not.

29:47 Let's let's say like 6 scripts in six hours. That that's the thing with AI and you know, that's even of course you have a very high tasting quality. That's why. Yeah, that's the thing. You're not just like turning them out, I guess. Yeah, because you need to be engineer. And exactly, it's the prompt. You know, it's crazy.

30:07 Somebody saw me with a prompt for a particular project, and I had that prompt in Microsoft Word, and I think the prompt was well over 15 pages. And they're like, is this just a prompt? And I'm like, yeah, it is a prompt there. They're like there, what is the the mid report itself? Don't worry, Prompts can actually get that long if you know what you're doing in terms of you're prompts. Engineering, Yeah, if you.

30:35 Don't know this especially I mean speaking, you know, to the to the diary of a CFO side. I mean, the, the, the impact on the CF OS life should be nothing but positive as a result of this, right? Taking the data resulting out like insights, like if you're not getting real positive, I'm not going to say positive output because if you're not making any money, it's not a positive output.

31:02 But if you're not getting real productivity as a CFO out of using AI, there's a disconnect. You're missing something. You're not using something, you're something needs to change, I guess is what I would say. And in my experience, it's just trying it. I think, you know, we were talking earlier about fear.

31:17 I think, you know, a lot of people that maybe like went to accounting school or whatever it is, is, you know, I like, maybe not like I like my Abacus, but like, I like my Excel. And there's there's a lot more to be done in the world with a lot less time now that we have some of these tools. And you know, we, we shout out to people like data reels, you know, that's external star arts, you know, so basically it has come for everybody. You cannot run.

31:45 You can. You can. Can run, you can hide, but hey, I was coming baby, he's going to find. You, he's going to find you. He's going to find you, right? You know, talking about fintech like you've actually like won, like so many hearts from founder to strategies to fintech leader. So what's the personal mission?

32:06 What's the why that drives your journey in Fintech? Yeah, well, when I started in fintech, AI was still a thing that, you know, we were not talking about. So for me, the origin story of why I really care, and I'll leave a lot of the companies nameless, was I was doing an internship in college. It was for a large investment bank and it was specifically for wealth management going to the office every day, putting on that, you know, suit that didn't quite fit because I couldn't afford a fund that actually did, you know, just kind of looking a little scrubby.

32:39 But, you know, sitting in meetings and selling index funds and you know, like balance portfolios to to folks and doing generally what would be considered, you know, the term fiduciary would be yeah, of course you'd based on your background, of course you do would be considered fiduciary level advice, right. But what I didn't realise is that you can as a fiduciary also be a registered broker dealer, right. So.

33:04 We have that hat like conflict of interest, conflict of interest. It's conflict. You hit the nail on the head. We were talking about this hat earlier, so I'll use it now. So. Show me the money. So the hat says, lucky me, I see money and I almost wore it just because, but it was a little bit too on the nose, but we'll use it for this example.

33:24 So we were selling these, you know, responsible portfolios and then suddenly we go to lunch with a, a salesperson that will remain nameless from a company that will remain, remain nameless. But they were selling annuities specifically. And what we could make selling, you know, index funds and, you know, fiduciary products was 25 basis points, you know, 30 basis points, something like that on assets. But as soon as you take off that fiduciary hat and you toss on this bad boy and you're a broker dealer, you can start doing a lot of creative things.

34:00 And I look like an idiot with this on the top of my head, but you can. You can become without. Telling the client. You could go from, hey, here's the thing you should buy, here's the thing we should put in your portfolio, I guess is what I should say. And then you can take off that fiduciary hat and say, oh, and just, you know, really to cover you because it's a insurance product. You should have an annuity as.

34:20 Well, oh, by the way, I'm going to kind of not share this with you, but instead of making 25 basis points, I'm going to make 300 basis points. I'm going to make 3% on this product. And from that lunch we went back to to the office and that afternoon we started selling annuities basically in every single meeting.

34:40 I mean, there were sometimes that where they were like, you know, literally 22 where it would almost be illegal to sell somebody an annuity. But if it was even close to the idea that you could sell them an annuity, the attempt would be made because you're making it, you know, if it's, if you have 100K to invest, wouldn't you rather, you know, make 3000 instead of like, come on, right. That's incentives.

35:03 But that's a very broken incentive system. So from that moment I just like struck me like this bolt of like wildly unethical lightning and I just decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life in finance and hopefully die leaving it 1% better than I found it. So started joining startups, studied entrepreneurship in school, realised that meant absolutely nothing. So I talked to my teachers into basically like letting me go join startups instead of coming to class. And I think I graduated with one of the lowest Gpas you possibly could, but I talked him into it.

35:34 And yeah, I've been working in startups ever since, I think since junior year and what you would call uni. So the answer is anger. Basically just anger at the system. You picked business acumen. You knew that business acumen was the real deal. You know, during my time PwC, they had this 5 criteria framework for evaluating professionals, whole leadership, business document, technical, competent, beauty, relationships and global acumen. So me, I've always like taken beautiful relationships and Jesus acumen very, very seriously. Because of course, your whole leadership, how do you need yourself?

36:17 How do you need your team? I love that framework a lot because I told my colleagues like these guys have bleached me giving us the cheat code to succeed in life. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think. I think if you can, if you can find a way to act ethically and make money at the same time, you're living the dream.

36:38 And that's what I think people miss that a lot about finance where especially that's the beauty of fintech, right? Like the biggest impact of fintech to this point over the last 10 years probably isn't actually the fintech companies like Robin Hood's big, Chimes big, Klarna's big and 26 is in Germany big. You know, like there's a lot of these companies that are that are big Plaid.

37:01 But if you think about the impact of Chime as an example, or of Revolute, where did all the overdraft fees go? Right at the big banks, all the overdraft fees went away because all of a sudden these fintechs were offering no overdraft fees. And then, you know, in America, there's the two day early pay.

37:20 I don't know if you guys have that, but the two day early pay thing that Chime had. So that was like Chime's entry. They were, you know, sign up for Chime, get your your pay two days early. It was so simple and you're not really taking any risk. Yeah, we have that. We have that here as well, revenue each month.

37:37 So Yep. So I mean, that's think about the risk you're taking, you're taking payroll risk, which is pretty much like the only risk you have is like if that person gets fired somehow between payroll getting run and they actually there isn't any because even then the payroll's still going to run. So why would you not just kind of bank on the fact that the payroll's going to run, get that money in there and acquire an unbelievable amount of users just in a small amount of time because of a very, very basic feature. And now you see the likes of, you know, some of the larger banks saying to get your money two days early, right? And as to.

38:14 That as. Well, and from Robin Hood, you see, like when was the last time you you logged on to anything and saw a trading fee? Their trading fees are gone. So the impacts of Fintech at this point, I mean, it's been big, but I would argue that the like societal impact mostly has been in that Fintech has pushed these huge organisations to be more ethical. They've given them a run for their money The exactly. And of course, you know, it links back to the speed of a perfect competitive market.

38:47 You know, I have a first degree in economics, but a lot of people don't even know that because of like the fact that my career has actually been mostly in accounting. You know, economics teaches you a lot of themes at the micro and looking at and I think economics is mostly mostly about optimization. So how do you optimise the benefits to the consumers and of course create a perfect competition market. So in a perfect competition market, you would have 0 or no charges, right?

39:23 And of course there's no barrier to the entry in the market. So it forces people to bring down the prices to that, you know, equilibrium point. Usually the the lack of competition, you know, make those guys raise the bar in prizes and thousands of beneficial to the consumers, you're going to see something. Yeah, I mean, if, if you have a monopoly or an oligopoly, you can charge whatever the hell you want to charge, right. But the more competition that's going to drive prices down. It's, I mean, the beauty, the beauty of fintech is exactly what you're talking about.

40:00 It's exactly. And it pushes innovation. Yep, species innovation, that that's a thing. I think competition basically drives innovation. But I stand to be corrected. But that's what I think our competition is the fuel for innovation. I think so I think, I think competition drives innovation and I think, and I think innovation drives competition.

40:18 I mean both, right. At the end of the day, like if you think about AI, it's a noob with AI as an example. Like, it's kind of just like, here's a technology that we just, like, threw into the fray and now everybody's like, well. We got to do something with it. Whoever does the best thing with it is probably. Going to win, so Sprint, right?

40:36 I mean it's it can go both ways for sure. Yeah, I, I think it's kind of like a loop, but you know, coming back to your own personal experience like you worked at MBKC Visa, like how did that shape your perspective and what fintech innovation is truly impactful? Yeah. So V sum was a I'll, I'll separate the two a little bit. So MBKC was working in a community bank. It was 1000 or sorry, not 1000.

41:08 It was a billion dollar bank, which in the US in terms of assets is pretty candidly tiny. Really. But. Say again. I said it's. Immaterial, basically. Basically, yeah, yeah. I mean, you got to be, but but if you structure the bank correctly and you think about building that business correctly, it can produce the revenues of a bank much larger with much lower risk, right?

41:37 So and with a much lower employee account. So that bank was fascinating in that it was and is one of the top, I don't want to get it wrong. So I'll use a larger number top 2025 mortgage lenders in the US, right? It's a billion dollar bank in Kansas City. But because of the ability to do business online and you know, rate tables like NerdWallet, things like that, people were finding that the, you know, customer service was unbelievable.

42:04 The speed was unbelievable. And this little bank that's NBK, this is 4 like 4 letters. Why, what, what is this? But oh, that rate looks good. Whoever just called me after I applied for the loan doesn't they seem nice. They seem trustworthy. And the Midwest does have kind of a, you know, we're known for being a little more trustworthy than maybe if a New York bankers calling you.

42:26 No offence to my New York friends, but we figured out this thing or they I shouldn't take any credit for it because it happened before I got there. They figured out this machine, but that machine needed to be funded, right? And a billion dollar bank is not sitting on enough, enough deposits to be able to lend out the amount that was necessary to be able to satisfy those loans. So we would always go to, we would every single night, every single day, go to the go to what was called the Federal Home Loan Bank, which the idea is basically it's this big pool of money where we could go pull from fund the loan and then securitize the loan and sell it off. So we, we can stay, we can stay this small, we can stay, you know, NBKC, this community bank

43:12 where I still bank, where I still walk in and talk to Robin, my, you know, my friend Robin and she, she hooks me up with my checking deposits and you know, all that stuff. But we, we can function on this, on this national level. So my job there was actually growing deposits. It was how do we go out, especially in this world of fintech as the chimes And you know, all of these groups are starting to grow and be the bank behind that fintech, right?

43:38 Because if you think about it, the biggest expense of growing these businesses is just customer acquisition. And if we can just be on the back end of that, then we can let the chimes of the world, which Chime was not actually a partner, but I'm just using as an example, we can let them go acquire those customers. All of a sudden our balance sheet is growing like crazy as far as the deposits go, right?

44:00 So our ability to lend becomes a lot more profitable. So if from the federal and trying to kind of keep it simple from the Federal Home Loan Bank, let's say we would have to, we would have to lend for three. We would borrow for 3% and then we would put out the loan at 4% just to keep math simple, 1% spread. If we partner with the fintech, that's not free, but it's inherently a free deposit.

44:26 It's like me walking in the bank and saying here's 10 bucks lending out that 10 bucks. All they need to do is make sure that they're actually compliant and can give me that 10 bucks back eventually. Now we have a four point spread on that loan, right, which the impact of that is gigantic. So really that was exactly exactly.

44:45 So that was my job was find creative ways to build the deposit side of the business. And that led to working with start-ups that led to we built an internal accelerator where we would actually fly companies to Kansas City for a 75 day like intense process where there we go from no partnership to full partnership, keeping in contacts that like the average time it took to build one of these a year, six months, something like that we're doing in 75 days. That was like, that was the thing because like all the only advantage that a Midwestern tiny bank has is speed. So that was the thing that we figured out there. We did some investing that worked out pretty well. And basically what that was for

45:30 me was learning banking. Like if I had not spent that time there, I would not understand banking balance sheets. I wouldn't be able to talk about the Federal Home Loan Bank. You know, I wouldn't understand reading between the lines on regulation. Like there's so many things that I think a lot of folks in fintech miss out on by not getting that experience inside of a true bank. So I could talk about that experience for forever, but that's basically what that was.

45:56 And then V some, we started with one of my favourite people on earth, a guy named Ben Milne. He's what has he done? Now he's on his second company. His first one was called Dwala and it was a very Web 2 payments company. You can almost think of it as a Stripe esque sort of situation, but out of Des Moines, IA so little harder to raise money, little harder to, you know, kind of take scale things a little bit. But it's a billion dollar company. He's now moved on to his second.

46:25 You know, he's doing something completely new now and he's actually building a stablecoin company. So he's gone from web one or web web 2 to web three, I suppose. But during COVID, we just got bored and we wanted to find a way to, you know, kind of continue the community and the ecosystem and, and learn this entirely new technology set of technologies that was coming out, right?

46:48 Like at that point, I would, I didn't know how to set up a digital wallet, right? I didn't know what a digital wallet was. And I'm not talking about Apple Pay, right? Like I'm talking about cold storage. I'm talking about all of these intricacies of the blockchain and of Bitcoin and buying Ethereum. And you know, how do you mention NFT, all of these things? That's all it's coins.

47:08 Exactly, all of it. And So what V7 was, was really an online virtual community where we would get to meet companies like Paxos and Tether and etcetera, etcetera. Companies that you see today is like the companies, right? Like we, I think we even had circle percent back in the day, which is crazy. But from that, I mean, I learned the underlying infrastructure of Defy.

47:33 So the I separate the two because they're very different experiences and one was a job and one was a hobby. But if you think about like how the world's coming together today, I very accidentally stumbled into the exact intersection of what's happening, right? It's this coming together of tratify and defy and what that actually means for the world. I definitely not would not give myself the credit to say that I knew that that's what this all was going to be. But you know, in if you line it up in reverse, it kind of the the story comes together into what is happening today. Interesting stuff, you know, like sometimes great scenes happen out of, would I say, lucky mistakes or. Oh yeah.

48:18 Yeah, I say lucky mistakes. Just I was reading something some years ago, I heard that the person who invented silk, I invented it by way of a lucky mistake. And I'm like, wow, interesting. And I remember when I was interviewing with KPMG in the UK and the lady asked me why did you get into order? I'm like I did not choose order or they chose me. That's deep.

48:47 Yeah, that, you know, that's the thing. You know, sometimes you don't choose a line of work people. It just happens that maybe one door closed. And at first, you know, people always say, oh, you'll be good at this thing, try it out. Somebody just told me, try it out. Try Peter and yeah. That's all you go. Yeah, that's actually.

49:08 I was actually, I was supposed to have an internship with the Kansas City Chiefs before and I found out it was going to be a 50 hour a week unpaid internship while I was still in school. And I do not, I do not come from money, my friend. So I like basically I was like, how in the world can I possibly do this? And I was, and there's like a high end car wash here in town where I was selling car washes.

49:34 And that's actually How I Met the general manager of the Chiefs and just annoyed him for I think 2 years before finally they gave me that offer and I was like, OK, I'm in, I'm doing this. I'm taking six months off school like going all in. And then I found out it was unpaid and it was like I just took six months off school.

49:50 Like I don't know what do I do? Pass. Well, I like I did pass, but I had no backup. I didn't know what to do next. So one of my other regulars from the the car wash was the wealth, was the wealth manager that ended up at that got me to that internship I told you about that got me into finance. So yeah, I mean, it's it's wild how these things happen. Happens, then happens, then, you know, these things happen sometimes and then people be like, oh, so you had it all planned out.

50:18 No. Sorry, sorry, I learned I did not have it all planned out. You just work out together. And of course, you know, for me, I'm a person of faith, believe strongly, you know, in the patient faith in the Bible, this is versus all things work together according to his purpose. So like I see that happening, you know, in my life a lot like things just happen.

50:41 Sometimes the door closes and of course another one opens and of course, you know, opportunities come up. I remember like my very, very first, or would I say contract, right I ever had in my life. What happened? I seated, I used to lecture professional students and what happened was I was left in one of my students private lessons and there was this corporate training they needed to do.

51:12 And this guy kicks up the phone and like, oh, we needed to do training. And then he was like, oh, what's the date for the training? And he was like, oh, I'm not available for that date. I'm out of the country. And he says, OK, I'll try to find you an alternative. He called the first guy. The first guy said, oh, I'm not available for that date. He called the second guy and the second guy was like, oh, I'm not available for that date.

51:39 And then he looked around, he saw me was like, bro, what's up? Can you handle this training and guess what my best Bible verses Philippians chapter 4 verse 13 I can do all things through crisis strengthens me like yeah, I can do all things but through crisis strengthens. We had yeah, he was like, OK, check out the topics and how you develop material for this.

51:59 I can do all things and. Say yes, right, like at the end, put, put, put good stuff into the world and you'll get good stuff back. And I think the other thing is just say yes to everything I'm telling you like. Preparation meets opportunity called a success. But I think about that situation a lot like I wasn't the first choice, I wasn't the second choice.

52:19 I was not even the third choice. I was the 4th. For a reason probably, you know, I mean, it will never know that reason that that reason is some of the it's ethereal. It's up in, you know, somewhere, but it ended up that way for a reason, man. Yeah. And of course, I was also at the right place at the right time, right. You know, it's all about when you develop sets and skill sets. If the opportunity comes, yeah, you can, You can get it. What?

52:48 A lot of people don't even develop themselves to the extent that you can even be frantic an opportunity. And that's very sad. Agreed. Yeah, I mean, I think again, a lot, so much of this comes back to education. You know, at the end of the day, like I, I hope to spend a large portion of my life in finance.

53:10 But from there, I really, really hope that I'm able to spend from, I don't know, hopefully I'm able to make enough money that by 45, but let's say 5055 that I spend the rest of my life in education and not just teaching, but like what is what is the next version of schooling? And if anything, I should be focusing on this right now, probably as AI is coming around, because this is this is the moment that that education is going to change completely.

53:35 That education already is changing completely, right? Like we're able to educate ourselves in a way that we never could before. So, yeah, I mean, all of these things are about about a mix of things. But I also think the one thing that you kind of said there that like brings it all together is showing up, right?

53:54 Like if you just, if you just continuously show up, you're going to end, you're going to end up in the right conversation with the right person. And it's just going to kind of happen. Show up and show out. Well, yeah, you, you got a little more show out than I do. But you know, when, when given the opportunity, I shall show out indeed. OK.

54:14 You know, that's something that I say. There's a theory I came up with and I like to pity to you because you brought up the the concept of education. I think the capacity of a human being is dependent on 4ES. OK, four education, enlightenment, experience and exposure. Education, enlightenment, experience, exposure. I don't think I could disagree.

54:44 I think there's, I mean, I think there's a lot of levels inside of that, right? I think to me, the one is exposure that goes beyond all of those. I mean, I think there's like, I think we were talking about is like the table stakes of a potentially successful human, right? Like everything you just said is like what you got to do to get to a certain place, right?

55:06 But I never thought I would work in events just to be totally candid, right? Like I, I studied entrepreneurship, like I thought I was going to spend my entire life just building companies, either founding them or being, you know, early employee of that, whatever it might be. But the exposure, I mean, I've been in Money 2020 for four years, never thought I was going to work in events.

55:26 I've been here four years. And one of the big reasons is not exposure from the perspective of I stand in on stage in front of 5000 people and they know who I am, but I get to stand backstage with the CFO of Open AI for 10 minutes before she goes on stage, right? Like the Vice, the vice chairman of IBM, Gary Cone, who was actually in the first Trump administration and spoke last year at Money 2020.

55:49 You know, whatever your opinion on the Trump administration might. Be I'm not American, so yeah, I'm neutral. If you're not American and your opinion is neutral, then you're just lying. But we can pass it. We can go past that. Whoa. You know the interesting thing? You know the interesting thing, right?

56:06 Yeah. Personally, like I love being neutral. Like people that know me know that I love neutrality. Why? Because think about it, I am trying to be a global top rated podcaster. I'm trying to be one of the top journalists in the world. And but you've got opinions. Yeah, yeah, I have my personal opinions I'm not going to like, right. So, for example, I don't support any football team. That is what you guys call soccer. And one thing I've noticed about neutrality is the fact that when you're neutral, it helps you to be able to form the best informed opinions.

56:46 Of course, you're not taking sides. And I think I learned that from my work in audit, right? You cannot, you have to be independent of your client in order to be able to do the best job and of course, make what I see a well informed opinion about their financial statements. So you cannot maybe have shares in them or know somebody on the board or have friends in top management or you to make a good decision.

57:13 You will never make that good decision. So as much as possible, I try to, you know, throw myself out of, you know, yeah, taking sides. So basically it's like, would I say a conscious decision? So about whenever I take sides, honestly I am taking this side and This is why so. Yeah, I get that from from an ethical perspective, I completely agree.

57:33 And also in the world that you live in, if you say you're a Liverpool fan, you're just going to lose listeners, right? Like if you say you're a Tottenham fan, you're just going to lose listeners. So I completely understand that from that perspective. But at the end of the day, we all, you know, we have our opinions.

57:49 And I'll be honest as to what my opinion was before I met Gary Cohn, the man, he, he's a, you know, you say I'm the man in the myth legend. And I say that to a lot of my guests as well. But I mean, he was, he was at Goldman for over 20 years. I will leave Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs. Yeah, I will leave it to others to look at what his separation package was.

58:13 But let's just say it was enough to, if I remember correctly, it was over a couple 100 million. So the man did all right, just leaving Goldman Sachs and I should double check that, but it was it was big. So you think of this guy, I mean, just you just kind of assume Wall Street fella part of the Trump administration, like the first, especially the first Trump administration, like you just kind of assume a certain something, right. And then I get backstage.

58:41 It's that big Monday morning, he's the big, you know, first opening keynote. He's over in the corner. He's got his, you know, his, he's his GC, you know, is everything's monogrammed, looking too fresh. I can't even handle it. Like I'm literally nervous to go say hi to this guy. Exactly. And I walk over to him and he was in the middle of something.

59:03 I'm nobody to him, right? Like I'm just some guy that like, I'm, I'm dressed up as if I'm about to get on stage. I have a microphone like in my hand. So I think he assumed something of substance was maybe going to come out of my mouth. But I'm nobody to him. He set everything down, like just completely took everything he was doing, set it down, gave me his undivided attention, shook my hand. We talked for like 10 minutes and I fell in love with this man.

59:29 Like if I like truly I was, I was taken in by his personality. I was taken in by his candour. And I fully expected him to get on stage and kind of just be a banker, be, you know, get, get on stage and be a banker government guy. But he got on stage and he just started going. He was just like, I disagree with this.

59:50 This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard over here. We should be doing this. Not this like it's you, you get surprised by people and that that exposure is addictive, right? Like getting to actually know that side of a human and actually getting to meet some of these people. It I mean, what what that will ever lead to? No idea.

1:00:09 But I mean, you know, maybe sometime in the future. I'm working with Gary. I hope. I kind of doubt it, but I hope. But more so, it gives you that exposure to realise maybe you shouldn't judge so fast. Maybe you should have, maybe you should have a little more empathy, you know, And I think a lot of what you were talking about before is really about empathy.

1:00:30 Yes, because really I don't know, like in my life, that's something I like to say. Never say never, right? I have realised that so many times I have been wronged by taking a side, so many times I have been wrong by judging a people or institutions or anything at all before observing the facts. And of course, being a being a science guy, you know and three season is, is the order of the day. So if you judge by the facts, if you follow the data points, you follow the numbers, you follow what you can observe, right. So if I cannot observe it, you know, with my own, I don't think it makes sense to you to form an opinion about it. Speaking of about what you experienced with a guy, one thing I've experienced with

1:01:20 success with people is they're oftentimes humble. Yeah, much more than you expect they have. Nothing. They have nothing to prove. Yeah, but people that are, you know, one of these try too hard and it's crazy. So for me, like I've decided to to embrace that culture, the attitude of having nothing to prove to anybody. Yourself.

1:01:47 When you take when you take $100 bill, right And you put it on the ground, you stepping it, you know, you put it in mud and you say, oh, you are $50, take you to the shop. Is it going to be $100? Yeah. So that's the way I see myself. It's not on you to tell me who I am. Like my value is in treats seek my value is set by God. So it's, it's not on you.

1:02:11 So whatever you say, it's your business, right? I know who I am and of course I know who my God says I am. So basically like over time, I think in a person's life or with you achieving success over time, just cover that. You have nothing to prove to anybody. You just need to be yourself, so. Like make yourself proud. Like if you can lay down, if you can lay your head on the, you know, on the, on, how can I not think of on the pillow, on the pillow at the end of the night and feel good about what you did?

1:02:44 Like, I mean, what else is there, man? It's, it's, you know, life, life's only so long and there's only so many hours in a day and might as well spend them trying to do something good. Absolutely. You know, some people feel like I want revenge. I want my OK. Like that's this crazy talk that somebody was telling me recently of like, oh, they want their ex to see them as a richer person. I'm like, what?

1:03:12 What the hell? Like you leaving for your ex, bro? Like leave for yourself, be successful for yourself, not because of your ex. And you know The funny thing? She likely doesn't even leave. She's not paying attention. About about you. So what are you talking about? I don't like people who leave for other people's validation. I don't like it at all.

1:03:36 No, no, I mean, at the end of the day, what's it's the emptiest way you can live like if you're just be happy with yourself, be happy with what you're doing, try to do something good for the I mean, that's like that's I know that I am not going to, you know, change this industry dramatically, right? Like no one person can change finance in 75 years that much technologies can, you know, but there's a very few number of people that really can change this industry dramatically in one lifetime, right?

1:04:09 So I just want to change it by 1%, all right, Like that's if I can just do that, then I'm pretty damn happy with what I've done with my life. And as long as I take some tiny step towards that. You say, if it's a podcast, a conversation, if it's a, you know, an introduction from an entrepreneur to another, like whatever it might be, like it's just it all builds, right? It all builds that momentum and that flywheel into goodness. Interesting stuff.

1:04:35 Well, you, you know, The funny thing, right? A lot of people who actually viewed, you know, things that are highly impactful did not really think it was going to blow up that much. We just set out to solve a problem. Yeah, Stripe, and that's literally Stripe. That has a thing, just try to solve problems. And that's what I do, try to solve problems. A lot of times, like big breaks that I've had personally, like I did not go chasing them, it just happened and I go chasing certain things and never get it.

1:05:08 So what's the point? But the chase still matters, right? Like at the end of the day, if you're not getting up every day doing that work, chasing after whatever that thing is like, you're not going to get the opportunity you didn't expect. So you still got to, you still got to do the work, you still got to chase it.

1:05:24 Exactly, just like the example I gave you know previously. Because for me it's all about solving problems. When you are busy, you wake up every morning and you're out there to solve problems. Don't worry, something's going to happen. Exactly man. Exactly. Get up and work. Get up and work. I'm telling you, you know the interesting thing. You know the interesting thing.

1:05:46 I don't know if I still have that alarm. I do have an alarm with the same exact words I just said get up at work. I have an alarm right on my phone with that same exact words that you said. Get up and work. Oh, I love that. I need that. It's motivation. It feels you like I have different alarms, you know, for different times of the day. This I love is a motivation for this. This allow is a motivation for that. You know, I think it is good for people to visualise things. I don't know different strokes or different folks, but for me, like when I see it, if I can read it, then yeah, we can make it happen.

1:06:28 Yeah, I agree completely. I agree completely. Whoa. Morning 2020. It sits at the heart of global fintech conversations. So like, what are the top trends currently shaping how fintechs approach innovation and growth? Man, talk about a big question. I mean, we've talked about a lot of it already, right?

1:06:48 Like the world of traditional finance having permission from a regulatory perspective to now start working in the decentralised finance world. Like you can't really get into a conversation about fintech right now without talking about stable coins. Like it's just it's impossible. Stable coin this, stable coin that.

1:07:09 Exactly. Exactly USDT. Exactly. So that's one side of it, but at the same side or not the same side, the other side of the same coin is. AI on the flip side. Yeah. And I think, I think what excites me the most is not. Is not D Phi and Tri Phi coming together, It's not AI moving into financial services.

1:07:34 It's the sum of all these things being greater than the parts. Right? Like when you start thinking about the impact of a smart contract on Etherium, hypothetically, whatever being applied with an AI agent from Visa, MasterCard, would, you know, pick it alongside a power of attorney that you're giving to this AI that is able to make financial decisions on your behalf, right.

1:08:03 You're getting really close to this idea of self driving money. And it's a scary idea because this and this is Angela Strange's theory or thesis from God, I don't know. She wrote this almost 7-8 years ago, something like that, but she wrote it before a lot of this technology existed. But now when you really think about it, like AI agents for commerce, AI agents for all these different things are starting to come about. Are they all great?

1:08:28 Maybe not. But if you Fast forward five years and you think about what, what could happen if you combine the idea of, you know, just your, your current account, just the basics, right? And wealth management, just the basics. But you're adding on the idea of blockchain technology, the security they're in validation of identity, all of these portability of identity.

1:08:50 And you throw in the idea that an artificial intelligence that to our earlier point in the conversation, has been trained by us, right, to make these sorts of decisions to manage the budget or to make a purchase here, not there. That that's world changing, right? When you start thinking about the combination of all these things together, the world changes dramatically.

1:09:13 So there's a lot of like real time payments. There's, there's so many cool things happening in fintech right now and all of them will be discussed at Money 2020. But I think the biggest thing that's hardest to talk about because it's such a big thought is what happens when you combine all these things. Food for thought indeed.

1:09:33 Food for thought indeed. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's something that is convoluted enough with enough layers of nascent technology that I mean, it's just the ability to speak to depth on it. There's probably 5 people in the world, you know, they could really have an educated conversation about what that would look like.

1:09:58 I'm not one of them. I'm just excited about it, you know, and that's, that's kind of the beauty of my job and your job. We get to ask the questions, right? Like at the end of the day, is asking the right question matters so much Tell you? Well, bro, I I think you should have conversations with Brett King because Brett King told me something.

1:10:15 Is that talking about me? To tell people that you are the kind of person with the right curiosity. To ask the right question. It's, I mean, yeah, it's, it's candidly it's, it's weird to be a guest on podcast sometimes, as you can probably tell, like I have a hard time not asking questions back to you because yes.

1:10:36 You know, right, It's hard, man. Guess what? And here today I published an episode with a guy in the UK called Kevin Appleby. He's the host of the host of Grow CFO. So Grow CFO, they're really doing a great job in the UK. They are like a community of helping CFO's pro, the mentor CFOs and provide training and all not so we did a collaboration.

1:11:02 So I was on this podcast and he was on my podcast. You know, like, you know, the persons podcast it's really hard you're holding yourself back from. Asking, but why do we do that though? For me, the beauty of podcasts is the conversation, right? Like as if I hold like I, I, I'm sure I have some opinions or some knowledge because of time in banking or fintech or whatever that you don't have. But you spend time in audit, you spend time in all these different portions that I don't have. So why would we spend the whole time with you asking me quite like it should be a conversation. Like the listener is going to get so much more out of the idea of us just talking about our mutually shared or not shared experiences and how they do or

1:11:39 don't fit together than just me saying Federal Home Loan Bank, you know, like it's just, it's just different. Then you should go, you should go watch the the episode with Kevin Appleby, especially the testimonial. But he was saying that what he really enjoyed about the episode was that it was a conversation was in.

1:12:01 According to him. He said he's been on podcast where in the post is so I've forgotten the exact words he said or he said something along the lines of the host mountain pressure on the guest as though the unlike journalist that is getting a politician to to make a mistake. Yeah, yeah. I mean, unless you're a Kara Swisher, why in the world would you do that?

1:12:28 I just do not understand the idea of like, put like, if it's not about politics. And I mean, here's a hilarious example, kind of hilarious, kind of really sad. Do you remember when Benjamin Netanyahu went on the Nelk Boys podcast? The. The Israeli Prime Minister. Yeah, do you know? Yeah, those are skinny guy. Yeah, the the ones that do the Happy Dad beer and just kind of sit there and like fart into microphones and whatever. Like, I don't know.

1:13:03 Not the highest brow podcasters in the world, but they they do numbers, numbers, right? It's crazy. So they have Benjamin Netanyahu on and they just kind of talk and like the most that they disagreed on anything with him was the fact that he liked Burger King more than McDonald's, right? And that like those are the like in those moments, good God Almighty, do your preparation.

1:13:28 Have, you know, be ready for a real conversation. Don't just sit down with someone who is one of the most important political figures at the centre of one of the most intense moments in history and have a debate about, you know, McDonald's versus Burger King. That's not the time. But for the most, when you're when you're not doing that, like, why not just have a conversation?

1:13:50 You're going to get a lot more out of it. Yeah, exactly. Like free flowing. And I think I really, really am grateful to that training from the Big 4. You know, you tell us, ask open-ended questions, ask probing questions, you know, ask questions driven with curiosity, learn. And of course, you know you need to learn before you can earn.

1:14:15 Yeah. And you give up, I would even say give up some earning to get some learning, you know, especially early in your career like. Yeah, a lot of times you have to do that. Yeah, work I've, I've the numbers I was making when I was first starting in startups were not, not significant, but the amount that I learned from that was worth 1000 times what I was making. And I would give that advice to especially to younger folks over and over and over again, is give up some learning to get some learning.

1:14:47 You're out of my mind. It's just that you need to switch that microphone for a megaphone. Yeah, help the younger folks that. 100 percent, 100%. Like, I see it's crazy how, you know, I have conversations with a lot of younger people, especially, you know, the Gen Z's, and it beats my imagination how many of them, once increased returns, increase results with minimal in future.

1:15:13 And like how? In what world does that work? It doesn't, I mean, I, I think we live in this world of Andrew Huberman and, you know, all in optimization and, you know, I'm waking up at 4:00 AM and I'm getting my 15 minutes a red light and then I'm pouring Saratoga water into this thing and I'm dipping my face. I mean, we're, we're getting into this world where it's almost like this discrepancy of like there, there's this like kind of over glorification of incredibly hard work, right? Or at least it looks like incredibly hard work on Instagram.

1:15:51 But is it really like, is that actually what's happening at the end of the day? I don't know. Because a lot of the technologies, I mean, I think it was Jamie Dimon. I can't, I can't remember which CE OS it was, but it was like 3 of the more significant CE OS. And actually, I don't think it was Jamie Dimon because this is not a thing he would say, but a number of CEOs are talking about the yeah, yeah, a number of CEOs are talking about the impact of AI potentially being that we go to a three day work week.

1:16:21 No, no, Jamie would never hear that. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. I don't think I don't. Think he wanted the workers back? He wanted the workers. Yeah, yeah. And maybe the answer is three days a week in the office and, you know, the other two days you're not working. The point being, I think there's this really interesting discrepancy between kind of this hustle culture on one side of it.

1:16:41 But at the same time, we're being armed with tools now that give us an ability to either produce at such a higher rate or produce at our same rate and then live a life. And, you know, that's a, so that's a personal choice around happiness and impact at the end of the day more than it is anything about, you know, corporate structure or anything like that. I, I and you know, for me, I'm OK here. I have an opinion, right?

1:17:09 So for me, I believe in hybrid culture, right? Yeah. I believe that organisations that do not adopt the hybrid culture, I, I think they are going to be counterproductive, intuitive, truly. Yeah, it's here to stay. It's just here to stay. Yeah, if I had to go into the office five days a week, I couldn't work for money 2020, you know?

1:17:36 Yeah, I mean, that's just the the fact of of where we're at. Like, and I, I would be happy to move to New York, but that would cost them more money, right. And so as a result, I'm sitting here in Kansas City. You're in London. There's definitely more value that could come out of this if we were sitting together in person, for sure, right?

1:17:58 But a lot of that value would not come from the actual conversation on camera. It would come from the time we spend together before and after, right? Which we got a little bit of anyway. So I think it's just a matter of, you know, is the juice worth the squeeze on some of this stuff like. Ben, a pizza novice. Exactly.

1:18:16 And I'm, I mean, it's, it's lonely too, right? Like sitting in Kansas, Speaking of mental health, we were talking before it gets lonely sitting in a city that is not necessarily New York, trying to build in a New York esque, kind of, you know, global fashion. And that's why every single time I get to get on a plane and go see my team in New York or London or even get to go to Singapore and see my team, they're like the energy that comes with that is so significant. But if I had to do that every day or if that was just my normal, I don't know if I would know if I'd have that same energy.

1:18:46 So I agree completely. I think the hybrid is 1. What's necessary to attract the best talent and maintain it. Two, it actually creates more energy and creates space for creativity and thought. That kind of wouldn't exist if you were just, you know, banging in an office 9 to 5 five days a week. Yeah, exactly.

1:19:04 You know, people don't realise that entrepreneurship is is both an art, honest science. So art, creativity drives on what I say balance and yeah, balance and also being able to reflect, you know, be on your own, especially interact with nature and you should do really, really, really well. And of course, you know, you're talking about hiring and maintaining the best talent. Yesterday I was a keynote speaker and a webinar for HR professionals.

1:19:43 So what what what a coincidence, you know, I get to webinars. But then one was he's just accident for HR professionals. And of course, I think the other on an international standards on HR. So basically we've seen that the world is shifting in terms of the way we manage him capital. Yep. But a lot of organisations are not, you know, moving at this heat, or would I say at the average industry speed and that that would actually hurt them if they don't do something about it.

1:20:21 But, you know, I come from Africa and financial inclusion is a very, very big issue in Africa. So how do you see AI regional tap of financial institution? See, this is 1 good question too. This is where I kind of get on my high horse a little bit think, I think sometimes we get too attached to these new technologies, right? If you think about M PESA, if you think about a lot of what has already been deployed across, I won't just take Africa emerging markets, right?

1:21:06 The problems to be solved are, are ones that for the most part have been solved in developed markets. Are there better ways to solve them with AI or with block chain or whatever that might be? Like if I, if I implement an underwriting system for the gig economy that has better tracking as a result of actually, I mean, how does AI improve something like, you know, Google Maps, making sure that you're actually stopping the places you're stopping or things that we like.

1:21:37 One of the big underwriting pieces for some of these is even just, you know, how, how charged you keep your phone, right? Like there's, we don't need groundbreaking technologies to solve a lot of the problems in emerging markets. We need entrepreneurs, we need the people we we need, we need to give a shit about something besides the United States and the EU is my opinion. And we need to get out there.

1:21:59 We need to start building like that. That's what matters more than any of it. And like if part of that is, you know, an open AI enterprise subscription, great. But for the most part, in my opinion, that's a nice to have. Like I think that we need to find creative ways to solve problems that have already been solved. And in some cases, we don't even need to like we don't even need creative ways.

1:22:22 We just need to put attention on it, right? Because there's a perception that, you know, this group of people doesn't have any money, therefore we're not going to build products for them. But as the cost of technology decreases and, you know, technologies that existed 20 years ago, you know, an API call for this was was a terrible example, but like an API call for this was, you know, 10 bucks and now it's a cent. Like, why can't we apply that to this specific thing happening in this specific area of Africa, right? And to me, it's a, it's a lot less about AI, it's a lot less about blockchain.

1:22:54 It's actually about solving Triadfi problems more than anything else. And it's about entrepreneurs caring and realising that emerging markets are actually a lot more interesting. Like I would, I would, I would if I'm thinking about like measuring a life right, going and starting a company, an emerging market that has an impact on a million people and helps them get from, you know, here to here economically. I would much rather do that then start a unnamed trading company that, you know, doesn't have fees, but sells all of its order flow into certain organisations that then front run their customers and sell that off and make literally all of their money off of, you know, money off of like selling order flow, right?

1:23:47 Like what good does that do for the world? Not really like you actually you're if, if the if it is free, probably you're paying for it in some way and it's probably not a way that you actually want to be paying for it. So if you know you're, you're going to trade yourself to 0 or do you, you know, go to an emerging market, build something of use that people actually benefit from every day and helps the world like that, That would be that would be my answer.

1:24:16 I don't think that it's as much about these groundbreaking technologies. I think it's about attention and about diverting entrepreneurial. Resources and capital to the right places and just like doing the damn thing. I love what you see about attention. It's actually very important to you to bring attention to these issues. And at first I've actually done my own. You need to part.

1:24:38 So there is this economy are what I say students competition that I sponsor in Nigeria. So I finished, I went to the habit of Nigeria, by the way, it's called, of course, I be our law university. So they have this annual conference wherein they're close to about 10 universities. All economics are students, right?

1:25:03 So the King James podcast earlier this year we had the inaugural that I say competition request, you know, even price money and oppressor the winner, the mentorship, right? So what do they do? They watch the podcast and take any of the favourite episodes and use the lessons to learn from that episode to create an innovative solution to an existing economic programme in Nigeria and make a 5 minute presentation on it. Yeah, it's sometimes I think we overthink. I mean, especially in the US and the EUI think we over engineer, we overthink we over a lot of things, but especially when you're talking about emerging markets. I mean, I I I'm oversimplifying it very much, but these are solvable problems, right?

1:25:56 It's just that. Absolutely, absolutely. I think you would love to see the presentations of. I would. I would, yeah. I mean this. This across the board, these are solvable problems and the technologies exist to solve them. And for the most part, the technologies are not, in my opinion, the groundbreaking ones that require, you know, someone to know Solidity or something like that to solve. Like, a lot of these problems can probably be probably be solved by putting together, you know, a set of the right open source protocols.

1:26:26 Right, like you would be surprised at the simple technology that the winner suggested for providing a solution to the problem she was trying to solve. I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, so I'll let you go watch it. I'll go, I'll go, I'll go watch it. But but yeah, I, I mean, I think I, I also think that a lot of people get paid a lot of money to overcomplicate things, right? Like as soon as you start going and working for an unnamed consulting firm, it benefits you a lot to make things really complicated, right?

1:26:58 But as a founder, like, that's not going to serve you, especially in the early days. Absolute absolutely, you know, like simplicity, toss it like why? Why should you overcomplicate things? Like it gets on my nerves, but it is what it is. Yeah, yeah. You know, different strokes on different folks, but maybe as an entrepreneur you you discover that the Steam fact needs the. Yeah, yeah.

1:27:24 And less tech debt less, I mean, it's just more scalable, more ability to adjust as new things come in. I mean, across the board, like the simpler you keep it, probably the better it's going to be. I mean, think chlorine as an example again, right? Buy now, pay later. It is in and of itself like regulatorily compliance wise. It's this whole new thing that they had to work through the, you know, is this legal level of but when you think about it, it's very simple.

1:27:53 It's not it's not the craziest thing in the world, right. And from that one kind of groundbreaking innovation that is absolutely groundbreaking, but also not the craziest thing in the world, we see a multi multi multi billion dollar company come out of it because they've been able to listen to their customers and learn and build on top of and you know.

1:28:13 I to rate and innovate. Exactly. I think that that's as a secret to growth. But of course, you know, Speaking of the Planner IPO and of course our market signals. So the IPO actually sparked fresh conversations about fintech valuations, and that's the confidence. So from your own vantage point, like what does this moment tell us about the state of fintech markets in 2025? This is the hard part where I think, I think anybody that tells you that they know everything about finance or anybody that gives you a really, really convicted answer on something along these lines that like it means this for the future of fintech or it means this for the future of public markets.

1:28:59 I'd be willing to place a bet that they're wrong. Like the more confident they are about whatever their answer is, I would be willing to bet against them even stronger. So what that IPO tells me is that Klarna was ready to IPO. I know it's the worst answer in the world, but it's. Yeah, so I saw sometimes the the tourist answers are the simplest ones. Yeah.

1:29:21 And it, it, I mean, does it signal an opening of IPO markets? Does it, does it signal good things for Finta? It's, it's, it's not, it's positive signals across the board. But it's but but an IPO is a moment in time, right. It's, it's about, it's about, it's about continuing that, right. It's about the, the quarterly earnings after that, it's about the quarterly earnings after that. It's about, you know, half year.

1:29:44 It's about all of all of this. And if you start to see, you know, a decline in some of this, it could also mean terrible things. Excuse me? You know, speaking about the earnings, right, you're talking about at the end. And so I'm just going to corroborate your point and you know, give you a lead up.

1:30:00 So growth versus profitability. So how can pounders actually balance that growth, ambition, value, profitability in this area where investors are prioritising the fundamentals again? See, I, this is another, another area that I'm not quite sure about because I think, I think in traditional fintech, AKA I'm going to build a neo bank one.

1:30:23 I kind of think people are done building neo banks in, in developed nations. Like I think that to our earlier conversation in emerging markets, there's a tonne of Neo Bank South things left to be built, but in a like here they've kind of been built. So we're. Talking about balancing growth and profits.

1:30:43 Growth, Yes, yes, yes, so. While we do, there is this narrative around unit economics, there's this narrative around all that. But when you look at where most of the VC dollars are going, they're going to AI, right? They're going to these companies that unit economically are selling a dollar for $0.50 in a lot of cases, right?

1:31:05 And they're being subsidised by VC dollars. So this idea that unit economics is mattering is very true for the Clara's, is very true for the companies that are prepping to IPO. But is it true across the whole tech industry? I don't know. And I actually think that there's a shift happening back towards the let's take absolutely gigantic swings because especially in the age of AI, like it's not going to be a 0 sum game, but there's, there's going to be a number, there's going to be a Fang, right? There's, there's probably going to be a set of 10 or less absolutely gigantic winners that come out of this. So, you know, if they're making 20% margins versus 30% margins, I think a lot of ECS at this

1:31:52 point, they just want to see growth, right? Like if, if open AI can end up with 5 billion users, even if they aren't profitable, they can turn on that profit spigot pretty fast because by that point they've got everybody addicted to the product, right? And addicted in a good way because it's the copilot to their life, right?

1:32:11 And if I'm paying $20.00 a month for it now and they change it to 30 price elasticity, whatever. Like I'm paying 30, it's just going to, I'm paying, I'm going to do, I'm not, I'm not losing my, my copilot, right? Like that's not an option. So I, I guess I, I challenge the premise of it a little bit.

1:32:31 With that being said, I think if you're starting more of a traditional finance company, it's just hard and I would maybe stay away from doing it unless it's, unless it's more on the infrastructure side or unless it's something that's able to scale across the world without having to depend on consumers, right? Like I think, I think the age of consumer fintech is not over, but it's, it's starting over.

1:33:02 And as a result of that, I, I'm sceptical about how much unit economics really is the focus versus the story of the eventual unit economics, right. Like as long as you can tell the story about the eventual profitability, then you can get people there. But I, I don't, I don't, I don't know how true it is that they care as much as they say they care in Forbes and Wired and TechCrunch and whatever.

1:33:30 Marginal profit versus total profit, right? We'll see we'll see what happens in the end. But you just touch the nerve with the pricing of Open AI and think about it. What will happen like, OK, confession time. I think there was this time I I I was trying to leave open AI to trial and some other module.

1:33:58 I just discovered that Whoa. So I need to start training this new. Yeah, exactly right. This new thing from the scratch, I'm like no, no, no, no, no, I'm going back. There's there's, I mean, I don't know if it's sunk cost is not really the right way to think about it. But like you are, you're developing especially because of ChatGPT having memory and you know, some of those things like, yeah, you develop relation, not relationships, hopefully not relationships, but you, you develop loyalty as a result of just the product itself.

1:34:35 So. People don't understand that you know what goes into training your AI and just tell you. But this, this is an alternative. You can just easily speak to this one. It's even cheaper. And like, don't worry, you can't. You cannot understand. Yeah. And imagine that in an enterprise level, right? Like think about like, so one of the biggest companies in the US doing really cool stuff with AI is Rocket, the Rocket Mortgage actually.

1:35:00 So they basically like an underwriting and actually trying to like get somebody. Through a loan, right? There's a whole bunch of steps in that process. And if you just like apply AI horizontally through that, that's not going to go well for regulation regulators or a lot, though, there's a lot of things that could fall apart.

1:35:19 But if you take a step back like Rocket did and you say, OK, piece by piece, like we're going to we're going to turn this into basically microservices, if you will. And within some of those microservices, we're going to apply AI and explainable AI, not AI that we just, I don't know, it said this. So we did it, you know, because that doesn't work in financial services.

1:35:39 So if you can apply AI in specific places in that stack, the outcomes are crazy. Don't remember the numbers off the top of my head. This was a little while back, but Rocket announced something along the lines of like a 20% decrease in touches and a 20% increase in throughput of actual volume, right? And that was just as a matter of that kind of micro service AI attachment, which I'm keeping very broad because I barely understand it, but that, you know, it's, it's things like that where I think we're really going to see fascinating things happen.

1:36:13 I, I think we're still very, very far away from this AI that we're just going to plug into a bank and it's going to somehow make things better, right? Like stable coins will do that to some degree. But even then you're not just plugging that in. That's, that requires engineering there. There's there's building that goes into all this. Yeah, a lot of engineer and prompt engineering ease. I don't know, it's a difficult thing and you, you get better as you as you as you do it more, it's more like driving. You become a better driver by driving more. And I think I like that, that perspective that our rockets are adopted.

1:36:48 So it's that's a project management perspective. Basically, you pull, you pull it in. Yeah, exactly. It's of processes, right? And of course you optimise, you know, the chains within other processes. So if you optimise those pockets within the processes, definitely you'd have an overall optimization. And that's pretty smart.

1:37:12 And that's why we go to school, you know, to learn this thing. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's not as sexy to talk about as some other stuff, but I mean, it's the stuff that's going to really make a difference in the future. Financial services, especially in in regulated industries. I mean, the same is true in insurance. The same is true across a lot of different spaces, I think. Even even in start tops, right?

1:37:36 If you adopt that approach, right? Just adopt A project management approach and of course optimise your processes. If you optimise your processes, just T stems will be optimised right? There's automation now, right? I love automation. I don't need to the performance setting repetitive tasks, right?

1:37:56 So you are you automate the financial side to the operations and if you're happy, you don't need to do more. Smart work beats hard work all day long. But you still need that audit. Yeah, yeah. But you see, you still need the hard work. They pass it. Getting the hard work in is even what is going to make you smarter, you know?

1:38:18 Yep. A. 100%. Really you need to, you need to know what to do. Like right you said earlier, if you do not work hard enough you would not even know what to do. Yeah, yeah. And so, and I think it's another one of those things where, I mean, you know, Sam Altman, who it's so weird to me who Sam Altman has turned into. But back when he was, you know, the startup guy, what he would say over and over and over again is solve the smallest problem that you can as well as you can, right? Like take the smallest pain points and just solve it within an inch of its life.

1:38:48 Stays close to your customers. You can and iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate. And it's possible that whatever that thing is has nothing to do with AI, has nothing to do with blockchain, has nothing to do with any of these things. And if anything, I mean, I hope we don't become over obsessed with some of these new technologies because there's a, it's not great that some of our bank systems are still running on COBOL and like really old mainframes.

1:39:14 But there's a reason that they are, you know, there's, there's reasons for all these things. And I think that sometimes startups that haven't studied the history or had the chance to work inside of some of these organisations just have this assumption that it's stupidity or something, or this assumption that it's it's, they're just Luddites.

1:39:34 Very very often it's not that. Very, very often there's a very real reason that that specific server is on Prem at that very specific place, be IT security, be it whatever it might be, so. You read by Mighty Gay. You know, it's the security. Regulate your concerns. Yep, we got to be careful about getting too far over our skis with a lot of this stuff.

1:39:54 I mean, it is wildly exciting and it's going to change the world. But you know, watch Ex Machina and. You see how it could go bad? We need to put a link to that movie, you know, in the in the in the distribution section. So Speaking of strategy, like what lessons can in tech entrepreneurs learn from planner with how they have to detect from pandemic darling, it's a long term sustainability? I really think that the biggest lesson from Klarna, the thing that impresses me the most about them is the business model innovation, right?

1:40:29 It's the fact that they're serving multiple sides of a marketplace, sitting in the middle. They're they're facilitating connections in a way that no other company does, right? They're a payments company, but it's also a discoverability of that new pair of shoes. It's also right like it's, it's a place where people spend time like you're wait, hold on, rewind.

1:40:49 I'm opening a financial app to spend time doing something other than just a pure fight. Like I'm not, I'm not transferring money. I'm not investing in anything necessarily. I'm just getting on there to check out maybe some shoes, check out, you know what's going on. But the payments app and in the US especially that like you know, in Asia, super apps, things along those lines, that's very much more a thing.

1:41:18 But I think with what Klarna has been able to do is to build that multi sided marketplace and to build a brand that people want to be a part of. I think that's the other thing about a lot of what fintech has done is like the pride of a Corona card. I think it says something about you, right? In the same way actually.

1:41:36 So this is a conversation we had with their CMO and I was asking like, do you think the Corona is in some way a luxury brand? And his basic answer, he said no, but we as we got in the weeds of it, like there there's overlaps, right? Like there there's pride in the idea that I have a client of card like back in the day. I mean, if you think about the Monzo card having that orange Monzo card walking orange.

1:41:59 Card bro. That meant something, right? It was a conversation starter I so. I I traded my orange one for for the white one. See, there you go. Even even that is like that's what I'm saying is like all of these different. I don't have that route. I don't like that orange word. It annoys me like. Everybody.

1:42:19 Every top Deacon hire just has the orange one. But to our to our earlier question about growth hacking, that was a piece of growth hacking for them, right? So to the client point, I think, I think building a brand that people trust, you know, and building a building a friendly brand inside of financial services is something that's not easy to do that they've been able to pull off.

1:42:40 And I think that the like the branding experiment in the branding execution they've done there is more exciting than, you know, buy now, pay later itself, like what they've done is so much bigger than what it started with. And to me, to me, that is the most exciting piece. I don't know if that's even really a good answer, but to me that's what's so unique about it that gets me excited about it.

1:43:05 And you know, Brandon actually does. Would I say, I don't want to say Manifili or like has a yeah, influencing people. Yeah, yeah. Think yeah, Brandon is very, very big. Yeah, like I have a, you know, I fly a lot, so I have a Delta Amex Reserve card, right? If I didn't fly so much, I definitely wouldn't have that. It has nothing to do with my actual standing in society, but it's metal.

1:43:33 It's heavy. When I drop it on the table, I feel a certain way. Right? Like there's. Yeah, it's all about like, there's only so many touch points in finance where you can separate yourself. And it's those little moments that I think companies like Klarna have really been able to figure out. Interesting stuff.

1:43:50 You know those metal cards just like the the Monzo or white card as well. It's metal. And when I'm at the airport and you know, you swipe it and you get VIP access discounted, you feel good about. Yourself, yeah, you kind of like you're growing it, you know you're like yeah, excuse me, VIP coming through yeah, it's I mean all it's a card, you know, but but it gives you this it's it's emotion, right. It brings you back to the emotion of it. Yep.

1:44:19 Yeah, and I, I like what they're doing with this. You know, partnerships, you see, it's not just about the fintech, but of course, you know the partnerships they're able to build. Sometimes they just come up with a new partner and tell you, oh, partner did this cinema. You can go grab, you know, the cinema tickets, popcorns.

1:44:40 I'm like wow. If you think. Yeah, I mean a lot of things. I don't, I don't know if they would want me saying this and luckily I don't work there, so it doesn't matter. But I think a lot of what they've done is, if you squint a little bit, similar to a lot of what Amex did back with the black card, right?

1:44:56 Not that it's at that same level of like only Jerry Seinfeld has one or whatever. But if you think about kind of the you, you mentally associate yourself with this brand in a way that makes you feel good about yourself, right? And if you can achieve that in financial services, you've unlocked something absolutely gigantic.

1:45:17 You know, entrepreneurship is basically about unlocking markets, and these guys have been able to unlock multiple markets and yeah, it's a really good thing for them. But you know, you are at the heart of curated content or, you know, conversations that one needs 20 to 20. So what kind of leadership mindsets stand out to you in this space? Just before you answered that I have a philosophy. And by the way, Morgan Anderson, one of the top tax debt resolution experts in America, describes me as a modern day defence philosopher.

1:45:55 OK, I I have taken that title around with it. Right. So part of my philosophies is that when you're hiring or when. Yeah, when you're hiring to your team, when you or having partnerships and visas, you need to consider three very important things, Mindset, skill set and tool set, in that order. The mindset, the skill set and the tool set. Yeah, a lot of people, a lot of organisations disregard the mindset and it costs you heavily. It has cost me heavily as an entrepreneur. Like let's call it speed of speed, right? Because you go for the skill set and you know, you can learn very quickly that it's not just about the skill set because the skill set kind of taught the tool sets kind of provided AI's here, you know, different softwares or the

1:46:46 mindset. It's difficult to teach more a success mindset of both mindset, especially if people are not willing to adopt it. So like in terms of the mindset of what has like been impressed you in the space? This isn't really, I mean, we have, you know, 300, three, 150 speakers, some of the most impressive humans in the world.

1:47:10 Like we're going to have Jennifer Bailey who runs Apple Pay at the show and I actually get the get the privilege of getting to interview her. We have Max Levchin at the show. I mean, part of the PayPal mafia. Speaking of, you know, buy, buy now, pay later, just unbelievable people that we have coming.

1:47:27 But the thing, the thing that comes to mind at most is, is another company that will be there and be there and with some strength, they'll have a good number of folks there is Microsoft and. If you. Think about I love Microsoft. Yeah, well, but what a weird. Take a step back. Think about what a weird sense that is. You just said.

1:47:47 Would you have said that five years ago? I I'm speaking to you using a Microsoft laptop. Let's start from there. Have you always been like a Microsoft person? Yes, I'll say so. Yeah, I'll say so. Maybe. I've never owned a Mac in my life. Oh my. I you're. OK, so you and I are different in that way.

1:48:07 I'm very like I'm Apple since the beginning but. Yeah, for phones, yeah. There you go. Yeah, but. The laptops, nothing. I I don't think I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Apple, only if you sponsor my podcast. But I want here you go. Yeah, I want Microsoft to sponsor my podcast, guys. But if if you look at kind of where Microsoft was, I mean, Satya Nadella, I'm getting CE OS mixed up.

1:48:31 Satya Nadella is their CEO, right? Yeah. When you think about what he's done since taking over, it's been cultural and it's been mindset related, right? Because the amount of infighting inside of Microsoft of well, we have this resource, we have this resource, we have this resource. And like, we're not, we're not skipping levels, We're not talking amongst teams.

1:48:54 Like he disbanded all of that. Like he actually, like he's incentivizing skip level meetings. He's incentivizing just going and talking to the person. Things that we would think of as you know, inside of a startup is very obvious. But if you're trying to go from VP to SVP at Microsoft in 2012 was not in your best interest.

1:49:15 Your best interest was to do the thing that made you look good, right? And he's, I think been able to in a pretty small amount of time shift this culture and with AI that everything on top of it that they're building into one Team 1 dream, you know, for the most part heading One Direction. So if there's one company I had to pick that like really has done something unbelievable in terms of, you know, size of company and, you know, size of customer base and all that.

1:49:46 Like what Microsoft has been able to do in shifting their culture is unbelievable. And I think so much of that comes back to the simplicity of allowing humans to talk to humans and send. I mean, humans are incentives. We are beings of incentives, right? So if he shifts some incentives internally, that changes behaviour. And those incentives that he has changed has changed the behaviour significantly.

1:50:11 And as a result, Microsoft isn't this. Ten years ago you might have thought of it as I'm trying to be as nice about this as I can. They have taken thousand XA step forward in terms of their brand perception, in terms of their technology, in terms of everything, and they've done it in a pretty small amount of time.

1:50:30 And I mean, it's not like, you know, it's not like Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates were slouches. It's just it was just a different time, right? And the CE OS in between, all very, very impressive people, but really understanding the incentive driving the broader company and being able to reorganise that to run One Direction like that's, that's impressive.

1:50:51 And then how how about the acquisitions that they've made, for example, they are LinkedIn, which is very strategic. Yeah. I mean across, I mean their acquisition, their acquisition strategy, the fact that they've invested what they have in open AI at the point that they did, the fact that they're still also doing Co pilot themselves, I mean the list goes on as to the things that they're doing.

1:51:13 That makes so much sense. But to me, the biggest thing is like, I don't think a lot of those things would have been able to happen without the mindset and the culture shift. Yeah, mindset, skill set, tool set, very, very pertinent, very important. And of course, speaking about innovators, the younger generation of innovators, so especially the ones that are getting into fintech, right?

1:51:41 You. You are the pro. They are the Jews, right? So I don't know about that, but here we go. So, So what do you or what would your advice be to them right in terms of helping them not feeling overwhelmed by regulations or technology prevails first when it comes to finance? For Fentech entrepreneurs specifically, I apologise in advance for this advice folks, but my advice is go work in traditional financial services. It's that like it's work.

1:52:14 Go work at a regulator is what? That's one thing I wish I would have done. Like I wish that I at some point would have spent some time at the FDIC or the OCC or something like that. If I had not gone and spent time in banking, I would not know 90% of what I know because just that time allowed me to learn even the right questions to ask going forward to allow me to know more, right?

1:52:36 So my advice would be go work. Go work somewhere long enough in a portion of the company that you're interested in or that you or that frustrates you. Maybe find the problem that you feel is fixable or the OR candidly find the dumbest thing you can and build that thing. You know, as small as it might be, it might be as simple as you know right now, inside of this mortgage department, there's literally a person responsible for picking up a piece of paper or a stack of papers and carrying it up one flight of stairs to this.

1:53:14 That should probably be a piece of software by now, unless it's legally required that that's a human. And in the US and sometimes it is legally required that's a human. But I would say go work in the regulated industry, understand it, and then build the solution that you think actually makes sense whilst staying close to the regulators, right? That's the other thing that's changed a lot is I think in the early days of Fintech, regulators, policy makers, those doors were open, but scary, right? Founders didn't really want to kind of preempt anything like they wanted to stay quiet.

1:53:49 And I think the, the opposite is true now or well, the opposite should be true now where you know you're going, you're having that conversation, you're making sure that whatever you're building actually isn't. They're never, regulators are never going to tell you that what you're doing is right. That's not how they function. But they will give you, you know, broad strokes as to things that you can do differently and read between the lines on and you know, things along those lines. But it's, it's unfortunately the best advice I can give is go work inside of a incumbent, go work inside of a large financial industry company, insurance company, whatever it might be and solve that problem.

1:54:27 On the other side of the coin, I work for AD 5 company. Like if you are a good learner and you can understand the specificities of tokenization and also understand the basics of deposit accounts and settlement, then you should probably be working in a stablecoin company or starting one, right? It just it kind of depends on who you are as a person and how much of A self kind of self learner you are. But I really don't think anything can replace the experience of being inside of an organisation, doing something that you see could be done better and then going. 100 percent, 100%.

1:55:06 I do agree with you. There's no substitute for experience, right? Yeah, but a lot of people in this ageing time try to create shortcuts. Good luck. Yeah, good luck. You remind me of my experience in audit, and that's why I very, very much cherish my experience in audit. Right. Audit puts you in a very unique position. I I'd pretty much say auditors are accountants on steroids. They are the accountants, the accountant. So because in audit, you are doing a regulatory compliance work and of course, you'll also doing financial reporting work, you're reviewing the financial reporting of management, right? So you are just in between and you're doing auditing as well. So you grant like 3 different

1:55:58 hearts at least in one person. So it's like a cheat code for you to get your business acumen, for you to get your technical competence, for you to build relationships as well, and of course for you to learn leadership. And of course, that global argument of working with cross functional teams, because it is very important to be able to work with cross functional teams, right?

1:56:20 So it's, it's difficult getting all of that in just one single experience. And that's why I totally agree with you with that point of view of working in the traditional financial industry because that that's the only way you can get it right. We need to get the fundamentals right. Get the ABC before you get to XYZ. Exactly.

1:56:45 Yeah. And, and ask all the questions you can along the way. People, people want to help. People want, you know, I, I had a very lucky experience at MBKC where I got to work with the executive team for the most part because of just the way my job was structured. And I mean, I drove luckily their friends now and feel like I didn't actually drive them crazy.

1:57:05 But the number of just dumb questions that I would ask at the end of meetings, like we, we would have, you know, 30 minute calls, they'd end up wrapping at 20. But I didn't let people out of that room. Like I had 10 minutes of questions of what just happened because I didn't understand, you know, three different acronyms that were named. So I forced them to stay in the room and to find those acronyms for me.

1:57:24 So next time I was on the phone without them, I could actually know what I was talking about, right. And people generally want to help. So ask those questions. Yeah, but but a lot of people just assume. So you don't like, I guess something I love to say you don't get the question or ask, OK, Mark is a closed destiny. Exactly.

1:57:44 You gotta ask, baby, you gotta ask. The worst they can say is no. It has a worst and more like I've been taking nose since how long? The more nose the better. The more nose means more yeses. Yes, absolutely. The people who wait to take my nose definitely get to get the most yeses actually. So, but in, in terms of misconceptions, like what are the common misconceptions about, you know, the fintech industry that people have even till today?

1:58:17 I think, I think that at this point, I think the the biggest misconception is that fintech is so dramatically different than financial industries. The idea that like if you think about some of these fintech companies, unless you're working in a true startup, they're at a point now where they're being regulated similarly to some of the biggest banks.

1:58:36 They're like we, I don't really know how to say it other than like we made it yellow like we did it like financial, like fintech is big enough now that it is almost time for a new term like fintech is financial services. So this idea that like I, I am attached to the word fintech because it's, you know, something I've attached myself to through my whole career. But we've been doing this long enough now we've gained the trust and we've grown up, we've matured. So I, I don't think that fintech is fintech anymore. I think fintech is financial services. Yes, Fintech is financial services or I guess a lot of voice has still suffering from the trauma of yeah, that that wannabeam perception of fintech

1:59:31 had you know what I say in the last decade, but it has come to stay where it's the bosses. Even the traditional banks are won't book and letting it smell meetings with. And I think Fintech just needs more respect to the name. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's getting there. I mean, if you look at I mean, just I think Plaid is a great like kind of the penultimate example of a fintech company that has grown up into a true, you know, financial services infrastructure provider, right? Like Zach and Will and team built something that might have seemed a little nuts at certain points and you know, had UPS had downs almost got acquired to their benefit actually didn't has what seemed to have worked

2:00:20 out better that way, but they're. That's a that's a financial services infrastructure company now and they treat it that way like there's not a this idea of move fast and break things does not exist in fintech at all anymore because it can't we, we can't afford anything close to that anymore. I mean, we and true the same is true a million X in the crypto world like another FTX would set set that back another 10 years, you know, in terms of pricing, in terms of trust from regulators, everything.

2:00:54 So I think, I think now we have a new responsibility on our shoulders to carry forward with responsibility with regulation, with you know, compliant infrastructure that you know is time to put on the adult pants basically. Absolutely. We more success comes on more responsibilities. Yeah, basically, you know, at first Fintech is that term that is very close to your heart.

2:01:20 But the truth is it is not what it used to be in the last decade any longer. It is or would I say the proper industry right now and of course it is that I say that that adult industry subset of financial services, it is proper financial services. It's not just that baby industry any longer. Yeah, I'll put you that way.

2:01:51 That's one thing that's really beautiful about fintech is the innovation and of course the the rate of rapid growth that we have experienced over time. It's I think people don't give Fintech the credit that you deserve with that rapid growth. You already see industries come up and just low and low up India fields the way fintech has, has done globally and it's on a global scale. So I think they just have more respect. But you know, speaking about these innovations, right, Like what do you think you know, from a personal standpoint is? But I'll say the most exciting, you know, on a global scale. And of course, you know, the need, the financial inclusion is very, very close in my heart,

2:02:41 maybe because of the bias of, you know, my origin as a person, right, coming from the country in an emerging market. So I would always, you know, put the work out there. And of course, you know, it's my responsibility. I think it's my responsibility. I took it off. I don't know who gave it to me. I always try to ensure that I use my platform to ensure development in, you know, the country that I came from. So we should be shout out to my country. By the way, I'm always having my flag here, so. I bet that comes out during the UFCA lot. Yeah, so.

2:03:24 I guess. To answer your question, I think the one thing that I haven't mentioned that maybe is like nearest dearest, closest to my heart and what I'm most hopeful and excited about of all of this. When you take all the technologies we're talking about, right? And you think about how all this data has been siloed in very extreme ways, that leads to money laundering. Money laundering leads to human trafficking leads. I mean, I think a lot of the time when people think about money laundering, they think about narcos, right? Which in and of itself not great, but a lot worse things than drug trafficking are happening as a result of money laundering, right?

2:04:07 Human trafficking. Speaking of human trafficking. Yes. Speaking of human trafficking, I've had, I don't know if you know about the Meccan Club, right? So they're one of the world's top anti human trafficking organisations. I've had the CEO on this podcast and. Yeah, Yeah. So I mean this, this is this is the thing, right is if you think about the ability to break down those data silos, right and the ability for these bank consortiums in the same way that they're.

2:04:38 Working to move money together, if we're able to track and understand more of the how those illicit funds move, if we're able to, to gather more of those illicit funds, take them out of the market, if we're able to find more of the bad guys. Basically, the world becomes a much better place. Like when I got into fintech, the stat was that we catch less than 1% of money laundering across the world every year.

2:05:02 That stat has not changed. And it's a massive industry, massive industry. And if you think about the technologies we're talking about, if applied correctly and government in like in public and private entities are able to work together in good ways, like we could solve a lot more than 1% of money laundering folks, you know, And to me that that is actually the thing that I'm not going to say it's the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning because there's so many pieces to 2020. But like, if there was one thing in fintech that I would want to go build, like if I had to, you know, go start something tomorrow, it would be around that. It would be trying to find a way to decrease money laundering in the world, to increase the

2:05:52 quality of the know your customer rules, and to basically just try and do away with a lot of that evil. Very, very important, you know, but at least, you know, we just need to would I say, contribute the need to that we can contribute into that fight against money laundering and, of course, human trafficking. On my end, I've had Matt Friedman. Yeah.

2:06:23 Matt Friedman is the CEO of Meccan Blog. Anybody who knows about the fight against the doing trafficking would know that guy. He he's based in Hong Kong, but he's done a lot of work I think for the past 25 years or so on. Yeah. You know the fight at first. We have Team Nelson coming to the spot pass later in the year.

2:06:48 Team Nelson is the CEO of our Justice for Hope. Yeah, that's another big, you know, our charity that fights money. I'm sorry, human trafficking. Yeah, I've had Paul Moore as well. Paul Moore is, he's an entrepreneur. He's a real estate billionaire in the US and he contributes really, really deep to other fighters in money.

2:07:17 Why do I keep stealing money laundry? Because he's. Doing trafficking well, because you're probably saying it because money laundering is, it's not just about human trafficking, right? Like, I mean, I, I use that as something very visceral because we can all agree that it's absolutely terrible, right?

2:07:32 But there's a, there's a show on National Geographic called Trafficked. It's run by a woman named Mariana Van Zeller. It's I've had the pleasure of interviewing her a couple times at money 2020. And basically what she does is she goes into a new dark market every week. She'll go and literally follow from how fentanyl gets created where like the initial, you know, like the, the chemicals all the way into the lab all the way into the actual final consumer.

2:07:57 She does the same with ghost guns. She does the same with like there's so human organs, right? I mean, there's so many things that money laundering is driving that we, we don't think about South in terms of like humanising it. One, go watch traffic on National Geographic because Marianne is the shit.

2:08:15 But two, take a step back and think about the world of that dark money. It's, it's not good. It's not good at all. And it's actually really, really scary. And if we were able to solve even 2%, the world would look a lot better. So. Yeah, because, you know, it's very little money fighting against a lot of money.

2:08:36 So like how? It's it's systems I. Don't know. Yeah, and I think we finally have. A knife to a gunfight. Yeah, yeah, it really is. It really is. But I think now we, I think we got our guns. The question is how do we put them together? How do we build them and how do we deploy them correctly? And that's an exciting question, exciting metaphor that I hope doesn't get mixed, but you know what I mean.

2:09:00 Precision beats power, How many beats beat? Indeed. I think it's just a matter of strategy and of course we we're able to win that war against our human trafficking because it is very, very, very inhumane. It's unacceptable. All of it is man. I mean, it's, you know, I mean, when you think about just fentanyl coming and across the border from the top, from the bottom in the US, I mean, there's, there's, there's so many, so many things that money laundering powers that are the evils of the world. And if we could make a real dent on that, then we're doing something really, really good for the world. So anyways, that's that's my public service announcement is if you're thinking about going

2:09:47 and starting something, think about money laundering, think about anti money laundering specifically. Interesting stuff. I hope they get to hear you on that. Wow. We've actually been on this spot for more than two hours. You said it, you said it our did it that we're going to have a lot of fun today. So we we will have our Part 3, the course. You know this is Part 2 big fire round. Are you ready to?

2:10:19 I'm always ready to rumble, baby. Quick, fire me. Let's go. OK, good, good, good. I love that. You know, a friend of mine asked me Are you ready? And I said I was born ready. I don't know if I was born ready, but I'm ready right now. OK, let's go. So the one machine tech startup everyone should keep an eye on right now. One second.

2:10:40 That's a tough one. Now I see why you say you are not born ready. Now I just want to make sure. So there's a lot of companies inside of fintech that have very, very similar names and I want to make sure that I'm saying the right name because there's two companies, Braille, Braille, Braille dot XYZ. It was this just because my brain's tired. I couldn't think of it.

2:11:03 But it's that when I was talking earlier about the guy that started the company in Des Moines and is now doing the the stablecoin stuff, I keep an eye out for Braille. Ben Melon is one of the most impressive and good humans out there building in fintech. So I don't know if that was like lightning speed that I got you that answer because I wanted to make sure I said the right thing, but Braille dot XYZ would definitely be my answer. I say if it's better to be right down to the past, yeah. OK, so what's the biggest leadership lesson you've learned in the past year?

2:11:41 Empower your team to an irrational level. Make your team believe that they can do more than maybe they even can. I there's a really quick story with this. So I used to coach for American soccer, for everyone else, football. I used to go to goalkeepers when I was in college or when I was in university. I used to coach goalkeepers for my high school. And there was this really impressive kid that just played baseball.

2:12:08 And we've at my old school, we never had good goalkeepers. Like I ended up playing in college, but I had never touched the ball until my first year in high school. Just kind of ended up that way. And I always just told him that he was the best goalkeeper in the state of Kansas. Like athletically everything, like just he's competing against kids that have been playing since they were three.

2:12:29 Who cares? He's faster, he's stronger. He's going to go harder. He's going to yell louder. He's going to come at you harder. He's going to communicate more like he is the 1. And I would like, I would pull him to the side before every time getting a little emotional. I'll pull him to the side before every game. And I'd be like, you are the one. It's you.

2:12:48 It's you. Ain't nobody else, it's you. So I think like second guessing your team, like, you know, you got to validate, you got to make sure that you know, people are doing the things they're doing. But when it comes to true leadership, I mean, I think it's empower your team and make them believe they can do more than maybe they can even do.

2:13:10 I think that's very. Important by the way, he ended up playing for two years, was Allstate, got college offers and like became one of one of the best goalkeepers in Kansas. Actually he got he got more accolades by the end of his time at the school than I did and I was very proud of that. Yeah, like you definitely will be proud of that.

2:13:29 Like, I remember being a teacher, being a lecturer, and I had some of my students, like being a national prizes. I never won a national prize myself. And, you know, seeing my own students being prizes. And I've seen a number of my students go on to do, like, really great things. Some of my students have gone to Oxford for the masters and, you know, gone to Harvard.

2:13:52 And I'm like, wow, like I think I'm proud of myself. Let's keep making, let's keep making the impact. You know hey if you could host any 3 guests leaving or dead, you know on Fintech Family Hour who who they do what. Any guests or any 3 guests? Any 3. Any three man Charlie Munger definitely 100% Patrick Collision. I feel sexist that they're just all going to be men, but Jamie Dimon.

2:14:24 I just feel like the conversation between those three would be absolutely fascinating. Wow. Why Charlie Monger? Why not Warren Buffett? I know I had to guess. Because so Warren Buffett is, I mean, obviously one of the most impressive and amazing investors in the history of the world, but Warren Buffett would not be Warren Buffett without Charlie Munger like that, that relationship. You know, they weren't they weren't as close in later years, things like that.

2:14:51 But if you've never heard Charlie Munger speak, go go to YouTube, listen to Charlie Munger like his he's done hours at Michigan where he just gets interviewed. There is a few brains in the world like his that are simultaneously his, his ability to simplify the complex and to do it in a fun way. I mean, the man's, the man's funny is another thing, you know, And I think that something that we forget a lot is like to learn, you need to be entertained. And he's, you know, I mean, I think entertainment Exactly. Yeah.

2:15:26 So I mean, I wouldn't pick him because of the entertainment, but he's just one of the most prolific thinkers and one of the most prolific doers in the history of the world, I think. And he didn't optimise for wealth, right? Like he warns many X tend to 10s of thousands of XS more wealthy than him. I mean, I don't even I think Charlie died a billionaire, but maybe not.

2:15:53 I mean, he's definitely in the hundreds of millions. The one thing he ever bought that was like really, really big for him was a boat. It was just a really big dumb boat. It just, it was like basically a yacht, but it would break down all the time. He didn't use it that much, but he wanted a boat.

2:16:07 He's just a. Unique man that has created some really interesting mental models in terms of how to live life. And I think when you take a person like that together with my, who I believe to be the philosopher king of fintech, Patrick Carlson, and I just find Jamie Dimon to be fascinating in general. Like those 3.

2:16:31 I mean, I, that would be maybe one of the few times I'd actually shut up. Like, you know, I would just let them talk. Interesting stuff. Jamie Darwin, I think, man, he's got some, would I say, very strong opinions or on controversial issues. Ed he just makes him a figure for you to see back and leak a lot. OK.

2:16:52 Was my maybe my replacement, like if I had like, maybe Elon instead of Jamie? Maybe. Yeah. I don't know. That's a tough one. That's it. That's it. That's definitely like a, you know, it's a strong, strong debate between those two. But I would not replace Elon Musk for Jamie, or for Charlie Munger or for Patrick Olson. Let's have let you you turned into Mount Rushmore then. Exactly.

2:17:20 Basically, yeah, Yeah. And then that's not about. Rushmore So OK, so what's one book or podcast that completely changed your mindset? Podcast to change my mindset. Man, it's been so many. I'll go with a book. So there's a the Almanack of Naval Ravikant and this was happens to be written by one of my best friends.

2:17:45 But Naval is kind of a legend of this, of Silicon Valley, one of the founders of Angel List and similarly A philosopher king of his time, a philosopher king of not just startups, though, of health, wealth and happiness, right? So he's about building the best life you can and not just. Work work, work, work work. So the almanack of Naval Rafikant, I think would be with the one that had has had the biggest impact on my life. And it's the kind of book that you can pick up and just open to any page and there's value.

2:18:21 You don't need the context of the previous, you know, 20 pages or whatever it is. And I do on a regular basis. Just open it, take a quote and think about that quote for the day. That is Eric Jogginson. Yeah, proud new father as well it. Would I definitely have to keep that being and I see it's quite it's quite cheap. It's quite cheap.

2:18:46 Yeah, I think it's, I don't, I have no idea what it cost, to be honest, but it's the Audible he just redid. He just redid the audio version with actual some excerpts with an interview with Naval that he did. I mean, it's just Naval I think is probably the most prolific tweeter ever. I mean, hundreds of thousands of tweets. He said so much publicly.

2:19:08 And to write that book, Eric literally read every word the man has ever said, written every piece, and he got it down into the succinct. Like, I don't know how many pages it is, but it's pretty succinct. And it is. I hope they have it on being kissed. There you go. Yeah, I would imagine. I would imagine they do.

2:19:29 Yes they do. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's worth, it's worth a read. And and it's one of those books that, you know, you don't, you don't have the need to pick up and read from beginning to end because I don't think I could read it from beginnings. I mean, it's just you need time to digest. You need like, it's one of those things where you can just pick it up, open to a specific page and think on one sentence for three days.

2:19:55 Just that kind of book. Love that. I don't know what you think about apps type blinkers, but I love blinkers, you know? In the stage in time it is difficult kind of book around or you know how busy we can like it just helps you to compress them to digest it. I'm yeah, I like, I like them. For me, I'm a I'm a podcast addict, so most of my ears are taken up if unless I'm at the gym, it's pretty much podcast time.

2:20:25 So I don't listen to as many books or read as many books as I used to just because it feels like especially right now in finance, like if if you read a book, you're probably like a year or two behind if you're talking about the, the actual industry, but in terms of like mental models about how to live life. You know, yeah, yeah, those last a while. I love I love those I love those you know feel like but I see Evergreen everything principles.

2:20:51 I remember the the the verse has been my father ever kissed me was thinking we'll reach by an apple and you. Know Yep, Yep, I've read that one too. I couldn't get through more than like 3 pages I don't think because I was like OK, I'm pretty sure I need to think and grow rich. Got it. Hey, you know. The very first book I OK I bought 2 books, you know, for myself with my money.

2:21:14 The various press 2 books I got where Bill Kanecki possibly and friends and influence people on the art of public speaking. Yeah, how to win, actually how to win friends and influence people. I feel like is one that have Gen Z and John Alpha skip could be a scary thing. Like I think maybe it even needs to be like rewritten in a more modern fashion because yes, it's I would agree on that one as well. Yeah, very, very important book.

2:21:42 Wow. And of course, the very last question for you is the future of money is Dash. What do you think? Being built right now, baby. OK, I love. That and of course with that, it's love and respect to you. I always podcast the SI unit for measuring life this time and when a person shares the time with you to share their life with you.

2:22:08 It's been a pleasure. It's truly been a pleasure, man. This has been, this has been fun. It's rare that I actually get to like, you know, explore and, you know, conversate on these. You. Know because we're trying to talk talking points. So it's been a pleasure man and I really do want to do it again.

2:22:23 And let's let's talk offline about some of the partnership stuff because I think we could do. Some I'm so new to Lee, you know, whoa, man, now, now I mean, tell you what, what what do we. Say we got to go to AUS, we got to find the right time, we got to find the right country and we need to go to a UFC together.

2:22:43 You're coming to London again. Good morning like. Ali, any dude come in? Do UFC tell Olkadina? By the way, I have manifested this right that I would have been a right on this podcast. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. I like it. I have manifested this. You know about the PKFC, right?

2:23:04 About the PKFC. Yeah, the BKFC Ben Occo Python Championship. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. DV Feldman. I've had DV Feldman in this podcast. Dude, you have so many second degree connections to Dana. You Yeah, yeah, I think, I think what you should do is just walk around Vegas and just try and find Dana at the right point with the right number of drinks in.

2:23:26 And then I bet he'll do. He'll say yes. All good data, I'm looking for you. We'll track him down. We'll get him. Let it, let it, let us track him down. Let us track him down. Wow, interesting stuff, right? Yeah, gratitude is good attitude, right? And 1st, I am very, very grateful to you. And I always say this to the audience, always with the company in life, right? Conceived beliefs track the tribe and achieve. For me it's a goodbye.

2:23:55 And of course, as Zach and Do you want to leave a shout out to anybody and 1st, do you want to leave any last words before you say goodbye? Well, I mean, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't say Money 2020 USA happening in Vegas in October because it's so many dates. In my head. I want to say 26th through 29th.

2:24:14 Go to us.money2020.com. Depending on what part of the world you're in, what you're interested in. We also have shows in Europe. Amsterdam is going to be our show in Amsterdam happens next year. We also just two years ago launched a show in Asia and Bangkok. So depending where you're at in the world, what you're trying to learn about, come to money 2020.

2:24:34 Reach out if you're interested and just want to have a chat. I'm on LinkedIn. Happy to, you know, occasionally busy, especially close to show, but always happy to help and mutual. Thank you for your time. This has been an absolute pleasure and really glad we actually got to meet, spend the time on and I'm excited to do this in person. Absolutely.

2:24:53 Where you wonder where we're going to the studio and 1st I have to end this recording. That's important. All right, let's do it. Let's do it.