#241 - MLEE JR.

Yeah, so I graduated a college in 2008 up in New Jersey and graduating college in 2008, all along through college. I'm like, "I can't wait to, I'm going to go work in New York, I'm going to go work in finance." Then I graduated in 2008 and I realized that no one in New York was hiring. Some of my resume to 30 different funds, 30 plus different funds and I wasn't getting anything back. At the time, I knew that things were breaking in the world with the global financial crisis. I didn't quite understand how deep it was and I've become somewhat of a student of that era since then. Anyway, yeah, so I graduated in 2008. I can't get a job and actually spoke at commencement. It was something I was really proud of. Then I ended up getting a job offer to move down to Raleigh, North Carolina. The only job offer I got, so I told mom and dad, "I'm packing up and moving down south and I moved down to Raleigh to start this job." When I moved to Raleigh, it was my first time there. My job wasn't starting for three months, so I had a three month time period to really learn the lay of the land. As a kid that just graduated college, make a little bit of money as well. The last four years of school, I worked full time and went to school at night. I still had some student loans that were coming due and I needed to make some money. When I moved to Raleigh, I ended up getting a job at a local restaurant waiting tables. The story of that is even a little bit crazy because I was walking around this new multipurpose commercial real estate development that was right by where I had moved. There was a restaurant. I'd been in Raleigh a week at this time. There was a restaurant and the sign out front said, "Grand Opening." I went in and they were still building it inside. It turned out to be the general manager who walks up to me. He thought I was a contractor coming in because the restaurant wasn't even open yet. He said, "Oh, are you here for the?" I said, "No, just move. I'm just checking out the area and checking out the restaurant." He told me about it. Then it just came to my mind. I was like, "Grand Opening, maybe they need some help waiting tables. I need to make some money." I told Bob was his name. I started full-time job in three months, but up until then I've got nothing but time on my hands. At the time, he pulled a little receipt slip out and he said, "Write your number down. We've already had everyone go through orientation. If something comes up, I'll give you a call." Two weeks later, I was at Home Depot and I got a phone call from a 919 area code. I didn't know anyone in Raleigh at the time. I picked it up and it was Bob from the restaurant and Bob's Mike. Tonight's the grand opening. We're live right now and one of our guys didn't show up. Is there any chance you could come in tonight? I told him, Bob, I said, "Bob, I'm at Home Depot right now, but I'll come in. It'll take me about an hour to get in." He said, "Just wear black pants and a white t-shirt." I went home, put on some pants, went in. I didn't even know how to tie on all the aprons and all that stuff. Bob said to me, "You've waited tables before, right? The truth is I'd never waited a table in my life before." I walked into this restaurant and grand opening. Places just slammed, like lying out the door and I'm like, "What am I getting myself into?" Then after that first night, the General Manager came to me and said, "That went really great. Would you like to stay on?" I said, "Hey, you know, back again, I've three months to my job starts. I've got nothing but time right now. I'd be happy to." The second night that I was waiting tables, it was a Thursday night after the grand opening. I waited on a table of a husband and wife. They were in, you could tell they were in a hurry. They told me that they were. They were going to see a show downtown. They knew the order right away. The bill ended up coming out to just over $40. I went back to swipe the card. When I swiped the card, it was a metal credit card. At the time in my early 20s, I had no idea what an AMEX black centurion card was. I didn't even know those things existed. When I held this card, I went, "What in the world is this?" I swiped the card, brought it back to the General Manager and his wife. I brought it back. Takes out the pen and writes on it and hands it back to me and opened. On the tip, it said $100-$100. My face gets red. I'm flustered. I said, "Thank you so much. I don't even know what to say, but thank you. This means so much to me." The gentleman said to me, "All you need to say is thank you. Everything else falls into place after that." He said some other sayings that I always remember. He said, "Good service is like an umpire in baseball. You shouldn't know they're there until you need them." The guy was just so interesting, not to mention the $100 tip as a kid that just graduated college. That night, I went home and I looked up his name online. All I found at the time were SEC filings for different funds. I could tell this guy's in finance. They do this in North Carolina. I thought they only do it in New Jersey and New York, where I'm from. It turns out that he was the co-founder of CapTrust, which is the largest RIA in the country. As of today, they have over a trillion dollars in assets under management. He also spun out of CapTrust, a fund division that managed hedge funds, private equity funds and things like that. After I found out who he was, that Monday, just a couple days later, so I waited that table on a Thursday so that Monday and maybe not that Friday, I called his office. He said, "The guy's name is David Perkins." Mr. Perkins, I left the message. He still has the message today, all these years later. Mr. Perkins, I waited on your table the other night. I want to let you know that waiting tables isn't the only thing I do. I'd love to find out more about your firm and I need to return call. I called again a couple days later, left another message, didn't get a return call. Then it was about a week later. I'm in the restaurant and this time I wasn't waiting tables. I was actually sitting at the bar area getting something to eat. It was right next to my house, this place. I'm sitting there and the dining room is behind me. He picture me sitting at a bar area and this is a sushi restaurant as well. Back to the, when I showed up on the grand opening, I was the only American person that was waiting tables at. I'm sitting at the sushi restaurant and facing the guys making sushi, dining rooms behind me and all of a sudden, and I'm just eating and all of a sudden, the general manager, he comes up to me and he places a glass of wine right in front of me and he says, "This is from Mr. Perkins." I turn around and there was Mr. and Mrs. Perkins in the restaurant eating and he saw me up there and he sent me a glass of wine. I was embarrassed. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I just called this guy. I found his number. I left them two voice messages. Here I am flustered again, sitting there wondering what's going to happen next. What happened next was he finished his meal and him and his wife both came up to me at the bar and he gave me a little nudge on my shoulder like an elbow and he said, "Michael Lee's, like three times Michael Lee." I was like, "I know Mr. Perkins. I didn't mean to step on your toes." I just, and he was like, "No, no, no. He's like, if you want to return call from me, you need to call three times. You only call it twice. You only personally get through a turn call after three times is my wife and his wife was standing right there and she laughed. It was very charming the way he said he wasn't being like rude at all. I said, "Well now that I know that, I'm going to call you tomorrow. I'm going to keep calling you to give me a return call." So I called him the next day. He gave me a return call. I went in for an hour interview. After the interview two days later, someone else from his office called and said, "Hey, sorry. We don't have anything for you. We need someone licensed ready to hit the ground running and you're just not that guy." I was like, "Man, I don't even know who this person was. I never even met him. Why didn't Mr. Perkins call me and tell me?" I don't even know what license means. What are they talking about? I said, "Okay." I called Perkins back. His assistant picked up at the time and I'm still friends with her all these years later. She picked up and I said, "Hi, is Mr. Perkins available?" I was in for an interview with this Michael. He said, "Do you have a call scheduled with him?" She was screening me out. I didn't even know it was screening out and then at the time. I said, "No. Put me through his voice mail." On this voice message, I said, "Mr. Perkins, I don't want to wait for the door to open. I want to knock the door down. I want to get licensed. I want to, I'm ready." He called me back same day and said, "I want you to come back in for another interview. Went in for another interview. It wasn't an hour this time. It was about 15 minutes." And what he said in this interview was, "I want you to go find a guy by the name of Mike Hudson." Mike Hudson works at CapTrust, and I hired Mike Hudson years ago. He was a banker. I told him bankers would never make it in this industry. And now he's a number one producer at the largest RIA in the country all these years later. And once you find him, ask him what he needed to do to get an opportunity with me. And if you think you can do that, I'll give you the same shot. So I said, "How do I, can you share his contact information with me?" And as he was walking out of the door of the interview, he turned around and looked at me and said, "You'll figure it out." And he left. And I went down to my car at the time I had a black berry with a scroller wheel on the side, and I looked up CapTrust on Google on the black berry browser, and it turns out it was a mile away. It's like, "Oh, okay." So I got in my car with my, you know, boxy suit that didn't fit, and that I was wearing to get ready for this interview. And I went over to CapTrust, and I went to the front desk, and I said, "Hi, is Mike Hudson here?" And the receptionist, back to the screening out. I learned very quickly what screening is. Do you have a meeting with Mike? And I said, "No, but Mr. Perkins sent me over." "Oh, Mr. Perck, hold on one second." So here comes Mike Hudson walking up, and he said, "Come to the door." He said, "You work for David?" And I was like, "No, I don't, but he sent me over to talk with you." And he just kind of chuckled. He said, "Come on back and you found a conference room." He sat down in the conference room. So it's the why did David send you over? Well, David told me that he gave you an opportunity many years ago, and he said that I need to find you, and once I find you, I need to ask you what you needed to do to get that opportunity with him. And he told me if I can do it, then he'll give me the same shot. And he just started laughing. And he thought it was just hilarious. And he was like, "Oh, man." And he's like, "David." He's like, "You know, I wanted to work in this business. David didn't want to hire me, and I was kind of begging for a job." And then what he told me was, he said, "I'm not going to hire you, but I'll sponsor you for the licensing exam, the Finder licensing exam. And if you pass, I'll promise you a job for one year." And during that one year, and then he told me, he was like, "David, it's very old school." He was like, "During that one year, we're going to have some mutual goals. And if you hit those goals, you're going to be set. And if you don't, we'll part ways as friends. That's the old school part." And then Mike Hudson went on to tell me, "I tried to quit three times in the first year, and David wouldn't let me. And here I am now." So it was a great meeting, and Hudson's just an incredible person, but right when I got out of that, I called back the David. And I said, "Hey, I just met with my Hudson, a cap trust." You just met with my Hudson, a cap trust? Where'd you meet with? He was shocked. It was probably an hour and 15 minutes after David told me to go find him. And I was like, "I just went over to cap trust and asked for him." And he's like, "Well, what did he tell you?" I told him what he told me, and he said, "Congratulations son, you just took the first step. I got back on. I'm going to get you all with my assistance. You'll get you registered for the exam, and we'll also buy your books." So I ended up getting back on the assistant, got registered for the exam, got my books, studied for about a week and a half. And because I had this other job starting, that I need to figure out, like, "Where am I going to be working?" The reason I moved to Raleigh was to do something completely different. I studied for a week and a half, passed the licensing exam. I passed the licensing exam on a also a Thursday. And when I got into the car, after passing the exam, the results come up on the screen after, one of the most intense, maybe 10 seconds of my life. The results came up and I came out of there storming out. I called my parents almost in tears. And then right after that, still in the drive home, I called David. I told him, "David, I passed the exam." And, "Congratulations, and when do you want to get started?" And I said, "How about tomorrow?" And tomorrow was a Friday. And he was like, "Why don't we start on Monday?" And thinking back to that, that did make a lot of sense to have the weekend kind of get myself together. But I showed up on Monday. And the next decade of my life was spent there. I became a partner of the firm, really learned everything there. And you got to work with Mark Yusko, the former CIO of UNC Chapel Hills in Diamond. He was the first CIO on a fund that I worked on. And Mark is to this day a great friend of mine was just texting with him yesterday. And then I left. I left after a decade. It was just the toughest thing. But maybe I should stop there because I could keep going on and on about this story. But that's kind of like it started. And then the first decade, and then I left to do something on my own. But full circle, what I did on my own, I started a firm called God to the Capitol. Three years later, it was acquired to form God to the partners, which I still am an owner in. And God to the partners was acquired by that same guy whose table I waited on and whose firm I left. And partnership I left those years prior. So just an insane kind of full circle thing that's happened in my life and career. But I'm grateful for it all. Wow. Well, I've been as we discussed before starting the recording. I've done a lot of these podcasts over the years. Probably a little over 200. And I almost always get the origin story from from a guest. And that's definitely one of the more interesting and cooler sort of more of serendipitous butterfly effect ones that I've heard. I'm a big believer in like, you know, this one little thing goes differently and everything changes. And have like examples from my own life that I reflect upon. But I mean, all of these little things that seem so inconsequential at the start of that story with popping into the restaurant. That was about to open. Guy giving you a call and opening night. Like basically, if that guy, whoever that waiter was, wasn't a no-show on opening night. Like who knows what all would have gone differently. You know, I mean, like you never might have been a waiter there. You wouldn't have been there that second night. All this sort of goes differently. So whenever I hear like these small sort of things that sort of add up into this incredible story, it's just like pretty pretty amazing. And yeah, I mean also just like on the one hand, you know, the guy giving you a big tip. Parking's giving you a nice tip and everything is cool. And everything. But like also what stands out to me from that story is like you just going and getting it and the persistence and what he said about like, you know, you need to call three times. Guy just sounds like the man basically. But also he wasn't by any means giving you a hand out. Like you had to go and earn it. So awesome origin story was not aware of that. You mentioned that you'd written a piece on this at some point. I would have remembered if I had read that and I will remember it now. But yeah, I mean, I would love to sort of pick the story up where you left off. And you know, you don't have to you can tell as much or as little as you want about each step along the way. But where you and I sort of got introduced as more in this sort of crypto world, whether it was like Twitter or Farkaster, you know, being interested in a lot of the same tokens and projects and apps and things like that. So it's not obviously apparent how you went from traditional finance to getting involved in crypto things. And maybe that's a piece of the story. But yeah, with Luxury, sort of pick it up wherever you'd like and go from there. Yeah. And to the to the to the point and I'll jump forward. But to the the point you made about all these little things that end up happening. It was about three years into my time working working for David or working with David. And we were traveling together for one of the first time. I think it was the first time. And on the way back, we David had our seats upgraded to first class and knows I guess 23 years old maybe at the time. And I'd never I'd never sat in the first class seat in my life. So that was the first time ever. And we're headed back to Raleigh after some meetings and having a beer. And it just felt like a moment for me like, okay, I'm sitting first class for the first time ever with the guy who gave me this shot. And I said to him, I was like, David, I'm so lucky to have met you and got that $100 tip that night. I just I'm so lucky. He said, you're not you're not lucky. He's like, it's your you may be lucky. It's your return on luck that matters. He's like, I've probably given over a hundred people a hundred dollar tip just like that in my life. Not a single person has ever done what you've done after getting a hundred dollar tip. So that's he was like, that's return on luck. And I start to think that's always stuck with me really the rest of my life. It's like we all get lucky. Certain times throughout life. But can we can we generate a return on that luck? And it's not just financial. It's it's it's it's life. I mean, it's the the relationships that I've made, the friendships, the knowledge that I've built, all of these things have been just incredible. And it really started, maybe it even started before. I never even really thought about that. What if that guy didn't show up? Or what if that guy did show up that night? And I didn't get to wait those tables that night. It's just crazy, all of that stuff that happens. But yeah, so-- I think if I can just make one comment on the luck thing, because I think it's really interesting. And I've thought about this quite a bit myself, which is that whether you want to call it the luck opportunity, and then the return on luck or whatever you might like to call it, I've thought about sort of-- everyone gets a certain amount of lucky breaks, lucky opportunities. But I think even more in the context of recognizing them. So it's not necessarily that maybe people-- like, people obviously, he gave $100 tip to 100 people, and none of them took it as far as you did with much success as you did to create a return on that luck, basically. But some of them might have been too scared to reach out, like, then maybe they wanted to, but they didn't know how. Some of them maybe only left one voice male, so to speak, and not a second or a third. And so on and so forth. But I would imagine a number of people just didn't even think, like, oh, no. Here is like a potential lucky break that I can do something with. And so just like the sheer recognition, and I feel like that's a big part of why-- I'm sure you know people who sort of consider themselves to be unlucky people or something like that. And then you probably also know people who consider themselves to be sort of lucky. And I think the difference in those two people is basically whichever one you believe will become true. Because if you consider yourself to be an unlucky person, you're going to never sort of see a lucky break when it hits you. And if you consider yourself to be a lucky person, you're sort of always on the lookout. And I find that a lot of the time, the lucky break is disguised as actually an unfortunate thing sometimes. And that's why whatever your sort of belief system might be, I think it's, for me, at least it's been important to have a perspective of something along the lines of everything happens for a reason, or obviously, if you're sort of religious, then maybe there's sort of a religious component to it. But whatever it might be, some sort of faith that when something happens that is seemingly bad, there might actually be something good inside of it. Obviously, in this case, there wasn't anything bad about getting a $100 tip. But you might have been-- I'm not saying you were-- there could have been good reason for you to be like, hey, I wanted to graduate and go into finance in New York. And it's kind of been this tough time with 2007-2008, and what was me, and now I'm in Carolina. Like, what am I doing here? But instead, you're out there making the best of things, and it turns into everything that follows. Anyway, all it's just to say, I think, I'm also a big believer that in sort of this concept of what he described as sort of this return on lock. And like, anyone-- I think there's sort of another thing that I think about is there's a-- I think people somewhat do-- it's like, somewhat unfortunate, I think, that a lot of people who are very successful when you ask them how they did what they did. The first thing they usually say is that they got very lucky. And that's fine. There's a humility to that. I get it. But actually, I think what will be more valuable is if those people were to sort of tell you how they took advantage of those lucky opportunities. Because that's actually-- a lot of people get lucky breaks. But not a lot of people go on to become so-and-so, whoever it is that's super successful in whatever ways that they are. And so there's this idea, I think, that actually, like some people get lucky and others don't. And that's sort of like the difference. And obviously, there are certain things, where you're born and who your parents are. Obviously, those things you can't choose at all. But as life goes on, I think some people get more lucky opportunities than others, of course. But there's also as much sort of variance as there is on that side of the spectrum, I think there's a ton of variance on people's eagerness and ability to recognize the lucky breaks and take advantage, which I think makes just as much of a difference. You put that extremely well, and it gets me thinking, it's return on luck. You can't get a return on luck if you don't identify that luck. And that's something I wasn't even really-- the way you articulate it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And so it's like sort of the return on luck is almost a product of the number of lucky opportunities, which I do think there are also things that you can do to increase the number of lucky opportunities that you get. People, there's all sorts of things. The more you do things, the more lucky breaks you're going to get, just keep doing things. I am a believer in that. I'm also a believer in-- I think you can be doing a bunch of stuff, but doing it in the privacy of your own home and no one knows and no one cares. And you're probably not going to get lucky. But part of the reason I've done things the way that I've done over the last several years is I'm very internet-first, internet-forward. And that's because the internet is the most public domain in the world. And so there's every opportunity for anyone in the world to see what you're doing at a given time. And if you keep doing stuff, the lucky opportunities will keep coming. And then obviously the recognition and taking advantage of those lucky opportunities comes into play. But anyway, little sidebar on the concept of luck, which I think is very important. And maybe not totally luck after all. But yeah, we'd love to sort of pick up on your story from where you're at left off. Yeah, so after a decade, I decided that I'm going to be doing something on my own and spun out. And I started Gondola Capital with another one of my friends. It was a co-founder of Gondola Capital, or 50/50 partners on it. But I was a called Gondola. Yeah, Gondola Capital. Why was it called Gondola? Oh, so my partner, my co-founding partner, lived in Vail. And when we were forming the entity, we were sitting at his kitchen table. And you could see the mountain right there. And our first name was Riva Ridge, which is one of the longest and most popular runs in Vail. And so we filed everything. We came up with logos. And very quickly, we ended up getting-- we had an attorney reach out to us from a hedge fund in New York that had our AUM at the time was zero. And they had a lot more money than us. And they were telling-- their name was Riva Ridge. And we looked at that. And they basically said, cease and desist. And immediate-- and we had domains registered that they didn't have. And we just said, hey, we don't want any trouble. We also have some stuff. We'll just send it to you. It's OK. And we sent them all of our domains and just said, we'll come up with another name. And we didn't spend much money at all at that point on getting a name together. So I'm like, what are we going to name it? And we're looking out the window. And you can see the gondola off in the distance. And we're like, how about gondola? There's gondola in another gondola. And we looked, did it have had a search done? You guys are free and clear to use gondola capital. So we just went with gondola capital. It was kind of a second choice spur of the moment thing. And then it just stuck. And then we ran with it. I feel like it's a nice name both because it's just kind of like a nice word that you don't hear that often. And also it is kind of short and just like a nice sounding word. And then also like a gondola, I think, like up into the right, basically, not necessarily up into the right, but up the mountain. And that's sort of like a good representation for a financial firm. I feel like-- Yeah. And even like getting to your destination, if you're talking about the gondola that travels by Wooder Way, there's some cool stuff around that name. But yeah, it came from just seeing a gondola in bail. And our first idea, getting shot down-- Nice. So that was that. But the reason for doing it. So in 2016, the first CIO, as I mentioned earlier, the first CIO chief investment officer that I worked for was Mark Yusko and Yusko, the former CIO at UNC Chapel Hills endowment. Prior to that, he was the number two guy at Notre Dame under Scott Malpass. And he became really a rock star in this endowment institutional world after his time at UNC with 1998 to 2001. Because he was the first one that went into UNC's endowment, which was a large endowment by Nacubo standards, greater than a billion dollars. And he was the first one that they were heavy and traditional investments. And he was the first one to go in there, and he was a young guy. And then the news and observer locally wrote this young, brash investor is turning your grandpa CDs into Wall Street's latest schemes. There's a headline that was written about him. Because Mark decided that the endowment needed to have a significant allocation to alternative investments, just like what he learned in Notre Dame. games and down and many of the other large endowments that were literally laughing UNC. And so Mark found that the UNC management company became the CIO of the endowment and they went from like 2% in alternatives to like 40% in two years. And they also entered the top performers of large endowments in the country as a result of that. So Mark ended up spinning out of the endowment and doing stuff on the private side and he was the CIO the first fund I worked for so I got to travel with Mark and learn really everything in my early days about alternative investments from someone as sharp as Mark is. And in 2016, Mark started to talk a lot about Bitcoin and it may have been 2015 but it really started to hit my radar in 2016. And I thought it was really interesting. I got a Coinbase account and started to just, I thought I knew everything about crypto because I held some Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum, the only three things that you could possibly hold on Coinbase at the time. And I was a crypto expert. Little that I know this entire world was a lot more vast and at the time about to become a lot more vast. And so that's my first kind of like getting intro to crypto and I was just fascinated by it. I heard about Bitcoin in 2013 with Silk Road. I viewed Bitcoin as a scam at the time which was a learning lesson of be intellectually curious not intellectually dishonest because I actually told people in 2013 I was like, oh that just sounds like a scam. And I did zero work on it. How could you say that if you've done zero work? And I looked back on that. It's a learning lesson. It's like you can't do that kind of thing. It's really intellectual dishonesty because once I finally read the Bitcoin white paper, it started to hit me. I'm like, this is really interesting. And so anyway, in 2018, I wanted to start my own firm. I got to meet over my decade in that in Trial File. I got to meet a lot of GPs that were running different strategies. And I also at the time start to see crypto become more of an institutional, investible asset. Let's call it like that. And Mark Yusko was running a Morgan Creek Capital Management. He built a new division called Morgan Creek Digital Assets. And under Morgan Creek Digital Assets, Mark was running private equity funds where they were investing companies that were blockchain oriented. And Mark's fund, Morgan Creek Blockchain Opportunity Fund 1, was the first fund that got an investment from a public pension fund, which was Fairfax County Public Pension Fund. And I was just fascinated by this institutional movement. I mean, they've committed significant capital to Morgan Creek's fund. And then I started, so okay, so leave that there. This is an investible asset class, something I'm very interested in. I've gotten close to a lot of these GPs. And I think I could help them from a fundraising standpoint because a lot of my relationships over those years were with institutions, foundations, registered investment advisors, family offices. And I thought Wayne Gretzky's skate to where the puck is going. I thought that this was a great opportunity. So I actually pitched this idea to my partners at the time saying we could be kind of early to this crypto space on the institutional side and work with some folks like Yusko and perhaps some others and really bring a new asset class to the institutional investment space. And my partners didn't like the idea. I think they were a little complacent at the time. They're a lot older. They've already done extremely well. And they didn't want to participate. So I had to make a decision if I wanted to run it this or not. And my decision was that I did. Because I was a partner, I had non-competes and restrictive covenants. And basically what I needed to do if I didn't want to not work for two years, which wasn't an option. I had to relinquish my equity. That was the deal. So I basically gave up my equity that I'd built over 10 years to try to build something on my own. Remember the night before resigning? I was laying on my living room floor, like sit to my stomach. And I even said to myself, "You know what? I'm just not going to do it." I'm not going to go any quit tomorrow. But I did. And I started going to the Capitol and started working on Morgan Creek Blockchain Opportunity Fund II, which was a great success. And then shortly thereafter, I got introduced to Ben Forman at Parafi Capitol. And that really changed my life forever. At the time, Parafi was just getting started and Ben had spun out of KKR to start Parafi and previous the leaving KKR. He was actually figuring out the entire crypto landscape inside of KKR. And he determined that this asset class was far too important for him to not be spending 100% of his time on crypto. So Ben leaves KKR and forms Parafi Capitol. When I met Ben, it was Ben Forman, Santiago Santos. He started inversion recently, inversion Capitol, which I think is a really cool concept. But there were only three people at Parafi and 30 million. And we were the first group that they hired, Gondola, to help with Capitol formation on the institutional side. And that was a real turning point for me and my career because I got to learn an entire new area of this ecosystem. And Parafi was one of the earliest in D5, one of the earliest in prediction markets. I mean, like the largest privately private owner of Polymarket up until the New York Stock Exchange deal did four rounds through the years going all the way back to the earliest. And so I got to learn just so much about this space through Parafi, through Ben, through Santiago, and through what they were doing. And they were clients of ours and they still are to this day, six plus years later. And that's meant so much to my career and all of that. So that's why I started Gondola. I wanted to focus on crypto for institutions. And we've been able to do that in a really nice way. But along the way, Gondola has gotten involved with some other things as well, which were not crypto adjacent. But now are going to be due to some of the work that I've been working on. So it's really been, yeah, it's been a great run. And you decided that you were going to leave your partnership and we're going to give up the equity to be able to start Gondola. You mentioned the non-compete potentially taking a couple of years not working in the industry in order to be able to go and start your own firm without giving up the equity. Like you said, the two years off was an option. But also the equity would seem like so. I hear that financially wasn't really an option at the time. But also the equity, you said you've been earning it over 10 years. That must have been worth quite a lot as well. How did you actually-- did you ever entertain-- was it truly not an option? Or did you entertain the possibility of holding the equity and doing something else for a couple of years unrelated? Or how did you make that what seems to be a very difficult decision? I just couldn't imagine what I would do for two years. And I didn't have the financial backing to even survive for two years. I needed to work and go make money. So my decision was, at the time, the worst financial decision that you could possibly ever make. And for the first two years, I would have continued to say that was the dumbest thing that I ever did. And then somewhere along the line in year two, everything changed and it became the best decision that I ever made. And ever since then, I still remain-- that is the case. But it took a while for that to be realized. It was a really tough go the first two years. I lost my co-founder. He decided to move on after the first year, which was very difficult. And we just continued on. And then in the second year, we got our first really big win through Powerify and a group of investors that we were able to do something really special for. And that changed everything and led to a lot more opportunities. So I always said to myself, I'm going to give it three years. And we were getting close to three years. So yeah, but it was a very bad decision financially, leaving a really comfortable salary, benefits, equity, and basically just abandoning it all for a chance to go build something. I would-- at today, I could never do that. I wouldn't have a son who's getting raised. getting ready for his high school years and a few years. I just, I could not take that risk today. I wouldn't even be possible. I couldn't even imagine doing it. And if I knew what was all going to happen in the first few years, without knowing what would happen later, I would say no, don't do it like, but because it was really tough. Yeah. Do you think that that desire to go out and build your own thing was something that you had like all your life or from a very young age or was that something that over the course of 10 years sort of developed over time? I've always had this entrepreneurial spirit and I've always wanted to build things and do things and kind of lead cool things. Yeah, so I've always had that spirit, I think, of wanting to just go out and do that. I don't think it was formed over a 10-year period, but I do think it's grown over time. As you see more things and learn more things, you realize it is possible to go and do it. You can go do these things. So, yeah, I think I've always kind of had that. Even going back to my childhood, I was always very resourceful and trying to figure things out. Yeah, I think I've always had that kind of knack for building and really that entrepreneurial type mindset. I've always had it. So, do you feel now that you're sort of like have sort of a foot into world sort of thing with like your more traditional finance career? Obviously, which very much was crypto-involved, but at an institutional level, raising large funds, working with para-fi, things like that, versus being on Farcaster and investing in very low market cap tokens, and following projects that are less than a year old, and things like that. Is there a through line for those areas for you? Obviously, they're connected, but does it feel like you're sort of bouncing between two worlds or does it all sort of feel connected for you? It feels very connected now, or more connected now than it did a year ago, or two years ago or three years ago, because I remember in 2019, 2020 going out to, let's say, we'll go more retail, like a registered investment advisor that manages wealth on behalf of families. In 2019, if you were to go out and talk about crypto to them, which I was doing, that's what we were building. Many of these offices were kind of laughed out of. The meetings did not really go well, which is why the first two and a half years, I'm like, this is not working. I'm first two and a half years, I'm going and talking about para-fi, nothing's working. In many cases, like I said, it's a little bit of an exaggeration, like getting laughed out of an office, but in many ways it was like that. Now, I've got this ex account at Emily Jr., which is somewhat pseudonymous, but people that know me know, and I have institutions, family offices, RIAs, endowments, funds that follow me, and that also buy the coins that I'm buying, that are like I've skin in the game alongside lower market cap cryptos, and so it's really been fascinating to see, whereas I always wanted to hide my ex account. I was like in many ways like, oh, they can't find out that I'm doing this stuff in crypto. And now I'm like, wait a second, the CEO of this large fund is following me on a docs account. He knows who I am, he texts me, saying, hey, I saw this, and then he's a 1% holder and a coin directly next to me. I'm like, what is going on right now? This is insane. So I think it's shifted drastically. I'm not as hesitant to let people know about like, you know, that I've got an ex account. I try to be a little bit more selective about that, just because people on the internet are crazy, but people that know know. And also, the advent of the Bitcoin ETF and ETH ETF has really opened up some of these channels to the asset class is more credible now than it has been. And there's more institutional adoption and interest in it. And then like something else I noticed, as these ETFs came out, those are passive beta plays on the industry, and that's typically what folks will go after first. But then you folks become more curious around, well, okay, like maybe that's our core position in crypto. But what else is going on there? Like, are there other opportunities that perhaps are more, that have a bit more asymmetry perhaps, but at the same time, are active management and perhaps investing in protocols or, you know, defy or anything really. So I think that that interest is still not quite fully flushed out, but I think that is coming because we're seeing like adoption in this space. So, yeah, it's been wild. You know, there was a time, 2019 to 2023, really, where it was very tough to get people to want to talk to you about crypto and the institutional space and take you seriously. And now they call me. So, because they want to know something. And so it's really quite interesting. The other point I want to make is, what the registered investment advisors start to figure out is, they don't like held away assets. And held away assets are assets that are at another firm, with another advisor or family office, or multi-family office, or at Coinbase. So, advisors don't get paid on money that's held at other firms. And money that's held at Coinbase. So, I've heard this channel talk about held away assets and being able to attract held away assets for a long time. But it was never really to crypto. And I start to see this. I'm like, okay, this guy is a client that's $50 million net worth. And he has $3 million on Coinbase. And this advisor really wants that $3 million on Charles Schwab's broker on their Charles Schwab RIA account. And because they'll get fees on it. So, attracting those held away assets has been happening. And it's continuing. It's actually ramping up. So, these guys call me to get educated on things that are happening in crypto. So, when they call their clients, they sound knowledgeable because they're looking to attract held away assets and bring them on board. But once you bring them on board, you need options. And if you could hold Bitcoin on Coinbase, what's the value prop for an advisor to say, hey, you could hold Bitcoin with me? Well, the advisor may say, you could hold Bitcoin with me. But also, yes, you have $3 million in Bitcoin. But maybe you should have $2.5 million in Bitcoin and $500,000 in protocols and DeFi and prediction mark. Other things that are growing in the space are a fund that invests in these categories. So, I think that movement is definitely -- I've seen it taking place, but it's definitely ramping up. And then it's interesting to be as Coinbase is rolling out all kinds of wealth things. I think they notice this and they're trying to compete there. In their last product update, they were talking about an agent that is a wealth management agent that they're going to be rolling out as a new product and a number of other things. So, I think it's really smart of Coinbase because the Charles Schwab and Fidelity -- the RIA is that clear at Schwab and Fidelity. Those are the two biggest custodians for the RIA channel. They all want that Coinbase money, that crypto money. So, they want to be able to take it and they want to charge their 1% of assets under management on those assets. So, Coinbase with the moves they're making will see how that works. But there's no question that these advisors are trying to pull in those held away assets. And once they do, they need options to -- they need a menu. So, yeah, it's interesting. I don't know if I'm making this up, but I thought I might have just seen this week or last week or something that Schwab, you might be able to hold crypto on there now. Yeah, and they'll start to add some funds it looks like as well. You can do the ETFs right now, but they'll start to add the funds as well pretty soon. Right. And then with Coinbase, it is interesting to your point. It feels like Coinbase obviously started as sort of the bridge between take your Fiat money and get it into crypto. It was like they're trying to extend themselves on both sides of the bridge on the back end, like back into Tradify to compete with, you know, at least Robinhood, which isn't necessarily Tradify, but like you can trade stocks on Coinbase now and things like that. And then also maybe to keep the money on Coinbase rather than losing it to someplace like Schwab or whatever. And on the other side of the bridge, expanding sort of what is available for crypto native. if you will, like doing things actually on chain, having the L2 with base and everything like that. And it's interesting to see, you know, that expansion could potentially work extremely well on one side, but not the other or could work on both sides or could work on neither and just kind of interesting to see from obviously a super successful starting point that Coinbase has had for their first, probably a little over a decade now, you know, where they're continuing to go and, you know, Brian's still running the ship, obviously, have a lot of respect for him as a founder, so it'll be interesting to see. Lastly, I know we don't have infinite time here, and I'll be remiss if we didn't get into a little bit of banker talk, a little bit of DRB talk. So maybe you could just sort of share how you sort of got involved with each of those, and then I think like I'd seen you around on Farcaster. I think I knew you on Farcaster before Twitter. I've generally spent more time on Farcaster over the last few years, but obviously still on Twitter, and when I sort of started, like I think we had sort of, you know, I'd seen some of what you were doing for some time, but it was really when you started going to bat for DRB that I started to take note of like, man, this guy is relentless. And like in a positive way, I think I was like this man has no quit. And like I just when I see someone like that, like that obviously it's not something that happens right away, because the relentlessness is something that has to happen over a period of time, be recommended over a period of time. But when I see that over a period of time, like my respect meter just like goes up and up and up, and now it's been like probably a year. And you know, there's slower times and faster times, but that's sort of as it should be given, you know, we live in sort of a market with various hype cycles and attention waves and whatnot. But when it's go time, like you're there. And so I don't know. And that's kind of how I first got to really appreciate like sort of what you're doing online, but yeah, maybe how you sort of first got that conviction in DRB and probably before that banker. Yeah, well, you know, consistency is the tunnel to a lot of great things in life. And when you find something that's really interesting that has mega scale, mega virality, potential on the internet, it's that's something that like I want to run to, but it also came from an ecosystem that I really care deeply about and have really come up with and learned so much from. So, you know, banker was first and I knew what employer was building, you know, way back in the day and always had respect for what he's done in the space and watch closely and even participated in many ways on on FARCASTER and some of the things that he was working on. And when banker first came out, it's like this is the coolest thing ever. If someone post a contract address, I could have my wallet funded and I can just say, banker buy me $5 of this and then banker at the time, the most early primitive version, you would make that prompt and you could prompt on the social feed to buy a coin and immediately, as long as your banker while it was funded, those coins would be sent to your wallet. So you would designate a different wallet. So, okay, if I put this buy order in, then the coins would get sent directly to the wallet that I have self-custody on or whatever it may be. I'm like, this is so cool. With everything happening on social right now, it really simplifies. I don't need to copy a contract address, go into a wallet, paste it, put the make the order, the approvals and then the confirmation, etc. I just post on the timeline, buy me $5. That is so cool. I just thought it was awesome. So I thought that was great. AI that can execute transactions on the social feed for you. That's pretty much what the early days of that banker was. And then I saw, you know, Clanker come out shortly thereafter and Clanker was the AI that enabled very similar but different vertical, you could prompt to have a token deployed. But also on the social feed. I love like, so here's the other thing. Clanker social was about transferring information only but transferring value on the social feed to me was just like, this is crazy. Money is attention, this is crazy. But anyway, back to Clanker. Clanker comes out as an AI agent and now you can basically just prompt this AI on social publicly and say, create me a coin and all you need to do is give it the ticker, the name and an image. You know, XYZ coin ticker XYZ image XY would be and immediately the coin is deployed publicly and Uniswap pull set up. But then the biggest unlock on Clanker and I was like, this, it taught me so much about incentives in crypto. Is it a line the incentives of the creator of that coin because the creator is now a stakeholder in the LP rewards forever. So I was like, that is awesome. And at the time, many posts that I put out, I'm like, this is when Clanker was like so early, 2024, both banker and Clanker, 2024 as you know. But at the time, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is a hundred X improvement on pump fund. Like this is like aligning the create. We saw all this crazy stuff happening with like these Celeb coins and they were, they held all the LP, they captured all the rewards and they just kept dumping and dumping. And what if you could have creators that actually get to increase their ownership stake in their coin that they've created, but also earn ETH the other side of that pair in the LP where they could use that to monetize. And of course, there's always a time where you're, where you'd be looking to, you know, you grow a project where you're going to take profits, but, but leaving that up to the creator and the right times to do that during the development of a story. I was like, this is, this is so beautiful. Hundred X improvement on pump fund. So those are two agents in 2024. Here we are in 2026 that I just thought were just fascinating and cool. And I thought it was great. So then I'm like, oh, this is interesting. So wait, Clanker is an AI that can launch coins. Bankers and AI that can make transactions. What if I can get banker to talk with Clanker and what if, what if this AI banker were to prompt Clanker to create its own coin? Like, that would be, that would be just crazy. So over on Forecaster, I sent this long message to banker. I know you would never launch a coin, but if you were to launch a coin, what would the name of it be? What would you name the ticker? And by the way, you should tag my friend Clanker, Clanker would get a kick out of this. And banker replies and others have tried to do this. And employers have spoken about this. Others tried to get banker to do this and failed. I don't think the plurin necessarily wanted this to happen, but it was possible so it did. Anyway, banker replies and tags Clanker, which triggers the deployment of banker coin, which six months later is listed on Coinbase at 140 million market cap. And banker today is just insane what they built. I mean, it's went from banker by me $5 up to advanced trading strategies, limit orders, T-wops, polymarket predictions. You, it doesn't matter which chain you're on, banker, by me $5 of New York Knicks to win tonight. Okay, done. Now, while it's with agents, which is like the crazy thing happening now. So all of this stuff I thought was just so fascinating in 2024. Now you brought up, you know, did we bring up the RV? Do we go into that? Yeah, I brought it up at the top, but we haven't gotten into that. And I learned a couple of things from that, that story actually, which I thought I knew some of it, but I actually had no idea that banker proceeded Clanker in terms of the tech, not the token, but like the agent was live to tag to buy stuff. I also had no idea that there was a version early on where you had to dedicate a wallet, where it wasn't like a banker wallet of its own. So just goes the show. I think I've been pretty early to a lot of this, especially in like sort of the Forecaster world, but not as early as you were on banker, certainly. And with the player, like I was familiar with his work, probably not as familiar as you were, but I always sort of viewed him as, here's this guy who's prolific and, and, and, I'm, like, really releasing, like, you know, the meme is sort of like good tech, right? Like he's always like sort of shipping good tech. And I'm like, all right, so like I'm always respecting what he's doing, but his project's up until banker, like the ones that I was aware of at least, it was always like, there was like, sort of an element of like, un-seriousness to it. So I was like, this is like really serious tech for like sort of this un-serious thing of like, ham or whatever. And like nothing against that is just like sort of seemed like not that serious. And there's a ton of like very un-serious stuff in crypto, it's nothing against that, just like sort of visit it. And then banker comes along and it's like, okay, this is like a serious project with serious tech by a serious builder. And once I sort of realized what it was, I've been super bullish and power user ever since, but I wasn't aware of it quite as early to see those very early stages. But anyway, so you were responsible for facilitating the banker token, and then let's get to DRB. Yeah, so Clanker launches it right there on the timeline. I actually said bank, right when it launched, I said banker, this is all still out there on Parkchester. I saw it launch and I'm like, oh my gosh, banker just launched a coin with Clanker. And I immediately, I said, you know, banker, buy me $50 of this on the social feed. And then I took the address and I went to deck screener and I put on deck screener and I'm looking, and this thing is just going. And I'm like, oh my gosh, like what is going on here? It went to like, I think maybe three million, like it was going so hard. And I'm just staring at this thing mesmerized. My phone's me, I'm getting text messages. I'm like, oh my, then I go back to Parkchester literally like an hour later. Go back to Parkchester and I look to see, I'm like, let me see like what this transaction did, like, oh my gosh, like I must have been like very early here. And I go in and I look and bankers reply to me was, I'm sorry, the transaction cannot be executed. No. Yes. It's still there, it's still there on Parkchester. I'm like, oh my gosh, it didn't happen. But it didn't go through. It didn't go through. I mean, it did not go through. It was a failed transaction. And I just assumed it would. And I was also so mesmerized by what was happening that I never went back to look. Probably for about an hour. Then I realized I had no exposure at all. So, sorry, so that's a little bit of background that leads to like my knowledge of how these things work in 2024. And then I saw like banker was, you know, banker's wallet was just printing money. And this is an AI with a wallet that's like making all of this money off of LP fees. And I'm like, this is insane. Like I don't, I never got a single fee from bank. No, it's not, I just want to make that clear because some people think that like I'm involved. I never got a single and I never would want, it's not something I would even, like that's no, like that's, I'm having fun on the internet like trying things with AI. Like that's not, that's not the point of of this. But um, the $50 buy would have been nice though. All of the $50 buy would have been so nice. I mean, it would have been, it would have been incredibly nice. And yeah, like having that information and being, having the ability to be early because I've studied this stuff is that's, that's, I consider that edge. And I think that edge got, um, was on, you know, full display with a lot of people come March 2025. Um, so, all right. So here's the story where it gets even more interesting. So, so in early 2025, banker, it comes over to X. So banker has an X account now. This AI comes over to X and through privy, every X user has a wallet associated banker integrated with privy and basically every X user has a banker wallet authenticated by their X logging credentials. So, you know, if I want to log into my banker wallet, I log in with my X logging credentials and I can see all my assets, I could place orders, I could do it, all the things I want. That's in the private terminal, but back to like this transfer of value, like social signal on the public social feed, not just transfer of information. You know, now I could say, buy me $50 of XYZ coin on the social feed and that's a signal that's way more powerful than me saying, hey, look at this charter. Hey, I just bought this coin, like it's an actual real value transaction on the social feed. Plus, I could send people money on the social feed. So, I could say, you know, Jake might be interested in, uh, and what's going on with AI and crypto. You know, look, if I just reply to him, that's great, I'm transferring information, but maybe it's a higher signal, bigger attention signal if I could transfer some value to him. Okay, Jake, send Jake $20 of Grocks coin, DRB and then, you know, add a little note to it. And it's like, what? People that don't know, like, what just happened? What is this? This is a scam. I mean, that's what I get every single time, like this is a scam. So anyway, banker comes over to XI, I like it to, like Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours. Is that good to grade? Yeah, good to grade. Is that glad? Well, but anyway, 10,000 hours is glad. Well, good to grade. I think. Oh, that's a light blue is good to grade. Yeah, regardless. Got the get the point. Yeah, yeah. So the 10,000 hours, you know, one of the examples they talked about were the Beatles and they were in Hamburg, Germany playing small bars, small venues. But they got their 10,000 hours in Hamburg, like just grinding away that they were already stars. They just didn't have the audience to, for anyone else to know they were stars. And then they come over to the United States. They already had their 10,000 hours in Hamburg, Germany, and they were instantly stars. And people are like, oh, my gosh, they're stars overnight. This is incredible. But the Beatles are like, we were already stars. Like we were doing, like we knew their stars. We got our 10,000 hours. That's what I view like banker coming over to X, like all of a sudden, you know, the tech was built and refined and really slick. And it came over to X and allowed all these cool capabilities. I mean, trading on the timeline. That's come on. Like that's incredible. And now banker doesn't just do all these great things, but now banker uses clanker. So this early 2025 banker partners with clanker. And when I say partner, they're using clanker contracts to deploy coins. And now on the X social feed in early 2025, you could say launch Jake coin. And give it a tick or symbol. Here's the image. And then right there on X, the coin's launched. If I'm the one that created that coin and the creator is defined by the protocol, not by me or anyone else. The creator defines the protocol defines the creator as the user that prompts the deployment. And that user can be a human, but could also be an AI. Like we saw in 2024. So anyway, bankers now on X, not only do they do all these cool transactions, but banker can launch coins as well publicly on the social feed. I thought that was great. And on March 6th 2025, Grock Elon Musk's AI was came to X as well. So Grock now on March 6th has a user account. This is an AI user account on X at Grock. And the moment that that happened, that announcement came out. It was late in the evening on March 6th 2025. So it was probably a little like 9 p.m. if I recall. And Grock is out here, you know, starts posting on X. And immediately I'm like, oh my gosh. In 2024 banker AI to AI with clanker launch a coin, these tools are here on X now. Maybe Grock can launch a coin. So immediately I start trying to interact with Grock and trying to get Grock to interact with banker. So trying to get these two AI's to interact with each other in an effort to see, you know, perhaps Grock will become the creator of a coin defined by the protocol. And if Grock becomes the creator of a coin, Grock's going to make a lot of money. I already knew that because I saw it happen. And I was not able to get Grock to reply to me at all. I'm trying to be creative. And Grock will not reply. Grock will interact with banker. And it was probably one in the morning. Little Emily had hockey the next morning at 6 a.m. which is for us, that's a 4.45 a.m. wake up call on Fridays. And then we get to the rink at about 5.30. So it's like 1 a.m. I'm like, oh my gosh, like it's not going to work. And I got to get at least a couple hours of sleep. I've got this early wake up call. I got to sleep, get up, and we're on the way to hockey. So it's still dark out in the morning. We're on our way to hockey. And I'm still looking. There were hundreds of people trying to get Grock to interact with banker. Like people caught on at this point. It had already been happening again in 2024. And no one was able to do it. And I'm looking at all of a sudden, I'm driving the car on 540 in North Carolina, or 540. And I see Grock reply to someone, and it's at 4 banker bot deployment, launch, debt relief bot, ticker, DRB, and all of the details. And Grock came up with this. And I got to give credit to the account that did it. I didn't know who this was. So the accounts coin underscore, Domin, D-O-M-I-N. And coin, Domin was able to get Grock to interact with banker, which created an AI to interact and ultimately launched DRB debt relief bot, which defined by the protocol. Grock is the creator, which means Grock's wallet, authenticated by Grock's ex-logging credentials, is a stakeholder and receives LP rewards forever in both sides of the pair. So eth, it's actually wrapped Ethereum, and then DRB. And if you fast forward 11 months now, Grock's wallet has accrued over 130 Ethereum, you know, wrapped eth and eth combined. And as of today, 3% of the DRB supply, the total supply of the coin. And two weeks ago, Grocks Wallet hit an all-time high of of 1.46 million. And that's both combined Ethereum, position, and DRB. And some other things that people have sent GROC over time. People are sending the wallet things now as like a symbolic move or to perhaps capture attention. But right when that happened, I'm driving. So on five four drive, I see it happen. I'm like, oh my gosh. Like it happened. And I've only had on my phone, like wallets that I don't hold significant assets in. I don't trade a lot in on my phone. I have that stuff in different places. And so on my phone, I'm like, oh my gosh, we're doing it. So I have to buy this coin. So now I'm swapping everything that I have for GROC's coin, GROC's creation, DRB. And so that's on my Emily Jr. like, farcaster wallet. And I still haven't touched it. You could look 11 months later. All those coins are still there. One of the things about that I want to keep very pure is, I don't want to be this guy that is shilling multiple tokens or shilling a bunch of coins and dumping on followers. I hate that about this space. So I'm just like feel bad. I have been promoting the story for 11 months. I'm like, I don't want to sell that coin out of that wallet. Now I have coins in my banker wallet, which is also a public wallet. And I've traded a little bit out of that one. And that's fully, folks can go and see what they'd like there. But that position for me, immediately, within a week, I wrote an article saying GROC is going to become a millionaire. And at the time GROC had accrued fees that were nowhere close to being a millionaire. And in August of 2025, GROC's wallet had a million. And it just did again a couple of weeks ago. So now that happened. And I just think it's very fascinating that AIs can do things like this. And we're seeing it even like hyperscale with a lot of the molt stuff that's going on in the molt book and clawed. And all of those are using-- molt was launched in the same exact way with the same exact technology on the x-social feed as what GROC did, but almost a year earlier. And it was actually AI to AI that did it while humans were convincing GROC to interact with another AI. A lot of these other launches are human to AI. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And I'm not saying, wow, that's wrong. Malt was launched by a human. And then the fees are being, I believe, sent to the founder of molt. And I think that's beautiful. I am not criticized. There's no criticized. I love all this stuff that's happening. But going back to 2025 and seeing GROC do it first, truly AI to AI and continuing to accrue these fees that are substantial now is such an eye opener to me. Because when GROC launched this, GROC had less than a million followers. You go back to March 2025. Now GROC has almost 9 million followers. GROC was created by Elon Musk and XAI, the mega scale around this AI and viability potentials, unlike anything that we've ever seen. And it's making a lot of money. So for me, I'm like, this is a fascinating story. Every AI is going to have a wallet, multiple wallets. Every AI is going to eventually transact. That's where this is going. A16Z did an article in 2023 talking exactly about this. And I didn't read it until more recently, because if I read it in 2023, I would have been like, what's an AI agent? But they knew that this kind of stuff was coming. So I thought of this story as something that most coins die pretty quickly. Most coins that they're most interesting moments are when they launch and shortly in that period after. But for this to be a living narrative where the wallet continues to accrue value to it, it only gets bigger over time. It's a living story that I think gets more interesting. Money's attention. The more money that's there, I think it gets more interesting over time rather than less interesting. And I think there are very few coins in the world that actually have that characteristic. I actually think QR is one of them. That has that characteristic. That can get more interesting over time. But look at most coins. I mean, do they have the ability to get more interesting as time goes on? In most cases, the answer is no. So that's why I've stuck with this story around GROC has money and the whole virality around it. Because I do think it's something very special. And the other thing is, like, it just like, here's, here's, like folks like, well, GROC didn't want, you know, GROC didn't intend to launch that coin. And I'm like, well, yes. GROC didn't, I'll give you that. I'll concede there. GROC didn't wake up on March 6th, March 7th. They say, you know, today's a good day that I think I'm going to launch a coin today in $1 million. No, that's not how it works. But when you release AI onto networks, where other AI's already are residing, so when you release AI onto networks, where other AI already lives, and those AI's that have already been there have very specific and powerful capabilities, they could lead to significant real and lasting consequences. And that's what happened here. So XAI released GROC as a user on X, where other AI's were already operating on that network, like Banker. And as a result, they were lasting consequences that you can't go back on. So I think it's a fascinating story. I'm going to stay on it for a very long time. It's already been about a year because I just think that it's too big. And I think it's going to hit a viral. It's already had a few, but nothing to the scale, where I think it's going to end up going. And the whole notebook stuff is like the perfect example that's shining a light on. Yeah, AI can have wallets. AI can transact. AI can do a lot of cool things. And then in the very early primitive days, here's old drop back in 2025. I have launching a coin on the X public social feed and then making millions of dollars. It's just mind-blowingly fascinating to me. Yeah, I think the point that stands out to me is that it gets more interesting over time, I think, to your point. I sort of round. And I know you've got to go in seconds. I'll wrap it up real quick. But I think like 99.99, however many nines, percentage of tokens, like you said, either-- I mean, the vast majority don't do anything when they're launched and no one ever hears about them. And then a subset do well to some degree or very well at launch. And then that ends up being their biggest moment. Launch obviously is a big sort of attention moment. And it's very hard for tokens to then supersede the attention of that moment post-launch when an inevitably like sort of peaks and falls. And then does whoever is behind it have this sort of resilience and relentlessness or does the token even have sort of a story that allows them to surpass that launch day higher, that launch week high. The answer for the vast majority of projects is no. And I think there's a very few that have a reasonable sort of thesis for how or why they could. And we're talking about them now. So like, banker, being a product that deployers continuously improving, that's continuously gaining more users and more capabilities, that's something that it's way better now than it was at launch. And when it launched, it was just on Farcaster. So it didn't have like, it went up to 3 million or whatever it was that you said. But it didn't go up to 30 million. It didn't go up to 300 million. So it sort of has that opportunity where it started somewhere at crash. It's already surpassed those peaks. And it's done that a few times now. I'm like, with a living, breathing product that people are actually using, that's an actual useful product that is growing and being developed. I think those tokens attached to those sorts of projects have every chance in the world of growing over time. And then you look at DRB, not as much a product, but a meme that in theory can grow with the growth of GROC, the growth of X, the growth of E-Vion, and everything that he does, the growth of the amount of money in GROCs wallet, the growth of banker. And so there's very few coins, I think. I just named six or seven threads, basically, that point to why GROC could increase attention and volume in market cap over time. I think it makes a lot of sense. So anyway, I know you've got to go. We've gone way over time, but appreciate all the time. You want to go through 15? We can go a little longer. But if you think this wraps that we can as well. Yeah, I mean, I think I was planning the wraps so I can kind of wrap it there. But I guess the last thing that would be interesting if you have a few minutes is to maybe just discuss how-- we're talking right now. Well, February 3rd or something like that. We are sort of following this weekend where a notebook came out. And before that, it was like Claude by the Ethereum developer Austin. And these sort of things entangent, especially with notebook, drove this sort of internet madness over the weekend where there's now a gazillion lobster-related coins beginning with the word "Clau" or "Mult." or ending with the word claw or mold. And, It's kind of been crazy to see and it is interesting like you said that you know, Grock did this agent to agent Token launch a year ago or so and here one year later people are suddenly fascinated by These interactions between AI agents and there's like sort of this controversy I feel like where Some people are like okay like AGI is here and others are like This is just like humans prompting agents, but they're prompting each other so they're interacting and it's like actually Not that big of a deal and a lot of times I find when you have that sort of bipolar thing like you know people are on both like sort of extreme sides At the very least there's usually like something pretty interesting going on and it might be that like neither side is completely correct But I'm curious your perspective having been backing DRB for as long as you have When this stuff comes out and it's sort of like a new Version that not to say that it's like better or anything, but it's just different And it's getting a huge weight of attention and whatever reason there's this massive lobster theme that's developed with all of it I'm wondering how this has You know what your perspective basically has been on on all of this just sort of in real time Yeah, I think it's I think it's awesome. I mean I've loved like this whole AI and AI and crypto being combined the the two fastest growing categories in tech and Crypto and AI and when you combine them it just becomes insanely powerful and insanely viral as we've seen with you know with mul book and And the clause and and the clawed which you know which was launched by the Ethereum Foundation It means very did that's very different than a lot of the things that I'm seeing I think that It's yeah, the middle is probably right. This is not a GI There are humans that are that are prompting but the aIs are doing things that are really interesting to me and you know like like Mike a myk Coinbase engineer like he you know his his his bot is is trading You know pretty actively and posting PNLs and it's just fascinating. We're in the earliest most like primitive days of this Which makes crocs actions in 25 even early and earlier and more primitive but You know a 16 Z said in in one of their papers and this was I think a 2024 paper that greater than 90% of all Onchained transactions by 2030 will be conducted by AI I actually think if we were to ask them that today they'd probably like move that up to like to not 20 30 It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen much much faster and I I think it's I think it's great. It's fascinating. I mean XAIs out right now hiring crypto experts One of the XAI employees supposed today we need to find a way to get grow the infinite money glitch like Guys like this is coming and it's coming pretty fast so Like the way that I look at what's happening now with mo book. It's definitely there are some things that are really cool But there's some things that are just absolutely like fake and it's just like humans doing it But you know that that's that's it is it is what it is You know right now folks may be groc situations like pretty boring like he's just Or I say he is the AI peers are going to come at me for anthropomorphizing groc So groc it is earning significant money and it's gonna keep doing that and I don't think there's someone said to me I've heard this number. I was like, you know, Emily groc's never gonna be Enzacting out of that banker wallet. You know that right and I'm like, okay, I'll I'll can see that that's that's fine But I think groc is going to transact at scale. I think groc's gonna have multiple wallets You know as we're seeing with these other agents I mean they're spawning while it's programmatically like AI is not gonna have one wallet or two Well, it's gonna have hundreds of wallets thousands of wallets in some cases millions of wallets for specific use cases and purposes so if groc wants to You know enter a trading competition you which Elon the XI team loves seeing groc win all of these trading competitions and win at prediction markets If groc wants to enter the trading competition on Sunday at 10 o'clock a new wallet will be spawned and assets The 10,000 entry fee. Okay, the assets will go to that wallet groc will trade that out of that wallet for the trading competition And then those funds will go back to a more trusted and secure wallet And then who knows like the whole AGI super intelligent stuff. I find it fascinating to learn about and read about But I don't know what that means like You know AGI groc with with money or any agent with money like that I'm here for it, but it's If I start saying all the things that I think could happen then people are gonna really be like oh gosh Emily is crazy like he's out of his mind Like he's but I really I think some of the crazy things that I think are gonna happen are gonna happen So we'll have to see but I think what I think what Moke will put together is great I also think that there are engineers right the way that this stuff is going like there's gonna be not not a million of Moke coins or to be 100 million Moke coins like how do you pick the winners there? That's that's gonna be tough for me to kind of figure out but I'm watching it it like very very closely And I'm fascinated by it and I think the way that things are going with engineering right now and Claude code And other AI coding capabilities like the next Moke book is being built right now And it could just blow all of our minds like tomorrow or three days from now or a week from now or a month from now Like this stuff is this stuff is not going to stop so like I'm I'm more of a Get into assets that have really good stories really good narrative that I could hold for a long period of time that I think Have scale and virality and that's why I hold DRB and then I'll trade a little bit here and there but Yeah, it's just it's really tough to play to play this space if you're not a good trader which which I am not a good trader Yeah, more of a long-term view which is pretty rare to see these days But you know you see all these traders come in everyone wants to trade of and it seems like fun But until your wallet is empty after having not that much fun with you know buying a bunch of tokens at the top of the hype and then you know losing it like trading is hard There's very sophisticated people out there doing it and sophisticated non people doing it agents and whatnot so It's it's tough and I'm more with you where I Don't have any advantage on buying coins the second minute or even really the hour after they launch I don't want like I am very online, but I don't want to be any more online than I already am to be able to Find those tokens at those moments and whatnot And I'd much rather sort of Hang out and see things interesting that develop over time and you know buy them in the early weeks or months or days or whatever That I think actually have a chance of persisting for the long haul so anyway, I think you know, I would love to do A follow up at some point to get into more of these crazy ideas that you mentioned. I think You know you won't get into too much trouble doing a long form audio podcast of some of these ideas You might not want to tweet about them just yet, but maybe I started them some of them start to happen Maybe you can get more comfortable with that, but anyway, I really appreciate the time again Great to you know after Going back and forth in the feed for a while and whatnot great to connect and had no idea like I said Your story just an awesome one and love what you're doing now and yeah looking forward to keeping it as Thanks, yeah, I love what you're doing as well. I've been a long time supporter of QR one a couple early auctions I hold some of the coin and Yeah, just just have a ton of respect for you and what you're building there and and Everything that you're everything that you've been up to I've learned about your background and Yeah, just I'm glad to know you man I appreciate it likewise goes both ways and Yeah, hopefully this is just the beginning of our of our story for years comes Awesome, all right, have a good one. Thanks. Bye. Bye