Ryan Inman on Cryptocurrency and the Metaverse

Show Trancript

MMM 200

~ ~[00:00:00] Do you want to know what’s harder to find than a Sasquatch, a Loch Ness monster, or even the Chupacabra? Take a hike with me as we walk through the metaverse of someone more mythical than a unicorn. Welcome to the money meets medicine podcast, where we talk all about the personal finance topics you issued learning medical school.

I’m your host, Dr. Jimmy Turner, and here’s your co host. The one and only the man, the myth, the legend. Ryan Inman. Hello. What’s up, man? It’s been too long. It’s been a while. I’m excited ~to~ to chat. Hi everyone. Hope everyone’s been well. Yeah. So far you’ve called me a Sasquatch and Santa Claus. In the last 20 minutes of catching up, that’s true.

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This is great. I was ~like ~waiting here. ~Like ~you’re working on ~like ~tech issues, ~like ~trying to get the thing up. Cause you don’t podcast anymore. ~And and I’m like, ~I’m texting Ryan. ~I’m ~like, Hey Ryan. I feel like the kid, ~like ~the night before Christmas, which I guess makes you Santa Claus.

I was just so excited ~to, ~to get to talk to you and to catch everybody up, man. So this is going to be a ton of fun. It’s weird. This is the first and only podcast I’ve done since I stopped podcasting. So I don’t have a setup. I don’t have the cameras. I don’t have anything cause it’s [00:01:00] been years. But anything for you.

So I’m here and I’m excited get into it and I’ll give the disclaimer up front. Jimmy and I have not talked about really what we’re going to talk about here. It will probably be typical for when Jimmy and I get together and catch up every few months or six months or so.

And so I think this is going to be pretty unedited and just fun. But if you either ~a ~don’t know me or don’t care, you might not like this episode, but Hey, you never know. Maybe we provide some value on whatever we get into talking about. Oh, I think it’s going to provide value regardless, man, journey’s been entertainment value ~of ~at the very least.

Yeah, for sure. And I think I told you this before, this is the 200th show, which is why ~I was like hanker. I was like ~hammer texting you to get you back on the show. I was like, dude ~is ~200 got to get you on. We got like a million downloads at this point. So have to have you come back and couldn’t be more excited to have you.

Yeah, I’m pumped man. And congrats on 200 and sticking through it. ~It’s~ anyone knows how hard that is. It is me and it is extremely hard to do. And I’m proud of you. ~It’s pretty. ~Yeah, thanks, man. Before we dive in, as always, the show is [00:02:00] sponsored by Money Meets Medicine Disability Insurance.

So it’s that time of year to make sure that you’re wrapping up all of your financial tasks with a bow. It’s around the holiday season, so if you haven’t secured disability insurance yet, make sure to go and snag a quote by visiting moneymeetsmedicine. com slash disability. We could start anywhere, but yeah, I want to start with that real quick disability insurance, huh?

~Yeah. What do you got, what do you got going on? Yeah. ~Yeah. So ~my~ my best friend Mike and I started money meets medicine, disability insurance. After, we went through the venture capital back startup world for a year and learn more about disability insurance. And honestly, ~Yeah. ~The more I got to know about it, the more I realized ~it, ~it falls into one of those mantras like if you want to do something right, you got to do it yourself.

~And ~and so Mike and I started that up and it’s been great, man. We’ve literally had less than 1 percent of the doctors we’ve worked with get denied, which I’m pretty sure no other agency can claim. And so we feel like we’re doing really good work for people and making sure that what happened to me doesn’t happen to other people.

So it’s been really fulfilling. That’s super cool. I, never sold products and never did any of that, but like it was always one of those really big pain points was always very [00:03:00] frustrating that you couldn’t get the appropriate coverages and that ~you, ~most of the time we’re talking to people who are slime balls, so I love it that you’re doing that.

Cause I have the pleasure of knowing you personally and knowing you’re a good person. So I know that anyone who’s using you guys is not going to work with a slime ball. So I didn’t pay Ryan to say that. So no, not at all. Actually. Holy crap. Do I get a fee? We’ll talk about it later. We’ll talk about it.

So making money in retirement. So let’s just back up. I think the best way to have this conversation, Ryan, is just to like historically go through it. So we’re like in the midst of, podcasting on money meets medicine. I am burning out at a prolific rate and I’m like, Hey Ryan, I think I need a break from the show.

And you’re like, Hey, actually, I think I need a break too. And then it just disbanded, and so ~we ~I ended up resurrecting it later, but I get the question all the time like what in the world happened to Ryan Inman like there’s literally reddit posts on if you know this out there what happened to this guy did he like drop off the [00:04:00] face of the earth and so Why you let everybody know been up to the last few years.

I didn’t realize I was on Reddit. I’ll send you the link later. Oh man, okay. To clear the air in case people thought it was because you and I didn’t like each other. There’s very few people when I left the industry that actually, On their own wanted to keep tabs of what I was doing and wanted to stay friends and jimmy is one of the select few ~I Oh, I mean i’ll be honest.~

I burned out. On what we were doing ~not here But just ~with financial residency with physician ~will ~services and I just felt like it was a huge burden to help as many people as I could and ~Just, ~I felt this huge weight on my shoulders every time that, I’d hear people’s stories of how they got taken advantage of.

And I’m like, we can help you. I want to help you. And then eventually I looked back and I was like, we’re helping hundreds of clients and I can’t scale fast enough. I’m one human. And it just all piled up. So when money meets medicine disbanded, it was not because Jimmy and I don’t like each other.

It was, we both were exhausted doing different things. ~I’ve just made it. ~But yeah, it had nothing to do with that. And in fact, like it was one of the things I missed the most. If I think back, [00:05:00] several years ago was just, you and I shooting the shit and having fun helping people.

So I hear you ~and. ~You took a, ~an ~really interesting turn. Like when I started having this conversation with you, I was like, Hey, Ryan, what are you up to? you ended up being up to was nowhere even on my radar as a possibility. You basically dove into the metaverse. So maybe you talk about the efforts, like what is that?

Yeah. So dove into gaming like video games. It’s always been a passion. Anyone that knows me knows that I’m a huge nerd. That’s always been a passion. And there was this kind of ~real, ~really cool intersection between. The current internet of a browser versus these more gaming world.

The people call it the metaverse and Facebook, changed their name and all this other stuff. But really the way I looked at it was like a 3d internet, right? You’re able to walk around and. be in a gaming environment and learn and purchase and interact. Think of games like you’ve got MMOs, right?

Massively multiplayer online games, let’s say world of Warcraft, right? Where people still 20 plus years later are still playing this [00:06:00] game and enjoying. They’ve made friends, people have gotten married, like some weird stuff has happened there, but. It tells you that there is a demand, there is something there.

So I went and jumped off the deep end of let me follow another passion, which is gaming. And that kind of led ~into ~into learning more about the metaverse and taking a real serious look at cryptocurrency. Thanks to printing 220 years of our money supply in one year.

Cause that’s what happened in 2020. And just the staggering amount of inflation and going, okay there’s the markets that are going to obviously benefit from this, but where’s potentially where am I blind spots? What am I not thinking about? And yeah, those kind of intersect in those two.

And it was really fun, deep diving and building some stuff inside that kind of environment and participating in that environment. I’m glossing over, we can go in detail more, but and then that kind of led into really look into how our money works and how the world’s economies work, from looking at the cryptocurrency side and seeing anti regulation and what would happen if there was more regulation.

And now fast forward [00:07:00] Regardless of politics, not to say I don’t care who wins or loses, but with what we’ve coming, we now have a lot of potential pro regulation which I think will set. A new standard for the world economies. It’s going to be really fascinating to watch.

Yes. As I’m listening to you talk about gaming and then crypto, like I had friends, I can’t even call them friends. Cause like I’m a gamer. In fact, nerd moment. Like I just played overwatch for like 45 minutes before this. I was like, I got some time to burn. I’m just going to go play some games.

That’s , one of the things that I do. Cause we bought Wesley. All the stuff to build a computer at home, a PC at home last year. So Wes has got a gaming computer that we built together. It’s part of our Christmas present last year. And but like I think back to college, and I actually know people that played World of Warcraft and ended up failing out of college because they got so caught up in that universe.

And so, it’s one of those things where like it’s fascinating how Deep people can dive into that realm. It’s addictive too. I played a lot of World of Warcraft, like a lot of World of Warcraft back in the day I made a lot of games, [00:08:00] Diablo, Warcraft, you can name a thousand games, Halo but they designed, they’re good at designing these games to be highly addictive.

Achieve things and do things? So it’s an interesting world, but ~that, ~that just proves like, I think more of what was being built and how I think the world could catch on and adopt more of a 3d internet. In my head, I have this image of you buying a cyber truck and then putting like a turret gun in the back of it.

Cause it looks exactly like the truck from Halo. Yeah. Taylor does not like the cyber truck. I like the cyber truck. I’m not allowed to get a cyber truck. Actually I take that back . I’m allowed to do whatever, but I’m not going to get a cyber truck ~let’s take a, ~let’s take a dive into a little bit of that.

So we talked about the metaverse. I’m not going to get a Cybertruck. No, we can talk about that too. Like every time we pass one, we’re like, Oh, that’s cool. I think it’s cool. And then I’m like, yeah, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pull the trigger on that one. ~I couldn’t, ~I’m a car guy. I couldn’t do it.

It’s just not my cup of tea. ~But ~but yeah so metaverse crypto, you started something called life force games. Is that the right name? ~Yeah. ~Yeah. What is that? Yeah, so we, I got basically a company together that was going to create a video [00:09:00] game that kind of blends using the blockchain of cryptocurrency.

And. The actual like process of designing a game. I never ever thought I would have an opportunity to do it, but I’ve always wanted to design my own game. Sure. And so what we ended up doing we raised a bunch of money from VCs and we set off for almost two years to build a.

No code, drag and drop game generator that allowed anyone to build their own game without having to know how to code. And you can’t just build a platform and not show people how to use it or give them a reason to use it. If you think of Fortnite, that was, they built, the epic engine.

And then they said, Hey, we got to have a game to showcase how awesome this is. And it turned out Fortnite was probably one of the most successful games in history, but Yeah, mine does too. So we ended up building a game and it was called Spark Defense and it was basically a tower defense meets like a MOBA game think of like League of Legends type style meets like a tower defense.

And it was simple enough that Wyatt could build his own levels and [00:10:00] drop who he wanted to spawn and where he wanted and what attacks they wanted to do, it was all drag and drop and slide, a little bar and everything. I got to, really participate high level in the game design pieces and really the business side of stuff and enjoyed the heck out of it.

But games are really hard ~to~ to build successfully and get to market. So ~we. ~We got invited to Steam Next. So anyone who knows Steam, it’s the platform where you can download and buy games. And I don’t know how many people are on Steam, but it’s millions of people. Yeah, I know Steam. I’m on Steam.

And so it was part of Steam Next. And we had almost 30, 000 people play the game. But it didn’t do well basically after that. And so we ended up having to close the doors. ~On that ~returned what little capital we had left and had to chalk it up to a loss, but ~the ~the experience was pretty amazing ~to, ~to see something come to life and ~to get, ~to get to work with people, hands on building the game from the ground up is really cool.

~Yeah~ so walk us through that a little bit, right? So you mentioned venture capital stuff and, I lived in that space for a year, so understand it. But you said you went out and asked for capital from VCs. was that [00:11:00] process like taking it? I presume you started this from the ground up, and that was your idea.

And you went and pitched this idea to the VC partners. ~How did you ~Let’s say someone’s listening, they’ve got a great business idea and they want to get into that world. How did you find success in getting that money? I’ll be honest~ my~ my business partner was really spearheading a lot of the VC pieces.

But it’s a lot of calls. And it’s a lot of the pleasantries, exchanging and then lying to your face. That they like your idea and then you never hear from them again. It’s not an easy process. It’s a grueling process. There’s a ton of things happening. There’s so many pieces on the legal side.

You hire a good attorney. You hope that they’re good. You have to trust a lot of what they’re doing. You can read the documents 10 times over, be confused more and more every time you read the document. So there’s a lot of nuances to it. I’m lightheartedly, joking about it, but it was a really cool experience.

It’s just a lot of work. It is more work doing that than probably building the whole product. Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. I remember we probably ended up being on like something, man, it’s probably 70 or [00:12:00] 80 VC calls, like different VCs having conversations and to be honest, I had the same exact experience where you’d be on a call and some be like, Oh, this is a great idea.

I really think this is good. So we’re going to circle back, which is their. Favorite phrase, let’s circle back on this when X, Y, and Z. And it was basically their way of saying Hey it’s not you. It’s me. Or I got to get my hair done. That’s why we can’t go on a date.

And it was it’s an interesting world. Like it’s full of a bunch of really nice people that want to change the world. But I wish at times people would just been no, I think this is a terrible idea and this is why I’m like, okay, great. I can use that. This is constructive, but that was not the conversation I typically had.

That was also not most of our conversations until we forced it to be. And towards the end it was a, Hey, by the end of this call, I just want to know yes or And even then they still couldn’t give you a good answer. Or they had just unrealistic expectations.

You basically show me your numbers and you better be as good as Fortnite. Otherwise we’re not funding. And it’s if I had four nine numbers, I wouldn’t need you. Yeah. It’s hard. Seeing an idea being, building [00:13:00] it and being a part of that is a really cool experience.

Failing really sucks, but like it’s part of life. The VC part though was probably the worst part of it all. ~Yeah. ~Yeah. No, it can be a struggle. Feeling like you’re swimming upstream. So I followed your journey, Ryan, like I actually learned a term that I’d never heard before.

And I think we were dancing around this, like when you’re talking about, the metaverse and video games and cryptocurrency and that sort of thing. And we’ll talk about crypto in a second, because I think that’s something that obviously a lot of listeners are going to be interested in.

Your journey’s taken you right up that alley. . But tokens, like what in the world is that I remember reading that at some point when I was following along from the sidelines. And I still, to be honest with you, don’t really understand what that is. What is tokens?

So from a super high level, it’s just math that most people in the industry can’t, for some reason, can’t fathom. Like common sense math. So when a new token is going to be created, so let’s say that in my game, I was going to create a token, which I wasn’t, and that was also part of the reason why I couldn’t raise because these VCs got real clever they figured out that if [00:14:00] games were going to launch tokens, meaning a new cryptocurrency, that they could get a piece of that, and that token would be.

~to be sold in the net, ~available for sale in two years, roughly, right? They had, this limit here, you’ve got to hold for this amount of time. Then you can sell 10 percent every month for the next 12 months or whatever it is. And they realized that if I put 5 million into Jimmy Turner’s video game he’s going to launch a token.

I’m going to get my token value is going to be. Maybe five or 10 million that I’ll get my money back in two years. I don’t actually care about your equity. Like the traditional VC model is you’re either going to get acquired or you go public, right? Or you die and you close the doors. They figured out there’s now a fourth piece is a token and that’s their liquidity that they can dump on retail investors likely.

And so they said this is an easy model. We’ll throw, As much money as we can out there. We don’t really care if a lot of these business models make sense or if they’ll ever make money, we’re going to get our money out in two years, three years anyway, so we should have to hold on for that long.

And yeah, so that token needs a plan, right? How, who’s going to get, what is there a billion? Is [00:15:00] there a hundred million? Is there 10 million? What’s the plan with these tokens? How much go to the team? How much go to the advisors? How much go into the game itself? And I’m using the game.

It could be anything. It could be a protocol. It could be, any business segment. And so when you’re figuring out. The really where these big piles go, it think of just a big pie chart, who’s slice of the pie goes where. And then the next level down is okay.

You said 18 percent is going to go to, the player base. How does it go to the player base? What do they have to do? Do they have to do a bunch of achievements? Do they have to play? Do they have to find items? Does it get dropped out every time that they go on a mission? What does that look like?

So at the end of the day, though, it’s just math, economy and math it seems complicated but I totally get what you’re saying. So for listeners that aren’t familiar with the VC world you have a company, you own a hundred percent of it, and then, very much shark tank style. You go and say, Hey, I want X number of dollars for this percentage stake in my company.

For 10 percent it costs. And you come up and then the investor then owns 10 percent of your company. And as you raise more money, that gets diluted. And [00:16:00] it’s stat that in and of itself, to be honest, it is a little complicated to understand at first, but then if you have tokens and the tokens themselves are worth something, then yeah, I can see how that really changes things.

whole dynamic. Yeah, it truly flips the whole dynamic. If Jimmy what were you raising for? Do you mind me asking? Was it the, Oh, it’s for attend back when we were running attend. Okay. So it’s a website that, I’m not going to actually say what a 10 does.

I’ll just say like ~a web, ~a financial website. ~That, let’s just use ~SoFi, right? They’ve got investments, they’ve got loans, whether we like SoFi or not, it’s not a recommendation. It’s the first thing I could think of that most people would know. Sure. And let’s say that SoFi decides that they want to launch a token and they say, look, if you’ve ever borrowed with us, you’re going to get some of our token.

If you’ve ever invested with us, you’re going to get some token, but the length of investment and the amount of investments you’ve made we might give you more token. And then for new users, if you sign up, Hey, we’ll give you, 500. If you bring a million dollars over whatever their promos are, Hey, you refinance 300 K worth of debt.

Like we’re going to give you 500 bucks. Now it’s not 500. We’re going to give you [00:17:00] 500 worth of our token. And hey, but if you hold our token let’s just say 10, 000 worth of our token on our platform, you’ll get an interest rate reduction of 0. 25%. They can now all of a sudden start to incentivize different ways.

That you would interact with their platform. The more money you bring over, the more debt that you have, the more time that you spend on the platform, the more people you refer to the platform. It’s a way to incentivize~ it’s, ~users or clients or whatever you want to call them to continue to use them and not their competitors.

And so we’re just talking about in a game environment, but this could be literally applicable to anything that we do or anything that we use. And there just hasn’t been enough rules and regulation. For people and companies in the U S to feel comfortable. I think that is changing. And so I think the next 10 years we are going to see companies like SoFi pay us to use their platforms and to be loyal users.

It’s going to be fascinating to see how this unfolds. ~Yeah. ~So I’m hearing you talk about tokens and, we’ve touched on cryptocurrency. naturally, my brain goes [00:18:00] to a couple of things. One is like the entrepreneur side of me goes to, Hey, these are the opportunities that are out there. And when I think opportunities there’s opportunities to, to make money.

The other side of me goes to the personal finance, like financial literacy side, where I think about the liquidity of stuff. And wonder, with crypto with tokens, like how liquid those assets are and if they’re less liquid, how much of our portfolio should we even be considering putting towards these things if we do it all?

So listeners know, like for years, you were and still are, to my knowledge, a big fan of low, cost broadly diversified index fund strategy in terms of and now we’re talking about tokens and crypto. Have you just completely, gotten rid of index funds or a part of your portfolio?

Like I just want people to understand, cause I think it’s interesting that we’re talking about alternative assets in some sense. And we all know where you and I stand on index funds. Yeah, walk us through that. No, definitely still in the index investing. That is never going away.

I don’t think trying to time the market, beat the market ~or. ~Or anything that would deviate from that makes [00:19:00] sense. ~But just ~and I talked about it publicly many times, like I own gold and silver and ~that, ~those types of things. I’ve owned some of that for ever, literally collecting as a kid with my grandpa and I never sell any of that stuff.

And that’s fine. If I want to say, Hey, that was half a percent of my portfolio or. 1 percent or whatever , right? The way I viewed crypto was that I was going to buy 5%. This is disclaimer, not for everyone. And please don’t trade and do stupid stuff, right? Only, your own, only, your own finances.

But I was comfortable with 5 percent of my portfolio right into crypto. But I had the caveat to myself that said. If it goes to zero, that’s fine. I’m comfortable. I’ll move on and we’re good. If it goes up a ton, I’m just not going to rebalance this 5%. So ~I’m ~basically put it in its own little silo and said, I am comfortable with this at zero.

I know what I’m doing. I’ve got the rest of my portfolio. We’ve got traditional areas, Roth areas, five 29s [00:20:00] brokerage accounts. Like our trust is set up. Like we’ve done all the right things. I did not renew my life insurance policy cause I didn’t need it. It was not needed at the time. So why pay the multi thousand dollar premiums?

~I, I could take that and invest it. ~Because now I’m self insured. But at the time I needed the coverage. I would have the coverage, right? So again, personal finance, do what you’re going to do. But since, that piece has grown and I have not rebalanced it and I won’t rebalance it.

So I’m going to keep living my life, doing my stuff, investing the way I invest, but that piece is isolated no, I think that the timing of this, Hilariously, like as we work this out, it’s just completely coincidental. But as we’re recording this Bitcoin just went over a hundred thousand dollars for the first time.

Yep. ~And ~and as you’re talking, I’m like doing the mental math. I’m like Brian, invested this, three or four or five years ago. And it was 5 percent then, but now it’s gone up by 5x. It’s interesting thinking about that. And so I don’t know if you mind sharing publicly and obviously, as we always say, like this isn’t specific recommendations.

Was it just Bitcoin back then? Or did you take a leap at [00:21:00] Doge or like any of the other coins that have existed over the years? No I thought Doge was really dumb at first and now I actually love it. ~I don’t own, ~I don’t own any, just so we’re clear, but I love the concept of some of the memes the whole Elon departmental government efficiency and that was his demand that puts the United States government As a meme to me, and I think that it’s terrifying, but also funny.

So maybe the ~stupidity~ stupid side of Ryan thinks this is funnier than it probably should be. But lots of, I’ve changed it a ton of times. So there’s a personal bucket and a business bucket, and we can talk about what I do business wise and things after, but in the personal bucket.

It was mostly Bitcoin. I had done a little bit of Ethereum and a little Solana. I have since basically pushed it all and it’s been for a while into Bitcoin. I am okay with self custody for some people, most people never should self custody. So what does that mean for those that don’t know what that means?

So if you were going to buy Bitcoin let’s say at Coinbase, Which is a centralized [00:22:00] exchange that is a way to take us dollars or whatever local currency to you’re going to ACH or wired into them and then you can facilitate a trade just like you’d buy a stock, right? I’m going to buy Apple stock.

I’m going to buy Bitcoin. And you do that on Coinbase’s platform. You can leave it there, right? And that means that they have the keys to that Bitcoin. Okay. Right now some people will say not your keys, not your coin. ~That’s fine. ~It’s not for everyone but if you then take that money and move it off to your own wallet, you now have self custody And what that means is there’s no bank to call.

There’s no one that’s in charge that can get it back. You send it to the wrong address. You’re totally screwed. ~It’s ~if someone ~comes in, ~breaks in your house, ~like ~they take your Bitcoin, there’s no one to call and say, Hey, I got robbed. Let me call the fraud department. Bitcoin does not have a fraud department.

And most people should never self custody. Because they will lose it. They won’t respect the process, ~I think~ or they’re just not going to be comfortable. And at some point, a large sum of money, everyone’s going to feel uncomfortable with that since the [00:23:00] ETFs came out, it’s probably a very, if you’re not saying that Bitcoin is responsible or not, I don’t want to sway people to do, they can do whatever they want.

But if you said, Hey, look, I’m interested in Bitcoin, This self custody thing scares me, Blackrock, Fidelity, VanEck, ARK they’ve all created Bitcoin ETFs now. So you can buy it in a brokerage account. You can buy it in an IRA, whatever you were going to do. Again, not talking percentages, just.

Giving examples. And then you don’t need to have custody. Like BlackRock, I think itself~ with their ~with their ETF tickers, I B I T they hold two and a half percent of all the Bitcoin. Oh, wow. They’re huge. They’re getting tons and tons of inflows from retail people, from institutions, like all this stuff.

It’s like 500, 000 Bitcoin, right? They hold the keys. They custody with Coinbase. You don’t have to do anything. It’s in your Roth, or it’s in your traditional, or it’s in your. Brokerage account or whatever you have and you don’t have to worry about it, but you get all the same price exposure and you don’t have to worry about it.

So for me, I have been gravitating a [00:24:00] lot to those types of things where it’s just easier. ~So for, ~and again, I’m just ~like ~taking my normal investing brain from the index world. ~And ~I know I’ve looked into this a few different times, but I’ve just never really pulled the trigger like in my brain and I know that Bitcoin is, the darling of the cryptocurrency world at the moment.

~And~ and has obviously the longest track record in terms of success. But question is like, how accessible or index funds are like the ETFs you’re describing? Is that just in Bitcoin? Or ~is that, ~are there? Probably diversified ways to invest in all of the cryptocurrency out there.

So if ~the, ~something else takes a larger share of the market that you’re reflecting that, or are we just talking about picking an individual coin and saying, Hey, like crypto’s, predominantly been Bitcoin. So let’s just go with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the first, right? It created this and then some of the developers spun off and created Ethereum and then that kind of cascade of all these other tokens.

And now we’re talking back in what, 2000. 15, 16, 17, all these other tokens came. And then obviously innovation has occurred. Right now I think it was in January of 24 that [00:25:00] the Bitcoin ETFs were finally approved, right? Which is, I thought a miracle. I thought there was no chance in hell that was going to happen.

Gary Gensler would not approve that, but he ended up approving those, which I was surprised. Since then they have approved an Ethereum ETF. There’s several that are out there that have created those, it doesn’t get the same buzz as that there’s not as much institutional demand as there is for Bitcoin.

I don’t know of any countries that are talking about strategic reserves in Ethereum, but you’ve got, even the United States is talking about a strategic reserve. There’s already been a bill circulated for 200,000 coins for the next five years, so a million Bitcoin. If you mind, there’s only 21 million Bitcoin, so a million Bitcoin to be purchased by the U.

S. government. So talk for a second about that because obviously some people listening are going to have lots of knowledge about cryptocurrency and some people are going to say, hey, ~that’s an alternative, ~that’s an alternative investing. So the 21 million Bitcoin, that’s important because you talked about inflation earlier and cryptocurrency is a possible solution to that.

Can you link those two [00:26:00] ideas that people that aren’t familiar with crypto can understand? Yeah, if we think about there’s 21 million Bitcoin that could ever be created. We don’t know who actually created Bitcoin. My gut tells me it’s the CIA, but I have no idea. ~And ~so ~how do I do this?~

~Like high level. ~Every time a transaction is processed on the blockchain, ~it’s~ these blocks are essentially being created and ~inside ~they have to ~essentially ~solve ~for ~complex problems, it’s a bunch of computers doing this and ~they’re ~now a whole industry called miners, like M I. ~And ~ERS, not ~like they mine Bitcoin coin, ~like they mine Bitcoin.

And I’m not talking like, oh, it’s a little gig. ~Like ~they’re worth literally billions of dollars and publicly traded for years and have huge balance sheets and things. So that’s the bulk of the rewards that aren’t happening right now. It’s not like ~Jimmy, ~you can spin up a graphics card and say, oh, I’m gonna mine Bitcoin at my house.

~Like we’re. ~We’re long past those days. ~Sure. ~But anyway, ~this, ~the network is secured all across the globe. ~Like ~no one can turn it off. No one can do it. I think Putin on TV, ~I ~just said who can censor Bitcoin? ~Like ~nobody. So even if a dictator is saying ~like ~no one can do it, ~like ~that means he’s probably [00:27:00] tried.

~This is it’s more scarce. ~This is ~the, actually I should say this, that’s ~the first product in the history of the stock market. ~Okay. ~That has a cap, a finite number with probably near infinite demand. Not saying it’s in the short term, but think a hundred years down the road, we’re still doing this.

There’s not more being made. I can issue more shares of Apple stock, or I can issue more shares of Google, but I can’t issue more shares of, Bitcoin is capped. And that’s done at the code level, right? I think 19 ish million of the 21 million are in existence. So every time transactions are being, essentially processed on the blockchain, there is a reward for doing those that the miners are going after.

And that’s how new Bitcoin is created. And yeah, so I’ll stop there, like high level ~with~ but I think that cap is the important piece to understand. Is it critically important? Cause ~not, yeah, ~not many, like Ethereum is the number two ~one. ~It has no cap. It’s. ~Yeah.~

Inflationary by design and has no cap. And then a lot of the other coins behind it we talk Solana or, literally any other coin, they’re all there’s called [00:28:00] proof of work and proof of stake. And so the proof of stake is. You don’t need these expensive machines and it’s not, decentralized and all these different companies are running miners and things, the proof of stake is I have the token.

I’m going to essentially put it somewhere. They call it staking. I’m going to put it somewhere to secure the network. And that by nature is going to be inflationary because the people staking are going to want more reward, right? For doing that. But the reward has to come from. The pile, right? This comes back to our tokenomics discussion, right?

It comes from the pile, right? That, that big piece of pie and going Hey, if you stake with us, we’re going to give out, I’m making it 1 percent of our token every year for the next 20 years. It’s inflationary. More tokens are coming into the thing. ~And but It’s different because it doesn’t cost energy to do that, right?~

~ Different ~but the end of the day, if there are, and let’s just make the math easier, 20 million Bitcoin, and there’s only ever going to be 20 million Bitcoin. Like the idea of inflation is not really possible because unlike the dollar that to your point earlier has been printed at astronomic rates and devalues all the other dollars.

When that happens, if [00:29:00] there’s only 20 million Bitcoin and there’s only ever going to be 20 million Bitcoin. That same thing can’t happen. So it’s not the German Frank that, that went through inflation and then, collapsed and like all of the other, basically fiat currencies that have created any other civilization or been a part of one have eventually collapsed.

Do you, we’re essentially just saying it’s scarce, right? ~In, in that there’s a, it’s ~a limited mindset, if you will. ~Like it’s limited in that~ It can’t be produced more of it, even if there is a growing demand. You could almost say the same thing for gold, right? Like it’s a scarce resource. ~It was, ~we used it for 5, 000 years, right?

It’s a physical piece, even though we don’t trade gold. I don’t go take a little sliver of gold and go buy Starbucks. But people view that as money and have for 5, 000 years and a store of value. It’s an interesting thing. Not everyone agrees and that’s fine. But it’s scarce, but you can actually make more of it.

They just found more of it, right? It’s just not the same. So I want to nerd out for a second. Just because you are a mythical creature and I don’t always get to have conversations with you. So can inflation happen in the opposite direction? ~What I mean that mean deflation, but no.~

~So sorry. I guess it’s not like a direct opposite. What I mean is that ~instead of creating more Bitcoin, couldn’t they ~fraction~ [00:30:00] Fractionate, ~I don’t know what the word I want to use here is ~make ~a, yeah, ~a fraction of Bitcoin such that you keep dividing it and now ~you’re what ~one Bitcoin would have bought a house this year and in 10 years it’s a different, it’s a different Math problem, your one Bitcoin is now worth half of a Bitcoin because more people have become interested and so there’s more fractional shares out there.

that something ~that, ~that can happen? It’s already built in from day one. So you’re talking about divisibility, right? Can I break this Bitcoin into one? So for the record, you do not have to have 100, 000 to participate. ~And this~ you can buy 5 worth. ~The ~breaking down a Bitcoin breaks down into a hundred million units and they call those Satoshi’s or sats, right?

So a hundred million sats equals one Bitcoin. So if I had half a Bitcoin I have 50 million ~sets. ~I actually think that at some point we will probably see a. Repricing and instead of saying Bitcoin is worth a hundred thousand today, we’ll say maybe a million sats equals 84 or something like that to make [00:31:00] it more meaningful because most people still don’t know that you can buy less than one whole Bitcoin, right?

And ~that, ~that is a thing it’s built in when you send a transaction on the network, right? You’re going to pay. A gas fee, right? And the reason that exists is because there are tons of machines that are basically securing the network, right? They’re making sure that when a transaction is processed, it is truly immutable.

It can never change. They all agree upon that. And then they move on and process the next transaction and the next one. And they do those in blocks, like we previously highlighted. But that costs money to run those machines. And they want some sort of reward on top of the money that it costs to do that.

And so they need a gas to do that. And the gas is basically a tiny bit of Bitcoin, right? Some Satoshi makes sense. Yeah. Think about when I send you a wire, I need to wire Jimmy 10, 000. My bank charges me a 25 fee. It goes through the swift system. It now it’s taking forever, ~but. It shouldn’t take that, ~but it takes multiple days.

~Don’t wire to hit the wire ~to clear. I think the last time I sent a wire a couple of weeks ago, it took three days. For them to [00:32:00] process we can get into my fidelity issues. If you want ~to~ I sent an ACH from their platform to ~my, from ~my bank account, pulling money in. ~They’re holding it.~

~I should You not. ~They’re holding it for 30 days. Oh, wow. ~In a CH. ~So ~I called wow. Yeah. ~I called some of my industry buddies and I said, are you experiencing this? And one of the advisors said, yeah we’re seeing a significant slow ~in, ~in money movement and delays. Lots of other ones are not but something’s up with fidelity.

~And so I’ve not been, makes the question though. ~I wonder what they’re doing with your money before they let it move. I feel like they need the float. ~I feel like they need. ~It’s not ~just maybe ~just about interest, but about reserves. You never know what’s happening behind the scenes.

There’s no transparency. It’s one of the things I love about the blockchain. I can pull up and say, Hey, Jimmy, what’s your wallet? And you tell me what your wallet is. I can see anything that has ever happened in that wallet since its existence. It’s full transparency. So I’m thinking like. You know where this goes on the finance realm and black rocks talked about how they want to tokenize the stock market think about Every share of apple stock is now its own token, right?

Apple has its own token, you know [00:33:00] in a very controlled environment. It’s trading on this specific blockchain. It’s not a public one you know for privacy reasons, whatever But now Nancy Pelosi decides that she wants to inside trade on some information. You will see that in real time. And I think that, and I’m picking on her because she somehow gets paid 200, 000 a year and is worth 150 million.

She’s infamous for this. But yeah, I mean there’s even a Pelosi tracker, which I find fascinating. it’s one of my favorite Twitter accounts. But yeah, you’d be able to tell. And so blockchain technology is different than just Bitcoin or Ethereum. It’s the infrastructure. It’s the railroad track, so to speak.

And Bitcoin or any of these other currencies are. The trains that are moving on the tracks, right? Is I guess a way to think of, so they’re two separate concepts. And the part i’m fascinated with is the technology that the railroad tracks so to speak Because that can open up basically think of third world countries that people don’t have banks, right?

They can’t get bank accounts, whatever like now they have a method that they could transact not saying As americans [00:34:00] we Are very fortunate we have Lots of amenities and lots of cool things from a financial product standpoint and banking and things that a lot of countries don’t have. But also I realized that we only pay corporations and that we only interact with corporations and it’s a really weird thing to think about, but 50 bucks.

Let’s say, how do I pay Jimmy 50? We live very far apart. I can’t give you cash, right? So I have to. Pay through a corporation, right? That’s venmo that’s paypal something like that cash app, right? And like how did we as a country or even a world get to the point where like I don’t Yeah, I can write a check but now i’m writing a check from my bank to jim like we’ve gone so far away from A peer to peer where we control to now the corporations are the ones that are controlling and moving the funds and we, at a convenience, maybe how we got there.

But, you see a world where cryptocurrency exchange is happening peer to peer? Don’t think in its current form. I think right now it’s a, ~it’s. ~It’s it [00:35:00] feels early stage like internet adoption, right? Tons of disbelief. People don’t see the value. People think it’s funny. People are ignoring it, actively making fun of it, whatever.

But there are enough core users to show that it has legs and that it is attracting enough brilliant minds to continue to develop, ~I am not one of those brilliant minds. ~I just can see how this is unfolding. ~That ~there are some. Really smart, talented people working on blockchain infrastructure, payment infrastructure.

~And then now, ~and what caused me to really get excited and really get into it is we’re seeing the political changes, right? That all of a sudden countries are now talking about being active in this. ~And ~I don’t care. The price is great, but forget the price, right? It could be a dollar, a hundred thousand, 10 million.

I don’t care about the price, right? If we think about just, Some of the institutional adoption that’s here. ~Like ~we’re seeing a whole new market play out in the ~Braun ~proxy derivative market with a company called micro strategy. We don’t have to go too much in detail, but ~like ~it ~is ~totally flipped the bond buyers upside down.

It’s been [00:36:00] fascinating. They’re essentially bringing in money through various ways, buying Bitcoin. That is now an asset on their balance sheet that then allows them to continue to ~buy more money or ~borrow more money, which then they in turn buy more Bitcoin and it’s this kind of crazy infinite loop where they can just keep borrowing and they’re issuing stock and ~they’re ~doing some dilutive things.

But as long as they buy more Bitcoin and as long as Bitcoin is moving stable or moving up, they can continue to borrow billions and billions of dollars. It is fascinating to see that on, just as someone who loves the financial markets, to see ~the ~A completely new idea happen ~in, ~in real time ~now that’s, ~I know I’m getting nerdy, but ~it’s no, ~I think it’s pretty cool stuff.

And for me this is such a fun topic to discuss for so many different reasons, but I’m going to send this episode to my brother in law, Jordan. So I’ll give him a shout out Jordan. ~So ~he lives out in your neck of the woods out in California. Jordan at least three or four years now I’ll get texts.

And the reason that I know what cryptocurrency is doing, particularly Bitcoin is Jordan will text me when it hits a new [00:37:00] high. ~And so ~when it hit a hundred thousand dollars, he sent me the text. ~And and ~so for me, I’ve always viewed it. ~Okay. ~Back then as an alternative asset, it was something that.

Felt a little bit like speculation or that there might be a bubble or that, it might be the new tulip bulb craze ~or, ~however you want to describe it. ~And then ~as time has gone along and now we have more resources to invest a little more alternatively cryptocurrency is definitely something that’s piqued my interest and I’m just in the early stages of learning about it myself.

And this is what I will say, one of the few areas in finance, maybe the only area of finance where I do have. A little bit of FOMO and just calling that out. And when Jordan has sent me these texts over the years, I’ve always just been like, yeah, that’s fine. But I’m going to get there with my index fund strategy.

So I’m not gonna try to hit any home runs and now I’m viewing it ~more of ~more as a. Diversification piece to your point and thinking that, it’s pretty reasonable to take 5 percent and put it into something that is clearly heading towards the direction of changing the way that we understand inflation and currency and exchanges and how monetary policy might work moving forward.

There’s Enough [00:38:00] momentum inertia at this point that I think it’d be a little silly to not educate yourself on it. So I guess my question would be Ryan, if someone wanted to ~start earning, ~start learning about cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, that sort of thing. ~And ~I can’t talk you into coming on for like quarterly crypto episodes.

Maybe ~I can ~I’ll work on Ryan afterwards. If you want Jimmy to bring me on more, you can email Jimmy or tag him or do something. I don’t know how you ~out or put it in email ~or put it in the reviews. Jimmy needs more reviews I bet. Yeah. I’ll always take more reviews.

Email me at Jimmy money meets medicine. com. If you want to hear more of Ryan, which I imagine all of the OG listeners are going to be like, please bring him back. I would love to hear your inbox will be crickets and tumble. Oh, dude I bet that I’m going to get emails about this very episode. And Ryan, so just to go back to money meets medicine in general, and then ~I’m going to, ~I’m going to let you answer the question I asked a second ago.

You know what people miss. ~Yeah. ~Banter like me making fun of you. ’cause you know you got a face that is meant for podcasting. ’cause you literally don’t have a camera on now, by the way. Nice. Yeah, I know. ~And and that was always your line by the way. I stole your line. I know. And , ~and so people love the banter and ~that, that, ~that’s the comment I get.

It’s I really love the way you guys shared your information and the knowledge and I learned from it. [00:39:00] But you did it in a way that was entertaining and you made fun of each other and gave each other a hard time. And we were, be honest, Terry from Dumb and Dumber. That’s right. ~That was, ~I missed that, man.

I know. I missed that. I love you, man.. You too. So Ryan, if people want to learn more about cryptocurrency, like where in the world do they even start? ~Oh do you do blog posts? ~Do you do blog posts though? I don’t write blogs anymore. No. Okay. I was just trying to think if there were some links that I found and sent to you or people could start.

~I don’t, off the top of my head. ~Yeah, send them to me. ~I’ll put them in, ~I’ll put them in this. ~It’s ~it’s like a death trap. I say go to YouTube and then you’re going to find all sorts of crap information and scammers and people that, are in every industry. But Yeah. ~I’d have to.~

Sounds like you need to write a book. No. ~That was a lot of work. Yes. ~That was a lot of work. I hope people still I don’t care about the money of it. Like I actually don’t get anything. I turned it back over to the publisher. I just wanted them to ~like, ~Get out there. ~I hope people still use that.~

But no, never writing a book again. ~That was so much work. ~That was so much work. ~I hear you. ~I hear you, man. Maybe the best way is to bring you back on. And we can talk crypto every, quarter or something like that. But Ryan, it’s been good, man. ~What’s been ~so good to hear your voice.

It’s fun to chat. That’s what I told him in the beginning. I was like, Jimmy and I haven’t talked in a while. So this is where you’re going to get like nothing rehearsed. No, no talking points. Just shooting [00:40:00] from the hip. We’re good at that. What was your question again?

So my education, but the one before it. No, that’s predominantly my main question is I guess two things. One was the education and the second one that you’ve already hit on, which is. Okay, so Jimmy’s interested. Jimmy wants to take 5 percent of his portfolio and Jimmy wants to invest, I like talking to the third person by the way, Jimmy wants to It’s like the royal we over here.

That’s right. I’m famous enough at this point. I’m just kidding. So I want to take 5 percent of my portfolio and I want to invest it in a cryptocurrency of some kind you mentioned ETFs. You mentioned wallets. You mentioned self custody through wallets. You mentioned Coinbase. Where do people get started?

Yeah, everyone’s different. And I’ll tell a probably a couple of stories as we go through this, but in 2022, cause we haven’t even touched on defy and like what I actually do day to day. ~Yeah, I guess I forgot to ask you that. Yeah, it’ll be fun. ~In 2022, my dad calls me and he says, All right, Ryan, I’ve been thinking about it and I have a single clue what the hell you do every day.

~I need you to explain this to me like I’m five. ~I was like I’ll explain it to you like you’re my dad. So of course, like you’re five walking the old man through this and I’m [00:41:00] explaining. A little bit about Bitcoin and the process of getting someone that has no idea of never heard of crypto, like my dad’s like that Bitcoin thing and I’m like, yeah, he’s I saw it on TV once.

I’m like, Oh God, he’s is it physical? I’m like, no, it’s digital. He’s that doesn’t make any sense. I’m like, this is going to be such a long call. Holy God. It’s dad, when can you come down? Maybe we could just do this in person. So we ended up actually doing that. He came down to visit. It was for one of the kids birthdays and we’re sitting there, we’re watching Wyatt play soccer and he does year round soccer and loves it.

He’s a good goalie. And I’m explaining, how Bitcoin works and transaction. I’m showing them different things. And I set up and I said, look there’s no ETFs. I think they’re going to come at some point. Finance is an interesting point in time where retail people, you know, you and I, the little guys, we actually can buy something before institutions.

I don’t think there’s been a financial product in history that has existed. And I think it’s a unique opportunity. He’s okay, how do I do it? So I set them up with a Coinbase account. And I say, look, when you put money in here, only put money that you’re willing [00:42:00] to say it’s worth zero. I don’t want you to look at it.

I want you to think about it. I want you to care about it. Just you put money here, whatever it is. I don’t care the amount, right? Could be 10, could be 20, 000. It could be a billion dollar, whatever you want to put in here. And he goes, okay. And I said, but you can’t share it. You don’t really want to talk about it.

You don’t click on links because people are, in every industry, there’s bad. people that are going to try to hack your identity. How many times have we heard about, wiring money and, a thief or credit card scams or whatever. It’s not just inherent, even though the media will tell you it’s all bad it’s in every industry, right?

And so what worked for him was we got him on Coinbase, we bought him some Bitcoin and, not a whole coin ~and ~And now he keeps it on his phone and he’s been tracking it. And he thinks this is like the funniest thing in the world. And he’s not worried about selling or gains. He put enough in that he was happy, but not enough that it like moved, maybe a couple of percent of this thing. ~And~ and then the ETFs came and I said, okay, dad, you’re not really technically savvy. I don’t know if we should hold this here. I think maybe we should look at the ETF options and doing this through your brokerage. [00:43:00] And he was actually comfortable enough.

He’d gotten to the point where he’s I’m okay. I think this is fine. I’m never moving it off. I now understand what you mean with self custody. That is a hundred percent not for me. I’ll lose that thing in a second. Don’t want to touch it as long as they don’t get locked out here. And I have to go through customer service.

That’s the case, but it should be fine. So that’s where he ended up. But I have many friends that are like, no way. I’m never touching it inside there. That does not make sense. Great. Go to the brokerage, type in the stock symbol, buy the ETF and you get some exposure there. It doesn’t matter which account you own it in.

It’s up to you again. Everyone’s got their own personal thing, but you can buy it and it’s super simple there. ~And so I own I owned a lot prior to the ETFs. ~I own way more ETFs than anything else. Now though, like to me, the safety, the ease, the simplicity, like can’t get hacked, can’t get stolen, like still have obviously some, but the majority of what I’ve done is now in the brokerage and it’s way, way simpler. Yeah. I think that seems like the lowest barrier of entry. And yeah, I know about defy a little bit because you and I have texted about it, but what is defy? What are you doing nowadays? What are you up to?

Cause I [00:44:00] think it’s really cool and it continues this conversation. Yeah. So defy is decentralized finance. And we didn’t really talk about me. When I closed down PWS and FR and everything, but we can go back if you want. But essentially I took some time to figure out what I wanted to do. And as I started looking at the metaverse stuff and the gaming things and wanting to do that, like I started digging further and been like this crypto world is really fascinating.

And not again, For the price ~is ~prices is fine. Obviously, everyone wants to make money and doing something, but for the railroad, right for the blockchain technology for what could come. And the piece that I found the most fascinating was the defy or decentralized market where. People were providing liquidity, meaning they were putting up some of this, their crypto and coins and allowing people to trade back and forth with it.

And they earn a fee. So the way I described this to my dad was when he asked me what the hell I was doing every day was I said, look, if you flew abroad and [00:45:00] you’ve got us dollars in your pocket. You want some of the local currency, you’d either go to the teller that’s sitting, the, ~one of those little ~at the airport.

At the airport, one of those little desks, right? Exchanges. Yeah. You go to the bank there, unlikely, but you could. Or you go to your hotel, right? And you ask for it and you say I got dollars. I want pounds. What can you do? They said, sure Jimmy, we have both sitting here on hand and we will do, here’s the current exchange rate, right?

The price of the pound to the dollar. ~That they don’t set. ~That is the market setting that it moves every day when markets are live and operational and everything. And here’s our fee for doing it right now. This is a single entity, your hotel, or the kiosk at the airport, right? And they, let’s say are going to take a 5 percent fee and they quote you the price.

You get your pounds, you walk away, they get their dollars, they wait for the next customer. That is a legitimate business, and ~that ~they ~do is they’re ~providing liquidity between two currencies, the pound and the dollar. It’s really simple. If you just think of that and then it changed dollar to aetherium and change the pound to [00:46:00] Bitcoin, right?

Someone’s sitting there and says I’ve got Bitcoin, I’ve got aetherium, I’ll exchange, one to each other or I’ve got USDC, which is a stable coin. ~It’s ~tracks to the actual dollar it’s owned by a us company called circle. That is, I got a. Nice office in the world trade and they’re worth a bajillion dollars.

Of course, their largest shareholders, BlackRock, because they own everything. ~And~ and so it might be, USDC and Ethereum, it’s just having two coins and having both those providing that liquidity and someone wants to exchange. You’d say okay how do you find those people?

There’s websites or protocols that are out there that allow people to put up this liquidity, right? A little bit of both coins into a pool which is just a layman’s kind of way of saying it’s a code base that is sitting there that people can pull from or put money into. And.

Anyone can go swap from one currency to another in those pools. They’re called liquidity pools. And I know this is a lot, so you might have to rewind or [00:47:00] honestly might fast forward because you don’t care. But the fascinating piece is that it doesn’t matter if you’re white, black, Asian, American, Chinese, Japanese, it doesn’t matter if you have a hundred dollars to name or you’re Bill Gates.

It literally does not matter. It’s code. It provides equal access to anyone on the entire planet to participate in the financial markets. That is pretty cool. Never happened. So everyone now, obviously ~people have, ~some people have more money and some people have less, but like equal opportunity, it has never happened.

So I went Holy crap. That is a really cool use case for blockchain technology. Do I like what the underlying coins are doing? Most of them know, right? So there’s some risk on which coins you will provide liquidity to, but if you’re comfortable owning some of these coins and being able to provide that liquidity and to earn from that liquidity is fascinating to me.

And so if we think about those fees being charged that centralized entity, right at the airport, [00:48:00] they might charge a 5 percent fee, but they don’t ~give ~very many customers every day. And so they have to charge enough that it makes sense. But if you’re on the open internet, that is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, three 65.

Never sleeps doesn’t care if it’s christmas fourth of july your birthday. Nothing. It is always open and always Operational the fees can be a lot less And that helps out the normal user who doesn’t want to ~say ~Use coinbase to buy their bitcoin because coinbase charges one percent and that adds up Or one and a quarter.

I forget what it is. You can go on to this decentralized Platform ~and there’s a lot of them ~and you can ~You ~Swap for maybe 0. 1 percent or 0. 05%. So it’s a better pricing than a centralized entity. And the money is going directly to the people who’ve put money in their pool pro rata by how much you’ve put in.

So as an example of what that actually means, if there’s a thousand dollars in the pool, that’s put in by, five people but Jimmy’s put in 500 and the others have put in, ~one ~25 each. If 10 in fees comes into the pool because money was [00:49:00] swapped, Jimmy would earn half of the fees, half of the pool.

These pools have like millions or tens of millions of dollars in them. The market right now, I think just on one protocol is several billion dollars a day is traded. ~On those ~so now it’s getting big enough that some of the bigger Institutional players are starting to look at that but the fees are still really high because There’s not a ton of liquidity out there, even though billions are traded maybe ~a good You know ~a billion dollars in liquidity and five billion was traded It means that as a whole collectively money cycled five times in a single day.

It’s crazy Yeah, so that is crazy. I’ve been as a business side separate than ~my personal ~my personal I Honestly, don’t trade. I just leave it there. It is sat there and I don’t touch it. But on a business side, I’ve made a decision that I wanted to provide liquidity in some of these markets, not all of those markets.

Most of these coins are complete trash. There’s 50, 000 different cryptocurrencies and 49, 950 of them are complete crap, right? But there are some good ones and I’m willing to. Take the risk of [00:50:00] owning those as a business, right? This is no different than, a physician going and getting, renting some space, buying some equipment, hiring some people, right?

I don’t have to do that in this business. I can have the money mostly work for me. I can work out of my house and that kind of thing. But, ~and ~these are public, like this is anyone again can use this. So like the percentages I’m talking about are not exclusive to some voodoo magic Sasquatch thing that Jimmy might think I’m doing.

But depending on the currencies that you’re providing liquidity to could range anywhere from like 30 percent a year to 200 percent a year. In terms of I’ve put money in and the fees that are being generated are coming back to me and the amount of money that maybe is in the pool related to how much money is being traded will determine a lot of that fee.

But the most wild part about all of this is that you can actually compound it and compounding returns. We know how we talk about time in the market, the longer you’re in the market ~that ~the bigger your portfolio is the more that it can compound over time This piece is interesting because [00:51:00] as you’re putting money in these pools And you’re earning a fee it’s on every trade So if jimmy puts his money in at 2 p.

m. Eastern on a monday and he checks back at 3 p. m Eastern on a monday, it’s been in the pool. Maybe five transactions have happened. Maybe 50 transactions have happened Jimmy, you could go pull That income, the fee that you generated, you could ~go ~pull that at any time. All right, you pay a little gas fee you claim the money it goes back into your wallet And then you could put it back into the pool.

Now that fee is earning fees It’s compounding in real time not waiting for some, longer duration You could do a daily weekly monthly whatever you’d like. And so now you have ~The, whether ~the eighth ~one or ~the world of compounding interest working for you on a daily basis. So while the actual coin might go down in price, might go up in price, ~that’s that ~it matters.

But in this, ~in the ~example doesn’t matter, right? You’re still earning a fee from people trading in and out of those things and that feeds you compound. All right. So we talked about Individual coins, we talked about ETFs and that kinda being the lowest barrier to entry. Now we’re talking about defi ~and ~which is like the [00:52:00] highest barrier, hardest and ~actual ~time consuming ~a ~job.

~Yeah. ~Yeah. But when you’re talking about these fees, you’re talking about from like a business standpoint and the compounding that compounds upon compounding. ~Yes. We can keep going with that. ~Yes. From a business standpoint, but the. Individual investor does not have access to that. If they did that, they could, I’m not saying that people should do that. I’m just saying that like one, that’s what I do, but that is, I’m a normal human, just like you are. And there’s, there could be a guy in England that could do it. And the guy in Africa that could do it. It doesn’t matter who we are, where you’re at, you have 50 to your name or a billion.

Anyone could do that. It’s just time and effort, right? To do that. And it’s a lot of learning and trial by error. And, there’s hefty amount of risk associated with that. But I have found over the last few years, like I find it, cause I’m a nerd, I find it fun. And ~there’s, ~you ~enjoy the process. I ~enjoy the process.

And from a business sense, like I have no overhead, right? So anything I make actual earned income. My only business expense is one the cost of legal to keep it alive and pay the state. Cause of course they want their money. And to [00:53:00] my accountant, right? I have no other overhead and over things. But I take risk every day owning those, whatever those underlying coins are which is a healthy dose of risk, but I’ve separated it completely from my personal finances, which are in all the traditional things that we’ve talked about.

And that allocation that I haven’t touched. Yeah. So let’s bring this arc full circle, right? And cause the people ~that, ~that are listening, this is by the way, just serendipitously my first long form podcast. But yeah, this is great. So you’re witnessing the next Joe Rogan people.

That’s right. It’s happening right in front of you, whether you like it’s happening in your ears, Jimmy’s the guy, but yeah, I don’t know if I’m gonna surpass that guy, but my question is to bring this full circle. We talked about leaving money ~means ~medicine, we talked about how that took you on your journey ~to, to, ~to video games and metaverse and then to cryptocurrency that was associated with that and tokenomics.

And then we talked about, individual side, personal finance, cryptocurrency, and then, all that kind of led to your work now in DeFi. But let’s bring it back to the very beginning because you brought this up and I’m glad that you did. Physician Wealth [00:54:00] Services, when you stopped Money Meets Medicine, it wasn’t long thereafter that you transitioned away from that as well.

And for the listener that’s listening ~at, ~on this show at the end they’re obviously a very big Ryan Inman super fan, just like me. So all nine of you out there, I love you. ~That’s right. ~That’s right. It’s a big fan club. I’m the president, but we have a few nine people listen.

And then Jimmy’s mom plays us on repeat to get this to the million. So how that works. That’s true. That’s exactly how that works. So what happened? Cause there, there are people out there that have reached out and be like, Hey, I just like this seemed very abrupt. What happened?

Is he okay? There are people that reached out that had legitimate concerns about Hey, like I just want to, I just want to know that Ryan’s okay. So yeah, this podcast in and of itself lets people know that you’re still alive. So that’s good. I’m alive. I’m okay. ~Was Yeah. ~What’s the story?

What happened? Look, burnout, right? ~It, ~it doesn’t just come Oh, I may, eat tiptoe my way into burnout. And then today I’m like, Oh, maybe another, like it hits you right in the face. ~And I ~we had a hard time with the kids in 2020. And you know me, I’m like full open book.

I can talk about anything and everything. And I hope people don’t get offended. That ~here, whatever I say. ~ Was hard with the kids in 2020. We were trying to figure out, Taylor was working a [00:55:00] ton as a physician and it was the busiest I’d ever been. And I have always felt like I need to help as many doctors as I can.

Not cause I need more money, but because I don’t want them to keep getting screwed over by every effing financial professional that’s out there. And it’s infuriating that keeps occurring. And I see it firsthand with our friends or friends of their friends, which is the harder one. Cause I’m like, I know you, I’ll help you, but I can’t It’s hard.

And then, we did a whole month. It was in April of 2020. And I, I felt horrible, like absolutely horrible, not like about myself, just about what everyone’s going through. And we did a daily podcast on financial residency, but what people don’t know is that I had like hundreds of questions that came in and I couldn’t answer all of them.

And I felt really guilty that I couldn’t help, Everyone. And as COVID was continuing, our client population was getting angrier and angrier. They were not happy with their work environment. They, everyone thought I was crazy by saying like physician [00:56:00] salaries are not guaranteed. People were figuring that out firsthand and I felt horrible and I’m never going to be like, Oh, I told you but it was a really hard point.

And so I had hard stuff at home. I had. The busiest, 90, a hundred hour work weeks. I remember back when this was going on and you made comments to me about working past midnight and then, and, waking up at five in the morning to start your next day and every day, ~it sounded more like it.~

~Yeah. ~It sounded more like a neurosurgery residency than it did like a financial planning or, multi media company. No, I didn’t kick my foot up and been like, Oh, we’ll figure it out someday. Like I was working a ton and it was crazy. And It got to the point where, I was even creeping into working on Sundays, which was always my no go with Taylor.

And she’s look, you gotta do something like I’m overworked and this is hard with Wyatt and Ruby and this. So it just came to a point where I was like, I have to make a decision and there’s no way to stop this unless I go cold turkey. ~There’s no way to just stop this. ~So I reached out to a good friend of mine, Daniel Wren.

~I, ~I don’t know if you’ve had [00:57:00] him on or not, but I love Daniel. I trust him. I told Taylor, I have it written down. If I get hit by a bus, you call Daniel, right? Like he will be able to help you. And that’s where we sent all of our clients. Every single one of them. I said, look, some of you are going to be sad or mad that I’m not doing this anymore.

But I trust Daniel ~to, ~to do the right thing. Jackie, who is a part of our planning team I told Daniel, I was like, you got to hire Jackie. She’s amazing. ~And~ and she still works with Daniel, but she helped a lot of our clients transition over to Daniel. ~Sure. ~And so I knew that at least I was leaving them in a good spot with an option to go somewhere to someone I trust with my own stuff.

If I wasn’t here the podcast we were creating so much stuff and doing so many things in the blog and this and that I just couldn’t, I couldn’t keep going with what it was. And so Daniel did some podcasts with ~that ~Doug and Tammy. I’ve known them for a long time. ~Yeah. ~Doug has done all my mortgages.

Doug has done mortgages for my friends. Like I trust Doug. He’s one of the few people in that [00:58:00] world that will actually do the right thing. Not many would. And Doug essentially said, look, Tammy. Is cutting back all her clinical stuff like she wants something to do and she loves the concept ~like I’m ~like cool run with it like I’ll know that it’s in a good spot now ~I know it is not the same ~and I’ve saw the reviews and it breaks my heart a little that ~like ~people didn’t give it the same.

~And as~ as I hoped that they would but I’m still hopeful that they can continue to create content and do some cool stuff over there. And then it just ~way it ~worked. Unfortunately my grandma had passed a few months later. And then at the end of that in December, Ruby got diagnosed with type one diabetes.

So then that added to this. And so for those people that probably already know, Taylor’s type one and now Ruby’s type one. So now I’ve got, a four year old that has type one or five year old that’s type one. And so that has been a whole challenge just every day we thought we knew enough, but we did not, even with, Taylor, it’s learning about the schools and fighting that and holy crap, the schools are in a bad spot.

If [00:59:00] what we’re experiencing, if other people are experiencing it, like Taylor’s hobby and now personal mission ~as to, as ~is all around helping kids that have diabetes. Get appropriate care that they need from the school’s system. And ~she’s fighting with ~she’s doing some amazing things. I don’t want to take it away.

She’s got podcasts and things that she’s been talking on, but it has been tough. There’s been some real hits. I lost my stepdad, like a, what, two years ago. And so working with that and the estate with my mom and those things. So there’s been a lot of things and I think it was really good timing for me to leave considering like all the different life events that occurred after that too.

~Yeah. ~Yeah. No you were going through it and for those that. Haven’t been there. And obviously I haven’t experienced what you’ve experienced. You have your own personal life experiences, like personal finances, personal, obviously ~100 percent is ~very specific to you. But I went through burnout with medicine.

I went through it as an entrepreneur. That’s part of the reason why you and I paused money [01:00:00] means medicine to begin with, not knowing that all that stuff was going on in the background. I knew some of it, obviously not in the entire shebang. But honestly, sometimes that giant burden that you feel if you’re listening to this, sometimes the answer is to just stop and the unfortunate thing about it is when you’re running a business and it has that inertia, it has momentum.

There’s not like really a great way to do that, right? Like you can try to make it as least painful for people as possible. But at the end of the day, no matter how you do it, there’s gonna be people that understand. There’s some people that don’t understand and you can’t make everybody happy even when you try.

And so I have had times in my own entrepreneurial journey where I’ve just stopped doing things. And ~the reason why ~the predominant reason why was just purely self preservation. And I think for people that don’t. Run a business and have a life and, have 4 billion things going on. Sometimes it’s a little harder to understand that because they have their own complexities, their own life, the things that they’re struggling with.

And, so we’re each on our own [01:01:00] journey and Ryan, I appreciate being open and transparent about. Yours. Cause I know a lot of that stuff was super heavy for you. Yeah, no, ~I from day one, ~I tell people when you ~get, ~start podcasting, there’s no way to fake it. And especially after what, four or five, 600 episodes, ~like ~I think those that listen and know who I am, know that I’m very blunt ~and, ~and I’m fully transparent. ~Yeah~ it wasn’t like I was ~like ~depressed or anything like that. It just was like every day I woke up and I was just going, man, I have so much to do. I’m barely sleeping. ~The kids is ~I felt like I wasn’t being a great dad cause I wasn’t present as much as I could.

And it was just, COVID was a tough time. And it was weird cause it was the busiest I’d ever been. We had so many people reaching out for help. ~I was doing ~and I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about it, but I was doing ~like a ~a business mastermind. It was a huge advisor out of LA.

Basically had a program that they said, Hey, look, any advisor that is fee only can apply to this. And here’s what we go through. And we just we want to teach the next generation of advisors, [01:02:00] like what we do and how we do so you can build better businesses and thrive and whatever. It was fascinating.

It was like the way of community service, so to speak. And I was fortunate. I was one of those advisors. And as we were going through and, they pull your business metrics and they, they analyze everything about your advisory practice. And they were going, Holy shit, how are you doing this?

I’m like, I don’t know. I just, I want to help people. And I got the podcast and this one, like you’re growing as fast as we are and we have 27 advisors. I was like, we have two he’s do you sleep? I’m like, no. I don’t like I’m overwhelmed. I got a lot going on. And I at some point was actually searching to find a new CEO of physician well services to replace me on the business side of it.

Cause I literally needed more help. And I couldn’t find anyone. That was good. That would actually care. And even just finding other advisors was so hard because no one understands physicians in an intimate way. And [01:03:00] then the ones that do always looked at them like they were dollar signs and not people.

And it’s just like we went through 20 interviews or 15 interviews or something. And I just was getting tired of that. And I’m like, I don’t know any other way out than to get hit by this bus in my face, right? ~And ~I could say no, no more clients and stick to a tighter podcast schedule of once a week instead of doing it two times ~with, ~cause we were doing the Friday, like financial assessments and people calling.

~We had, ~I feel horrible if you’re listening and I didn’t do your assessment. I’m really sorry. We literally had 200 People that had recorded and done stuff. And we got through as many as we could. But yeah, I finally had to stop telling people to do that because I couldn’t handle the amount that was there.

~But ~I looked at it, I was like, I can’t hire good people. I can’t hire more advisors to help me. I can’t keep, I want to keep podcasting. I truly liked it, but then it would, have me feeling that I can’t help more people. ~And then, and ~I was talking to different residency [01:04:00] programs.

I was doing it for free. I just wanted to help people. ~And ~they’re like, this is so helpful. I’m like, great. ~Like how, they’re only doing, ~can we pay them? No, buy the book and give it to your residents. ~And ~I, by the way, make what, ~2 ~a book. ~Like it wasn’t about, ~it wasn’t about the money.

But at some point I just woke up and one day I was like, I don’t, unless I stop, I don’t know how I fix this. And ~everyone was, ~all my friends, they were advisors going, you’re crazy. Like we were making well over a million dollars a year, ~like ~from the business. Like they’re, you’re nuts.

You’re just going, I’m like, yeah, I’m walking away. But people have to understand that ~at the day, and I think you touched on this earlier, ~and this is important. You have to enjoy the process and it’s not about the results, right? It’s about the process. And if you enjoy the process, things will go well.

If you’re looking to make, massive scale and gains and do all these incredible things you will often find. That it doesn’t quite work out. In fact, ~we have a, ~we have an episode coming up after this with Jordan Gromit, who wrote a book called the purpose code. And we dive into that exact topic, but no offense, Ryan, I won’t be as good as this, but I’m just kidding.

This is a big, I can’t make fun of here. I’m sure it’s going to be awesome. It’s a good show for sure. But ~right. ~I’m glad you’re [01:05:00] doing better. And whenever you want to scratch that podcast itch you are more than welcome to come on money meets medicine. If people email ~it ~and they actually want to hear more or talk ~about ~more about this stuff, ~I’m~ I’d be happy to, if it’s just you asking.

All right. I’ll track down the Sasquatch and I’ll say 47 people reached out. So they want the Sasquatch back on Money Meets Medicine. Oh boy. Ryan, thanks for coming on man. I appreciate you having me on and I hope everyone’s doing well out there. And if you’ve ever supported either Financial Residency, PWS, or Money Meets Medicine, know that we truly appreciate you and I know Jimmy is putting a lot of work into this.

~And ~It is truly a lot of work. I’m talking as the person that has been on the other side of this. So anything you guys and gals out there can do to help him by sharing it or writing a review or sending him an email, even just a thank you. I will tell you it goes a long way. A hundred percent.

All right. That’s enough. Nice things. I can say about Jimmy. ~Okay. Okay. That’s ~I got to stop. [01:06:00] See you next time.