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Patrick L Young is a lifelong entrepreneur and fintech industry veteran. His first book, “Capital Market Revolution!” published in 1999, was a bestseller. A former stock exchange boss in Europe, he runs the daily information service for bourses [stock markets], “Exchange Invest”, which is followed by executives at NYSE and NASDAQ down through the pyramid of exchanges. Patrick’s most recent book, “Victory or Death,” looks at the impact of fintech, including blockchain and cryptocurrency on the business world. Patrick sits down with Chris Snyder to discuss blockchain, fintech, and the future of global markets.
Patrick L Young is a lifelong entrepreneur and fintech industry veteran. His first book, “Capital market Revolution!” published in 1999, was a bestseller. A former stock exchange boss in Europe, he runs the daily information service for bourses [stock markets], “Exchange Invest."
Today’s show is sponsored by banks.com – the world's most comprehensive and trusted branding and discovery platform for banks and banking related products & services. Banks.com is aligning consumer core values with trusted financial institutions bringing attention and awareness to leading financial brands.
To learn more, go to www.banks.com/partners or you can send an email to info@banks.com.
Patrick L Young is a lifelong entrepreneur and fintech industry veteran. His first book, “Capital market Revolution!” published in 1999, was a bestseller. A former stock exchange boss in Europe, he runs the daily information service for bourses [stock markets], “Exchange Invest."
[00:00:01] Hello, everyone, Chris Snyder here, host of the Snyder showdown president at Juhll Agency and founder of Financial Services Platform Banks dot com. On this show, we take a no bias approach to business success and failure, told through the stories of the top entrepreneurs and executives who have lived them. Join us today as we get the unfiltered backstories behind successful brands. Today's show is sponsored by Banks Dot Com, the world's most comprehensive and trusted branding and discovery platform for banks and banking related products and services. Banks dot com is highlighting consumer core values with trusted financial institutions, bringing attention and awareness to leading financial brands. To learn more, you can go to banks dot com for partners, or you can send an email to info banks dot com. OK, without further ado, today's guest is Patrick L. Young. He is a lifelong entrepreneur and fintech industry veteran. His first book, Capital Market Revolution, published in nineteen ninety nine, was a bestseller seller. A former stock exchange boss in Europe, he runs the Daily Information Service for bourses, which are stock markets. He also runs Exchange Invest, which is followed by executives at New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq down through the pyramid of exchanges throughout the world. Patrick's most recent book, Victory or Death, looks at the impact of fintech, including block, chain and cryptocurrency on the business world. Patrick is here with us today to discuss blocking fintech and the future of global markets.
[00:01:43] Welcome, Patrick. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for the invitation. Delightful to be with the Snyder Snowden.
[00:01:51] All right. Thank you, Patrick. And you hail from currently from Malta. So I'm sure we'll get into that country a little bit and how you wound up there, but which is a beautiful country. But before we get into that, let's do a little bit of the origin story. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing, where you grew up and how you think you got to where you are today.
[00:02:13] Well, what an interesting journey. I was originally born in Belfast in the north of Ireland, and I was born at a not particularly propitious time in our history, what they called the Troubles, which was a very unfortunate series of events as a result of, well, lots of politics, which we're not going to get into today. But on the other hand, it was a wonderful and interesting place to be born. The weather sucks, but it's beautiful and green and you have lots of lovely fresh food as a result of it raining all the time from childhood. I was really driven with an interest in technology. I had a huge passion for cars, race cars in particular, and that sort of drove a lot of it not to, pardon the pun, drove me in many ways in my entrepreneurial career. So actually, when I was already at school before I even reached high school, I ran the first couple of series for historic racing cars, vintage race cars, you could call them in the United States of America, which it wasn't exactly something which was equivalent to the Monterrey week and on the West Coast of America. But nonetheless, it was the first series of races we had for a race cars. And I ran this for a couple of years and I was fascinated by the way that cars worked and also the motor racing business. And that leads you very quickly into, well, how do you get money in order to go car racing? And you meet lots of people who have racing cars and old cars and they themselves tend to be entrepreneurs quite frequently or people who are lucky enough to have a great deal of money in many cases. And that led me to take an interest in finance. So I taught myself how to trade on the stock market and how to trade options, probably not terribly brilliantly, but that led me into a career in the financial market subsequently. And I arrived in the city of London quite spectacularly, actually, because I was interviewed for a job on Monday, October the 19th, nineteen eighty seven, which is famous Black Monday, which was the most incredible thing because there was just anarchy happening left, right and center. But nonetheless, I managed to get the job, which was really, really fortuitous because within a couple of weeks nobody was hiring any more because suddenly everybody was scared about the economy. So it's one of those things like everything in life, there's a whole lot of hustling. There's also an element of luck.
[00:04:35] Yeah, it. Did you did you ever get into motorcycles? Because I know the Isle of Man is something that is super interesting as well. Or you just a car guy.
[00:04:44] I'm much more of a car guy, but yes, I mean, the Isle of Man is only 90 minutes by Catamount from Belfast, where I was born. And we can actually go to the Isle of Man for the day. I stayed on the car side of the equation. But Ireland is also huge for motorcycles and motorcycle road racing. And actually many of the people have been. The people who won the most road races at the Isle of Man tea are from a roundabout where I come from slightly further into the country in Northern Ireland, where petrol heads. We're crazy, I think, per square inch of the province of Northern Ireland. We probably have more motor sport history than anybody else. And actually with a lot of motoring history as well, there's a lovely story of somebody who used to work for me. She had you know, she was lucky. She had a little bit of a trust fund and it was three generations old and it was all built on the back of Dunlop tires. But nowadays they're owned by Goodyear and nobody really thinks about Dunlop tires. But the Origin story there is beautiful. It's startups in the Edwardian, the end of the Victorian era in the UK, her grandfather was a doctor and he bumped into the local. I can remember he was also a medical practitioner, I do believe, and he said, Oh, Mr. Dunlop, it's lovely to see you. That's a very interesting tricycle your child has. And he said, well, Terri, my man, or words to that effect, because this was around nineteen hundred, I've got this very interesting invention.
[00:06:12] We have a tire and it's rubber and you put air in it. And of course at that point in time was a radical concept. So anyway, this, this, this this woman who used to work for me, her great grandfather had been an original member of the seed round for Dumble.
[00:06:28] Oh, wow. That way you talk about seed and it wasn't on TechCrunch. Nobody bothered posting it to the Internet at the time, but that's actually what they've done. So, you know, we invented, thanks to a Scotsman living in Belfast, the pneumatic tire. We were quite pioneering and lots of stuff to do with motor sport and motorcycle racing as well. And it's just amazing. I'm so as a complete petrolhead, I've remained one to this day. And even nowadays in Malta, I do the commentary on our local historic car racing, the Malta Grand Prix every year, which is a lot of fun.
[00:07:03] Yeah, no, I love it. And I don't know if many people know this, but I believe that BMW started as a motorcycle company and transformed into a car company. But I think there's some there's some parallels between this this fascination or tinkering with cars in that whole culture and that whole scene. I think it it parallels very well with what we see in fintech, not fintech specifically, but technology specifically in our in our pre game. We were talking a little bit about how hard it was to actually be a digital nomad. You were explained to me I had to carry all your gear with you. Right. But there was no schools for this stuff. Like you had to care enough to do it. I think the car thing is very similar to that. So how did you how did you get into fintech in technology specifically? Because you were in finance in cars, right? I mean, cars was a hobby. Finance was your job. How did you get into to fintech and technology?
[00:08:12] Well, when I was organizing my car races, when I was at school, I already had some simple computers. This was my second computer, Sinclair Spectrum for anybody who remembers these things. Forty eight K of around 48 K of roll, a huge improvement on its predecessor, which had eight K of role in one K around. That was also by a guy called Sinclair who was this great British genius of the early computing movement. And I was actually typing up the race results and recording them, which of course now was seen as a complete folly because of course, they can't be read by any other system except for Sinclair. Some system there and you learn some lessons. But I was always fascinated by technology. When the interweb thing came along, I realized very quickly that what we were doing in finance was going to change quite dramatically. So I used to work actually at one stage on the floors of some of the exchanges. So I worked on the floor of the London International Financial Futures Exchange, life in London and on the floor of the stock exchange. And that involved lots of people wearing funny colored jackets. And the Pilbara, if you if you've ever seen that old movie trading places with Eddie Murphy, that's what it was. I mean, that was the New York floors that they were all Nycole.
[00:09:23] And it's an incredible experience. But you look at this and you sort of think, wow, this is like poetry in motion and it's like those beautiful nineteen fifties classic cars or motorcycles. They're absolutely exquisite. But my aren't they just totally inefficient compared to what we know today. I'm now remarkable and I realize the technology was going to drive things forward. So I got onto the Internet and doing business on the Internet around about nineteen ninety four.
[00:09:51] I may have been doing business before but I've got a stack of old floppy disks which someday will have to be gone through hopefully before I meet my demise in order to manage to challenge that assertion. But certainly I was on there. I became a digital nomad and I was fascinated because I could trade online to a certain degree in a very, very primitive way. And that started making you realize that the whole stack of finance was really going to change. And in essence, I mean, finance has been remarkably static over time. But the house a number of moments where big revolutionary moves change stuff.
[00:10:27] So, for example, take one, the mid 19th century, smart people invent the telegraph and all of a sudden now you can be sitting in New York and you can have the prices of that morning's trading session in court in Liverpool, which stage was a dominant position in the textile industry of the world. And that informs and educates you how the rest of the US market is going to trade. And obviously we all know the US has lots of cotton that it produces and. So technology has always driven markets, but certainly in the mid 90s, it was a very, very lonely furrow to be out there saying, really, this Internet thing is going to catch on, it's going to change your life. And in 20 years time, you will believe that you're going to be living your life on the Internet. Yeah, nobody believed it.
[00:11:18] No. And it's interesting, if you think about Apple and Steve Jobs and you even think about Bill Gates, Larry Ellison with Oracle and all these guys and even the guys from Netscape, you read this, read the stories or watch the movies about them. And people were literally like, this is not going to work. Like this is never going to be a thing. And it started out like Sun Microsystems was the Stanford University network. They created these ways to talk to different universities and colleges. This was something that I mean, what was there to supercomputers? There was one in Michigan and one in Washington, I believe, which is why Microsoft use that one. Larry Ellison, I believe, use the one in Michigan. These were very expensive things. I mean, this was like NASA stuff. This wasn't this wasn't everybody every day carry a computer around and be a digital nomad saying, no, no, no, Ubiquiti was not going to happen.
[00:12:20] And you've even got those those great statements by Bill Gates in the early days when he says, you know, seven hundred K of memory should be enough for anybody. And nowadays, nobody would even touch a mobile cell phone that had seven hundred K would expect a multitude of multiple of that to be the memory of anything that we're going to use, even our Fitbit.
[00:12:40] Yeah, well, the T one, I don't know, I have to go back to T one calculators, the graphing calculators and stuff. Probably would do a better job of that even 20 years ago at this point. So thinking about finance and thinking about the evolution and I hear a lot about banks and banking and how they need to transform. Obviously, you've got Syntex now, you know a lot of them, minus the the regulations, minus the licensing, doing some interesting things. Then you've got the old monolithic banks like I think if you researched the word banks, I think it was created back in Rome, back in, whatever, five hundred years ago, or maybe there's some debate around that. But if you think about FinTech, which is the business that you're in and you're also in the business of making sure information through your newsletter is available to everyone, and you really talk about these issues, where do you think we're headed? If you had to think about, OK, you took us through the floppy disk, you took us through what your evolution was with trading, where are we headed? If you took us, took us through the Internet and nobody believed that that could happen. Right. What is going to be the next big innovation as we maybe get into blocking cryptocurrency, these big monolithic banks that have trillions of dollars in assets versus the fintech? I know there's a lot there to unpack, but you've done this one hundred times. So can you take us through your vision or what might happen in the next five to 10 years in our space?
[00:14:18] First of all, if you don't mind, I'm going to just drop us back half a millennia. I realize that's the entire history of the United States of America. And by the way, what a history it has been of the United States of America. Quite incredible. But if you go back then to the Renaissance, the Renaissance, as you would call it, actually, that's really the origin of the word bank. So the bank was where the money lenders used to sit on benches, which is a banker in Italian. But the thing that's interesting about that is to get banking working. We need a technology. And the technology was somebody needed to be able to work on a balance sheet and therefore, for example, in victory or death, what I talk about there is the origin of how the banking supercycle became a thing in the course of the last five hundred years. And it's because we talk about Luca Pacioli being the godfather, the father of a country. But actually Pacioli, he was really udemy of his day, OK, something like that. He was the ultimate educational platform and he was very gifted in taking information, breaking it down and turning it into effectively books or coursework and teaching it to people. And he was also very lucky because he had this fabulous illustrator he worked with called Leonardo da Vinci, who went on to be obviously remarkably famous in his own right. If we look around that time, so just before fifteen hundred A.D., you've got this guy, Benedict Benedetto, as they called him, an Italian, truly, and he came out of rugosa, which is Dubrovnik in modern day Croatia. And he wrote a book, The Book of the Art of Trade and the Book of the Art Trade actually lays out the basis of the balance sheet. And let's face it, today in business, you couldn't spend more than 15 minutes in business school without understanding a balance sheet.
[00:16:14] Mean a supply curve would give you a few of the things that you're going to know. There's a thing called the balance sheet, and we're going to spend the next X number of months learning all about what you can do with a balance sheet. So the book and the art of trade actually explains the whole thing about the balance sheet. And as a footnote, it's quite interesting because the oldest known copy that they've ever find of the book of the art trade was actually about four hundred meters from where I'm talking to you today in the heart of the letter, in the original treasury of the Knights of Malta, which is not the National Library of Malta, which it had sat there for two hundred years. And essentially nobody ever bothered to even pick it up because there were so many gorgeous ancient books that they were working the way through the catalog anyway.
[00:17:01] Balance sheet. What does that do? It enables banking because now I can write down what are my assets, what are my liability, what is my cash flow? And that helps me understand so I can be sitting on my bench and rather than randomly, as they were before, a lot of the lending was, for example, to farmers in wheat in Italy so that they could manage to grow their crops and understanding those sorts of things. A lot of this just looked like voodoo. All of a sudden we have technology. The balance sheet becomes the thing that drives the banking revolution. And that banking revolution is added to by the origin of the limited liability company and the limited liability company. Is this this piece of sheer genius, which is what you may do the wrong thing somewhere along the way, but you will only have to pay the amount of capital you have in your country. It is the ultimate almost Christian redemption for business, if you think about it. But it has allowed so many people to fail to pick themselves up and go forward. And equally, it has allowed people to then use that balance sheet to understand what's going on, mix those together. And suddenly banking comes on the scene and it's like instant party. The economy goes crazy. People go, you know what? I would really like to go and find some weird, wonderful, far flung countries because there's got to be somewhere across that big flat map. Oh, by the way, I think that big that big fat map. I think the world curved. Do you think so? Controversial. And obviously we see that whole enlightenment thing gets going. So the Enlightenment gets going. We start having massive trade routes. We have massive trade routes which then explode. Previously they were on allowed. Now they start to be on scene. So whereas before, for example, Malta was pretty much bounded by Italy, Greece and the Lebanon, which it had been trading with for the course of eight thousand years, suddenly people were sailing all over the world because they have risk capital. And that was coming from financiers, from banks. So we get stock markets and so on. Why does this matter to where are we going in the world? Because I believe that banking has been in a five hundred year supercycle and we essentially an. Five hundred year supercycle, it peaked with the top of the financial crisis in 2008 because 2008 was really the last time when everybody believed everything that banks were saying. Now you're listening this and you're a banker and there are great many good people who work in banks. There are fabulous, particularly cooperative institutions, local lending institutions across the United States, America. They're wonderful. But we also know there are a few banks that are run by charlatans. We don't need them here, but there are certain people that don't necessarily run high on the Christmas card lists of lots of other people in the rest of society, and they have been known to bankrupt society.
[00:19:59] 2008 is the peak of that. And that's why FinTech is really interesting, because it's the origin of fintech. Well, it's somewhere around about 10 years earlier, I would say, because I wrote this book, Capital Market Revolution, that was the first best selling book of fintech published by the Financial Times.
[00:20:15] Nowadays, of course, you pick that book up and everybody goes, well, man, wasn't it just so obvious? Of course. And of course. And it's like the greatest actually, it's the greatest tribute somebody could pay to. And I said, you know what? I went to lots of lovely stuff, dining rooms with fund managers and bankers. And they put the hard word on me in a fashion that I really felt as if I was walking out of a nineteen Scorsese movie. I mean, lots of people were very upset at the idea that suddenly their meal ticket might disappear. How does this impact where we're going to go in the future? The first and most important thing to understand is that if you've got a 500 year supercycle, it doesn't just disappear by the end of 10 or 20 years. So I think there's a fallacy of fintech, which is it's lovely. And I do admire lots of youthful people who come forward and say, you know, we've got this great app, we've got this great concept and we're going to destroy the banks all by Thursday week or next January. By the time we get rid of covid or something like that, something that's going to happen in the appreciably medium term. And the truth is, it's never like that. I mean, if you look at things like radio, I mean, radio was effectively supposedly going to die at the moment. Television appeared and television was already on cable in New York by the time of the nineteen twenty nine Wall Street crash by the nineteen eighties, everybody said, well, that's it really was dead. But somehow or other radio held its niche because you could watch television in your car, et cetera. Nowadays, look at it, radio is wonderful.
[00:21:47] We call it podcasts. We love it. People listen to the Snyders shodan, they listen to podcasts the world over. So nothing ever kind of goes away.
[00:21:57] It just finds a narrower niche. And equally, if you look at the automobile that we can talk about motorbikes, they didn't kill the horse. The horse is no longer a major league industrial player in the world, but it's become a leisure activity. I mean, good grief, how would the northeastern United States of America I mean, the bourgeoisie would all fall over. They'd have nothing to do at weekends if they didn't have their horses to play with in one way, shape or form for polo, for riding, for showjumping, eventing, whatever. So everything stays pretty much in the mix. And banking is the same thing. What we're in now on the most important thing to understand, if banking will become less important to the mix of financing over time, but it's not going to disappear, certainly not in our lifetimes, although it will be reshaped by the power of fintech and by the fact that, you know, ultimately you can remodel a great Eisenhauer sentence.
[00:22:56] I mean, Eisenhower famously said plans are nothing, planning is everything.
[00:23:03] And I could actually say, you know, banks are nothing, but banking is everything, because without a form of ability to store money, to move money and to effectively legislate and administrate how money is distributed between people in terms of borrowing, lending transactions and so on, then we don't have a society. We might as well all head back into the Catskills and knit our own sweaters and trade conservations with each other and barter. So the future of fintech is exciting. It's beyond exciting. But I think then we break into two things, and that is a lot of fintech to me is like a cookie cooking show. So people watch Hell's Kitchen on TV and what's Hell's Kitchen? It's a fundamental show where you have an arguing family restaurant or some of these other huge problem that get huge amounts of money, though it's all a disaster or the kitchen's not working, it's dysfunctional. And obviously then you get Gordon Ramsay or whoever turns up and they start swearing at people because it's entertainment as well as everything else. And then they shuffle. Randomly change the drinks in the restaurant, they change the menu, they get them to rethink what's going on, they bring the family back together and they all start growing. And at the end of twenty five minutes plus advertising, everything's going well. And you've got this lovely new restaurant and move on to the next episode. My worry is that a lot of fintech feels like it feels like being on the outside looking in and they haven't really experienced what's going on. And I'm not saying that's impossible to build your business from. I think there are lots of ways you can do that. But actually, the sort of fintech businesses I really like, probably because I'm a boring nerd, is I love businesses where the people have identified a problem. They may not even be that good with technology themselves, but they look at it and they go, you know what, this thing just doesn't work. Or it takes a lot of time or it's horribly huge numbers of paperwork. And also and it's just dumb. And an example of that, for example, is the mortgage business. And if you look at how awful, it's awful. But the IntercontinentalExchange, they've taken their exchange technology in their exchange methodology that runs the New York Stock Exchange. It runs effectively the biggest markets in oil and gas in the world, etc. And they've got they've got to be a way to do this better. And they're not removing the paperwork. They're adding new workflows. They're making things digital. And what are they going to do? They're going to collapse the time. They're going to improve the cost base for those people who are in the business. And ultimately, they're going to make an awful lot easier for people to buy and sell property thanks to collapsing down all of the frankly, ludicrous paperwork that we have in mortgages. And we know that it was ludicrous because what helped spur the peak of the banking business in 2009, and it was a mortgage crisis because there was lots of effectively fraudulent paperwork in the system.
[00:26:18] Yeah, well, let me there's so much to unpack there. But one thing I got from that is the more things change, the more they really stay the same. I mean, as you walked us through the trade routes in the Mediterranean and when we talked about it, to me, that seems no different than what's happening today with China. Globalization. I think there needs to be there probably needs to be some some consolidation of the supply chain. So there's not so many people in the middle of these transactions. You mentioned. I think trust was a key thing and what you in what you brought up. And I think that the banks have had a stranglehold on this this ability to drive trust through there, through their storage of a value and currency with which people just fundamentally I mean, nobody leaves their bank, right?
[00:27:18] I mean, I bank with a pretty large bank and I shouldn't. But it's such a pain in the ass for me to move it. They kind of have you, but there's so much to unpack. There is what I'm hearing from you is nothing's really changed. We might be changing the drapes right now in the kitchen, in the restaurant, but there's still food. Right. And in the other thing that I want to that I want to ask you about, especially as it relates to block chain trust, some centralization of a global understanding of how we would pay for things, some kind of global currency.
[00:27:53] But at the end of the day, the banks aren't going anywhere. I think there's there's you know, you'll have to correct me on this, I think. Seventeen trillion dollars of deposits in the United States of America, maybe over one hundred plus trillion dollars globally in deposits across the world. So this those guys aren't going anywhere. I think they can just let one hundred million dollar funded startup that might say they're worth a billion bucks. What do they care? They'll just buy them, right? I mean, who who really cares? But to get us out of.
[00:28:32] All of the middlemen all call them in the in the transaction, in your mortgage, getting out of it, nothing against real estate agents, but everybody's got a piece of this transaction in technology, hopefully can help us consolidate, centralize, identify the proper party, facilitate the payment mechanism so it happens right away. Take that money out of your bank account so you can pay your mortgage or to refinance or use their equity in ways. But let's talk about the centralization of maybe trust a centralized currency. And that's when we start talking about block chain and crypto. Can you. Now, I don't know. I doubt, seriously doubt that a lot of our listeners know the fundamentals of block chain, which is probably going back to the conversation we started earlier about Ledger, but also crypto. Can you tell us where you think this is going? Because that space is really taking off in the last actually the last couple of years?
[00:29:34] Absolutely. So you mentioned trust and trust is the absolute most important thing. And I have lived in, gosh, 10 or 12 different countries. I've looked at a number of countries post communist countries in Eastern Europe. And the thing that you have to take away about commerce is the most important thing in commerce is trust, because if you don't trust the person next to you, you're never going to deal with them. And that's one of the reasons why the United States of America, the United Kingdom, countries like that, they have an incredible amount of trust because they've got a legal system which is essentially fair, essentially open to all, and works in favor of decency, reasonable documentation, et cetera. Part, not for a moment, because trust is at the epicenter of what goes on. You talk to it block chain. Look, here's how I described block charm and its relevance in the book Victory or Death. Think about a network of information. I mean, think about a database. Now, the thing is, I can be sitting here in Falletta. You can be sitting on the west coast of America. We can each put a piece of information into a database, but there's no problems to that piece of data per say. I mean, there's a little stream we can eventually find on a header, which tells us that's when this was created to multiply. The thing about a block chain that is beautiful is that a block chain takes every piece of data and actually says this piece of data was created at this time by this person and will not let you modify that piece of data unless I give you permission, Chris. OK, so you've got this totally different thing. And I call blockin the magic Post-it note, because if you look at corporate fraud, corporate fraud is the final hour of often people make a mistake and they cover it up. A great example of that would be 20 something years ago, the Barings Bank collapsed in the U.K. and the Barings Bank had been an investment bank that had funded the original railroads in Argentina. It had been run for hundreds of years. They went bust because the guy that ran their Singapore trading office made a mistake, lost some money and covered it up on his spreadsheet. And nobody was able to tell that he'd covered it up. There were various other things happen thereafter, but if he had a block in the block, Ken would have shown the records he had changed. And that's why I call this the magic Post-it note, because guess what? If you change something on your screen right now and I've got a Post-it note just sitting beside my screen, I stick it on my screen to remind me to change that later on. You can't see that Post-it note. Yeah, Block Tyndall's is block ten is the magic Post-it note. When I use that Post-it note and change something, everybody in the network sees immediately that I changed something. So everybody in the network similarly builds trust because they know I'm not just piling loads of data in at my end, which I could be changing. And therefore, if you're looking at the business of trust, if you know and you can look back and say, oh, Patrick, Éliane created the accounts on this company at nine a.m. and then he did this multiplication nine twenty in this location, nine thirty, etc., You can easily look at that and go, OK, that data's good. I know that data has provenance. If it's there for a title deed of a property, it's much easier for you to go. Yep, that's the property title deed.
[00:33:27] I want to ask you a question, because I thought just popped into my mind if we built something that is always trustworthy, always, always, always trustworthy. Now you've commodity's trust. Now, what is your key differentiator if you commodity's the trust in everybody looks the same in money is potentially a commodity. Yeah. How do you differentiate? Do we all just become a world currency then and nobody makes money doing this. You just kind of lease your trust pawson on the block chain. Because because I would argue that you work with people because they have varying levels of expertize or trust. If we make this technology available to everybody and everybody looks the same and everybody uses it, why would I bank why wouldn't I bank with a community bank that has access to the federal funds desk versus JP Morgan? What I want to take out a two hundred thousand dollar mortgage. I don't need to trust them. I just need to conduct the transaction, which is not a differentiation of brand. It just commodities is trust and in commodities is money. So then where do we go?
[00:34:33] Because I think that we move to a whole new specter of what we can do. Because the thing is, if I can easily walk in tomorrow, you're going to build a relationship. Relationships are themselves part of trust. The computer can give us trust in data. The computer does not tell us what is the best thing for us to do with our lives. It does not give us a suggestion on what is the best mortgage to take equally. It's a perfect way of saying this. Building that I'm sitting in nine is five stories. It's whatever, two hundred square meters, blah, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't actually then tell me.
[00:35:14] Oh, by the way, what you could do with this is you could turn that house into five condos or you could build a restaurant on the ground floor or you could do a hundred other things for which you're going to. Use transformational finance. A mortgage, venture capital, private equity, whatever, and you're going to go and build a business. But what we're talking about here is we're building the basic business blocks of trust so that we can go and do whatever we want. So whatever the mind desires and if you think about it, we're starting to get into it's a little bit like the realm of using some of those really funky building games that allow you to build your own planet and do this because you think about what people did even and I'm going to show my age here, second wife, it was incredible. I mean, there were stock markets and there were other people. And ultimately we get to the point where people will specialize. So some people want to do interior design because they're good. Some people want to run banks and stock exchanges. Some people want to lend you money because that's their capital and that's their bag and what they do.
[00:36:20] Other people will want to repair the classic motorbike that you have, which they can see from the block chain, all the things that have been done to that classic motorbike in the course of the previous 20 years. And therefore, they're in a position to say, OK, I'm doing my own little piece of restoration history within it. So it drives commerce and drives new ideas, not when it comes to cryptocurrency and one world currency and things like that. I would stop there because the one thing that we know from economic theory where I think economic theory does work, is that as soon as somebody invents one thing, there's always competition.
[00:37:00] Yeah, well, Difford was the absolute best basic motor car of its generation, but that didn't stop a thousand other manufacturers or building other cars all over the world for different demographics, different people. And ultimately some people were building better cars in the Model T Ford. So the mobility Ford had to become the mobile way forward in order for that to be an improvement of the design.
[00:37:25] So I think when you look at when you look at things like cryptocurrency, some cryptocurrency being nowadays a block chain based digital currency, the simple fact there is I think we end up with potentially a panoply, a huge portfolio of possible currencies that are going to reflect what we are interested in. There will be transactional cryptocurrency, which will probably be some sort of central bank digital currency, they call it these days, which could be the digital US dollar, because we do that's pretty good and everybody in the world knows the US dollar and therefore it's easy to go and use it around the world. And that's what the Chinese government are working with, their digital one project and so on at the moment. Equally, some of us might be sitting there and going, well, I think there's going to be inflation in the future. So what's a good hedge against inflation? Well, actually, what I like is a currency that's based on gold. So we want some gold cryptocurrency as you go along. And equally, however you look at it, people are going to start creating more and more money specialization. And actually, even before the block chain really became the thing and before Satoshi Nakamoto wrote his great Bitcoin white paper I talked to by Digital Money and Capital Market Revolution in the late 1990s, because one of the things I think people don't realize is they think that, oh, fintech and cryptocurrency, it's all new. Well, actually, digital money has been around for 20 plus years. When I was writing Capital Market Revolution, I wrote part of London, part of it in Sydney and Australia. And I was traveling around the world as a digital nomad. And I saw advertisements for a thing called Bane's. You can go Google it B, double E and NZ. And that was going to be the future of money time. And it was a very interesting concept. And in fact, that spawned a whole series of competitors very quickly. Not those died. It was also going to be E gold, which got killed by the regulators because you cannot hold gold in the United States of America. And thus you see the same cycle, I have to say, repeating itself at the moment, because what have we seen in recent weeks? We see South Korea closing down platforms for cryptocurrency. The United Kingdom does not want retail investors speculating and holding cryptocurrency. The Hong Kong regulators have just announced new regulations to try and stop retail investors holding cryptocurrency. Now, while it's not happening, well, that's happening because the biggest money monopoly on the planet is not happening. And it's not the commercial banks. That's the central banks. The central banks have grown used to the idea for richer or poorer, for greater or lesser quantitative easing in recent years, that they actually are the people who control the money that sits in your wallet. It's the power of.
[00:40:27] Power, you can if you take that away from them, they no longer can make the rules right. So a couple of things, sematic things that I that I just want to say back with technology and creating maybe commodities interests or commodities money, you think that it's actually going to create more innovation, right? Probably more knowledge like the the advent of the knowledge worker has been coming for quite some time. But this probably gets us out of turning the wrenches and using our minds more knowledge towards the innovation. And then the other thing that I picked up on was this this hyper segmentation. Right. And you use the car reference like that. Everybody wants to drive a Ferrari, a Ferrari, maybe some people want to drive a minivan. And there's different flavors of that. And if you can imagine, to go completely nuts. When I took my kids to Disneyland, they had this Speed McQueen car shop in there where you can actually go in with a little kid and they grab the chassis and they grab the wheels and they grab the right and they have a they have a person, they're helping the kid with the screwdrivers and stuff, put all this stuff together. So it almost seems like you would have some kind of host or, you know, the service component in the human component of all this actually may become even more important today than the focus on what has been engineering building blocks. Right. It might be more important to for differentiation, service, knowledge, innovation.
[00:42:15] Would you would you agree with with that look, core elements of business, just don't go away. And service is one of them. And one of the things that we can see throughout history is there are people who are willing to pay for the zero service experience, and that's why we have discounter airlines. At the same time, there are people who want to pay for a service. And actually you look at Disneyland, I mean, that's a great example, apart from the fact I'm really jealous of your kids because they didn't have the Lightning McQueen experience I got when I was there. Probably better because I'd still I'd be seeking political asylum, probably building my thighs and shot sleep at night. But you know, what is Disneyland? I mean, Disneyland is just a massive piece of technology and real estate, which is brought together to deliver a service. And ultimately, if you took away the princesses that come on at the princesses lunch, the way all of those things, no one would go to just look at the real estate. I mean, it wouldn't be the same thing all about the service experience. It's about having the opportunity to encounter Lightning McQueen and all of the other people from all of these different great franchises and ride things in a Star Wars fashion, but also feel as if you're part of Star Wars by bumping into secret deal with those sorts of things. So service is vital wherever you go. Think about to take a step back on that central bank issue.
[00:43:44] Money. What is cryptocurrency? Well, ten years ago, I went to a very bizarre funeral. It was the funeral of Nicholas Copernicus because Nicholas Copernicus that were never sure where he'd actually be buried. And he was born in a city called Toren in Poland, where my wife comes from. We have a and they dug up this series of bones and then they went through DNA and they find his relatives and they match the bones to him, which point in time they could have been a lovely little coffin and decided to give him a quick run, run the country of Poland on this sort of ground farewell tour. And they had another cemetery, another funeral for him before they took him off for a burial at the cemetery. Now, what is interesting about Copernicus, Copernicus set the world the opposite way, right? Because suddenly he said, oh, no, that whole concept that actually the Earth is at the epicenter of the world of the universe isn't true. It's the sun helu centricity. Changed everything in society and look how much innovation flowed from the thinking that he brought with him. Equally, if you look at cryptocurrency, what does that do? Cryptocurrency and I do this on charts. When I'm doing a presentation, I show the little this is the original Copernicus universe. And I put effectively the face of a central banker on it, the head of the Fed Reserve or whatever, Jerome Powell. And then I go, actually, that's the old world. That's the analog world. The new world is. And I do the same diagram, the epicenter of the Copernican universe with Bitcoin in the middle, because what we're moving to with cryptocurrency, what we're moving to with the digitization of assets and therefore trust based networks using the block chain is that money turns on its head. We, the citizens, have not had the power in the money debate for the modern era of central banking. Remember, the modern era of central banking is really only one hundred and fifty or so years old. And I mean, the Federal Reserve is actually a creature of essentially the First World War era. But those guys, they really have an incredible role of running absolutely everything in the economy. No cryptocurrency gives us the opportunity to take more control of what's going on, which is why we have this savage battle for the the heart and soul of money is raging. And the regulators will say, oh, they use all these great central banker terms. There's systemic concerns. The systemic concern is we can see our pension not turning up if we let this thing go rampant. Not do not get me wrong. I think overall central bankers are trying to do a decent job and they're reasonable human beings like the rest of us. But technology changes what goes on in exactly the same way as this Copernican revolution is like the Ford Model T, the Ford Model T got us in cars and now we suddenly go to the outskirts of time on the weekend. So what did that do? It drove all sorts of exciting developments. It got people municipalities were putting asphalt on the road because they wanted you to drive their way because then their merchants could put vegetables at the side of the road and sell your stuff. And very quickly, what went down there? People went, hey, hold on a second. If they want to buy raw vegetables, maybe they want a cup of coffee. If they want a cup of coffee, maybe they want a burger. Well, if we could let them just drive their car and look what would happen. And that's why this whole cryptocurrency revolution within FinTech is really interesting, because what Bitcoin delivered was it's the Model T Ford of cryptocurrency. In fifty years time, people will not use probably in five or ten years time. People will not regard Bitcoin as being the ultimate cryptocurrency. But what it did, like the Ford Model T was it got everybody moving. It got everybody thinking it got everybody a job or lots of people enough people to build a commoditization. Uphoff have their wallets for cryptocurrency and then they started buying other stuff, et cetera, et cetera. And those revolutionary processes have, let's face it, driven a whole series of new innovations. And we're still in the infancy of this whole block chain and separately cryptocurrency revolution.
[00:48:23] Well, one thing I want to I want to ask, since you brought it up, it's really about power and centralization for the governments. And what cryptocurrency is about is is decentralization and taking that power away. Yep. And so if you think about it, I read something the other day that said China's probably going to be the first country to be completely digital with their payment system. Cashless, I think was the one that used super sophisticated word there. But if the governments want to hang on and stay in power and centralize everything so they can control and then you've got cryptocurrency, would it make sense that they would just come up with an alternative way to distribute money and make it more efficient than it is today so they can maintain that power and continue to control, therefore, just without like a very serious revolution? I mean, how hard would that be for cryptocurrency to really take off? I think in America, I think it's a higher possibility than some of these other countries that are very serious. But I don't, you know, think about it first of.
[00:49:48] How much people trust their own currency, and I mean, one of the great things about the US dollar and what they call the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar is that pretty much the whole world trusts the US dollars. I mean, I could walk out with some of the currencies that I've collected over the years, maybe even different countries. And there's not a huge market for Serbian dinar anywhere outside of Serbia, whereas US dollars, they would rather have US dollars in Serbia, Serbian dinar most times and in pretty much any other country on earth. And you look at where you can go in the world and basically you can invariably find a way to transact in US dollars. But much difficulty. I think the the interesting issue I mean, you talk about China and obviously they have had an incredible digital payments revolution. I mean, to such a degree where it's not actually very difficult if you visit China that last year they had to allow tourists to have brief download periods so they could download things like Alpay, which is part of our financial or one of these other digital wallets, because actually people couldn't even go into a burger bar and order essentially a Big Mac and fries or let alone a bowl of noodles, because you actually do it all with using the point of sale terminal in a couple of QR codes or whatever. And by the way, that takes you to another little aside. I'm going to give you a quick Segway. Great conversation I had years ago with Steve Forbes, and he was talking about how no matter what you do with technology, it makes one thing efficient, but it creates another opportunity. And the example there he gave was McDonald's when they brought an electronic point of sale terminals, every McDonald's franchisee thought it was going to reduce their overall headcount. What actually happened was they ended up adding headcount in the kitchen. Yes, more than the people. They were losing a point of sale because you had lots of people who would come in and they would be embarrassed by the size of the order they wanted. So instead they could play essentially point of sale bingo, like some crazy lady who's had too many gin and tonic or vodkas in Las Vegas late at night. And they were just going like Big Mac, ordering huge amount of food, which then came down the chute and they paid with a card and it was easy. And you create you create demand. So again, it's an example of how that moves forward in order to create economic demand.
[00:52:12] Now, the Chinese, what are they doing? I mentioned a moment ago central bank, digital currency, CBC. So it's essentially the digital Chinese one. So therefore, they've now got the situation where people can have their electronic wallet and they can have a digital version of the Chinese currency deposited into that which they can use for transactions.
[00:52:37] And a number of other countries are already looking out across the world. It's very cost effective for government because they print fewer banknotes, which are relatively expensive ways to have money printed. At the same time, it also makes it a lot more efficient for understanding who's got what money where, and therefore you can hopefully chase people who are money laundering or have been dodging in criminal activity, et cetera, et cetera. So therefore it's good for the overall tax coffers of the country and it just makes commerce more efficient.
[00:53:11] So I think you're going to see those sorts of moves where people are going to start centralizing the flow of that central bank digital currency. But then you see where that starts to hit an instant problem. Is that everything else that you have currently that appears in the paper-Based statement that can turn into an electronic currency, too. So if you've got your frequent flier miles or you've got your bonus miles that you get from going to your favorite supermarket or whatever, those can all sit simultaneously in your wallet, which is why you've then got companies in the USA, such as, for example, backed by Katee, and they've been in the forefront of really trying to rationalize the ability of how you spend money in a more organized fashion, that they're coming out with their wallets in the near future and rolling that out. So you'll be able to hold effectively anything you want as an asset in your wallet, your frequent flier miles being a very good example. And then you've even had some wacky examples today date. I mean, this is an interesting bank in Germany, Theodore. And they took the whole concept of trust to an extreme, which was, you know what? You can deposit anything you want in your bank account. And we will give you a statement that we are holding that safely for. You could put there points from World of Warcraft into the bank, deposit it. Which brings us back to actually what are banks going to be doing in the near future? The answer is they're going to be moving.
[00:54:47] Much more to a service based environment where they hold your trust, they keep hold of your money because you trust them, because you can see them on the street corner and you understand or, you know, people who work there, etc., whether they're a community bank or whether they're multinational. And then they're going to be selling services on the side, which is actually going to be much more efficient for them rather than the current thing where they're trying to keep using their own balance sheet to sell you stuff, which invariably ends up with paperwork that would not have been far out of what happened in Wild West movies.
[00:55:23] Now, let's talk about consumer preferences a little bit. We touched on regulation. We touched on sovereignty. We touched on tech with block chain. Let's talk about consumers and consumer preferences. And I want to ask you about where you think specifically the physical bank branch kind of location. There's been a lot of things out there saying or consolidate their reconsolidating, nobody to go to the branch anymore. Fundamentally, I disagree with that. I think you will need some physical presence here. But as it relates to consumer preferences, community banks versus fintech or big banks, the physical location aspect of banking, where do you think consumer preferences are headed? With that? You see the new Capital One commercials, right? They've got this. I've never been in a capital I don't bank with them, but I'm like, huh, that's interesting. I basically just go to Starbucks, but I go to my bank is a capital one. Like what's going on here with consumer preferences?
[00:56:26] You know, one of the things I always think is very interesting that banks are that you go into the average bank branch, the average classic bank branch, and I can remember them from my childhood. And the first thing you noticed was that they obviously were paying too much money for their pants because all of their pants were attached by some piece of writing.
[00:56:50] I mean, gradually it became a plastic elastic cord. But I can still remember it being a little ball bearings altogether. And yeah, this thing so far and then had a ridiculous quarter of a kilo which was welded into the desk of the thing, because obviously the bank didn't trust the people who were depositing their money that they were going to run away with a pen. Not I think that was one of the big problems because banks took the idea of we're trustworthy and we must be trusted to ludicrous extremes. And therefore, as you say, whether it's Capital One or a multiplicity of banks we're seeing in Europe, they're turning into this sort of fascinating cozy corner, coffee morning, plus Kresh for children and everything like that. Simple fact.
[00:57:36] There are some things you can do online on your bank that are really easy and the vast majority of people are going to do those transactions in those ways. There are also things that you need to do in a bank that you can do way faster by talking to somebody. And telephone banking has its merits. But actually sitting there looking at somebody's face to face and then showing you how something can be done is hugely beneficial. And I don't think people are suddenly going to want to jump into the idea of doing their banking by zoom in the same way that we're doing everything else based on their Lockton. So bank branches have a vital role to play where they deliver a coherent service. And that's true of all intermediation. I mean, capital market revolution. My first book, 20 years ago, we ran to the raved about disintermediation because if you don't add value to the food chain, you will not be in the food chain in the long term. If you add value, if you make it easier, better or you can add to the bottom line of your company by selling a service that is a coherent that benefits the consumer, then there is a great reason for you to be there. And let's face it. Who in their right mind these days picks up their landline telephone and talks to a cold caller? In fact, in my case, I haven't even had a landline telephone in any of my houses for 10 years. Because why?
[00:59:08] Because I can't take it with me when I go out the door, but my cell phone goes with me, so that's fine. So trust again, no one wants to talk to CocaCola because we don't even know that's the person from the bank. The great thing is when we get inside and they've given us a car or whatever it is from a local tipping, the top of the for all of that and enjoying enjoying the pan that we're actually allowed to hold in our own house that they've trusted us with, we're building a rapport and then we're going to say, yes, you can help me, dear lady, because I'm looking at this or this or this.
[00:59:44] Can you explain it? And that's where banks can do so much so well. But it doesn't mean that you need to have necessarily the sixty five thousand staff you had in your banking balance sheet before, but you will have a certain number of specialists. And guess what? They're not going to spend their whole day just counting piles of cash and doing boring things. They'll actually be helping you make your life work, which is what a private banks do. You know, the whole point of private banks. But the time you've got some mega turbo nutter, incredible black card that's delivered to you by a series of DHL couriers who are sprinkling old crushed rose petals in front of you when they're handing over your new perfect credit card because you lost it, because you're staying at the Pinski and wherever Abu Dhabi or somewhere private banks have been in the business of building a relationship with you and being there to help you because they could get the fee income you loads of money. What we're annoyed is, of course, a commodity based environment, but the difference is the fee income that I can get by being a specialist in understanding a series of things is enough to justify my salary in the bank. And hey, you get a decent espresso while you're there. You get to maybe bump into people. Banks can go back to really community banking. And by the way, this is one thing the United States of America still has, which the rest of the world has largely lost, is genuine community banking rip off, say, Europe. We're all based on soulless chains. Were as fast as you're in there. You just want to get out of there instantaneously. And I think the community banking ethos needs to go up and make life fun when you go to the bank and make it pleasant and be looking at your kids and going, it's interesting, your kids, whatever, six or seven or eight years old. Have you thought about what you're going to do for their financial planning, whereas instead it's just become a kind of Crist Crist casino of selling you anything there is going and hoping that you're still in the brands for the time the customer comes back to find out whatever it was you sold them in the first place and that it was going to finish. And I'll finish with one other little point. You know, look at cell phones. 15 years ago, the High Street, the mall was full of cell phone shops. I mean, you could not trip over the entrance without having five, six, seven, eight franchises all sitting in every month. You go to the mall these days, whether you're in Poland, whether you're in the UK, whether you're in Los Angeles. And actually, you've got to go look at the map to find out where the cell phone firms are because they're in there somewhere, but they're not occupying a smaller footprint. Why stop? Because when they were at the Cres landgrab stage of acquiring you for the cell phone business, they needed loads of space because they had to sell you to you and explain to you what a cell phone was. Now, nowadays, we all turn up illegal. I'm on this plan. I'm thinking about that plan. And do you have the new whatever is the funky phone at the time that he always said something or other? The sound sounds good, knows whatever, because I'm thinking of changing my phone. And that's why you've seen the footprint and also the number of branches of cell phone company shrink. It's a weird thing. The people go, oh my goodness, when bank branch is closed, that's a catastrophe. No, it's a sign of maturity in banking, but it certainly does not mean that banks will disappear because again, you can offer a service and you can deliver a brand in your branch that is impossible to get. And actually, you know, my biggest problem with FinTech saw that huge numbers of fintech are run by people with very little life experience. And they're not good at customer experience. They're not good. They spend a huge amount of time on user experience and an app. But actually, once something goes wrong, they really can't cope. And it's a. A little bit like it's a little bit like great airlines and other airlines, so if you go to somewhere like Singapore Airlines or Cathay Pacific, they are incredible airline experiences now. But they are so organized that sometimes when something goes wrong, they don't know what to do. Whereas if you deal with someone like British Airways, British Airways has been this endless series of great customer service focused businesses. But they know stuff goes wrong because they've been dealing in lots of weird and wonderful countries over the years. So actually where they come into their own is when something falls apart because they can help you, because they get empathy and the good the ability to. And that's the thing which Syntex I mean, I'm giving a very broad brush here, but a lot of Syntex really lack. And that's why, for example, I use I use several different fintech apps for banking and stuff like that, as well as my main bank. I'm not going to name the bad ones, but a good one, which is transfer wise. That's why this great transfer has cost me a little bit of money. But what I love about transfer wise is basically within three hits of a button. If I can't get something resolved, I can find a way to email a human and that human comes back and empathizes with me and sort Sadaat. And I think no matter how technological you get and here we fold on new potentially the crevasse, which is the eye, if it's been programed to answer three questions, gives you three answers and actually drives you stark staring mad. It's a brilliant idea. And there's a lot I can do for us to help customer experience and make it a better service. But humans have that. We have that fuzzy logic thing, which makes us just so much better interaction with other humans.
[01:05:45] Who would have guessed, yeah, I use well, front a lot. And when I had when I started using those guys, I had just just I was like, wow, why am I kind of buying my own stocks and doing my own thing? If you look at market returns over the last 50 years or whatever, whenever the research says it's right around seven or eight percent. So, yeah, my Google stocks and Facebook stocks and all these tech stocks have gone up quite substantially. But if you normalize that over time, the energy that I spend or that I used to spend, looking at ETFs, looking at these exchanges, well, front has this thing called self driving money. And I'm like, where the hell have you been for the last twenty five years? You know, so and they're great. I mean, you know, transfer wise, I've got some experience. So there's a lot of great things happening. You know, as we wrap this thing up, I want to pivot away from FinTech for just a second and talk about just being an entrepreneur. Right. You've you've started your own businesses, run your own business currently. Can you can you give us, like, maybe a couple a couple of key words of advice? What were some of the things that led you to do your own thing? What were some of the things that that really enjoyed about being an entrepreneur? And then, I mean, I think finally, like, what's your advice to the rest of us? Because you've got you've got a lot of experience. But I just want to hear a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey.
[01:07:17] My entrepreneurial journey has been fantastic. OK, not there are other people who have made more money than me. There are other people who have done very different things to me. But that's the great joy about being an entrepreneur. And to me, an entrepreneur is about freedom. You empower yourself and it is the best thing in the world when it comes to a good year. It's bonus season. You can pay bonuses to your staff and watching your staff skip out the door happy with whatever that bonuses. I'm thinking this has been great because they have been hugely helpful in your business to adding to your productivity. Those are fantastic things. And that's why I think I really would say God bless all entrepreneurs, because every entrepreneur who adds a scintilla of growth to the economy, even you have one job to the economy. You are building something. And ultimately that creates a better society. And that's why I think entrepreneurs are so, so important for life, because when I go to a lot of developing and emerging countries, I see people who are so scared about what they're going to do to be an entrepreneur. And I see so many cases in the world where people end up encased in a job or a profession and they hate it. Now, I got to tell you, as an entrepreneur, there are things I hate doing. There are things I do not like. There are cycles that will be bad and you will have to lay people off and do other stuff. And that is horrible. It is heart rending. And one must do it with the ultimate compassion of trying to help. When you have a business you have to close or move onto. But at the end of the day, there is nothing better than the feeling of getting up in the morning and knowing that what you do today benefits you and benefits humankind. And also, let's understand one thing. My wife is an entrepreneur. I am an entrepreneur. We have our own specialties. And the one mantra we have all points in time is I want you to succeed.
[01:09:31] There is the worst thing in the world. And getting up and thinking that this is a zero sum game, you just hit the nail on the head. I mean, we were talking earlier about building platforms, building stuff. And then if you build a trust economy, what do you get on top of that? The answer one answer is, well, front. They come along and they build the whole new thing. No, well, front didn't put anybody else out of business because actually what we see from the financial business is you can keep growing because people use their money more, they invest their money more, they turn things up. So being an entrepreneur is absolutely fantastic because there is no finite number of businesses.
[01:10:09] There is no finite amount of economic growth we can deliver. There's. A finite number of services we can deliver and you look at again, God bless the United States of America. There are people in the United States of America who have managed to make billions out of chicken fertilizer by a product of a by product that no one wants to touch. You look at people in Iceland who've gone into the fishing business and realized what they had to do was vertically use every piece of the fish. And thus they've developed beauty products. They've developed all sorts of, again, fertilizers to all those things. And that's why being an entrepreneur is just fantastic. And meeting other entrepreneurs is so amazing because, like the best food in the world is meeting somebody and they go, so what have you got on the wall? It's like, well, you know, I've got this business, which is actually the daily newsletter of the business of stock exchanges. And it's read by the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, the chief executive of NASDAQ, Adena Friedman, and all these other guys way through the whole world. And people are looking at you going like I hadn't even really thought about the business of stock exchanges, let alone the idea that was an information service in there. And so that brings me to my final point. Follow up passion, do something. But you know what? That ten thousand dollars thing, it's really important. I spent years learning about exchanges. I went run. I ask people questions all the time. Never, ever be afraid to ask another question. Keep listening to what you hear. Keep refining that and you will find amazing and interesting ideas and niches where you can deliver a service and people will love you for it. And actually, the funniest thing is when I produced this newsletter Exchange Best and I took the beta out to all of my 12 of my friends, they all looked at me and were like, why do you want to do that? That's that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard. OK, I'll send you a beta for four weeks.
[01:12:10] After four weeks. I said, OK, so I'm going to cancel this now because it's the dumb idea and they're like, no, no, I can one minute. I actually I think I need a little dose of humble pie here because actually I see what's happening and that's the truth of it.
[01:12:26] You know, you look at I tell you agree it's a great thing. I mean, as Bob Newhart, fabulous, classic American comedian, and you used to do these things where you talk to people on telephone and he's talking to Sir Walter Raleigh in the new colonies in America, and he's talking about what he's bringing back and he talks to him about tobacco. And it's just ridiculous because he makes it sound so stupid. And you think about it, it is a nuts idea. But actually, you look at how that created a whole new area of economic growth. It created all manner of different industries. It created all sorts of jobs. And now we're at the point where you look at goodness knows I know nothing about the cannabis industry, but I know a number of entrepreneurs who are very interested in that. And why the interest, not just because of this stuff, you could smoke actually, because there's one hundred thousand byproducts that you can take out there that can make a better industrial world. And that's why this is a world of opportunity. I want you to succeed. And I believe every entrepreneur and the world wants you to succeed because what we're doing is building growth and building the pie. And the pie can be big enough to support everybody among the seven and a half billion people we are blessed to share this planet Earth with every day.
[01:13:51] Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. And it doesn't have to be one hundred million billion, gazillion dollar company. You just need to provide that value.
[01:14:00] Well, you feed your family. Yeah. Feed your family. You are an entrepreneurial success. Don't worry about having to list your company anything like that. Just build a business that feeds your family. It's the most fantastic feeling to be self-sufficient.
[01:14:18] Yeah, it is. And fellow entrepreneurs here on this on this podcast and a lot of audience that's entrepreneurs. I always want to give them that. You know, podcasting has helped me with listening to podcasts because you can't talk to people about this stuff. And being an entrepreneur is is somewhat of a lonely place, although I think the technology with podcasting especially has allowed folks like me, probably folks like you and everybody else have this surrogate support group that we can listen to and go, oh, OK, wasn't a terrible idea. I'm not batshit crazy and I am providing value and I am surrounded by this by this family. Right. Of people. But Patrick, this has been great. Patrick L. Young, a lifelong entrepreneur, wrote his first book, Capital Market Revolution, wrote an. Book Victory or Death, which I am going to go read, it sounds fascinating and I have to read it anyway because I love this stuff exchanging best. He's got a Twitter account. We'll put all this stuff in the show notes. Patrick, it's been a pleasure having you on. And it as a. Thank you so much.
[01:15:33] Thank you so much. Has been a joy being on the Snyder show, Don. All right. Thank you.
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