Pumping Bitcoin while pumping iron with Paxful’s CEO

Hey, it's Joe from Coyne Telegraph. I'm at the gym with Ray Youssef from Paxful. Let's pump it up.

Bust the Fiat out of you, bro.

All right, then show me what bitcoin's all about.

Becomes about doing whatever it takes, my good man.

Whatever it takes.

Whatever it takes.

Pumping on hell yeah.

This is the start, my good man. If that doesn't work, we're on some new stuff, my good man.

Okay. That's right. You're gonna show me that later, I hope.

Oh, absolutely, my good man. I got some tricks up my sleeve, so up to you. Some London from a good man. The collective state of humanity is not pretty. It's flabby af. If humanity was a singular body, we'd man boobies hanging down to our ankles. It's not pretty, my good man. So the question is, how do we strengthen the collective body of humanity? It starts first with strengthening the physical body, allowing the blood to flow, my good man. The problem with the world today is that the blood is not flowing. If the world economy is a circulatory system, it is stagnant. The parts are dying. There's nothing equivalent to waking up a stagnant body than lunges, my good man. This is gonna give you thighs like a Brazilian samba queen. This is what Ronnie Coleman lived for.

Do you think Ronnie Coleman. Do you think Ronnie Coleman would be a bitcoiner?

Ronnie Coleman would be all about it, my good man. He's got the biggest bitcoin stash next to Max Keiser. It's a little known fact. Good God, sir, that's gonna give you a big butt. This don't give you a big butt. Let's go. Shoulder day is special. My good man wants shoulders like bunches of bananas. Cannonballs.

So if Paxful goes up in flames, are you gonna open your own gym?

My good man, it's all about the mission. Any company that I start is about the mission. Once it serves its purpose, it's no longer relevant. Because it's not about a company. It's about the mission. And it's about the people you're serving. Above all. We keep that in mind. We will have success. But some people don't want to kill their babies. I'm willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish the mission. And I mean whatever it takes. I can see that. Right.

So Ray Blood's pumping. The price of bitcoin, maybe not so much. What's it going to take, do you think? Your work in emerging markets, that's going to help to improve bitcoin adoption worldwide.

The answer is simple. Absolutely. If you look at the state of the world, my good man, it's all about victory. If you want to win, you gotta bet on the winners. If you look at the west, what's the average age? 40. Hardly. People are making children. They're being suffocated all around. And the west is. It's kind of dying right now. So where's the life? Who are the winners? Who are the people that still have the fire in their bellies? They're gonna take things and are ready to move forward. Who still have enthusiasm about life? Right. Who still have a smile on their face? No matter how hard they're working, they're thankful. Look at Africa, look at Latin America. Look at India, look at Southeast Asia. That's 6 billion people in the Global South. The Global south is where we should be looking right now. Focus on it completely. And that's what I've been doing for the past seven years. Why? Because it makes sense. They're the winners. You want to win, Bet on them. It's all about betting on the Global south right now. Now, that's hard. Right? Because you're going into a place where there's a lack of infrastructure. How are you going to get them? The bitcoins, what are they going to trade for? They have a lot to trade for, including their time. Right. And their talent and energy, which is tremendous. But they don't have money. So how do you make that trade? I had to solve that problem first to make the area fertile with bitcoin. Educate people so they understand the importance of that. Seventy years later, we've had quite a bit of success there. Right, awesome. So now there's a place to start. So where do we go from here? What is the measure of success for us in the bitcoin world? Right. In the world of financial freedom, is the measure of success that everyone has a bitcoin wallet? Would that be nice?

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

That'd be a good start. It's certainly better than people going to shitcoin casinos, gambling away the family farm, or worse, coming out with a bad attitude and.

Or going to banks.

Exactly. Right. Either way, they lose or they get nothing. Right. So what is the measure of success? To me, the measure of success has to be a billion citizens. And by citizen, I mean someone that is engaged. I don't believe in users. We have to build citizens. If you really want to win this game, we must unite the Global South. How do we unite them? What are the Things that people in the Global south need, right? They need. They need to be able to transact, right? We want to get free trade going because free trade creates wealth. That's proven in every market in the world. Every example in the world create free trade. People will make themselves rich. They'll find ways to solve problems for other people. They'll naturally leverage arbitrage opportunities. They'll be able to trade the quality of their talent on an open market and the money will start to flow again. Economic apartheid is why they have not been able to do that. Bitcoin is the answer there, but it requires quite a bit of education to use right now. So how do we get a billion citizens? Binance has 100 million users, right? About 3% of them are active. Same goes for paxful with our 10 million users. Either way, it's not enough. We need to move a lot faster. And just people going to a shitcoin casino and gambling away their money, that's not a measure of success. We want to get people using this in real time. But the more I think about it, our strategy is all wrong. We're trying to replace banks with wallets. Is that the path? It's not because we're just playing their game. We've let our animosity towards the banks, which they rightfully deserve, We've let it blind us to a far greater opportunity. It cannot just be about replacing the banks with wallets. You must offer full spectrum value to these people to make them true citizens. At the end of the day, communications and payments are one and the same. If I told you, hey, let's split a protein shake and I'll pay you with some mobile minutes, you'd laugh in my face. But in Africa, that's par for the course. The telcos started out giving people communications and then from there it wasn't even a pivot to payments, just a natural part of life. 94% of all payments in Africa. Exactly. M pesa happen with ussd, which is interactive sms. You don't even need a smartphone to do it. So you'll attach money to a message. Just as easy as saying they get emoticon or a hello Kitty gif. The telcos have shown us the path, but we aren't listening. We're still trying to replace banks with wallets and that is not the path to a billion citizens. We need something more. We need to zoom out our perspective and think bigger. This is how we're going to bring it to the people in a way that it's a part of their life, right? So the more I think about it, you know, an exchange like Binance or a peer to peer marketplace like Paxful, neither of them are enough. They're just parts of the equation. But anything you put together, whatever machine you build to help these people, it has to be built around their lives. And this is, this is something that people don't really understand. This is why, you know, so many companies pay McKinsey hundreds of millions of dollars to figure out how can we break into Africa, how can we penetrate the market there and dominate. It's a very colonialist mentality that has absolutely no respect for people on the ground. That's why they haven't had any success. They might not have Morgan Stanley money, right? But what is Morgan Stanley money? We know it's just an illusion, right? So we have to go in there with a mindset of giving, of helping, of building, and that's why we've had success. So the global South, I don't like the term emerging markets. Was they've been there for a while, right? What are they going to emerge into? Still emerging. Turn into Goldman Sachs and start copying our ways? We don't want that. We don't want them to emerge into monsters. We want them to build up their own generative, organic way of doing things, a natural way of doing business. They just want to trade, free trade. It's beautiful. How can we help them do that? A focus on education is great, but primarily we have to shift away from this mindset that we have right now. Just replacing banks with wallets. And let's go to the people directly and see what they want to do. And we build ways for them. And that's what I'm doing. That's what I'm going to be doing at a far greater pace right now. Because all this has kind of come on me on the last six months. You know, as I look around and I see, why aren't we moving faster? We should already have given these people so much more. But instead we just came out of a bull market where people have been trading pictures of monkeys for millions of dollars.

Don't get me started.

That's humiliating, honestly. Like, you think the guys that run the world, these small cast of dominant men that run the planet are looking at us like, oh, these guys are going to be a problem? No, they're laughing. They're laughing their asses off at this. This is a joke, man. We're basically just trolls. Trolling is a useful tool, I have to say.

Yeah, but we not like that we.

Have to change our perspective.

Brother Ray Youssef, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thank you, brother. It's been good, my man.

It's been a coin Telegraph interview.

That's right. Click.