Crypto Megan Podcast | Tim Draper on Bitcoin’s Path to $5 Million: Latest SEC & Bitcoin ETF Updates

My belief is that a weak leader is someone who tries to tell everybody what to do, and a strong leader is somebody who trusts people and sets them free. This is the show where we bring in 4 awesome entrepreneurs out of thousands that try to get onto our show. We get the 4 that are selected to eventually compete for a million-dollar investment, and these entrepreneurs are Extraordinary. Here in Miami. To my immediate left, we have Crypto Megan, otherwise known as Megan Nielsen Draper. She has a great Web3 portfolio, strategy consultant for companies, investors, and celebrities, but she also has an amazing show, and she just interviewed me for it. She's one of the best interviewers I've ever Heard. She asked some amazing questions and she really understands Bitcoin deep, deep, deep.

Welcome to the Crypto Megan Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Nielsen. I'm a high-end crypto and NFT portfolio and Web3 strategy consultant. I'm currently on a world tour as a Web3 keynote speaker at all the biggest Web3, tech, and fintech events around the world as an industry leader To educate anyone from beginner to C-level executive, and of course, to advocate for women in Web3. My mission is to inspire new people to get involved in the crypto and NFT space with quality, entertaining information they can trust as pioneers in this cultural and financial revolution, a paradigm shift. My name is Megan Nielsen, aka Crypto Megan, and I am here in Miami where all the magic is happening during Art Basel. We are at BitBazel, and I am joined today by a very special guest, legendary investor, billionaire investor Tim Draper, one of the most prominent tech venture capitalists of our generation, founder of 30 venture capital firms including the Draper Fisher Jurvetson, an early backer of some of the most influential tech in the past 30 years including Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX, Coinbase, Robinhood, and the list goes on. I mean, this is just— this is so cool that we get to be here where all the magic is happening right before we're filming— you're filming Meet the Drapers here in Miami. Welcome to the show, Tim.

Thank you, Crypto Megan. It's an honor to be here. I'm thrilled. It's really fun to be here in Miami. It's hot.

Oh yeah, it's hot. We are like right in the heat of Miami heat.

We're in Miami heat right here. So yeah, it's been wonderful and been a great month or so for Bitcoin. And we're really— I'm just excited to be here. I'm looking forward to the Meet the Drapers episode that maybe we'll get you on that show so we can kind of do that thing.

That'd be fun.

Talk show hosts.

Yeah, and actually I just found out we have something in common. I'm on a 2-year world speaking tour and Mr. Draper here is also— how many?

How many continents have you been in?

How many time zones have you been in?

Well, I don't think we've done— there aren't many entrepreneurs in Antarctica, but we've pretty much covered all the other continents. I could— maybe if we can do like a penguin-to-human translation with a brain-computer interface, penguins might have really interesting ideas for what kinds of products we should be using out there.

See the ideas that flow before the show? I mean, we're right here in the action actually, so if you're hearing things in the background, we're getting stage check. This is like about to go down. So this is super fun. And yeah, you're into AI.

Yeah. So I've been traveling all over and yeah, we've, we've hit each other twice, once in Portugal, once here. But, um, yeah, we, we have, we call it the biggest global business plan competition in the world and we do it on Meet the Drapers.

That's so cool. So you get your family involved. I know your daughter Jessie.

My daughter's been on it. My son Adam's been on it. My son Billy's been on it. I don't think we've gotten Eleanor on it. My sister Polly is an actress. She was on a show called 30-something at one time, and she's also producer, writer, director of something called the Naked Brothers Band. I don't know.

If I remember correctly, you also starred in something.

I was in the Naked Brothers Band. I was Principal Schmoke. I was the comedic principal in the show.

Amazing. So you're also a TV actor.

Big Nickelodeon show. And we had a lot of fun with that. And she, she now is on my show, which is a very unusual thing. We didn't really think this, but actually she's, she's been a major actress in a lot of big things. But, but her biggest audience that she's ever had is through Meet the Drapers.

Yeah! Fancy that, right? The Family Affair, and that's her biggest audience.

Absolutely. My dad's on it too sometimes.

Oh my gosh, that is amazing.

He's terrific.

I mean, you guys seem to truly know how to enjoy Apart from being— I mean, I don't know how you have time for all of it, but it seems that you're like one of the few people that I see in all the stress in the midst of all these filmings that you're just enjoying life.

Oh, absolutely. Well, and to do what we do, I'll go to a new destination and I'll meet with— well, for instance, okay, I went to Argentina. I met with the president. Actually, I fell off a horse on his ranch. No, the former president. I'm looking forward to meeting the current president. He's gonna break it. He's gonna be the next domino to fall.

Absolutely. We're gonna talk about this too, because I know you have a lot of theories about weak leaders versus strong leaders. And I also believe that that is everything, right?

Yeah, we have— yeah, my belief is that a weak leader is someone who tries to tell everybody what to do. And a strong leader is somebody who trusts people and sets them free. And it makes a big difference. So we have a strong leader finally. In Argentina.

Amazing.

But, um, no, I was on the— sorry, I was with the Chilean president on his ranch.

Wow, too many presidents, you lost count. Right.

And then I'm, um, and I fell off a horse and landed on my back. Um, it, um, and actually the, the hospitals in Chile are delightful.

Well, you learn something every day when you're on the road.

They're delightful. The nurses were fantastic. The doctor was Fantastic. Just did a great job. Everything was great.

That's good to know.

But while I was there, I did fundraising. I did— I met with a bunch of entrepreneurs. We did a Meet the Drapers episode. We did a lunch for all the Draper University alumni, Draper University Heroes alumni. And so we do it all kind of at once. We go to a new location and we do it all at once. I visit with a lot of entrepreneurs and then we might end up funding a few and Amazing. And then I move on to the next country.

Making magic happen in every single place. And you mentioned South America. We go to Bitcoin Miami every year. We met the ambassador last year and they invited us out there to interview President Bukele. So maybe we'll get to go there soon.

Oh, I can't wait. When are you going to go?

Hopefully soon. But I would love to see Bitcoin City and just everything that's developing there. Because back to the strong leadership thing, and this is something that Charles Hoskinson says, the founder of Cardano as well, just let people be free. Let them make decisions for themselves. And there's just such a dire need for control right now in the government. And I know you have a theory that it even strengthens the economy and it makes everything run.

Oh, it's proven out in a million different places where the countries that were the most free grew the fastest. It's just— and the ones that were socialist or heavily government-controlled went flatline. China is a perfect example. During their period where Deng Xiaoping said, I trust you, I set you free, and some of you will get rich first.

Right.

That was a boom time for 40 years. It grew at 9% a year. And then President Xi came in and he said, none of this, none of this, none of this. You have to do this, you have to do that. And he's a very weak man, clearly.

Yeah.

And his economy went flatline. And he thinks that by doing that, he'll build a stronger country, stronger army, all that. Turns out that the countries with the least regulations and the freest economies grow the fastest and are the most secure.

Wow.

So it turns out that you don't want to flatline your economy if you are feeling like you want to, you know, be militarily powerful.

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Okay, here's my theory. You want my theory on this? Yeah, I do. The internet came along and we were all open and we were doing deals across borders. I had businesses in Russia and in China, great people I was working with in all sorts of countries. Things were really booming everywhere. We were all benefiting from the trade that was going on, free trade going on around the world.

Right.

And then Bitcoin showed up.

Uh-oh.

And it scared these leaders. They realized that they were no longer relevant.

At what point do you think— are you saying that that happened?

I think as soon as they started talking to their central banks and their central banks were saying, whoa, hey, we need to control our currency because that's how we control our people. And control is The death of freedom.

Right.

So that's my theory is that they started to put up barriers. Trump talked about a wall and then the trade war with China. President Xi decided he was going to kind of increase his military and not trade around the world except buying ports. That's all he really wanted to do was buy ports. President Putin wanted to invade Ukraine. That ruined the lives of 200 million people, and none of them really wanted a war except him. And weak leaders create wars because they're losing popularity. And then people kind of go, okay, well, let's get behind the country.

Right, right, right.

To get the people to rally. So my theory is that Bitcoin came, it was a threat to the way governments control their people, and they freaked out. And so that's what's going on. And now I think it's the roar of the dying lion. I mean, nobody wants a centralized currency anymore. Why is that? I mean, why? FTX was centralized, BlockFi centralized. Luna, Terra, they were all centralized. They all went belly up because it was all tied to one individual or one group.

Yep, people problems.

Weak countries have the same problem where they have weak leaders. Historically, Argentina, Nigeria, Venezuela have horrible currencies and they're all central control.

So there's one focal point or one common denominator.

And when people started bring centralized currencies to me. When they started, I saw Bitcoin and I got all excited and I bought all that Bitcoin in the US Marshal's Office auction. Yeah, of course. But I bought it all and then I got deluged by people who wanted to create their own currencies and they wanted to be centralized control. And I just threw them all out the door. We turned down FTX twice. We turned down BlockFi. We turned down Celsius, we turned down because they were all centrally controlled. And if you get— and the whole point of Bitcoin was that it was decentralized. The principles, the core principles. And open and transparent and global and all those great things. So we turned all those down and we looked really stupid for a while, which is typical.

It's what happens when you've got that—

I'm willing to look stupid for a while.

You're contrary. Yeah.

And so then, of course, you know, all of those went out of business. My whole thinking was, if you wanted centralized currency, you've got it. You've got a central bank. You don't need another currency.

Right.

But if you want a decentralized currency, one that is not subject to political whims, not subject to manipulation or You know, Trump went and he spent $10 trillion. Well, if you print $10 trillion, your currency is going down.

Oh yeah.

And that means inflation goes up and your interest rates have to go up because you have the Federal Reserve. They don't want a downward spiral.

Kicking the can down the line. Yeah.

They didn't want a downward spiral like Argentina. And so they, they raised the interest rates. And then people get laid off. There's a horrible bear market.

Yeah, you kind of, in essence, break the economy for a while.

You've broken the economy for a while in order to let it come back. But you don't have to do that if you have a decentralized currency. Actually, Biden is doing something absolutely sneaky right now. What he's doing is he's blown through about 2/3 of our oil reserves in order to lower the inflation rate so he doesn't have to raise the interest rates. So he artificially keeps the economy going at a, at a decent pace so that he can potentially get reelected. That's sneaky. That's so—

Not many people know about that. Not many people know about that.

It's pretty bad.

It's low. It's low.

And just to put it to you, you got to let that free market flow, and then people adjust. And they, you know, if oil goes up, you have to pay more for oil. If oil goes down, you can expand your business.

You let the market adjust.

The market can adjust and everybody's better off. But if they start doing these little manipulating things, it proves to all of us that they are no longer relevant and they need to reinvent government, and government needs to be something that is as a service, like software as a service, government as a service. It should be something we choose and they provide.

And they actually try to provide a better service instead of more control, you know, worse quality of life for everybody. Just listening to you now, it feels like all of this hardship and difficulties could have been solved so much easier with just a simple thing like Bitcoin.

Who could have thought?

It's freedom, you know. It's like, it's very interesting to think all of these things that are happening around the world right now that aren't so unnecessary. And you mentioned the geological, geographical borders being closed. Like when Bitcoin starts to get real adoption and it's, you know, this digital portable property, soon the governments will have to fight for you, right? These geological borders or graphical borders, they won't mean anything because they'll have to come forward and say, hey, I'm going to provide a better service because I want you to stay here with me, right?

And you see the US government like being very paranoid and scared of everything. They're scared of Bitcoin, they're scared of AI, they're scared of all this stuff. Think of their age. They're like the average— the average senator is 73.

Yeah.

And I mean, really, are they looking for like, how do we improve and think of the future and whatever? No, they're looking back.

They don't even desire to go forward.

They're looking back and they're going, no, no, I want dollars. You know, no, no, I want control over my people. I want everything controlled because, hey, I've made it this far, I want to just keep hanging in there. As opposed to somebody your age who might go in there and just go, hey, obviously we want Bitcoin as our national currency. Well, I want to be able to pay my taxes in Bitcoin. I want to go get my food, clothing, shelter in Bitcoin. No reason for a currency that is manipulated by a government.

No, no way. And you just mentioned taxes. I mean, my dad's an accountant. He has his own accounting firm. It's like I try to explain to him, this would be so much easier. This would all be obsolete if you could just use, you know, the ledger and the blockchain as this open everybody and everything is tracked and traceable and transparent would make the world a much simpler place to live in, right?

Nikki Haley hopefully will be the president, and she is also an accountant.

Wouldn't that be fantastic?

And she understands how this whole thing works, and she understands freedom. So I think, yeah, I think it's starting to dawn on people that we got a real winner and we're really lucky. And it's interesting, the US has always seemed to find the president that they needed at that time. And I think Nikki Haley is the president we need at this time.

That'd be amazing. That would be absolutely fantastic. I mean, a step in the right direction as we, you know, are on the precipice of maybe, you know, some of the greatest changes in human history in the next 10 years. You know, nothing's going to be the same. It feels like back in the era of the internet. And, and, you know, education is also really important in getting that adoption. And I know one thing Charles Hoskinson says that I love is that he says, We can't be so ignorant to think that people won't be able to learn or that this is just going to be something that nobody learns about because, you know, you see these 80-year-olds running around with iPhones. I mean, it's just a process, right? It's a process and—

You talked about learning. I was talking to the guy who's the top professor at UC Berkeley for astrophysics and we were having a great conversation.

That could have been a good conversation.

That was really fun. But then he started talking about going into the faculty lounge and they were talking about AI. And so here's what I picture in the faculty lounge. There are 10 people, they're all talking. 2 of them are saying, this admissions office has really improved. The quality of our students is extraordinary. These essays, I've never seen anything like them. Okay, so 2 people totally out to lunch.

Right.

6 of them— Are going, we gotta ban this thing, keep it off our campus. How do you get rid of it? How do you stop it? And that's the, the Luddites. That's the 73-year-old senator. That's the old presidents. It's the, we want to keep it and control people and tell them all what to do. Right, no change, it's all bad. Nothing. And then there are 2 of them that are looking at the world and going, wow, education's gonna change forever. This— we can create this new curriculum around AI. It's going to be extraordinary. And, you know, I look and I think the way back when we were monks and we were writing the Bible with a quill and we were copying it over and over and over, and then some genius created the printing press.

Yeah.

And we don't need to do that anymore.

Suddenly.

So now we got a new printing press. We got AI. It's gonna be so cool.

Very cool. And I'm of your camp that I know a lot of people are afraid that AI is gonna take people's jobs, and there's always this fear and this demonization.

It is, but then the jobs will get better.

Right. Yeah. And then you'll have— it'll elevate the human existence because we can focus on things that are much more important than maybe the mundane tasks that bog us down with daily, you know, hours of our lives. So—

Of course. And I picture this, you know, none of us imagined that we'd be walking around with cell phone that you could push a button and get your food delivered or get picked up and moved somewhere else. Absolutely. Whatever else this amazing Steve Jobs— he's an amazing—

All the greatest tech entrepreneurs in our lifetime.

He has done extraordinary things, and so have all those other entrepreneurs that have added new features to this phone. But I think with AI, robotics has Technology has historically been a horrible place to invest. As a venture capitalist, I avoided it like the plague. It's hardware. Nobody wants to pay for it until it's proven. You have to prove it. You have to teach it over and over. And that was mostly because it was all rules-based. Again, the rules-based system.

Those rules, man, boxing us in.

All it did was sort of say, I can pick up this water bottle, I can move it here, and I can move it here. And that was all rules-based. Well, now— and expert systems and that kind of thing. Well, now it's deep learning and it's a neural network and the robot or the neural network can look at this and say, this is a 97% chance that it's a bottle and we think it's a 94% chance that it's an Evian bottle. water bottle, and I know how I can pick it up, and I know how it unscrews this way. And so I can, I can do that and pick it up and then, you know, bring it to the lips of whoever's— whoever bought me.

That's wild.

And so I actually think we're going to have not just phones, but we'll have robots with us. And they will basically— You guys are our personal assistants. Exactly. Yeah, it's like, hey, you know, I forgot my scarf. Can you go pick up my scarf? I mean, I don't know what sounds so terrible about that, right? It's over at George's house. Go get it.

You forget something.

Yeah. Or, I mean, I mean, ChatGPT has made it so fun.

Fantastic. Yeah.

It's so fun.

Yeah, that's a wild ride.

I did a whole Shakespearean poem, 2 Shakespearean poems, platonic, for my 2 assistants, and And I did it all on ChatGPT. Wow. And I just handed them to him and I wrote, from ChatGPT, you know, but they didn't know what ChatGPT was.

Oh my God.

I thought you were a genius.

Tim, you've got a hidden talent here.

Well, no, they knew I was a poet, but they didn't, you know, this was a little bit more—

Are you a poet? I don't think many people know that.

I'm a poet.

Wow.

Yeah, I wrote The Risk Master.

A man of many trades.

I wrote The Bitcoin Shuffle.

Oh my gosh, we must hear that like at some point because that's— I did not know this. So many sides to Tim Draper. I mean, I don't know how you have time for all this, but you got many talents, it seems.

Yeah, just live, you know.

You know how to live, that's for sure.

Yeah, I just live.

Yeah, fantastic.

So yeah, anyway, that AI has changed everything. And then the other things you can do, I hadn't been programming for a long time, but I thought, well, let me do a little random walk down a pier and see how that works. And the AI wrote a perfectly good program, and it was really quite amazing. So if you're a software designer, you have an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is you know how AI works.

Right.

The disadvantage is it can do most of the things you're doing already.

Yeah, I mean, at some point that human element won't even be necessary because it is too efficient now.

No, you'll find other— the humans will find other things to do. I mean, humans were terrified.

The human element in like that part of it. Yeah.

Humans were terrified of the horseless carriage. They were terrified of electricity.

Yeah.

They were terrified of the internet.

Yep. Newspapers thought they'd be the big bad guys of the world.

They've been terrified of Bitcoin and now they're terrified of AI. But what happens is The world just gets better.

Absolutely.

We just keep pushing progress forward and the world gets better. There's no way, as much as you romantically would like to do it, you would ever want to go back 50 years.

No.

Or 200 years before indoor plumbing and electricity and whatever.

Yeah, it's a fantastic point.

You would never want to go back. So we are gonna go forward and the next 5 generations are gonna look back and say, God, these guys didn't even have drones following them around.

Can you imagine? I mean, it's just so funny to talk about and it just blows my mind.

And they could. And they were on one planet. They were living on one planet. Can you imagine? Yeah.

The headline I saw the other day, by the way, it said Disney's top priority is new Marvel movies and Elon Musk's multi-planetary existence and stuff like that. And I just thought, oh wow, this is like, this is like It's like the war of the century for us. We're at a crossroads.

Yeah, there is a little bit of a battle going on, but it always does. And technology always wins out. Eventually we will have all the things that we imagine. They will all come to fruition.

Yes, and Bitcoin being one of them. Bitcoin, I mean, we're going to segue into that now as we progress here. The Bitcoin, so you are a Bitcoin OG, as I like to say. I know a lot of people may not know this, but you bought about, what, around 30,000 Bitcoin? From the Silk Road auction project?

I did, but I bought 40,000 before that that I lost for $4 each, that I lost to the Mt. Gox thing. So I had 40,000, they're gone, I think. I don't know, maybe it's some—

Oh my God. Well, you contributed to the scarcity.

I did. Wow, that's, uh— And then I saw— I thought that was the end. I thought, God, this was the greatest invention. Why did that, that one group decide to destroy it just by, you know, having, having a bad system for trading? And I thought that was the end of it, but Bitcoin only dropped about 15% in price on that news.

Something so significant.

Fundamental, and it only dropped 15%. So I went and I did a lot of research and I said, there's something going on here that really matters. Yeah, and so in addition to the drug dealers and the gun runners and whatever, people were— they were remitting money to other countries. Companies were paying people that were unbanked in Bitcoin to work for them.

That's phenomenal.

People without bank accounts were able to be a part of the world economy. This was— this is something that's coming from underneath. It's not— a lot of inventions and stuff, they start at the top, like the Tesla.

Right.

I mean, I paid $80,000 for a Tesla to arrive 2 years later. So I was leading the edge there. But Bitcoin has been this under— this grassroots swell, and it just keeps coming. And the politicians are going, you know, oh, you got to stop it here. Maybe we let it run here and we don't let it run here. But what they're missing is we all want it. It's going to be something really important for everybody.

It's now so big that they must pay attention to it. They must do something in regards to regulation and moving this forward. There's no turning back now.

No, no.

This is it. Like, this is the can't turn back.

It just keeps coming. And what's really a little frustrating is that we've had kind of a draconian SEC during this period. with Biden.

Right.

And they have spread fear throughout the land. And that has sort of torn apart innovation. And so we— every time I meet a new entrepreneur, people go, why do you travel? Well, because every time I meet a new entrepreneur, they're saying things like, oh, we need to geo- We have to geofence this around the US. We can't do— this is really cool, and we're all going, this is so cool, we got it! And then they say, oh, you can't have it. And I said, what do you mean I can't have it? Well, we have to geofence around the US. We don't want to deal with your SEC. They're just—

Nobody wants to deal with it!

And the SEC's sitting there with a bunch of rules that they're clinging to that are 80 years old!

I always say this. It's like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole or something. It just doesn't work.

It doesn't work. They didn't think this through. It would have been very simple for them to just sort of say, okay, we're gonna let this thing rip. You know, Clinton did a really good thing when the internet was coming up and people were— the press was starting to say, how do you tax and regulate and whatever, get in front of this thing? Clinton said, let's just see how it goes.

Which is not usual, right?

And he just let it rip. of just letting it go. We have Amazon in the US, we have Google in the US, we have Apple in the US, we have, you name it, all of those internet companies. Webflow, Uber, DoorDash.

Versus all the ones that want to go offshore now.

And right now all the innovators are going, well, I got to go to Dubai because they're letting me innovate there. I can do an airdrop there. Dubai, you can buy tokens there. We don't have people protecting the widows and the orphans. And my feeling is the orphans need to be able to take risks because they've come off a tough childhood, and we're not allowing them to take a risk and try to make a life for themselves.

They have this incredible opportunity.

And the widows, The widow— I haven't met a widow who wasn't rich.

That was a great joke. Who are we trying to protect?

And these are protections that were from the 1930s, after the total crash, the total bomb, you know, whatever.

Yeah.

And what has our SEC done? Have they actually protected us? FTX was something that the SEC was all behind.

Exactly.

They're making, you know, artificial decisions for all the rest of us. I didn't want to go into FTX, but the SEC thought that was a good idea.

And why?

So they didn't know.

They didn't know.

And it's a horse race. You gotta let it— you gotta let it rip.

Yeah. Yeah. I remember the congressman who was grilling him about it and said, who, uh, whose rulership was it that let the The FTX collapse happened, sir. You were, and then he just keeps going on like, "What else did you do, Luna? Oh, you were like, what have you done to help move forward?" You're not protecting anyone. Yeah, no, except their own interests possibly.

So they're really because I mean think of how how big the fines have been. Oh yeah, that was a four billion fine for finance.

Yeah, for and do you think that was a play like many say to just capitalize on Coinbase being the U.S. dominant player with BlackRock?

I hope not. I mean, I hope that it was just individuals making individual decisions. I tend to not be a conspiracist.

I ask you because it's all out there.

Because it's systems that conspire. It isn't individuals.

Right, right.

Individuals are just doing their thing, trying to make a living, you know, going home to their families, doing whatever. But systems can be messed up. Socialist systems really destroy countries.

Oh yeah.

Communist systems, dictator, unless they're benevolent.

They stifle people.

They stifle people because they're telling everybody what to do.

Right.

It's like, you know, some guy in Russia points to me and says, you're gonna have to be a ballet dancer.

Right.

You know, I am the opposite of a ballet dancer, but they had a quota they had to fill of ballet dancers. Right.

And Coinbase, yeah.

So somehow I'm stuck being a ballet dancer for my whole life. my life, and I could have been a venture capitalist.

Right.

And I could have done something cool things for the world. That's a very good way of looking at it.

I think that's going to help a lot of people conceptualize what's going on. It's the systems that are failing. And Coinbase happened to be the one that was complying with the SEC rules. And just like you say, a lot of times maybe they just have no idea, and they're like, okay, here you are, you're doing what we said you should do, we'll use you. And maybe it's just that simple.

But the SEC sued Coinbase. I mean, it was just willy-nilly. It was like Coinbase is asking, how about, can we do this? Can we do this? And then all of a sudden they get a lawsuit. It's like, exactly what?

So it's a lot of stuff.

It's a little bit like the mafia enforcement right now, but it's slap on the wrist, fines, move on. It's systemic. So that's one of those things. You get Nikki Haley in there. I think she's capable of making some of these really important changes.

That would be absolutely incredible. So as then, so as we transition into the—

we're here in Florida saying Nikki Haley.

Nikki Haley.

Cheese up a few states more.

We're all for her. No, I fully support that too. And what an incredible change that would be. I mean, just, we're ready for that kind of change here. Oh yeah, no question. Absolutely. And so back to the Bitcoin, as we segue to Bitcoin and we kind of wrap this up, you bought 40,000 Bitcoin.

30,000.

Well, in the beginning. 40,000 at some point. That's now—

30,000.

And then you got 30,000 out of the Silk Road auction from the US. And you looked at it, you said, I think this This is a good idea. And what was the price you bought it for at that time?

$632. And market was $618. And everybody I was talking to was saying what a discount they would pay for it. They were all saying, well, it's a lot of Bitcoin, so what's the discount that I'm going to pay? And I was thinking, first of all, I think this is here forever. And if it's not, I'm going to lose my money anyway. You know, whether I pay $618,000 or $632,000.

Right. So it's kind of like that thing, it's either going to zero or infinity because it's a system. If it works, it works, and if it doesn't, it doesn't. That's the way you thought back then?

That's the way I was thinking about it.

Wow, that's pretty visionary.

So I thought, okay, I'll bid $632,000, and I thought I would get 1 or 2 of the lots. There were 9 lots. I got all of them.

You didn't expect that?

It was like, you know, you paid the most for the painting. Oh, the high bidder. You got stuck with it.

You're stuck.

You bid it up and then— That's a great story. So I paid the most anybody had ever paid. And then it immediately, it went up to $634 and then down to $180.

Oh man.

And I looked like the biggest idiot. And then I just thought, well, just hang on. You know, it's fine. And I actually bought more. The Winklevoss bought a bunch in that second auction, which was much cheaper.

Right.

A smaller auction, but much cheaper. So they went in and bought that. And I bought some and they bought some. I think they sold theirs, kind of. But I— that piece, I invested in a bunch of Boost startups because Boost had created the first Bitcoin accelerator.

Okay.

And I invested in a bunch of them and I invested in Bitcoin. And it was really interesting. They all, except for one, all of them took the Bitcoin, sold it at $180, and then tried to build their business off the, you know, whatever the investment was that I made, except one. And he did this sort of gradual thing, and he's the only one still in business.

Look at that. Look at that. You got to have the vision. You gotta have the vision. And so let me ask you, have you sold any of those 30,000 Bitcoin?

No.

Wow, that's incredible.

No, in fact, we're taking— we accept Bitcoin at Draper University for tuition. We accept it at Hero City for rent. We accept it in the Draper Startup Houses, and we encourage it in the Draper Startup Houses for everything they sell.

And I accept Bitcoin into Draper Associates So you can live in like a Bitcoin-centric world?

As an LP, people can invest in Bitcoin and then I can do the investments in dollars. What I'm hoping to do—

Interesting.

Long-term is raise a whole fund all in Bitcoin, invest it all in Bitcoin, and have the companies we invest in pay their employees and suppliers all in Bitcoin. And then we have a complete Walled garden and pay taxes in Bitcoin. The complete walled garden. No accounting, no auditing, no bookkeeping, no transfer agent. No, the whole thing is run automatically on a big smart contract on the blockchain seamlessly. That could end up being our future. And the less friction you have in an economy, the faster it moves. The richer everybody gets.

It just makes so much sense.

So this is a— it's obvious that it's coming. It's just a matter of kind of getting through the Luddites.

Right. And just going through the hurdles and, you know, the obstacles that they place. We're used to this in the crypto community. I mean, yeah. So you could literally—

I love how resilient the crypto community is.

They always rise from the ashes.

It's so great.

Yeah. And so you could literally live in a Bitcoin-centric economy in the Draper universe. You don't even need fiat money.

Well, that's what we hope to do.

That's very cool.

And there will be— I mean, I think when people can buy their food, clothing, and shelter, and pay taxes all in Bitcoin, there's no other reason to have a fiat currency.

Right.

So there will be a moment there where there's a— I mean, I hate to say it, there'll be a run on the banks.

Right.

And people are going to run to get rid of their dollars and put it into Bitcoin.

Yeah.

And that's going to be like all at once. And so I tell all my companies, look, after Silicon Valley Bank went under, look, you do put it, put a third of it into a big bank, third of it into a small bank, and a third of it into Bitcoin. And they say, why? And I say, well, a third into the big bank because the big bank seems Stronger, yeah. Put a third into the small bank because the small bank is small enough to get bailed out by the government. The big bank is not. And a third of it into Bitcoin because you as CEO and your board are responsible for payroll for at least one payroll and maybe two for everybody who works for you, and you better have some money to pay them. Even if both your banks are out of business.

Wow. I mean, what a picture you're painting here. That's why they pay you the big bucks, because you got the vision. I mean, that's incredible to have the wherewithal to say, hey, like, this is how we're going to set it up. But yeah, there are already bank runs happening. I just saw a news article that said that 60 banks were set to shut down these kind of branches, and it's already happening. I mean, it already is happening. So that takes me then to your infamous price prediction. Okay, everybody talks about your price prediction because you are a Bitcoin OG, because you have this vision. So you said a few years back that you believe Bitcoin would hit $250,000. 50,000 by— well, it was going to be by the end of 2023, right? Originally. So what do you—

The only reason I was making predictions was I made a prediction on CNBC. Or no, sorry, I did it on Bloomberg. Bloomberg Business? No, Fox Business. On Fox Business News. I made a prediction. I said in 3 years it's gonna hit $10,000, and that was in 2014. And they looked at— she looked at me like— They were like, this guy, this guy's crazy. And then I said drones were gonna be a big deal, and she thought, drones? Bitcoin? What, what are you thinking? Bitcoin at $10,000? What are you thinking? It hit $10,000 exactly on the 3-year mark from the day I was interviewed.

You knew it.

Weird. So I thought, oh, maybe I have this skill.

So they asked me again and I thought, well, okay, I'll try it.

And I sort of projected out and I thought, okay, the software is going to take a couple of years to develop. The— it's going to have to find the consumer's hands.

Right.

Once it finds the consumer's hands, it's going to be on its way to To where it's ubiquitous. And the way it gets to be— when it's ubiquitous, that's probably $1 million to $5 million per Bitcoin when it's everywhere. So somewhere, we're going to be somewhere on the way there. And so I sort of chose sort of 4 years out, it's going to hit $250,000. That was my thinking. But the date has come and gone. I failed in my prediction, but I still stick to the fact that it's coming.

Right.

A couple of things that I wasn't predicting: how heavily the US government was going to try to protect their dollar and their central bank. I didn't know that they were going to get in the way of progress.

Right. Stifle innovation instead of make it flourish.

We haven't had a Steve Jobsian moment where he says one button and then it works. Okay? So we haven't made it really simple except for the business card I gave you that has Bitcoin on it.

Yes, I love that card.

So that's pretty exciting. I know where it is. But they haven't made it so that But whatever, camera to QR code, everything happens.

UX/UI, totally simple.

You get rid of, like, the very complicated— and I know Ledger's coming out with things that are going to be easier to deal with, but still, it's still way too complicated. And so, and then the third thing was, I didn't realize that the retailers would I didn't jump on this and say, I can save 2% on every transaction if I use Bitcoin.

Right. Yeah, I did see you say that.

So that hasn't happened yet.

It hasn't happened, but I do want to make a point about this because this is why you became so high on my radar, because you said that women would fuel the next bull run. And so it got all of the women excited, and that's part of why I'm on this world tour is because I see that they onboard better by in-person interactions than online. And so you said that because you said that women are 80% of the retail spend, about?

They are 80% of the retail spend, and they were about 14% of the Bitcoin wallets. And now that number is like 1 in 4. So it's coming.

It's getting better. Much better. Much better. And so, but beyond that, I mean, so many women that we see taking leadership roles and just being at the forefront of this movement is actually so incredible. So that made a lot of people excited. And so as we come into this, this new era where Bitcoin, you know, is maturing as an asset, as Michael Saylor says, from 2020 to 2024 is like its adolescence phase. And now it's getting plugged into Wall Street right now. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, is saying it's a flight to safety. And suddenly, but still not really, people are starting to wake up. But even so, I give lectures to our country club in Marbella, Spain, and we were talking about before, and it's usually like a little bit mid-middle-aged to older men and Even though BlackRock is stepping up saying, I'm doing this, we're doing this, they're still kind of reticent about it. And so I think that the only problem here is that maybe that part of the adoption is not happening as fast as we would think it would, which is why the price is where it is, because it doesn't make sense.

I think it's got to be simplified to the point of an iPhone. It's got to be so easy and simple that everybody just goes, oh, here. Click, done. You know, okay, here's how much I'm sending you here.

Yeah, simple.

And I think, yeah, and here's how much I want to invest in this company. Done. Or here's what I want to buy, these Ordinals or these NFTs.

Love the Ordinals, yes.

Yeah.

Cool.

I want to buy this or I want to see the proof that these shoes came from wherever they came from.

All the use cases that That blockchain so apparently has.

And I think it will. And I also want it all automated so that all the accounting is done in the background. So I think that stuff is all coming.

It's coming. But do you think it's coming now? Or— this is what's on everyone's minds. Bloomberg just came out with this big report to finish off with a bang. They say Bitcoin to $500,000. It's just so funny. It's just so bearish and then it's so bullish all of a sudden.

Right. It's just like, it's gone and they go silent for a while. Oh, it's gone up, it's doubled? Oh, well then we must be pointing in that direction.

Yeah, the typical thing. And they're saying now $500,000 Bitcoin, this is the last bull run we'll have for retail. It'll never go back down again. What are your thoughts about that? I mean, is this like the last time people can get Bitcoin at this price and it's never going to go back? Or are the normal cycles still taking hold? Because as we go into this new year—

So I think Bitcoin has followed the halving, the halvening. Some people call it the halving.

I know, it's a mystery, right? What do you call it?

It was— I've called it the halvening forever, and then other people are saying the halving. But anyway, when Bitcoin splits in half and it's harder to mine, right, on the way toward that moment, Bitcoin rises. And then it stays up for a while and then it drops. And it keeps an interest in Bitcoin while all these engineers are building it so that we can have that Steve Jobs moment.

Yes, that's what I was saying.

And when we have that moment, all of a sudden people will be just going, then the women are going to use it at retail. And when they— part of it will be when it hits $200,000. $750,000 or $1 million or $1.5 million or $5 million. It's going to be where people are kind of indifferent as to whether they hold or spend. Right now, it's like, I'm not getting rid of mine.

Right. Yeah.

I'm not spending mine. I'm not investing mine. I'm holding on while this thing plays out. And, uh, but there will be a moment where I kind of go, well, or people People like retailers won't even take dollars anymore. So that'll be a time when I have to use my Bitcoin to buy whatever it is I'm trying to buy.

And then when that moment happens, the theory is that then that's where Bitcoin becomes virtually infinite in a sense, and the price follows suit. And in the meantime, we continue to build, we continue to do our thing, although the price doesn't reflect what's being built in the backend by any means. That's what's happening. I think getting positioned now and people just getting aware now is just like you said, you just, you have this vision and you set it and you let it play out.

Yeah, you don't want to be running to the bank to get your dollars and turn them into Bitcoin. You want to have your Bitcoin before that happens.

You want to get positioned.

You want to make sure that you can relax while everybody's panicking.

That's right. And that's what you're going to be doing, clearly. So do you stick by the $250,000 for the end of this year? Well, here's what I'm thinking.

There will be this— that moment that I'm talking about, it will— part of it will be Bitcoin increasing in value. Part of it will be the dollar dropping off in value.

Yeah. And that's happening.

So what $250,000 means today and what it'll mean after the bank run are going to be 2 very different things.

So that's the message. That's the message we stick with. Is that like There's no telling what could happen to the price when that moment happens, whether it happens in this bull run or the next bull run or whatever it is.

Well, I mean, if we're— I don't believe we'll still be valuing things in dollars. So you'll just say Bitcoin. Yeah, there won't be a reason to hold fiat. Everything can be done in Bitcoin. Why would you want to hold on to a currency that you know Trump's going to spend $10 trillion $10 trillion of it, and you— $10 trillion of it, and yours is now worth 90 cents where it used to be worth a dollar. I— who wants to hold on to that when you can hold on to something where you know there are only 21 million of them? And if you got one, you got a couple—

You're part of that crowd.

You're in pretty good shape when they have the run on the bank.

No, absolutely. You know what, that's fantastic. We'll leave it on that note as we get ready now that you're about to be on Meet the Drapers.

That's right.

Yeah, and what will you be doing in today's episode?

Go watch the show, Meet the Drapers.

Meet the Drapers. Watch Meet the Drapers. One of the biggest audiences.

It's on Draper TV.

Draper TV, and where else?

Well, it's everywhere. YouTube. It's, it's all through. We have 70 million viewers.

70 million?

Yeah, they're from all over. It's like Brazil and India and Taiwan and whatever. They're all over the place. So it's—

So you're gonna have a look at some amazing tech startups here.

I hope they're amazing.

Yeah, and we'll try to pick a few possible unicorns.

We'll pick one to go to the semifinals, and then 15 make the semifinals or something like that. And then we choose 3 of those to go to the finale. And then the viewers—

Oh.

You choose 3 to go to the finale. And then that makes up our competition. And then the winner gets a million-dollar investment. And the 6 of them have to tell me what their valuation is. before I choose which one wins.

Wow, that is, that is some interesting dynamic there. That's pretty cool. I like that you even involve the people, the audience. That's super cool. 70 million people better tune in to this. This one's gonna be a good episode for sure.

There's a game. You gotta meet the Drapers.

So it's gamified.

Yeah, you can play a game where you choose which ones you like and then—

Of the companies?

Of the companies you see.

So you can be—

And if they make it to the semifinals, If they make it to the semifinals, it's like you double your money. If they make it to the finals, you're 5x. And if you make it to the— if you pick the winner, then it's 10x.

So they can see if they have that Draper magic, right?

Yeah, then they ought to apply for a job. It's like, I won your competition. Apply for a job.

Just to see if you've got what it takes, right? Well, anyway, Tim, thank you so much for being here today. Crypto Megan, baby.

Great to see you.