Crypto Megan Podcast | Yat Siu: How Digital Property Rights Can Unlock Financial Freedom

I'm here in Miami, Bitcoin Miami, with Yat Siu, chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands. And we just recorded an amazing episode.

Web3 to us is about true digital ownership. The whole point about it is that we actually have digital property rights. Property rights itself as a foundation in the physical world actually is what gives us our freedom. So ownership isn't only about sort of its value as a utility, it's also value to us as our identity, what it means to us. In Web3, that paradigm has to sit with data. If I actually know what the data is worth, then I'm actually able to not only sort of ask for my fair price, creating a competitive, free, and fair market.

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.

Communication in Web3 is highly fragmented and frustrating. Users have to check various channels to stay up to date with their digital assets, sifting through thousands of spam and notifications. This is why we created EtherMail, the first Web3 email solution.

Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Megan Nielsen. This is the Crypto Megan Podcast, and today I have the pleasure and the honor of doing an episode with none other than Yat Siu. Chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands. Welcome to the show, Yat. Thank you for being here today.

Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure.

Yeah, man, I've just been following your career and we run into each other at events around the world. You're pretty much nonstop. I mean, you're everywhere. I don't know how you do it, to be honest, but that must be what's behind part of the greatness in the brand is having those boots on the ground and being able to do the things that you do. I'd just like to kick this episode off with a little bit about who you are and your background.

Sure.

And eventually we'll segue over into how you made it to be chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands. But first, tell us about how you grew up and, you know, what life was like growing up.

Well, I mean, thank you. So I grew up in Vienna, in Austria in the '70s. My parents were musicians, particularly my mom was an opera singer first, and they were also Chinese immigrants. So they basically studied music in the '60s in Vienna. And if anyone sort of remembers back in the history, China wasn't a great place to be in the '60s and '70s. Cultural Revolution, you know, all this type of stuff. So when she moved there and eventually, you know, that's where she met her husband and that's where they had me. I was that generation of kids that never thought they'd go back to China, right? It's a little bit like telling maybe some kids today that you'll go back to Somalia someday and that would not be part of the plan. That was basically how many Chinese immigrants felt that way. But also because they were passionate about music, they studied music and then basically made that their profession. I ended up studying music as well, but I didn't study music because that was my passion. I studied music because I was a good Asian kid. My parents were very, very sort of classic tiger parents, as you know, the cliché. It's all true. But I think the other thing too that really, I think, was formative for me was that Austria was sort of a social democratic country, but it was nestled right in between what was still the Cold War.

Ah.

So I would, you know, my mom would work at the Komische Oper, which is in the eastern side of Berlin. So I would travel and visit her. So I really got to see the difference between what the West and the East at that point was like, basically what real communism looked like, what sort of, you know, that type of ultra-socialism I had an experience which had an impact on me.

Right.

Of course, I didn't realize what that impact was until much later, but it was something that had a formative impact for me. And, you know, while I was studying music, I wasn't particularly good at it in comparison to my fellow sort of students. I mean colleagues. So I ended up cheating a bit. I had a computer, it was an Atari ST, it had MIDI ports. So I ended up writing an early piece of software that would help me compose faster, right? It was kind of like a calculator.

I'm understanding where this is starting now.

Exactly. And back then, you have to remember in the '80s, using a calculator in the classroom was also not allowed, let alone a computer to do composition of music. So obviously I outperformed a lot of the kids there. My teacher wasn't particularly impressed with the method, but I uploaded the software in a pre-internet service called CompuServe. Now, for those of you who remember, CompuServe was kind of, you know, you dialed in with, like, sort of a modem. In this case, it was an acoustic coupler.

Again, I don't think there's many people that remember that.

Yeah, I don't think a lot of people remember that.

That's incredible.

I think it was like 1,200 baud, which is really, really slow. And uploaded basically the software. And, you know, I was just still a kid, but people appreciated it. So I started making connections online and then they started sending me money and I didn't have a bank account yet. And that was sort of the beginning of realizing actually there could be a business there. And there was this other impact, you know, Austria still today, I just came actually back, I just came from Vienna actually to Miami and there's still not that many Asian people there, but back then there were even fewer.

Right.

And so it was, I wouldn't say it was difficult in the classic sense, but you were definitely an outsider. But when you were online, It didn't matter how old you were. It didn't matter what you looked like, your background. None of it mattered. Just what you knew what to do. If something was valuable to the community, the community would embrace you. It's kind of similar to what we see today.

The precipice of Web3. It was like in the makings then and you had no idea.

I had no idea, but I was drawn to that because, you know, people liked what I did. They didn't care about any of this stuff. They just cared what I could do and contribute to that community, which eventually led to a job at Atari.

Wow. And it was only about the value you were able to provide.

Correct.

Exactly. So, so just backtracking a minute. So you were studying music and you coded this too. What exactly were you studying within the music?

I was studying piano, flute, and cello.

Wow, so you played all of those instruments?

I did play those instruments.

I think this is important in the narrative because even though you didn't like it, I mean, it's— there's something about learning those crafts and getting good at those crafts. What would you say is the kind of like skills that instilled in you by studying those music, that those types of music and those forms of music, even though you weren't a huge fan?

Hard, raw discipline. The thing about anyone who practices music and then performs music will know is like, and that's one of the reasons why musicians always have a difficult time listening to their own performances, is that you always pick up on your own imperfections.

Interesting.

You always listen, you know, like in the audience, they were like, hey, this was really, really good. But for yourself, you're like, I made this mistake. I didn't do it quite this way. I didn't express it that way. So that perfectionism comes into practicing music. I used to practice 8 hours a day.

Wow.

That was sort of the norm.

And you didn't like it on top of it.

And coming from a musician family, that was like, hey, this is what you do, right? And teaching methods back then were also a little more stricter than they are today, right? So we won't go into the details of that, but the world was different back then.

It was.

So to me, it was really the discipline.

That's incredible. I mean, just, okay, so you didn't like necessarily playing music or learning how to do this, but it did instill in you something that seemingly made you who you are today. Oh, it definitely was formative for sure.

And, you know, I do enjoy listening to classical music, for instance. I do appreciate music. So I think that has picked up as well. Maybe there's something else that happened there, but I never sort of went back to calculate exactly what this is. But I guess this element of sort of maybe a kind of perfectionism or sort of detail orientation. And also, I guess the other thing to me was I did end up studying music not because it was for me, it was for my mother. So I actually think that there's an element of that. where you sort of know and realize, at least in our upbringing, that you don't actually necessarily do something just entirely for yourself. This whole idea of this ultra-individualism is something that I encountered when I moved to the US.

Wow.

That was not something that really existed in Europe or in an Asian culture where you served your community. You had sort of this concept of filial piety, which is a very Confucian concept, which, you know, my parents were Chinese after all, was around serving the family and having sort of a respect to the structure. So I think that was my initial upbringing. So I had this sort of, I guess, care of duty that was part of my upbringing, which was a deep contrast to when I eventually went to the US because Atari basically sent me there to study computer science. It was all about individualism and all about—

That must have been a huge shock to you.

Oh yeah. And also—

It is very individual and one of the things—

And very capitalist as well.

Very capitalist, which, you know, it allows for its freedoms that it has. So you're seeing all these contrasts. And I live in Europe, I live in Spain, so I see how people are very family-oriented And they're all about serving their family and their community. And then you do see the difference in the US where it's like everybody is just out to make it on their own and do things for themselves. And it's not necessarily bad, but it's—

No, it's just different.

It's just so different. So you had to shift from those 2 ideologies.

Yes.

That must have been an interesting transition for you.

Oh, it was a huge transition. The other thing, what was also a huge transition is I moved to the US actually in the early '90s, and the US was at the height of its recession at that point. So it wasn't nice. And for those who remember anything about German-speaking Europe, the role model of the American idea was David Hasselhoff, right? So, you know, it was, you know, Knight Rider, you know, and that kind of stuff. And really, that's what we thought, right? And then you go there, and my first stop was Worcester, Massachusetts, which was really terrible. It was terrible.

That is— yeah, that's a different sort of view of the US, for sure.

Exactly, for sure. And I was like, what am I doing here? Like, this is nothing like what I expected America to be like.

And that's where Atari sent you?

Well, because that's where I was studying first. I studied at WPI.

Okay.

But I was studying and working, right? It wasn't really a case where you get to study in whichever. You kind of had to do both, which was fine for me at the time. It was kind of, you know, expected to do that. But I think the other thing that also I found when I was sort of— Worcester was close to Boston and they had a Chinatown. And that was the very first time that I met so many Asian people, right? 'Cause I was a minority and I kind of thought that was kind of the world, you know, you read You know about it, but when you actually go there, you know, even the signs are in Chinese and everyone looks at me and they're like, oh, you know, where are you from? I don't know because I never grew up in the part, right?

So you went from outsider to insider, but really you never grew up in China.

Correct.

So it's this sort of—

Yes, and I'm still an outsider. I'm still an outsider because obviously my language skills were nothing close to what they were on. And I was not, you know, I was an ABC but not an American-born Chinese. I was an Austrian-born Chinese. So I was kind of this weird weird construct as well. But then again, it just allowed me to observe the environment and I could sort of embrace sort of this kind of culture, which I think the US does do very well. You know, embracing the conflict of the diverse cultures is actually something that's very American.

Right.

That doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, I think.

It really doesn't. And I know because my husband's Swedish and so we're all over Europe and that concept to them is very foreign.

Yes.

Like, what are these internal conflicts going on in the US? But there are a lot of them and I think they're navigating through it as well as they can, right?

I think for me though, one of the things that despite me going to America and experiencing really what might have been quite an un-American experience in my expectation, there was this idea about what America was, right? Sort of this sort of, you know, when you think of the Statue of Liberty or they look at the stories or look at Hollywood, there is this idea of individualism and freedom and rights and so on that's very, very attractive, right? And you study about that as well. And even though America itself didn't really represent that when I went there. I mean, I was almost mugged, right? You know, and people were accosting me for money and everything, especially back then. The idea never left you. And so that actually had an impact. And again, probably would have a deeper impact later in my life as to what we're doing today in Web3. But sort of this principle that that's what we want was so powerful and attractive, which really doesn't exist in the same way, I think, again, elsewhere, elsewhere in the world.

I don't think so either, in the same capacity.

Correct.

It's this idea of, you know, anything is within reach.

Yes.

That many cultures or societies that have different operating systems, you really can't achieve that same level of freedom in that way.

And even in places like Austria, we had people like Schwarzenegger, right? He is Austrian.

He was the governor in California. He signed my university diploma. Right. Yeah.

He became the governor. He had an American— he had a Hollywood career. I mean, that was sort of the, oh, you can do this in America. So there's this meritocratic principle that, you know, hard work will get you there. Which really didn't exist in Europe. And you knew that there was a ceiling you couldn't get to.

Yeah. Okay, interesting. So backtracking now, you're working for Atari and they eventually send you to the US. Okay, so then you're in the US and you're working for Atari, and what are your thoughts at this point?

Well, I'm in the US, I'm basically sort of working and studying, and then midway through my studies, Atari goes under. It just basically disappears.

You have had a series of— just to recap, you're in the middle of the Cold War, then you come to the US in the backs of a So, you're in the middle of a horrific recession, Atari goes under, and yet you still continue.

Well, so, I mean, it was more like I was in the middle of my studies and then, you know, my sponsor basically sort of disappeared. Technically, as I understand it, Atari sold themselves to this sort of— it was a reverse takeover or whatever. Anyway, the Atari that we knew was all gone. And so all sponsorships, everything was gone. All the employees were like, what the hell's going on? And this happened around about the early '90s. From that perspective, you know, we're just like, okay, what do we do? So a bunch of ex-Atari people, including myself, went and basically built a business, set up a business supporting all the people who had Atari computers, who said like, where am I gonna get my support? So we were able to create a small business out of that. But what was interesting about the way it was set up is that we were 6 people and we, with the exception of one person, I never met any one of them in person. And we built this business entirely virtually. So we communicated over, back then, mostly Gini, a little bit of CompuServe, and eventually then basically with the early forms of the internet. And we would basically provide customer service, you know, patch updates, video updates, whatever. You know, back then phone calls were expensive. They were charged per minute.

Everything was clunky, slow and clunky.

And travel was expensive. So we wouldn't just meet up together.

So again, the precipice of the very early stages of what is Web3 today.

Yes, I guess. Or what is the web really? We didn't distinguish between that because the promise of the original web was supposed to be this open, decentralized information system. And to some degree, it still is.

Except for that that information got siloed to people at the top, and then we kind of lost track of that free distribution of information.

But the information wasn't really siloed in the classic sense. It was the derivative of that information that got siloed. It's what the data was able to create, not necessarily that the data was out there. So our photos or the images or the context or the blogs that we write would still be open to everyone. It's the analysis and it's the understanding of what that data would create that was really powerful. That's the part that we didn't have access to in sort of what ultimately became Web2, where you were able to write to the web, right? Right.

Kind of borrowed the land.

Correct. I'll come to that.

We're going to get to that because that is a super interesting topic. But now you're back here, you're doing everything virtual, and nobody is kind of even involved in this world.

And so what happened was, is that Atari obviously was a dying business, so we weren't going to continue working on that. So we thought, well, what do we do? We had media skills because Atari was a gaming company and so on. So we basically went into a new segment, which was basically we did an OpenGL modeler to create sort of design tools that would be able to support something that was called VRML. Now, in the '90s, HTML was becoming really big.

Right.

But this was pre-Netscape even. This is sort of when the Mosaic browser— Marc Andreessen had then just started Netscape. You know, those were the sort of those super, super, super early days.

Right.

And there was another concept that was brewing, which was using this sort of 3D framework around OpenGL called VRML. which stands for Virtual Reality Markup Language.

Okay.

So the idea was that, well, HTML would be sort of, you know, the written web and VRML would be the virtual web. And so in the '90s, we were already building basically a VR construct in terms of how we can interact and shop and do that kind of stuff.

That's crazy.

But it was all line graphics. It looked worse than Tron. But that was the vision and we built that. And the company that really tried to push this vision was called SGI.

Okay.

Silicon Graphics. And they were back then really known for doing all the sort of, you know, Star Wars movies and Pixar movies. They were all built on SGI. They had the fastest sort of processing power sort of computer machines back then, you know, using basically IRIX, which was basically a kind of Unix sort of operating system. Anyway, SGI acquired our business because, And back then they acquired many companies because SGI tried to compete with Sun Microsystems to become sort of the web machine. And it was structured under this thing called SGI WebForce.

Wow, this is a history that I don't think many people know.

Well, this is— if you're back in the early days of the web, you would know this, right? Back then also, I was using— before SGI, I was using sort of DEC, Digital Equipment, which is long gone, right? Right. You know, which was actually Massachusetts-based. Anyway, there's a little bit of history there. I was the only Asian guy on the team. that was sort of working on the software. And back then, people didn't want to go travel. People just wanted to live in the US and work there. So they're like, hey, you're the Asian dude. Would you like to go out to—

You're the guy that travels around.

You know, you go to sort of, you know, do stuff in Asia. I said, sure, I don't care. I was young. I was maybe 20, 21.

Hungry, evidently. Yeah.

And I would go to— my first stop was in Japan. I don't speak Japanese. I'm not even— I'm, you know, I'm Chinese, but whatever, right? So I go to Japan, then I go to Taiwan for a couple months, then I go to Hong Kong. And in Hong Kong, what happened was I couldn't get my email. I couldn't get— there was no internet access. So that was the first sort of situation where I was like, huh, maybe I should do something. Also, because my father is from Hong Kong, when I landed, I got permanent residency automatically, which again, I didn't appreciate. But, you know, so I didn't need a visa to stay there.

That's amazing.

And so I just said, well, maybe, you know, this corporate life didn't quite suit me. I used to have very long hair as well back then.

Really?

Yeah. So it was kind of, you know, not something—

I don't think many people know that.

Yeah, that's not something I tell a lot of people, but I used to have long hair and so on. stuff and whatever. And so I ended up saying, you know, I'm going to quit this and start one of Hong Kong's very first internet service providers called Hong Kong Online around '94, '95.

That's so interesting. That came out of necessity and you're looking for solutions.

It is, but also it is a desire to do something because for me, again, I never really ran— this was the first business I ran solo, solo, right, at start. For me, it wasn't so much about, am I going to sort of create a business that would make a lot of money? It's more like, I mean, obviously you want to do well, but more like it seemed like everyone needs this, right? Because it worked so well for me, right? You know, the internet gave me all this opportunity. Well, everyone in Hong Kong should see the same thing. They didn't. But anyway, I went and set it up rather impulsively, shall we say, because I set up infrastructure, I bought modems, I put it up, and then I started knocking on people's doors and it was like, what was this? It was literally like selling fridges to Eskimos.

That's, I mean, but that's so incredible. I mean, the impulsiveness comes from the passion.

Yes.

And that it seems to me that you're saying the corporate life didn't suit you, that you've had this entrepreneurial vein all along, right?

I think so, but I don't think the entrepreneurial vein came because I wanted to just build, build. I just wanted to do something that had impact.

Which is the key. And this is something that I say all the time today when I see a lot of projects as well, and I'm consulting for a fund, and I always think like, you know, this needs to be built to solve something. And there's a lot that's just being built to be built because it's cool or because, you know, they can. And no, like the best projects are the impulsive ones set up because Somebody had a problem and they saw that this needed to have a solution, right?

Yes, that's how it started. And in that process, I also ended up, which I think ended up helping me later, explaining the internet to people who knew nothing about the internet at all, which is, I guess, sort of these communication skills that would build up at a young age. Also, I think the other challenge I had, of course, was I didn't know anyone in Hong Kong, right? So this was something I just— I was kind of lucky in a way in the beginning. There was a community online. I got a job at Atari. You know, we just started a business together with a bunch of ex-Atari guys. It kind of just meandered in this sort of organic way. It was a flow. It was a flow. But in Hong Kong, I didn't have that. Right. I brought friends over from the US to help start the business in Hong Kong, but I didn't have a network in Hong Kong.

Right.

And so that was really difficult for me. And that morphed eventually because I couldn't make proper money on this one into one of basically Asia's first free sort of free email web hosting and essentially blogging service. sort of around '95, '96, '97, which I thought I would, you know, could be an advertising model. But I couldn't make any money because nobody was going to pay advertising for this sort of internet service that had 300,000 users. But they were mostly—

Which is not bad.

Back then, it was very, very good. But it was all broke students, so they couldn't pay for anything. So again, it was kind of because they were the ones who were adopting, right? They were the ones who thought this was cool. You know, everyone who was older was like, I don't know what this is.

Yeah, I don't want to touch it.

I don't want to touch it. It's, you know, everything So that's kind of where I found myself. So I took a job at AT&T. And that was interesting as well, because a very senior position, although I was very young at the time, because I knew how to build internet infrastructure. I basically built the internet setup basically with routers and sort of all that kind of stuff together with my sort of early team for this first sort of ISP in Hong Kong. So it was quite technical.

Yeah.

And AT&T, when the internet was really starting to heat up and the dot-com boom was just about to happen, AT&T basically needed skills in Asia to do so, and they offered me a very good position. So I basically ended up taking that job, but I didn't take the job because I wanted to work at AT&T. I took the job because then I could continue running this community that I had, which was at that time called Hong Kong Cyber City, because I couldn't turn it off because we had 300,000 people using it. They wouldn't pay me anything, but they were willing to wait for literally hours to upload their content. Because I only had a certain number of modems. So people, so they had to queue. And so you had to wait your turn.

Wow.

And, you know, some people would literally wait for 2 or 3 hours so they can batch upload their turns. It was so important for them.

That's incredible. Just hearing this now is just kind of like mind-blowing to think how far we've come and that you, you had the wherewithal to say, okay, I'm taking this job because I want to be there for you guys. I want to keep this running. That's incredible.

Yeah. So, and then I guess over time what happened? the dot-com boom really, really accelerated and the US was just going sort of crazy. You know, like Yahoo bought GeoCities for $4 billion, like sums that nobody had heard of. And then there was this company called ZAP!, which is a fish oil company that decided that it wants to be an internet play, a dot-com play back as it was called. And they started acquiring all these companies.

Dot-com. Yeah.

And they needed to basically buy traffic. And they found us and they said, 'cause we actually had a lot of traffic even though it was penniless students, but it didn't matter. And they made an offer to buy the business for, you know, A good amount of money. They never ended up paying everything because then that business went under. But that's okay. I got— I got— this is probably where I got my first, let's call it— I wouldn't say big money, but real amount of money where I could actually do something with.

Right. And with that, the first big break for you.

A semi-break, shall we say. That would allow me then to build this other business called Outplace, which was in 1998, which was Asia's first cloud computing business. But back then it wasn't cloud computing. It was called ASP, Application Service Provider. But essentially a cloud setup. And it came from this thought that I still wanted to build something in the space that had impact, but I felt I couldn't compete with Yahoo or GeoCities type of thing. I didn't have the funding to do it. So what would I do? I would build a business that would be the picks and shovels for other companies to do so. And so that email business, email being the biggest part of the business, really accelerated in 2001 when the dot-com boom burst. All of our competitors disappeared. Because they couldn't sustain themselves. And we at the time were built on Linux because we didn't have money.

Right.

In the early days, people weren't using open source software.

No.

But we were big open source. In fact, we were one of the top 5 Linux deployments in the world in 2001 to 2002.

That's incredible.

If you search like OutPlace and Linux, you'll probably find some records. We were powering up to 70 mailboxes, 70 million mailboxes at our peak. And we were probably responsible for 15% of the world's email.

Right.

At that moment, most people may not even know this, but service providers like Verizon Network Solutions, Register.com, Juno Online, these were all big ISPs in the US. They were all using our platform to run their email.

That's incredible.

And that was basically in 2001, 2002, because we could run it at a cost structure that was literally 20 or 30 times cheaper because we were using open source while all of our competitors were using— Wow.

This is just like, for people listening, this is just absolutely mind-blowing to hear this history because You have literally been playing virtual chess all along. And you say, I don't know necessarily what the music, studying the music did for me or that discipline, but it seems that you are sensationally good at connecting the dots and understanding what's coming. And just that picks and shovels plays. I mean, that's kind of like part of the entrepreneurial mind, but not only that, like the investor mind, being able to see things before they happen. So for me, as you tell this story, it's all making sense to me how you got to where you are now.

Wow. Thank you.

Really.

I think for me it was organic. But I think what ultimately meant to me was that it just felt like it was the right approach. And as a result, of course, I got to experience a lot of what happened just by doing.

Right.

And that sort of led into that journey. And then eventually we moved into gaming and other areas as well. IBM ultimately bought that business, that enterprise business in 2009. And sort of that was the beginning of, I guess that was the beginning of sort of, I guess, where Animoca Brands story really started, right? Which is I had a non-compete I mean, anything enterprise. So I couldn't do anything enterprise for 3 years. And what's nice about IBM buying a business is they don't like to bring founders in.

Okay.

Because they feel founders are— in that business, they would care more about the cash flow and the fact that it was running a certain way.

Right.

But founders are disruptive elements and they didn't like that.

Interesting.

Which is great because it means I was free.

You were free.

I was free. I had to help transition.

Not great for them. It doesn't seem like the right approach to me, but—

I think it was the right approach for them because IBM is a machine, right? So IBM can't really acquire companies that are very founder-led.

Okay.

But they can acquire solid businesses that would create cash flow or sort of turnover because they're easier to integrate into the machine that was built.

But do you think that not being founder-led, then they lose something along the way, or they're able to morph it into what they need?

I think for them it's more important that they can morph it into, into what they need.

Okay.

Because they're trying to morph it into their culture.

So you were worried about impact, and they're worried about making that impact into a machine.

I think, I think so. I mean, the processes. I mean, just, just as a history, when we acquired— when they acquired our business, we had about 150 staff. The IBM due diligence team was close to $200 million. Wow. Right. It was— it's just the way that they do things. It's— and then later talking to the team, they were like, well, you know, when we do an acquisition, it's millions of dollars in the process, even if it fails. Right. It really felt like a colonoscopy. It wasn't— it wasn't your typical sort of M&A. So that was a very interesting experience.

That's cool to hear the inner workings behind how that happens. Yeah.

But anyway, I was at that point a young father. Right. And I— one of the things that I had been using obviously was an early iPhone. And this is what I really started using. I was one of the first owners of an iPhone. But as a young father, I used to carry around these flashcards. And again, people would— it's not around anymore, but these are the Baby Einstein flashcards. And these flashcards are the kind of things that you show up onto your little toddler so that apparently you can help imprint that a chair looks like this and it's called chair.

Right.

I mean, who knows, right? But either way, It was very— it was sort of a sensation. But you would buy these packs that were like $14 or $19 for like 20.

Right.

These cardboard things. And as you show them, you know, kids go over them in minutes. So literally you can't have any free time because, you know, you would carry about literally a bag of like 100 or 200 flashcards. So this is nonsense. I can't do anything. So I asked my team to put it on my phone. Well, my smartphone. So I could just have the kid do it and I can finally have a nice sort of lunch with my wife, for instance.

Again, a solution.

It's just a solution. It's just a solution to something that I had a real problem with. And they said, sure, we'll fix something. And we were sort of experimenting what to do next and so on. And they just put it out there. Kooky idea. Like, who would put, like, you know, who would give what was like a $1,000 device basically to a toddler? They're just going to break it, lick it, or do something with it. And anyway, It was a lifesaver. It worked really well for me.

Many parents would agree.

Well, this is the thing. Weeks later, the team would come up to me and say, have you seen? I'm like, I don't know. I don't see anything. I don't know what's going on. And it turned out that millions of downloads happened in that week for this free piece of software. So clearly, I wasn't the only person—

You were onto something.

—who had a problem. And so that led us into thinking about sort of the App Store and sort of what the smartphone device would do, which eventually basically led to the beginnings of the early form mobile gaming, which then led to the birth of Animoca. That's kind of how that happened.

Wow, that's an incredible story. And it seems to me that happening organically because you were aligned with what, you know, that impact was that you wanted to make and finding solutions along the way.

Yes.

The one common tie in all this was looking for solutions to problems.

Yes.

The things that didn't exist. So that's, you know, you were able to use your intuition to follow that and not— I think another thing to say about your journey is that you weren't So you weren't necessarily looking for an end goal, that you didn't have an end goal in mind, like, this is what I want to accomplish. It happened organically because of your—

Something I needed, which I thought was important to solve, which has really been, I think, my entire journey.

Right. That's just incredible. It was so amazing to hear about the inner workings of how you grew up and how you came to be the person who you are now. I mean, in Web3, in this, well, whatever we'll call it in the future, this iteration of the web, I mean, everybody is so interested in what you're doing. And you're basically the powerhouse of gaming. And so let's segue into what Web3 is today, because we were talking about how the information got siloed in Web2 and in a certain way.

Yes.

Right. Which was that we didn't have the control or the power to store our own data, that we were basically renting that land on Facebook, on Instagram, and on all of those. And one of the things that you say that I really love is you explain ownership in a very cool way, because Web3, I mean, But the transformative nature of it is that for the first time we have the free transfer of value. That's right. Right. And real ownership. And I'd just like you to touch on what, what you believe that ownership is, because your definition is quite different but cool in a way that I think people can resonate with.

Yeah. And maybe I'll also touch into sort of— I think there's a connection between how we view sort of Web3 and what happened in the Web1 area, because I draw a lot of parallels also to open source, which we're big believers in, and composable as it is right now. But first, Web3 to us is about true digital ownership. The whole point about it is that we actually have digital property rights. Property rights itself as a foundation in the physical world actually is what gives us our freedoms, which allows us to do things like the freedom to transact and the freedom to do whatever we want with it and for third parties to conduct and do business with us simply because we have ownership. By having ownership, the center of attention and the center of power belongs to the people who own stuff. not necessarily the institutions who control that. This is an important point because this is around basically what the resource of the future, or actually the present, is already. And the resource of the present is data, and the resource of the future is data as well. We used to, in the early days, look at value in terms of like oil, for instance, or things that you would dig from the ground. If I own this piece of physical land and it happens to have oil, I've made it, right?

Right.

But you won't allow someone to come in and extract that oil from your land for no value, you realize what that is. But if you discover that land 1,000 years ago, it's worthless because we lacked the machinery that was able to extract value from oil and do stuff. You needed technology to come first and take that oil, turn it into energy, and turn it into what it is today. That's data.

Wow.

In the early sort of '90s, we were already creating a lot of data, but we lacked the compute power. We lacked the machinery. We lacked the AI. At that point, it was more brute force AI. Eventually, machine learning before it became deep learning. And the inflection point when actually the AI systems were able to create value out of data was when deep learning really came into being. AlphaGo and that kind of type of systems that basically demonstrated that you can actually create a kind of almost intuition out of the data.

Right.

That is basically what companies like Facebook or Palantir, Google, Amazon, all those companies started to take advantage of that. And it all happened behind the scenes. So what was valuable wasn't the data itself. The photos itself is interesting. It's what the data would create. And you look at it today, if we don't have data, then there would be no ChatGPT. There would be no OpenAI as we see it.

The data is everything.

The data is everything. There would be no self-driving cars. People don't think about the data.

It's just the ownership. But ownership, what is there behind that ownership? Right?

Right, exactly. And so the sovereignty of that data and the value of the derivatives of the data is something that we need to own. But how do we do that? Well, if you have your data all stored in a private system, no matter what obligations are there, you are at the whim of a central power. And that's why blockchain is so powerful, right? Because data turns from what was a private good into a public good, and in a public accountable good, I say, as well, because the control of that data is based on the consensus of the people who are in it.

Right.

So I look at blockchain not as a technical solution only. That's what, you know, the The people who don't understand this Web3 ecosystem criticize it for the fact that it's slow or it's inefficient. No, blockchain is a political system. It's just taking basically a sort of this resource, this most valuable resource, which is data, into a construct that we can finally own and control.

And making it transparent and accountable. Right, right. All of the things that are lacking in today's iteration of ownership.

Exactly. And that ownership, by the way, is the fuel that had powered physical worlds. I'll get to that. But I think the most important thing then is that when you have basically ownership of that data, you can then trade it. You can— that's one, one, only one, one network effect. But also third parties will come to you and say, hey, I want to do business with you because you happen to own that data. In the physical world, this is the example we always give, right, is that because we have actual physical ownership, like the ownership of cars, for instance, which is decentralized, millions of car owners exist in the world. we are now able to conduct business with you, with the owner of the car, don't have to seek permission with the person who created the car. If that wasn't possible, then we wouldn't have Uber, we wouldn't have Lyft, we wouldn't have people who create baby seats, we wouldn't have people who create basically all these new sort of electronics and tires and paint jobs.

These ecosystems around the ownership.

And in fact, the most amazing thing is that the ecosystem of the ownership around cars is bigger than the production of the cars itself. Because there's more people being employed servicing the automotive industry, right, in support of owners than actually people manufacturing cars and selling it.

Which is very interesting.

And that is, by the way, true for everything, right? You know, the people who create real estate and sell it to you is, you know, a significant industry, but it employs a certain number of people. But the people who create furniture or services or other things that you use, or banking services or mortgages, or that entire infrastructure that supports the ownership of your house, right? is far, far greater. If, you know, Apple had full monopoly and control over, you know, who could conduct new services on top of your iPhone, then we wouldn't have cases and we wouldn't have headphones. We wouldn't have all these type of industries that existed.

Yeah.

So that's really the engine of innovation comes from the fact that we have true ownership and that we can build on top of that. And it also creates more network effects and adds more utility to your item. So the car today, in the early example I gave, is much more valuable and willing to spend more money on it Because it has thousands of network effects. It has thousands of services. The car of 100 years ago, or like, you know, the Ford Model T, had one purpose: to take you from point A to point B faster than a horse and cheaper.

Right.

And they all were black, and that's fine. It was purely utility.

Yeah.

But today, we don't buy a car just to take it from point A to point B. There's a lot of network effects attached to it. Maybe it's social, maybe it's impact, maybe it's comfort. But these are things that we decide when we purchase a car. the fact that it drives you from place to place is a given. The example I often put is how it affects our identity. So ownership isn't only about sort of its value as a utility, which is one element. It's also value to us as our identity, what it means to us. When you buy, for instance, fashion, when you choose a place to live in, it could be Beverly Hills, it could be Manhattan, for instance, as an example.

Right.

Why do we choose to live in these places? Because they form a part of our identity or our aspirations. You could buy a house that's much bigger, much cheaper, and perhaps even more comfortable anywhere in the world. But yet you want to live in a crowded, small little apartment somewhere because you want to partake in its network effects. And that's basically what ownership means. If you buy a Birkin bag, you know, I give this example of a Birkin bag and a Bored Ape. When I gave that example, they were roughly the same price. A Bored Ape is much more valuable now than a Birkin bag. But you don't buy that bag because you want to put stuff in it. You buy that bag because of all the other—

What it represents.

And what it represents, the community and the culture with it as well. Right. So for us, and that's why we focus so heavily on NFTs, non-fungible tokens, it's because we think of NFTs as these digital stores of culture. We think of that as being the most important thing as us as humans. When we identify it, we identify with culture more than we identify with money. Some identify with money, but I argue for those people, that's because money is their culture.

Right.

have different culture where they see money as the means to the culture they want to achieve, your traditions, where you want to live, impact you want to create.

Very interesting. Yeah, to come at it from that perspective, which is almost like reverse engineering what's going on within this whole ideology and the psychology of, okay, I want to buy this, I want to have this. Behind this ownership, there's a whole other thought process that's going on.

Think about when you just think about just when you go into a store to buy just your clothes, what you're thinking about is not value. Value is an element, but you're thinking, I like this. Well, I like this is a construct already that completely speaks to your identity.

Right.

And, you know, I like this color or I like this look or I like the feeling. These are not actual tangible things, but they're incredibly human value, valuable to us as humans.

Right.

The other thing is that for us, from our perspective, culture is also, you know, the most important thing of any functioning economy. So we look at Web3 and the open metaverse as like a nation-state or as an emerging set of nation-states. And so for countries and economies to be successful, you need to have strong culture. If you don't, then underlying economies can't be constructed. If you didn't have good culture in the US, you wouldn't have— without Hollywood, for instance, then you wouldn't have Netflix, for instance. You wouldn't have TVs, right? You wouldn't have all this infrastructure that we've grown.

The things that make the US what it is.

Exactly.

Essentially in a cultural way to the rest of the world and to Americans.

That's right. And the final point I'll put on sort of why we sort of focus so much on digital property rights is that It relates to freedoms, right? There's a real parallel, and there's an equivalent parallel in the physical world, which is all countries that have very strong property rights, that you can own your house and that you can then basically therefore have a mortgage, and therefore you can conduct business in a very secure manner because you're certain about that ownership principle, therefore allows for more entrepreneurial and capitalist activities, which translates into much higher GDPs.

Right.

Every country that has property rights has a strong GDP, tends to be amongst the wealthiest in the world. Countries that don't have property rights or very low property rights, like North Korea, for instance, have absolutely very low to almost very minimal GDPs and tend to be the poorest in the world.

It's about that ceiling that we discussed.

But they also have correspondingly much lower freedoms. So the more property rights you have, the more power is decentralized, the more freedoms you actually have. So there's a correlation. So to us, it's not just that you have value. If you have true digital property rights, if you can have ownership and decentralize that ownership across Web3, then actually we also ensure that we have digital freedom.

Yeah. And there's something so powerful about when you actually grasp the real concept of true digital ownership, you'll never look at the world the same way.

That's right.

I mean, you just won't. And Michael Saylor said something that I really like because traditional— I consult for a lot of traditional finance clients and they're all about owning these physical things and it's hard for them to grasp the concept of why would I want to own something in the digital world? And Michael Saylor says that nothing that you own, that you own, do you think you own, except at the— so nothing that you own, you do not own, except the power of somebody more greater than yourself who can come in and take it away by eminent domain or whatever it is. Like, so that really isn't your true property. And so what Bitcoin or, you know, these digital assets represent is portable digital property that's truly yours.

Yes. I mean, there's this famous adage, right, which is— I forgot exactly which sort of historical British person said it, but sort of, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is not that people sort of want to be corrupted or take control of stuff. It's that when they're in a position of power, it's not just tempting, it's just easier to do so, as we see with monopolies. And when Facebook first started out, they didn't sort of aim to do what they ended up doing. They created these open APIs And people sort of really— what would the open API structure that they had allowed for people to basically build network effects on top of Facebook? But the network effects actually were consolidating within the data structure that was Facebook, and they were controlling it. And when they realized they had that power structure, they realized that it was easier for them to make more money, right, and to serve their particular needs by starting to close it off. And ultimately with that began this sort of slow form of corruption in terms of Well, we have centralized power and therefore eventually we evolve this way. And this is something that has been historically sort of uncannily accurate over time. And so if you can distribute the power and ensure that that power remains distributed, then you can remove that temptation. You can remove that sort of potential for corruption.

I like the word distribute power and distribute profits even.

Value and money is power.

Exactly. And so you said something too about ownership and you actually interacting with these protocols like Facebook and doing it for free because they're actually taking advantage of all of the things, all the input that you're giving them. And if we stopped interacting for free with Facebook, there wouldn't be a Facebook.

Correct. I think the thing is that we don't know what the value is, so therefore we give it away. And the way we think of it is when we share photos on Instagram, we're actually working for Instagram, right? We're employees in effect with no salaries. And the expression we'd say is we're digitally colonized because our time gets translated into value through data that analyzes us and then sells it back to us in the form of advertising. So we are both the contributor and the product, which is insane if you think about it.

It's insane.

But the reason why this is possible is because we have ignorance. And this is where the parallel between Web 1 and Web 3 is interesting. In Web 1, with the whole sort of information democratization, A trader or a farmer in China would know what the value of his rice was in America. So there used to be this information arbitrage because I didn't know what it was. So I would literally take 99% of the value and the person in China might still remain poor, but he would make all this profit because he disintermediated based on simply knowledge. When the internet came about, he was able to say, wait a second, the rice is selling for 100 times more.

Information.

Yeah, information. I want my fair price. Now, he might refuse it, but the opportunity is for an intermediary to come in and say, oh, well, okay, if he won't do business with you, I'll do it because I'm happy to do it for 50% revenue share instead of me taking 99%, for instance. And that creates a free market and that creates all of these opportunities. That's what happened basically with Web1, with Amazon and Taobao, Alibaba, and so on. In Web3, that paradigm has to sit with data. If I actually know what the data is worth, then I'm actually able to not only sort of ask for my fair price, an intermediary can come in as well and say, I'll offer you a better one if this person won't do it, creating a competitive, free, and fair market.

Yeah.

And right now we don't know what that is because Facebook won't tell us. So if you're a user on Facebook, you are worth— you, for instance, using Facebook or Instagram, are worth exactly the same as maybe some person in sub-Saharan Africa because that's better for them this way. You're averaged down, but probably your contribution to Facebook might be worth thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. Now, if you knew that your network effect in Facebook is worth $10,000, your natural response will be, well, I mean, shouldn't I be getting something free for that? Shouldn't I be getting maybe a cut of that revenue?

Right.

More importantly though, if they won't do it, an intermediary will come in and say, you're worth $10,000 to Facebook. I'll pay you $5,000 to do it. We already do this in the form of influencer marketing. If you think about likes, for instance, or if you think followers, and people game it so they can get it because that's the only sort of quasi-imperfect measure to say, oh, you're someone worth sponsoring with because you have like a million followers, whether it's true or not. But I actually don't have the chain analysis to understand, for instance, whether I'm really worth that.

The true network effect.

The true network effect. I don't know that because I only have a centralized platform that tells me to do that.

That you're borrowing land from.

Exactly. You're borrowing land from. So that paradigm, when it becomes open, Then allows us actually to conduct business in a much more faster way. And that's the effect that happens when you have digital ownership. You know, when people look at NFTs, they sort of just look at the pictures, but actually it's the network effects that you can analyze. You can say, okay, this is its volume, this is its traction rate, this is how many users have it. And therefore you can begin, as imperfect as it may be in the beginning, a way in which you can truly measure its network effect and analyze it and then say that's what it's worth.

And openly.

And openly, which you can't do in the closed networks of social networks, for instance.

Right. The behind the scenes, I guess, behind, under the hood look at what this truly is and what this movement truly represents. Yes. Which is so much more than people would understand in the beginning, which happens at the, at the inception of every new technology. Right.

But that's also because they've been kept in the dark intentionally. And I think it's not just about understanding the value of data. It's just generally understanding what is value and financial inclusion. Right. So the barrier of entry into Web3 isn't a technological barrier. I mean, you know, it's easy to set up a wallet. It's easy to participate. Yes, the blockchain isn't super efficient in terms of speed in comparison to MySQL, for instance. Yeah. However, what is lacking is understanding and having financial knowledge. So if you don't have— So the intersection— So true. The intersection of people in Web3 who are fully Web3 and have financial knowledge is 1 to 1. They may not have the same financial knowledge, but they have an appetite for risk. They understand compound interest. They understand yield. They have an appreciation for what they're buying.

And the freedom to be able to access those tools, which we've never had access to before. Absolutely.

But that's only a single-digit percentage. That single-digit percentage used to exist in places like Wall Street. And they had a kind of information— let's call it sort of information arbitrage. arbitrage, monopoly, actually the right word, that the rest of the world didn't have. And so the sort of implied revolution in blockchain and Web3 is the wider distribution of financial knowledge as a whole. And so if most people in the world actually have the same kind of financial knowledge as we have with things like general information, like what we see on Wikipedia, for instance, the world will be very different. We would have, you know, completely different structures and a much more healthier ecosystem as a result of that.

And that profit distribution that we've not gotten right for the last 30 years.

Yes.

We have a chance to make it right now and democratize global citizens.

Yes.

Right? Uplift global citizens in a way that has never been done before. And what you say about the financial understanding and knowledge is so true. Like, the universities don't teach financial knowledge and literacy at a vast range. I mean, you know, we go to these universities in the US that are very expensive, and we're competing for these titles and these things. system that has been created to make us part of this. I don't want to say worker bee, but going through the motions of you go to university, you get picked by somebody because of the university you go to. But meanwhile, we're going to gate the information that could truly make you free. That's kind of the sensation that I have after having been involved in crypto for so long and Web3. We didn't have that access then.

Yes. And the tragedy is that for most most certainly young Americans, their first experience with true financial systems is debt. And that's the problem, right? Because you basically get into some kind of long-term indentured servitude of a different kind.

Okay, you said it right there.

Before you actually know how to get out of that. And this also then creates all this sort of conflict that we see that's happening in places like the US. It's not just sort of you're being trained to be this worker bee, it's the fact that you are now stuck in a financial system.

A wheel.

Which you actually also don't understand. Because if you did understand it, nobody would sign up for 20% credit card interest rates.

Exactly, and there's so many traps in the US It just looks so appealing. And that's still going on at a very vast rate today. I mean, just all of the things and all the tools that we have access to that just get sent to the mail, like, hey, sign up for this and you can have a credit limit of whatever it is. And they just get head over heels in debt. And I think it's cool that now we're starting to have this awareness of financial literacy and understanding the basics.

And that's one of the reasons why we're so excited outside of its adoption possibility with Web3 games. Because the young generation learns through play anyway. And where do they spend most of their time playing? Video games.

Right.

3.4 billion people in the world play video games. And almost, I think it was like 95% or 96% of all of our children play video games. So, that's the medium. But what you're doing in those systems is you're not simulating the real world as much as they try to sell you that you are, because there's no value involved. You don't understand what that is. But our children have the capacity to learn financial systems because if you can teach them algebra, And if you continue with derivatives or, you know, like, and you teach them math, then you can certainly teach them economics and compound interest and so on. So I think that's actually something that I don't know necessarily that teachers can do because they don't actually know it themselves.

Right.

But that's what game systems can do, right?

Interesting.

Trading, building, interacting, right, basically with real money, real money systems that, you know, may only be $5 or $10 or $3, whatever. It's not really about how much it is, more about the fact you learn about value, right? And then you evolve over time. And, you know, I think, for instance, by the time you go to college, if you even need to or want to, you'll have a portfolio. It could be very small, but you'll understand exactly how it all works. And probably that portfolio will probably be more deeply in crypto than in stocks, I would imagine. But either way, either way, you know, you basically sort of improve your financial literacy, I think, I think through gaming as a whole.

That's so interesting, that whole view on it. I've actually never discussed it in that forum before. But yeah, I mean, it makes sense that you learn about value through all of your interactions in those games. And now segueing toward Animoca and what you guys are looking at and how you've been able to build up this kind of mega portfolio of all these really successful companies doing amazing things. What is it that you guys are looking for now in investments in the gaming world and in the future of what's coming?

So the way that we build Honey Mocha is a little bit sort of based on my own history in the past, right? And which is that I looked at Web1 and how it evolved, and then I looked at Web2 and how it sort of went pear-shaped. And so what can we do in Web3 that would sort of take these lessons? And for me, I think of this as somewhat of a privilege because it's almost like going back in time, right? If I was able to sort of have what I had now, but what would I do back in Web1? What would I do? And so one of the earliest strategies was to invest in what we think would be sort of the broader market, not just to build as we do, but also to invest in the broader market so that they can sort of share in this ethos of sort of what we describe as a shared network effect. That's when we made early investments in like Axie, OpenSea, The Sandbox, and all those type of businesses in the early days, because I viewed it a little bit like, okay, you know, what's the Amazon? What's the Yahoo? What's the Google? What are these companies there that would be in this space?

Based on your experience of when you were building this up before, you could see, have that vision of who's doing similar things.

Yeah. And that continues because we are still that early. And so today our portfolio is well over 400 companies.

Wow.

But we also have subsidiaries like The Sandbox, for instance, or most recently TinyTap and so on, and sort of a dozen other plus companies that are sort of building in that space. And the vision still is the same about true digital property rights. And mostly, I mean, there's many things that come with it, but I would say the 2 main things that we still look for is anything that can help build and construct more network effects. Into our digital property, as in through NFTs, or they can bring mass adoption. Those are the sort of parallels. Now, that means that, that means that includes everything. It could be layer 1, layer 2 sort of blockchains that we invest in. It could be lending platforms. Of course, it's games. Of those 400 companies, over 140 of them are actual games in and of itself that we think will also help onboard. Most recently, we've made a lot of moves in education and learning, which we think is a really big, important space as well. You know, where teachers can get fees. Exactly. All that stuff. So, so we continue to invest and invest in this, in this manner. And we view sort of Web3 a little bit like Internet 2001, 2002. So from that strategy standpoint, there's still a lot to be done. And, and we are also fortunate because we're based in Hong Kong and Hong Kong is extremely Web3 friendly, very sort of pro-crypto and has set policies in place sort of that really sort of help businesses like ourselves versus maybe some other parts of the world.

Right. And I have to ask because I want to hear it coming from you who's so deeply entrenched in this and who has such a vision and a history in this. When I'm around the world at certain conferences in certain places, I see a lot of pushback from gamers about play-to-earn, about the play-to-earn model and about being able to own their skins and in-game assets. And I find that to be unreal because it's so clearly evident to me and it seems like it would be a no-brainer for gamers. Why do you think that pushback is there from them?

So first, it is an entirely American narrative. If you go, for instance, to Asia, you don't just see people who sort of love sort of the idea of ownership and actually NFTs. Every major game company is thinking about an NFT Web3 strategy, from Square Enix to Krafton, the creators of PUBG, Nexon, Netmarble. I mean, Gumi, you know, of course ourselves, right? Clearly, like almost every Asian game company has on their roadmap a Web3 NFT strategy, right? In contrast to the American ones. But that's not to say that the American game companies aren't thinking it. So it's not the studios themselves. Remember back in 2021, EA and so on were like, NFTs is really interesting. And the community was like, no, we don't like that. And basically it came from the community and they retreated. I think it has a lot to do with a fear of capitalism that's happened not specifically just in the crypto world, but something that's affecting America Now again, when I first came to America, it would've been unthinkable to me that there could be a socialist narrative. But today socialism is a political platform and it is a political platform I would argue for the Democratic Party for this matter. And I think it was a recent Pew study that showed that 60% of young Americans under the age of 30 preferred socialism to capitalism.

That is so interesting.

Now, why would that be the case? Well, if you take a look at the last 2 decades, capitalism hasn't worked for young Americans. They've been left behind. And the other thing is, because they don't understand how money works, they don't have an understanding of financial systems. When someone makes a lot of money, something is wrong. It's this whole argument of billionaires are a fault in the system. You know, the meritocratic system basically doesn't really work anymore. They don't believe in this.

Right.

The thing that I often say lately is that the American dream is more alive and well outside of America than in America itself. Unless you're in Silicon Valley or in these places, in these hot places, or Miami for that matter.

Right.

But if you actually are in other places in America, it's desperate, right? Because the value of labor has basically declined in real money terms versus the value of capital. And if you didn't invest or don't know how to use your money, then you're behind. You are actually worse off today than perhaps even your parents' generation. And so when you think of it this way, then And capitalism seems futile, right? Because the people who have money continue to advance. They can have the money to hire tutors. They can have the money to get to better colleges and so on. Whereas if I don't have money, I'm left behind. And that's— so the pushback to me on NFTs and games isn't just about NFTs itself. It's basically digital capitalism. The same people have problems with people at Wall Street, all these bankers that are making all this money. To them, it's like dark magic.

Right.

Also, digital capitalism isn't helped by people who make money on crypto and then they buy a Lamborghini or something, right? And then they show it off. That sort of feedback is something that is— there's an aversion to it, right? You become allergic to it. And the fear is that you say, oh my goodness, does it mean, because I'm seeing a Bored Ape, that if I want to continue playing this game, I have to spend like $100,000?

Right.

Then I become excluded from the one thing which still feels fair and equitable, as opposed to something that I can't— I would be left out. But of course, it's not true, right? It's not like every car in the world is a Lamborghini, right? You can buy a Volkswagen.

You have many options.

You have many options, but they don't understand that because— and they don't appreciate and understand also what ownership is and what it means. Because I think in places like America, ownership is taken for granted. You don't actually understand the fact that you can own your house comes from the fact that you have this Constitution and a different democratic framework that protects That's what you have. Whereas in Asia, most people in living memory still remember what it was like to own nothing. The economy in South Korea 40 years ago was smaller than that of North Korea.

That's crazy.

Because South Korea was a military dictatorship, for instance. Or look at China, for instance. And now all these places have embraced property rights and they've become amongst the wealthiest nations in the world.

Increasing GDP.

Increasing GDP because of the fact that you have ownership. And in living memory, you would know that, right? My, you know, look at my own history in terms of my parents. They left the region for a reason, to look for better things. Whereas in America, you've enjoyed property rights really for, you know, hundreds of years effectively. And it was never under threat. This idea that you would buy a house and potentially could be taken away doesn't even enter your mind. And you, by the way, see this also very much with immigrant Chinese. Or immigrant Chinese are one, you know, because they were persecuted and so on, they are in search for this kind of sort of safety. And that's one of the jokes that we have amongst us is like, we're somewhat obsessed with real estate around the world. We keep looking at real estate prices and look at that stuff, even for just intellectual ideas in terms of pricing, because to us it's sort of a measure of safety as well, which happens with sort of persecuted societies. And by the way, I've seen this similar effect in Europe. When I grew up in Europe, we were not allowed to talk about money. That's why when it came to America in the '90s, talking about money was sort of the shock, right? It's like everyone openly talked about it and even looked up to it to say, hey, he succeeded, I could be there as well.

Exactly. Which was sort of kind of motivating factor, right? I see that in Europe still, even Sweden where my husband's from, it's a highly socialistic place and people frown upon you talking about doing well or succeeding or having money. And that's a different narrative in the US. So I really think this is so interesting how And I think about how maybe this all ties into that idea of being left behind and not understanding finances and the financial system, and that that is what has kept people from truly succeeding, is that lack of education in that area as well and understanding.

But I do think— and one of the things that excites us so much about Web3 is that I do think it can help solve some of that. And the reason why is because every participant in Web3 is no longer a consumer to be extracted from, which is the Web2 model. you become a stakeholder, which means in effect you own equity in the project you're participating in. You can even earn that equity.

Right.

So we think of data as a kind of labor, but the labor that you receive isn't money terms because there has been a betrayal in terms of the value of money for many reasons in the last decades.

Right.

But instead you own equity. Now imagine what the world would look like that instead of your pension being paid to you in cash that obviously has depreciated pretty badly.

Right.

You receive a fractional ownership of property in the city that you live in. What would that look like if suddenly every pensioner actually owned real estate? As just one example of the effect of ownership, that's kind of what Web3 really is, right? When you participate, you end up becoming a stakeholder, an equity owner of the projects you're involved in, and therefore not only contributing value, receiving back, but participating in the growth of its network effects. Right. In the traditional type of money concept. So the younger generation, if they do this, because it is after all their more native world, they would actually build equity ownership in this construct and therefore, you know, have a way in which they can sort of get out of sort of the sort of malaise that they're in right now. The wheels. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. But they don't understand it in America, partially because of, you know, this fear, you know, the lack of financial literacy. And that's why they have this pushback on sort of NFTs, broadly speaking, because of digital capitalism.

And that makes so much sense and it answers a lot of questions. And I think everybody needs to see this who's been wondering because there's all these controversial, kind of superficial arguments about what it is, but it's important to go deeper into the psychology behind it and understand. And you have that perspective having been from different places around the world and seen this happening. really in real time as you grew up and finding solutions to them. I find that absolutely fascinating. And I think everybody needs to watch this and to understand the inner workings behind what's going on here because digital ownership is so much deeper than what people perceive from the outside. And it actually ties into everything about financial literacy, about the true value of freedom, and that it's being taken for granted in American society as well. I think that's so interesting.

I think the challenge that a lot of young Americans have is that one of the things that they, because they don't understand it and they also don't know how to get out of their circumstances, they actually start to lose hope. And that's really dangerous.

That's so dangerous.

Because if you lose hope, then, and you don't, you're not optimistic about your future, then the natural response is to sort of look inwards. And the natural response also is to basically generally bring people down as a whole. goals to sort of advance yourself, to advance others.

To become maybe apathetic and not reach your true potential because you've essentially given up in a way.

That's right.

And you just fall into this kind of robotic way of living your life and not ever reaching that true potential. And that's tragic.

Yes.

And so I love what you're saying here because that's essentially saying that Web3 is an opportunity to give hope back to the people.

It is.

And that is so powerful. So it's incredible that we have a company like Animoca Brands and the seat, literally paving the way as the trailblazer in this movement. And we can see why now that you've made it this far and you've been able to grow this empire that is Animoca Brands. And, you know, I've been very privileged to have this conversation with you today.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for sharing all those wonderful stories about your upbringing, coming to the US. And I'm very excited to share this. And I hope that we can catch up again soon, sometime, somewhere else in the world.

Sure. No, it would be a privilege. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.