Dr. Brook on the Blockchain
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Dr. Brook on the Blockchain
Ep 69: From ESPN to Bitcoin Evangelism with Brian De Mint
Did you know that Bitcoin and blockchain technology have a long and fascinating history dating back to the early 1990s?
Brian De Mint is the author of The Bitcoin Evangelism and was the chief marketing officer for Athenium Blockchain for three years. He is an entrepreneur with 14 years of experience, and he has been investing in bitcoin and the wider crypto market since 2014.
This episode is about the history of bitcoin and blockchain. Brian De Mint learned about the history of bitcoin and blockchain when he was trying to disprove his friends who were interested in it. He became a believer when he realized that bitcoin could be used to fix the unsound money problem. The book, Bitcoin Evangelism, is about how bitcoin can be used to fix the monetary system.
"The true disruption is decentralization."
In this episode, you will learn the following:
1. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a solution to unsound money
2. The potential for blockchain technology to disrupt centralization
3. The history of resistance to adoption for new technologies
Connect with Brian:
Website: https://freshlymintedbooks.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianTheMint
Free Download:
The Words of Web3 - A comprehensive glossary of terms used in the space https://mailchi.mp/9d043022b5a0/words-of-web3
Connect with me:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drbrooksheehan
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DrBrookSheehan
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
Hey, Dr. Brook here with another epic episode of Dr. Brook on the Block. I am joined by my copilot today, Brian De Mint, who was the chief marketing officer for Athenium Blockchain for three years, and he resigned in 2021 in order to focus more on bitcoin and blockchain education. Love that, because I'm all about it. This led him to author of the book The Bitcoin Evangelism, which is an Amazon bestseller. In addition to his professional experience as an executive in the blockchain industry, he began as an entrepreneur for 14 years, since the age of 22, when he started a small business with his wife, Alyssa. They have grown that into a chain of locations, a parent company that invests in small businesses, digital assets, and DFI. Brian has been investing in bitcoin and the wider crypto market since 2014, so he would be considered an early early adopter and advising entities on their digital asset strategy since 2016. Welcome to the show, Brian. So excited you're here.
[Brian De Mint]
Thanks, Dr. Brook. I'm really excited to be on. I'm a listener as well. I've heard some of your episodes, and you always seem to have a lot of fun, so I'm glad to join the experience.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
Yeah, definitely. Well, that's exciting to know that you have listened to the show, and we bring a lot of energy and a lot of fun topics and people doing great things in this space. And so you will know that the first question I asked all my copilots on the show is, what is their intro story into web three? How did you get here, I guess, how did you begin your journey in 2014 to getting to this point now in 2022?
[Brian De Mint]
Yeah, well, so the first time I ever heard about bitcoin was in I think it was 2012, 2013. Everybody has that story where they disregard it, right? I heard about it, disregarded it, and then they have the later time when they got orange pills or red pill or whatever you want to call it. I never watched college football, but I happened to be watching Saturday game day. Maybe it was bored or something on a Saturday and before the games. I don't know if you remember this or if you watch sports, but they'll have the announcers kind of line up in front of the camera, but in the background, they'll have the audience, and they'll have people in the bleachers and stuff. And I remember there was a kid that had a big sign in the background. This wasn't, like, the focus of the show. The announcers were talking about the game, but this kid in the background had a sign that said, hey, mom, send bitcoin. And it had a QR code on it, and I didn't think too much of it. I just remember thinking, like, oh, what is that? Obviously there's a QR code, so maybe he's asking this mom to send something. And so I remembered it a couple of weeks later. And I googled it and I looked it up and it turns out that this kid had bitcoiners all over the world. Got so excited because this is how little press crypto got back in the day, that the going line online was bitcoin is on ESPN. And it's not that it was the focus of the show, it just happened to be in the background and everybody went bananas. And people from all over the world sent this kid bitcoin. And I guess he got at the time, this is 2012, so who knows if hopefully he held on to it. But it was like $24,000 worth of bitcoin was sent to him through the QR code because all these bitcoiners were so excited that bitcoin was on ESPN. So these guys were just sending a bitcoin. And I remember thinking, this is so stupid that I'm never going to think that this is cool. I remember specifically thinking like, this is so dorky, and I totally wrote it off. And then about a year later, I had some friends that were pretty like serious people, friends that I took pretty seriously. And they told me, hey, maybe look into this. And I remember thinking, like, you guys are so smart. Why are you guys being fooled by this? It's like this gimmicky thing that's in the background of ESPN and it's for pirate currency and all the bad things that you hear about crypto and stuff like that. Anyway, I actually started studying bitcoin and kind of monetary policy and things like that because I wanted to disprove of my friends. I wanted to show them how dumb they were, what they were. And in that experience, in that kind of processes of trying to disprove from a skeptical standpoint, I became a believer. I thought it was a really important, fundamental change in the way that we change value. And I think the one thing that really if I had a light bulb moment, I think it was when and maybe I'd already been buying a little bit of bitcoin by this point, but when I was really totally sold out was I heard Andreas Antonopoulos on the Joe Rogan experience. I think maybe his first or second time being on there. And the thing that set it off for me was he said that in the history of computer science, we've never had a way to cap something digital. So, like, if you type a word in a document, you can just copy and paste it endlessly music, digital music. When music went from being analog like in CDs and records and all that kind of stuff. Then when it went to MP3 files, that changed the music industry because all of a sudden you have LimeWire and napster and all these websites that basically took all of the monetary value out of music because the files went digital and you could replicate them endlessly. It destroys monetary value when you can make something infinite, right? And so he said that this was the solution to that problem of digital things being endlessly replicated. I'm like that's. So profound. And so sometimes you hear that, and I remember I probably heard that before that point, but sometimes it just takes a second or third time for somebody to sit down and say, like, no, if you want money to actually be digital, you need to find a way to make it capped and to have a finite supply. And so that was the light bulb moment for me. And then I jumped in, and then the rest is kind of history through the investing process, making connections in the industry. I got to join a project called, like you referenced earlier, called Athenium. I got to do the marketing for that for three years. But in that process, I saw even with smart money, we were going into venture capitalists, and we were pitching our blockchain. Like, here's we were education centered, like blockchain, where we were focused on all sorts of really cool innovations and stuff. But we were going in and pitching these guys with millions of dollars. They were ready to sign checks. And then at the end of the presentation, they would say, what's blockchain? Like, oh, well, you guys called us into this meeting, and we're pitching, like, level four or five complicated blockchain type stuff to you, and then you're asking us the fundamental questions. They're like, yeah, and what's this Bitcoin thing? Okay, so after being in enough of those meetings, took a step back, and that's when I resigned to write my book, because I said, you know what? We need to go back to step one and step two. There's so much smart money out there still smart money that doesn't understand this stuff. And so I want to be a part of it, just like what you're doing. I mean, a podcast was what changed my mind on this. So podcasting, content creation, books, articles, these are the ways that we educate people on this paradigm shift. And so I thought, this is really important. But more so than being a part of a specific project, I took a step back, and I said, I want to be part of the education and this wave of educating the masses on this new paradigm.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
Wow, that is super incredible. What a journey that you took from step one originally, seeing that photo or the video on ESPN, to getting to the point that you are today sometimes. I always say, it's those small, pivotal, inconsequential things that may happen on a daily basis that we don't recognize as these massive game changers in that particular Saturday morning has completely shifted your entire life over the last eight years. Since 2014, even before then, maybe like almost a decade now, to get you to a spot where you're being called into this space. You're being called into the space to educate. And that's my journey, is very different, but similar in the sense, like, I didn't ask for this. I wasn't like, I'm going into this. It's just like, okay, you're here, and this is what you're doing. So it's awesome. Very cool. Thank you. Tell us about the book, like, without giving it all away, because I want people to get copies of the book and read the actual book. But what is bitcoin evangelism like, how would you define that?
[Brian De Mint]
I'm all about giving away a little bit of the book because I think it's one of those things where I want people to think, understand the content. I believe it's good content. Of course I'm biased towards it, but a lot of people have bought the book, so I think that represents something. But for anybody that wants just even a free sample of the book, the first chapter is on YouTube, so it's a text audible version, so you can read it. Text comes up on the screen, but it's the audible, so you can listen to it. But if you just go to my channel, it's just YouTube Brian demand, and it's on there, the first chapter. But the first chapter and whether you like bitcoin, whether you like crypto, whether you like just the general idea of blockchain, I think the first chapter speaks to everybody. Because while I do think bitcoin in particular, and like I told you off air, I'm not a bitcoin maximalist, I do think that bitcoin is the solution for unsound money. So when it comes to fixing money, I think bitcoin is the answer. When it comes to fixing other problems, I think that blockchain technology that becomes decentralized is probably going to be the fix, whether that's medical research or voting or any of these things that both sides. I mean, when Hillary Clinton loses an election, the democrats say that the voting was rigged. When Trump loses the election, the republicans say voting is rigged. People agree that we want certain systems decentralized. And that really was the revolution in bitcoin. That's what the revolution of blockchain is. It's not that for me, the finite supply thing was the thing that set it off. But the true disruption is decentralization. When you can take centralization out of the picture, middleman out of the picture. That is what makes the blockchain so profound. So the first chapter of the book is called resistance to adoption. And I just go through several different technologies where there was incredible resistance to that technology. Like, for example, electricity. I'm in a lighted room. You're in a lighted room, right? We're sitting where it's just common sense that you have electricity. There's nothing scary or terrifying about electricity, but in the early days of electricity, there was propaganda everywhere, anti electricity propaganda from the incumbents. Like, the kerosene industry did not want electricity to take hold because then people wouldn't buy kerosene anymore. And so Rockefeller and all the kerosene guys, they put out these stories of houses burning down because of electricity and all sorts of problematic things that could happen, and rightfully so. In the early days, electricity, there wasn't safety features. They didn't have grounded wires. They didn't even have sheathing at first. So imagine if you had electricity in your home. You didn't have the wires in the wall. You had wires running up the wall with no sheathing. So if you had a two year old running around, they could just touch the wire. So, yes, in one sense, you had propaganda that was kind of trying to crush the industry. In another sense, the technology wasn't fully formed yet, and so you needed some progress to actually come along. And so there was a reason to be scared, but then there was other people, like making people more scared. And you sit back and you see that exact same thing happening in bitcoin. And the crypto industry is, yeah, it's not as robust as it's going to be. It's still rough around the edges, right? There's still rug pulls, and there's still scams, and there's still uncertainty about this technology, but there's something there that works, and we can see it. If you go on and you try out a DeFi platform, if you go on and you try I don't hold any NFTs, but people that are literally acquiring digital ownership of artwork through a nonfungible token, I can be my own bank with bitcoin. I can do all these things. So, yes, even though it's a little rough around the edges right now, electricity was rough around the edges. Automobiles are rough around the edges. The printing press was rough around the edges at first. And so that first chapter will give anybody that is in bitcoin crypto blockchain, it will give them confidence to see past, to have a low we talk about time preference, to have a low time preference, to not care about what happens today, but to have a long vision on this. And so that first chapter, I think, is really it applies to everybody in this space. And I think you'll be very bullish after reading that chapter, and you'll be really excited that we're in a bear market right now. You need to be in a bull market to be excited.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
Yes. I love it. I tell people bear markets are incredible opportunities to learn and get the knowledge you need so that when the bull market starts again and the bulls out running, you have a lot of pieces to really fundamentally make great investment decisions. Or you could have made great investment decisions during the bear market. But my question is, why did you? Okay, so it sounds like the book is very blockchain driven. This whole entire show is very blockchain driven. I am not maximalist by any sort on anything. I do hold NFDS. I have a mixed bag of different cryptos. I do utilize DeFi protocols. There's different verticals in blockchain. Why did you call the book bitcoin Evangelism, then?
[Brian De Mint]
Yeah, well, the primary focus of the book is Bitcoin, and it is our current monetary system. I think that the first thing that needs to be fixed before you fix everything else is the money. And so I think it's great that bitcoin was the first application of that, and I think it's the most obvious thing to a lot of people. And so a lot of people, I don't think they see the inherent flaws with our financial system in terms of centralized finance or trade. Why do I need to have DFI? You need to be a little bit more of a sophisticated investor to understand why taking out the middleman in a loan process is important. And while there's plenty of people that are into DeFi, I don't think this single mom that's just kind of scraping by but is feeling the effects of inflation, I don't think DeFi speaks to that. I think DeFi solves a lot of other problems, but I think Bitcoin in particular, a finite, scarce, censorship resistant, immutable, all the qualities of Bitcoin, I think that becomes a little bit more apparent, too. So if it's about educating the masses, that's about educating all the people. I mean, we're in a time where inflation is so in our face that people are asking questions, how do I solve this problem? And I think Bitcoin is the solution to that particular problem. So when I go into the history of the Federal Reserve, I go into the structure of how central banks work. I mean, for example, right now, I'm working on an animation that's going to come up on my YouTube pretty soon where I talk about just kind of like a prima facial proof that central banking is fraud. So, for example, Dr. Brook, if you.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
And I preach it, tell people all the time, we don't have a US dollar, people stop talking about the DXY. The DXY. I'm like it's not a US. Dollar. It's a Federal Reserve note. Oh, my God.
[Brian De Mint]
That's a company, right? It's a private company, but, yeah, Dr. Brook, you and I started a company, and we created 100 shares. You own 50 shares. I own 50 shares. If I go out and I say, hey, guess what, Dr. Brook, I'm going to give you five more shares. So your 50 shares, there are 55 shares. You're like sweet. I have more shares. But I don't tell you that. I printed 100 more shares. I'm keeping 95 of the extra shares. I'm in a business partnership that's diluting your shares. And if I'm not transparent in that, that's fraud. I'm being fraudulent towards my partner, and I'm extracting value. So although your number of shares is going up, your percentage of ownership in the company is going down. And so people don't recognize that happening. And that's why central banks exist, is to dilute the share of anybody that holds cash. Billionaires don't hold cash. They hold less than 1% of their value in cash. They know that cash is a toxic asset. And so there needs to be for the average person, we need to be able to start understanding this, is that we can deflect our cash into sound money. And so I think that fixes a lot of problems, but I think it is important for people. That's why I touch on I have a whole chapter in the book dedicated to the breakdown of different crypto asset classes. You were talking about that there's these different verticals. And so I think that's one of the number one questions I get from people is, well, what's the difference between bitcoin and ethereum? And I try to give really basic grounded examples like real world. Okay, think about your iPhone. Bitcoin is Apple pay, then ethereum is the app store. They're not in conflict with one another. They actually complement one another. The Apple phone is better. The iPhone is better because it has Apple pay, and it has the app store. And so I think that has a more synergistic message than just straight bitcoin. Maximalism of bitcoin is the only coin. And I do believe that at some point, other things like DeFi and NFTs could be built on top of bitcoin. But I still don't think that that excludes other blockchains from existing. I think that that's how protocols evolve over time. Protocols get better. The internet was a pretty basic protocol when it started out, but over time, we've developed email layers to it. We've enabled video streaming layers to the internet and protocols. So we stack technologies. And so I think it's important to understand what these different protocols do with these different blockchains do, because I think that's the key to a truly decentralized future.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
Yeah, absolutely. So then what would you say? Okay, this is a question that I have and one that I feel like I have not gotten a good, solid answer on. It does not change my viewpoint on blockchain by any means. Okay, so for those of you listening that may not know this, there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin ever. Like, that's it that's when Brian talks about a finite supply, 21 million bitcoin ever, that's it. So they're then broken down into smaller pieces called satoshi. And so you could get fragmented pieces of a bitcoin when you purchase it. You don't have to purchase a whole bitcoin. And therefore, my issue here is, okay, 21 million, and let's say you have 10 million and I have 11 million. Well, me and Brian are both consuming the entire supply of bitcoin. Everybody who has their bitcoin, most people aren't liquidating it. They're hanging onto it. They're not utilizing it for any purchases. You're not going to go to Starbucks and say, here, take some of this satoshi from me. That is where I see I can't get past. I'm struggling with how it's going to be used as an actual form of monetary, like a money transfer versus just a store of value. Because right now it just feels like a store of value.
[Brian De Mint]
That's a great question. Yeah. So I think it's just a matter of what circles you run in with the bitcoin community.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
All my people are holding, right?
[Brian De Mint]
I'm a toddler of last resort. I've never, since 2014, sold a bitcoin. But I spend bitcoin every single day. I literally spend bitcoin every day. Like, I bought here, this right here is a bag of coffee from El Salvador. I bought from a roaster down there. They accepted bitcoin. I buy my meat. I buy all of my meat in bitcoin. I spend all of my marketing dollars through Twitter. I've disintermediated my follower account is growing. I have like 6000 followers on Twitter. But I just started. Twitter is new. My Twitter following is growing like crazy. I don't pay for Twitter ads. I just pay SATS, like 100 SATS for people to interact and retweet things and stuff like that. So Twitter doesn't get any of those ad dollars, but the people that are interacting with my page and bring me more followers and telling their friends about it, I'm paying them directly. So it's like decentralizing the ad model and it's so easy to use. And so if you use layer one bitcoin, you can't do that because the transaction fee on a bitcoin transaction is like 1500 sat. It might only be $0.20 or something like that. But if I'm sending two cent, I'm not going to pay $0.20 for the transaction fee. Exactly. But with bitcoin lightning, I don't know how often if you use bitcoin lightning, most of the transactions are free. If I'm sending 100 stats to somebody, there's no fee and it's instantaneous. And so it's amazing. I'll pay 100 invoices in about five minutes. I'll just go through my Twitter DMs and just scans and it's instantaneous payment, no fees or anything like that. So I use bitcoin every single day and I'm somebody that will never sell a bitcoin. So I'm both ends of that spectrum. Okay, I would just say that I think that we're in the early stages of people using that. And I found that my buying power has gone up pretty tremendously over time. The better I hold it where my dad and my grandpa and every generation before, they all have stories about how much more a dollar used to buy. But I already have stories for my kids about how much less my bitcoin used to buy. And so it's like the opposite story of every single generation before. But I'm telling my kids, look at, hey, you guys see this coffee we're drinking? Hey guys, this meat, the steak that we're having for dinner tonight, we bought all that in bitcoin. So, yeah, I just think it's a matter of seeking those things out. And yes, you're right. I can't go into Target right now and spend bitcoin. I think that's coming, though. I mean, Fidelity opened up bitcoin, and I believe Ethereum you can purchase bitcoin and Ethereum in your Fidelity accounts. I think Strike has they announced it by December of this year. So I don't think it's going to happen because I haven't heard another announcement, and we're in December, but they were saying that Walmart might have strike lightning functionality for checkout soon. So I think when that happens, I believe that you'll see an uptick in greater salability of bitcoin being accepted at more places. I think it's possible. Now, I do get that argument, and I think that I've seen every year that's gone by, I've seen more and more actual real world utility of bitcoin.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
Yeah. It's interesting to hear you say that when you talk, because you said it depends on what kind of circles you're running around in, because I got a lot of people huddling, like, literally, it is on a ledger account. The ledger is in the safe. They're not utilizing, touching nothing. Right. And here you are buying coffee, meat, doing all kinds of things, like actually transacting in commerce with it. That's an interesting perspective. So thank you for sharing that, because absolutely. I do have a question going back into the blockchain realm in terms of you talked about bitcoin being Apple Pay and Ethereum being like the app store. The beginning story, I'm sure you're aware, kind of started out like, hey, we want to build contracts. We want to do all this thing on top of bitcoin. And bitcoin was like, no, we're not. We're just this is all we're doing. Right. The Lightning network then came a little later, but the theorem was like, we want to do these smart contracts. We want to do all this stuff. And they really, in my opinion, kind of blew the space wide open to allow blockchain technology to be used more than just a currency driven type thing and made it to where we can utilize it in so many different facets with smart contracts, with real estate, with voting, with medical records. Like all these different things that are coming out. In terms of web three, do you see any I'm sure you do, like, benefits to that. And can you speak on that at all? Like smart contracts?
[Brian De Mint]
Yeah, I think smart contracts are really exciting. They are, yeah. You talk to any businessman? My brother so my brother just started reading my book the other day.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
I want to read it. I'm going to get a copy.
[Brian De Mint]
Okay, thank you. I appreciate that. He has all these questions now, and it's like he's excited about bitcoin, but then he keeps asking about smart contracts. He runs a big construction company and stuff. Yeah. I think that different people hear different aspects of blockchain, and they're very excited about different components because there's a lot of different things you could be excited about. And so I think when it comes to business and commerce, smart contracts could reduce a lot of cost. I mean, if I don't have to pay an escrow service to escrow my house, but I can run the purchase or the sale of a house through a smart contract at some point, that reduces a lot of costs, and it actually reduces a lot of friction. We see this when you go from analog technology to digital technologies. There's so much more efficiency that comes with that, and so people use it more. And so one of the examples I use in my writing is people think, like, for example, so we're talking about escrow in particular, okay? The escrow industry is a billion dollar industry in the United states, okay? So digital escrow or smart contracts for escrow services, that could be a billion people think I think it's just thinking too small. That could be a billion dollar industry. No, you're thinking way too small. Look at the analog, look at paper maps, and you can look at any analog technology that gets disrupted by digital. Paper map industry was a $40 million a year business at its peak. And so you think about it. I don't know how old you are, but when I was a kid, you still have paper maps, and you'd have like, thomas guide and your parents pulled out one time a year when you would go on a trip, and that was it. It that was the only time you used a paper map was like, once or twice a year. Now think about digital maps. Digital maps, I use one every day. My ways is always on. It's always telling me where the police are at. It's always telling me my direction. But think about the internet.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
There's something on the road.
[Brian De Mint]
Exactly. So it gives you not only the functionality of a map telling you where you're going, but now it's giving you warnings about real time things that are happening, traffic warnings. The paper map can't do that. It reduces so much friction, it adds so much functionality that the market becomes bigger than the previously existing market. So if escrow, escrow was a billion dollar industry, digital escrow could be orders of magnitude larger because, again, the paper map industry, $40 million at its peak. How big is the digital maps industry? It's actually kind of hard to quantify. But think about the industries that exist that didn't even exist before uber lyft DoorDash. That entire gig economy only exists because of digital maps. Amazon could not exist on the scale that it does without logistics based on GPS maps. Same thing with ups and all these different things. So you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of gross domestic product based on digital maps. So that gets really interesting just talking about smart contracts just for escrow, not any of the other things that they can do, but just for escrow services. So now we're talking about not a billion dollar. Escrow industry. You're talking about a 10 billion, 20 billion, 100 billion dollar escrow industry because digital always makes things more efficient, more usable, more accessible to more people, and therefore the market is much, much bigger. And then you can add there's probably going to be functionality in escrow services that didn't exist before. So, yeah, when I think about that, it's really easy to get excited about smart contracts and things for that purpose. And so, yeah, I love Bitcoin for what it does for sound money, but to me, it's naive not to think about other components within blockchain and what.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
They can do, right, absolutely. Yeah. And we know, like we were mentioning earlier, currently, as of I want to say, it was like May of 2021, there was 861 different blockchains. And then these blockchains have different ecosystems built on top of them. And then the whole space gets convoluted and confusing to a lot of people because a lot of blockchain educators like you. And I would say that you and I are very different than a lot of people because most of the people want to just talk at someone and they're using all these big terminology and they're using all these fancy words and doing all these things and really not breaking it down to the basic, basic, basic use case. Right. Who cares about the technology if somebody doesn't like, you don't have to understand how your cell phone picks up a signal to make a phone call across the world. You just know that you need to dial the correct numbers to reach your aunt in India or whatever country, right? So many people right now, most of the listeners know this by now. I always tell them, be careful of the people you watch on YouTube because they might be like, shilling you something and trying to get you into some project that they're just going to basically run and dump or pump and dump. And so it's really about educating people with the proper like, what is the magnitude of blockchain? How can blockchain really shift the world in which we're living now for the better? And it sounds like that's what you're doing through Bitcoin evangelism, through the book, through your educational protocols that you're taking people on. And I just have to commend you for that because it sounds like we're very like minded in that I was.
[Brian De Mint]
Going to say back at you, yeah, this is why. But it's because it comes out of a passion, right? Like, it's very clear when I hear you talk, and I've heard you talk on previous episodes, you're passionate about it. But to your point, real quick, too, about the scams and stuff that I know, it wasn't even the question, but just as an insider look on somebody that was the head of marketing. So if somebody is going to scam you, it's going to be the head of marketing for a blockchain. Right. My role would have been like, thankfully, I like to consider myself a person of integrity, but my role is the guy that's trying to scam you because they're trying to sell you something. In my role as chief marketing officer, those are the people that are trying to sell you something. Those are the people that you should probably be kind of wary of. But anyways, my team and I, we genuinely were trying to put forth a solution that was going to better the world. So thankfully there are projects like that out there. But there would be other projects that would come along and they would message me or call me or whatever and they would just say things like, hey, let's talk about a merger. What if we did a merger or a joint announcement, some sort of partnership? And then we'll all kind of like a day or two before the announcement, we'll buy some of the coins of your project and our project and so people that will start to get people's attention. Then a couple of days later we'll roll out a big announcement and then we'll let the market purchase a bunch of the coins and then we can just dump them on them. And that wasn't just like one time. I got that message multiple times, many times people like it's because I think certain people enter the crypto space not with any of the intentions to better the world, but just to enrich themselves. It's really sad. And unfortunately, one of the consequences of the kind of the free market of the crypto system. It is a free market. It is a bit of a wild west, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad ways. I mean, the wild west was really cool, but it was also very dangerous, right? Anyways, that's one of those things that was just a common occurrence. And so for people to look out for that just because somebody is on the inside of a project doesn't mean that they know where the price is going. And if they are talking about something where they know where the price is going, be extra wary of that because they might be just trying to sell you a bag of goods that they're going to get rid of. And people ask me that all the time, like with Bitcoin, hey, do you know if the price is going up or down? Or do you know if the price of Ethereum is going up or down? I'm like, let me tell you, I was in a blockchain project and I couldn't even tell you if the price of that coin was going up or down. And you just don't know because sometimes we would make an announcement about something cool we were doing and then the price would go down for some reason. And then like a week later somebody would tweet about us. It was influential. And then the price would go up. I didn't even know that they were going to tweet about us. So people that tell you emphatically where something is going, especially in the short term, be super cautious of them because if they do know where it's going, it's usually artificial and it's usually probably a scam.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
Okay, I'm smiling as you're saying that. Not because I think this is at all a good thing, but because I want to ask you about this. And I know we're coming up close to the time that I want to really kind of keep the episode in, but I definitely want you to talk about this as much as you can. Alameda Research and FTX, when CZ of Binance CZ is the CEO for those of you who are listening, of Binance. And he turned around and basically said, I'm selling off all my FTT tokens, which are the exchange tokens of the FTX exchange, basically created a lot of fear in the marketplace, a lot of run on the bank, so to speak. People are freaking out. They were also selling whatever, Alameda Research, who happened to be an arm of FTX, who was their, quote unquote, to not get all in the weeds and get people all really confused. They did the investing, so to speak, with the FTX money. Well, Alameda Research Group turned around and said, hey Suzie, we're going to buy your stuff back at $22 per token or whatever. They were really trying to hold that $22 per token price because they knew if it fell any further down, it was just going to go basically to become worthless. And so that is what you're talking about, or when you're talking about it. That's the thing that went through my mind, is that market manipulation at a much higher level.
[Brian De Mint]
Yes, at a much higher level, that they were playing with big boy dollars.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
Millions of dollars lost in all of that debacle. I appreciate all of you who might be listening that reached out to me and were freaked out about my involvement in FTX. You know that I was not involved in FTX. I shared that with you all. But you also know that I'm also a big proponent of not your keys, not your coins. So I don't have stuff on centralized exchanges. I utilize centralized exchanges to make my purchases, but I move it along. And so that's what I educate you on. But Brian, back to the whole FTX Alameda thing. Do you have anything to say from a marketing perspective?
[Brian De Mint]
Oh gosh, I mean, it just seems like it was, it was intentionally a scam from the beginning. You get the details of it and I mean, the collusion between that exchange and then like political parties and then those political parties sending money to Ukraine, and then Ukraine investing back in FTX, it's just so murky. And I didn't even get to watch all of Sam Bankman Fried's New York Times thing yesterday. I'm going to go back and watch that. But there's people like Kevin O'Leary is tweeting about. You know what? I think he's genuinely sorry, and I'm still with the kid. He's, like, saying stuff like that. I'm like, come on, they're trying to COVID this up. The New York times is writing puff pieces on this guy, and he defrauded people. And at a really high level, the things that are going on is really tragic. And ultimately, I think that these exchanges failing. I know people that had an entire bitcoin or, like, ten ethereum on celsius or on blockbuster or whatever, they're getting stuff frozen, and that sucks. But I think these are the brush fires that need to happen in the crypto industry so that the giant blazing fire doesn't happen. I think ultimately it's good. It's just really painful right now. But going back to CZ's interaction with him, I know a lot of people in the crypto space were talking about how great that was, that CZ exposed this fraud and things like that. People that are saying, yeah, we needed this to happen for a healthy but yes, actually, I think it's good that he triggered that and made that happen. But what was he doing with the FTT tokens in the first place? I don't think anybody's clean here. He knows how these things work. And I just tell people all the time, be cautious of exchanges that have their own token, and that they leverage that in different ways. Now, binance has stated that they don't use any of their BNB coin to leverage certain things, but their users do. So it gets kind of murky in that sense, because there's a lot of leveraged loans based on BNB and that sort of thing. So anyways, I just think that there's even the good actors are kind of dirty in this thing, and it's a really messy thing. So it all comes back to, like, this is part of the ethos of crypto. Like you said, not your keys, not your coins. We shouldn't be beholden to these exchanges. We shouldn't be beholden to the sketchy things that these different projects are doing. If we're taking care of our assets like we should, then we're pretty much immune to this. And it's our responsibility if we want this industry to grow. Not just you and I, but like to the everyday user to tell your friends when you tell them, like, hey, go on coinbase and buy some bitcoin. Tell them immediately about self custody as well. And not everybody has to go buy a ledger. If you have $100 worth of bitcoin, go put it on a software wallet on your phone, it's still in self custody, and you can still back it up with the seed phrase. You can secure your seed phrase in such an easy way, you literally just write it down on a piece of paper. You write it down on five pieces of paper and keep it in five different places. It's fine. And somebody found it. But I hid a 3 million sat wallet in my book, and so I had twelve words hidden throughout the book that if you found them, you could unlock the seed phrase for a Bitcoin wallet. And it was just a good, cool example for people to see how easy you could hide a Bitcoin wallet in plain daylight. I had a lot of people buy my book and I hid it well enough in the book that only one person ever found it. And so you can get creative and you can secure your own stuff in very unique ways. Right, totally. I think that what you're doing as far as educating people on the responsible side of it. Like, yes, play in the Wild West, there are things that will be very beneficial for society that come out of the Wild West, of what we're in. But in the Wild West, you had to carry a revolver. You had to protect yourself.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
Yeah, exactly. People understand the concept. Like, they have the keys to their house. They don't just let anybody just come on in, open door, unlock. Like, that's the kind of idea but we've become so accustomed to just, oh, we forget our password. We'll just ask Google, forget password. And so they have this idea or this notion that they can't do this. And I love the idea that you said you could put all the words in different places and have them. It's kind of like I love Elon Musk. I'm a huge Elon Musk fan. And he's always the guy that does the little Easter eggs and people are trying to decrypt his Twitter. What is he saying? Is there going to be a stock split? What's happening? He's so great at that. And I love following those little Easter eggs around.
[Brian De Mint]
Totally awesome.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
Brian well, how can people get in touch with you? Well, I'm going to first put the link in the book and all your contact information. So don't feel like you need to spell anything out, but let us know where they can go so I know what links to put in.
[Brian De Mint]
I really appreciate that. Thank you for the platform, thank you for the audience, and it's just fun talking to you about this stuff. Yeah, I think we're all like we said, we're really passionate about it, so we can talk about it all day. But yeah, as far as my book, it's on Amazon. We just came out with the Spanish translation. I had a really big demand for the book in El Salvador, in Argentina, which is really cool because El Salvador, obviously, because Bitcoin is a national currency in Argentina, they have almost triple digit inflation. And so the sound money thing is really important to them down there. We have some of the southern African countries. We have a big demand, but the English version works there, which is great. It's been really exciting to be part of this international movement with helping people understand sound money in these regions. So, anyways, that's on Amazon. The book Twitter is probably like the most responsive on Twitter. I do sat giveaways all the time on Twitter. So if you follow me on Twitter, Instagram, same thing. I put out some cool content on there and on YouTube. It's just my name, Brian De Mint.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here, Brian. It's been a really fun conversation. Like you said, we can go for hours talking about all pieces of it, so we won't do that to you guys. But for now, that is the ride with Brian De Mint as we pull this train into the station. You all know the drill. Exit to your right and we will see you on the next one.
[Dr. Brook Sheehan]
You made it. Congratulations. That wasn't so bad, was it? I hope you laughed and learned a little bit more about this Web three universe and how simple and fun it can really be. Would you be so kind as to leave us a review and share it with your friends and family? It would mean so much to get this out to more people as we embark on the greatest transfer of wealth that has ever happened in human history. Can't wait to see you on the next one.