The Manosphere Report

0:00CZ, welcome to the All In Podcast.

0:01Thanks for having me here.

0:03It's really, really great to see you.

0:04It's a pleasure. I want to go all the way back to the beginning, because

0:08I think a lot of people don't really know your background the way that they

0:12probably should. The part of the background that I really care about is there's parts

0:15of your early journey in Canada, which is very similar to mine.

0:18You worked at McDonald's, I worked at Burger King.

0:20Okay. But before that, your parents were able to emigrate from China right around Tiananmen

0:26Square, right? My father went to Canada to study in 1984.

0:31That's five years before Tiananmen Square.

0:33How did that come about?

0:34So your father stayed in Canada once he went there, or no?

0:37He could visit us twice a year, basically, but most of the time he was

0:42in Canada. And he was a teacher in China?

0:45He was a teacher professor.

0:46He was a professor in China.

0:48And then he went to do an exchange program in University of Toronto first.

0:52Uh -huh. And then a couple of years later, he moved to UBC, University of

0:56British Columbia in Vancouver. And then he was there.

0:59We were applying. Back then, it's actually very difficult to get a passport.

1:04It takes like three or four years to get a passport.

1:06We started applying in 1985 -ish.

1:09It took like two, three years to get a passport.

1:11And then after you get a passport - Meaning a Chinese passport.

1:13A Chinese passport. Yeah. So, and then it takes like another few years to get

1:18a visa. Like that's just how long the process takes back then.

1:22And then, yeah, so we got it shortly after in 1989.

1:27When you look back, it almost seems fortuitous.

1:29Isn't there a version where post Tiananmen, they kind of just shut everything down and

1:33say, okay, let's just reset.

1:35And then maybe they wouldn't have approved the visa or?

1:38No. Actually, after that, the visa got easier.

1:40The passports, that got harder.

1:42So, they no longer issued new passports.

1:44Like the reissue of new passports got harder.

1:47But we were lucky. So, we got the passports like, you know, like maybe a

1:51year before that. And then we're waiting for the visa.

1:54And then afterwards, the visa got easier.

1:55So, in some ways, that actually kind of helped us to get the visa.

2:00Wow. Yeah, in some really weird way.

2:01Did that event shape your perspective in any way, shape or form or not really?

2:06Were you too young or no?

2:07You were what, 12? I was 12.

2:08So, I think consciously, no, it didn't change me that much.

2:12But subconsciously, I think, you know, there were discussions about democracy versus – so, there

2:18were some discussions. I was actually living on a university campus back then.

2:22The China Science and Technology University is one of the top four universities in China.

2:27So, there were a lot of discussions among the university students, which were older, like

2:31which were probably seven to nine years older than me.

2:34So, there were some discussions.

2:35But I was 12. So, I wasn't really clued into it.

2:39But I think subconsciously, it may have some kind of subconscious impact.

2:42I don't know. And what was it like when you moved to Vancouver?

2:46I moved to Vancouver, yeah.

2:47So, you land in British Columbia.

2:49Yeah. In Vancouver. It's like a different – it's just different.

2:53It's very different. It's very different.

2:55It's just a completely new country.

2:57Did you know English at all or no?

2:58I studied English for like a couple of years in high school.

3:02But, you know, I was not fluent at all.

3:04But, yeah, Vancouver is great.

3:06Canada is, you know, nice greenery, open space.

3:10Everything is pretty – the living standard is high.

3:12Everything is pretty good. Everything is very clean.

3:16The fruits are bigger. So, it's just a really nice environment.

3:21Did both your parents work when the family was reunited?

3:24What do they do? So, my father stayed – was like assistant professor in the

3:29university. He gets like $1 ,000 Canadian dollars per month of like – I don't

3:33know what you call it.

3:34Like a stipend. Like a stipend.

3:36Yeah. We get some like really low cost – housing, the faculty housing from UBC.

3:41So we lived on campus.

3:43I think on the third day of our arrival in Canada, my mom went to

3:47a sewing factory to work, like sewing clothes.

3:50She was a math and history teacher in China, but she doesn't speak that much

3:53English. So she couldn't get the same level of jobs.

3:56And she basically can only work at a minimum wage factory.

4:00She did that for like seven, 10 years.

4:03And yeah, so she just worked there.

4:06My mom was a nurse in Sri Lanka.

4:08And when we emigrated, when we got refugee status, my father was unemployed and my

4:14mom became a housekeeper. And that's what she did.

4:17And then she became like a nurse's aide.

4:19And then I think when I was like 14 is when I got my first

4:22job. Yeah, yeah. I got my first job at McDonald's at, I think it's 14

4:26or 15. I think it was 15.

4:28Yeah. We're the same age.

4:30So it probably would have been 14.

4:32I don't know what the, do you remember what the minimum wage was in British

4:34Columbia? I do. The minimum wage was $6, but McDonald's.

4:38Oh, that's incredible. In Ontario, it was $4 .55.

4:41So, but in McDonald's, they pay $4 .50.

4:43That's below minimum wage. Because the McDonald's somehow had like a special exemption because they,

4:47a lot of young kids work there.

4:49Yeah. So, so I think it was on my 14th birthday that I applied for

4:53the job. And then a week later I was flipping burgers there and it was

4:57the first income I had.

4:58But you're not like this precocious, technical wonder kid who's coding 24 -7 and learning

5:05computer science. Or were you?

5:08No, I wouldn't describe me as that.

5:10I think I'm, I'm a technical guy.

5:12I started computer science. I was learning, I was interested in programming even in high

5:16school. But I wasn't a programming wizard.

5:20I wasn't like, you know, one of those really genius coders.

5:23Yeah. I think I'm a decent coder.

5:24I think I wrote some decent code in my, in my career.

5:28And then when I was like 28, 30 -ish, I moved away from coding.

5:34I was like doing more business development, sales, et cetera.

5:37So there was like maybe, I would say, eight years of my career.

5:41So you're a normal immigrant kid learning to adapt in Canada.

5:44Yeah. Did you have a lot of friends?

5:46Yeah, I had a lot of friends.

5:47I had a lot, my - Only Asian friends or no?

5:50Both. I actually had like both Asian and non -Asian friends.

5:53But - I was actually, in our school, most of the Asians hang out with

5:57Asians. But I was actually one of the exceptions that I had like Caucasian friends.

6:01I had all kind of different friends.

6:04Yeah. My teenager years in Canada was great.

6:06It was like some of the best years.

6:07Like I think those years are really shaped me to be a happy person.

6:11I'm generally a happy person.

6:12How did it feel when you weren't able to get into my alma mater, University

6:16of Waterloo, and so I had to settle for McGill?

6:18How did that make you feel?

6:20Does it make you feel stupid?

6:21So actually, I was deciding, my sister went to Waterloo.

6:25So I was deciding between Waterloo and McGill and maybe UT.

6:29I knew I wasn't going to go to UBC.

6:31I wanted a different city.

6:33Yeah. And actually, UBC gave me the offer, but I just knew I don't want

6:36to go there. At the time, my friend's mother, who I really respect, she said,

6:43well, you might want to become a doctor because doctors have a good living, a

6:48good lifestyle. I took her advice.

6:50I studied biology, and Waterloo is not much of a biology school.

6:53So I went to McGill.

6:55But then one semester later, I said, no, no more biology.

7:01I'm going to move to computer science.

7:02Was it a typical kind of college experience for you?

7:06Did you have great jobs in the summertime, or were you just like an average,

7:09normal university kid? How did you pay for school, by the way?

7:12I worked every summer. I worked every summer, and I also worked part -time during

7:15the school year. I worked every summer.

7:17So no debt. You were like, I must graduate without debt.

7:19Yeah, I didn't take any student debt.

7:21The first year, I actually still took about $6 ,000 Canadian dollars from my dad.

7:26The second year, I was still a bit short.

7:28My sister gave me $3 ,000.

7:29And then from that point on, I never took money at all.

7:33I was self -sustainable. Wow.

7:35Yeah, so no student debt, very lucky.

7:38But I just worked every summer, like, yeah.

7:41You know, the best thing about Waterloo, which was a savior for me, was co

7:44-op program. Yeah, and I had these incredible co -op jobs.

7:47I still graduated with about $30 ,000 of debt.

7:51But I was also a pretty prolific trader and equities.

7:57Okay. And my boss, this guy, Mike Fisher, did this incredible kindness to me where

8:02I was working at a bank and I was a derivatives trader.

8:06That was my day job.

8:07But I was trading equities and I'd made him enough money.

8:11And he said, he called me Sherman, didn't call me Chamath.

8:14I think he said, Sherman, how much debt do you have?

8:16And I said, it's about 30.

8:18I said, Fish, it's about 30 ,000, 32 ,000.

8:21And he said, go downstairs right now to the CIBC and pay your debt and

8:25I'll write you a check.

8:26Wow. And he wrote me a $32 ,000 check.

8:29I should have said $300 ,000.

8:33But Canada is incredible because you can get this education and it doesn't saddle you

8:37with this debt that you can't overcome, which is not true in the United States

8:42for many people. Yeah. Even in McGill, there were people from the United States going

8:45to McGill pay international student tuition and it was still cheaper than the U .S.

8:50I was like, that's crazy.

8:50That's crazy. So, yeah, we were lucky that the U .S., the Canadian tuition was

8:55okay. So, you graduate from McGill in computer science?

8:58Yeah, in computer. Well, actually, I didn't graduate from McGill.

9:00I went there for four years and on my third year, I got an internship.

9:04On my fourth year, I got my, third year, I got an internship job and

9:07then extended, extended, extended. And I didn't go back to McGill.

9:12So, I didn't graduate from McGill.

9:14And later on, I found out I still need a bachelor's degree to apply for

9:17work visas in Japan. So, I went to one, this is like the doc, this

9:21is 2000, this is the doc home, like height.

9:24So, I went to an online education program called the American College of Computer Science

9:29and got a degree there.

9:32Oh, my God. So, you're technically a graduate from that school.

9:35Technically, yes. Okay. So, which internship did you get where you started to work there?

9:41So, I got an internship in Tokyo.

9:44So, from first year of college, I always worked on a programming job.

9:49So, I worked at a company called OriginalSim, writing some simulation software.

9:53And then, third year, I got into a company in Japan, in Tokyo, called Fusion

9:58Systems, Japan. And then, they were writing order execution systems for brokers of the Tokyo

10:04Stock Exchange. But, sorry, that's a Japanese company with an office in Montreal or an

10:07office in Canada? No, no, no.

10:09I went to Tokyo. You went to Tokyo.

10:10Yeah. It's actually an American, a bunch of American guys' company that's in Tokyo.

10:15So, it's like a bunch of guys who are - And you're thinking, this is

10:17an adventure. I'm going to go and live in Tokyo for a summer.

10:20Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was a college student.

10:22Living in Tokyo is like a, you know, it's fun.

10:24It's a dream. Yeah, it's a dream.

10:25Yeah, yeah. And the first time you go there, it's like, it's cool.

10:29It's from the future. It's cool.

10:30Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what kind of software did you write?

10:33Mostly order execution software. So, the same software that moves orders and Binance.

10:37So, what drives Binance today?

10:38Pretty much. Pretty much. So, it's the same style.

10:40Like, actually, all the software I was involved with, no decision making.

10:44So, when you first were exposed to this, it was not like, oh, wow, I

10:49love this. Yeah. This makes sense.

10:51Or was it more, okay, I'm asked to write this code and I understand.

10:55I'm asked to write this code and I'm asked to write this code and I'm

10:55going to write this code and I'll write this code.

10:55and the concept, so let me just do it.

10:56Were you attracted to the subject matter or you just did it because it was

10:59your job? I first did it because it was my job, right?

11:02I was so young. I didn't know what all the different industries are.

11:05And actually, when I got to the company, the company was giving me a project

11:08on working on digital imaging storage systems.

11:11Like, you know, basically not iPhone photos app, but for medical imaging, for Nikon.

11:17But very soon, the company's main product is the order execution system.

11:21Right. So I was involved in that, and then that became the thing over my

11:24career. And I like it because it requires quite a lot of technical expertise.

11:29Everything is about efficiency, making it go as fast as possible, process as low latency

11:34as possible. That kind of appears to me.

11:37I'm an efficiency kind of driven guy, like subconsciously.

11:40And just to double click on that, when you look at high -frequency trading organization,

11:44the Sasquatches, the Jumps, they go to such a degree to basically optimize for efficiency

11:50and low latency, all the way down to it's their own circuit breakers, it's their

11:54own physical fiber infrastructure. They're willing to sort of pay the price to just shave

11:59off a handful of milliseconds on either end.

12:03Yeah. How does that manifest in the software?

12:05So when you're writing that kind of software, how do you actually optimize for those

12:10boundary conditions in code? Yeah, yeah.

12:12So, well, there's quite a few levels, right?

12:14The first level you do is, like, basically you write your software to be efficient

12:17and fast, like no slowness.

12:20You want to remove all the database lookups, so you want to do everything in

12:23memory. And then you want to reduce any sort of additional computation.

12:27You want to simplify the risk checks, especially pre -trade risk checks.

12:33And then the more advanced versions, you move on to, like, the FPGA, which is

12:37a network chip card that's on the network card, on what we call the Ether

12:41card. So that you don't have to go all the way up to memory and

12:43come all the way back down to the processor.

12:45So back then, when I was, like, still writing code, like, maybe 10 years ago,

12:48that round trip is about 100 microseconds.

12:51Microseconds, yeah. And then by avoiding that, you'd reduce down to 20 microseconds.

12:56Right. And then you move it to the physical infrastructure.

12:58You want a co -location, right?

12:59You want to... Why haven't these organizations, like, in the AI world, for example, with

13:04Grok, our big observation, even 10 years ago when we were starting the business, was

13:07this exact idea, which is it's really inefficient to sit in a GPU, to go

13:12all the way up to HBM, to come back down.

13:14So let's just take SRAM and just do everything here on chip, right?

13:19Manage it with C2C, and that technical problem made a lot of sense, and very,

13:22very fast for the decode phase of inference.

13:25Makes a ton of sense.

13:26Why, when so much money is on the line for high -frequency trading, why did

13:31they never try their own custom silicon?

13:33I understand FPGAs, but nobody really went to the point of actually saying, here's a

13:38specific ASIC, or did they?

13:39And we just don't know about it.

13:40I don't think it exists on a very large scale.

13:44I think the algorithms change too often.

13:47So when you go to hardware, like you want to design on chip, it's very

13:51efficient, it's very fast, but when you want to change it, it takes a long

13:56time. Right. So when you want to reprogram it, I think FPGA already offers kind

14:00of the best. Best of both.

14:02The both worlds. Even FPGA, if you want to reprogram it, the programming cycle is

14:0610 times longer than software.

14:08Right. The company you worked at in Japan, was it successful?

14:11It's successful. You got, that company got sold to a NASDAQ listed company just before

14:152000. For a lot of money?

14:16For like $52 million back then.

14:19So that was decent money.

14:20And so, is that when you said, hey, hold on, there's something here?

14:24Or no, was it something else that happened?

14:26No. So at that time, I was too young.

14:28I was like 20 something.

14:29So you're working at this place.

14:31You're just a coder. Yeah.

14:32You're a salaryman. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

14:34In Japanese terms, right? Yeah, salaryman, yeah.

14:36You're a salaryman. So then walk us through what happens afterwards.

14:38So that company got sold.

14:40There was a lot of culture clashes between the parent company versus the original company.

14:45That's my first experience about, you know, how mergers may not work.

14:48Yeah. The two managements were just clashing.

14:50And then the same partners went to do a different company called Building 2.

14:56But now this partners, I didn't get any money, but the partners got quite a

14:59bit of money now. So they rented a very fancy office.

15:02Because that company only lasted a year.

15:04It means that previous success doesn't guarantee future success.

15:07In fact. So they spent a lot of money, had a very nice office, but

15:11that's zero revenue. So that folded within a year.

15:14And that's 2001. And so early 2001, I was looking for new jobs.

15:20And then Bloomberg was hiring.

15:23And this is right before 9 -11.

15:25I kind of got an offer before 9 -11.

15:27And then 9 -11 happened.

15:28I still haven't moved. Where was this?

15:31To New York? I was still in Tokyo back then.

15:34And then Bloomberg is in New York.

15:35The offer was in New York.

15:37The offer was in New York.

15:39So after 9 -11, I called Bloomberg and said, hey, is the job still there?

15:42Do you still want me to go?

15:43And they said, well, do you still want to come?

15:45I said, yeah, okay. So then I went.

15:47So I went to New York in November of 2001.

15:51Wow. And what was that like?

15:53The streets were pretty quiet.

15:54Yeah. And, but, you know, I was fine.

15:57I was, you know, New York is, New York was quiet for a few months,

16:02but it became lively pretty quickly, I think.

16:04Yeah. So I didn't feel too much issues.

16:08So I then went to New York and worked at Bloomberg for four years.

16:11Doing exactly, again, the same thing.

16:12You're kind of a salary guy.

16:14You're working at a big company.

16:15Yeah. Salary bonus, maybe some options or some phantom equity or something like that?

16:20Yeah. So I joined as a senior developer.

16:23I was put into a team called Tradebook Futures.

16:26They just formed this team and they had a system that allowed people to trade

16:30futures on Bloomberg, but it wasn't, it was like spread out.

16:32So they collected that into one team.

16:35And still no inkling of like that entrepreneurial bug?

16:39Not really. Back then I was like, nah, I, I worked.

16:43What were you looking for?

16:44Stability? Like why, like why Bloomberg being in New York?

16:47Like what was it? I was just a young guy.

16:49I was like, I think I was like 24, 24, 25.

16:53Okay. So I was just a young guy trying to get a job and, you

16:56know, experience different parts of the world and get, and, and just find my way

17:00through. I knew I wasn't experienced enough to do entrepreneurship myself.

17:04Right. So I was, and I was working at a small company in Tokyo.

17:07The company only had like 200 people.

17:09Bloomberg at the time had about 3000 people.

17:11So to me, that was a big company.

17:13Yeah. And there's fancy offices, fish tanks and free food and everything.

17:17So I joined as a senior developer.

17:19I got some good bosses.

17:20I got promoted three times in two years.

17:22And then I was leading a team of 60 initially.

17:24And they kind of grew to about 80 people.

17:27And that's when I became sort of a manager.

17:29I had no longer wrote code.

17:31And I started, started. The worst transition.

17:33The worst transition. Right. The worst transition.

17:35So, so that's kind of my Bloomberg experience.

17:37Yeah. So that, and I, yeah, so I stayed there for four years.

17:41And then you quit and moved to China.

17:43Yes. How does that happen?

17:45I think it was wrong.

17:45Like beginning of 2005. Again, the same friends I had, I made in Japan, they

17:52were talking about starting a new company, a new fintech company.

17:56And they were in Asia, right?

17:57So they're talking about Tokyo, Shanghai, or Hong Kong.

18:00And they said, Shanghai is most likely the most happening place for the future fintech.

18:05We should have picked Hong Kong.

18:07Hong Kong had a lot more happening since then.

18:09So I went there in 2005.

18:12So it was like five foreigners from a Chinese perspective, five Caucasians, four Caucasians plus

18:18a Japanese plus me. I'm the only one who speaks Chinese.

18:20And my Chinese was kind of rusty back then, too.

18:23So the six of us went there to do a new IT startup in Shanghai.

18:28So all of you guys just land there.

18:30And what was the idea?

18:31So we thought, you know, we had all this Wall Street experience, Wall Street trading

18:35technology experience. I'm sorry, your other friends, had they moved to New York or no?

18:39They were still in Japan doing their own thing.

18:41Two of the friends were in New York with me.

18:43And then the other three were from Japan.

18:48So the six of us came together.

18:50And we wanted to do, we want, our idea was let's bring the Wall Street

18:55trading technology into China so we can service the brokers and exchanges in China.

19:00But then, so we went, they rented a very fancy office again.

19:04Wait, okay, so hold on just.

19:06So when you guys start this company, so this is now your first entrepreneurial.

19:10You're like, okay, let's do this.

19:12Pretty much. Did you know to even ask the question like, okay, guys, what's our

19:17equity split? What's the cap table?

19:19Did you know any of these things?

19:20Or you're just like, great, let's go do it.

19:22I'm just assuming it's one sixth.

19:24We're equal. Like how did it all?

19:26It wasn't one sixth. It was like the top guy had like, I don't know,

19:2839, 40 % and the rest five of us split equally.

19:32So I had about 11 % or so.

19:34Okay. So I knew that.

19:36But I didn't know like, you know, all the ins and outs about, you know,

19:39shareholder rights, what terms. I didn't know any of that.

19:42Yeah. Preferred versus common, none of it.

19:45You're like, great, I got 11%.

19:46I'm moving to Shanghai. Yeah.

19:47So I just have 11%.

19:48I didn't, I have no idea what common stock is or versus preferred.

19:52So I just went. And then, but so I was a junior partner in this

19:56group. And then once we landed in China, I started, because I speak Chinese, right?

20:01So I began talking to potential clients.

20:02I went to talk to brokers.

20:04I found out we registered as a wholly foreign owned, what we call a Wofi,

20:08wholly foreign owned enterprise. Yeah.

20:13The Chinese brokers and financial institutions are not allowed to work with a Wofi.

20:16That's right. So we found out after we started a company while we were in

20:20Shanghai. And so the company pivoted towards doing any, any, any IT system for any,

20:26for any company. We can be like.

20:28Work for hire. Work for hire.

20:29We can be fixing. Deloitte.

20:30You became Deloitte. Not even Deloitte.

20:32We can be fixing printers or we can be writing like, you know, SAP implementations

20:36for you. We did all of that.

20:37So there's a whole spectrum of things.

20:39And so we did that for a few years and we actually made a living.

20:41For a few years. Yeah.

20:42For, for, for, for a few years.

20:44Like, and we made a living out of that.

20:46Yeah. We started, we had a, quite a number of automotive clients.

20:50The Shanghai General Motors, Shanghai Volkswagen, Shanghai First Automotive.

20:57They were all clients of us.

20:58And then we're like, maybe three or four years in, we started having offices in

21:02Hong Kong. And then we were dealing with a Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse.

21:06So it grew. So it was, it was successful.

21:08The company's still around. The company's still around.

21:10So I, I left in 2013 after eight years, but the company is still around.

21:14So in the eight years you worked at that company, all in Shanghai.

21:17I was mostly in Shanghai, but then I spent quite a bit of time helping.

21:20Helping to set up the Hong Kong office.

21:22And then I was also doing quite a lot of work for some clients in

21:25Tokyo. How big did that company get?

21:27I think even, it got to about 200 people again, and it's kind of stayed

21:30there for, for, as far as I know, even till now.

21:33And so as a junior partner, you just take profits and you share it like.

21:37Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, uh, uh, well, actually I, we didn't take that much profits.

21:41Um, I actually invested most of my savings back into that company and I actually

21:44didn't cash out a penny.

21:45Um, uh, but after a few years, the company was, uh, stable enough.

21:50to pay the partner salaries that all of our kids go to international school.

21:54So we get a six -figure salary.

21:57At that point, you had gotten married.

21:59Yes. Yeah, so at that point, I got married when I was in New York.

22:04So, like, yeah, so and then, yeah, so I took care.

22:09And you had met your ex -wife how?

22:11Yeah, I met her in Tokyo when I first went to Tokyo.

22:15So I met her in, like, 1999 -ish when I was first in Tokyo, like,

22:19doing the interns. And then she visited me in New York, and then, you know,

22:24we got married, and then we had kids.

22:27Now we are separated or divorced.

22:29In Shanghai, I had young kids, and, you know, it was enough salary to put

22:33the kids into international school, and that was good enough for me.

22:37Wow. So far, again, nothing here tells anybody that you're about to go and start

22:43Binance. No, no. Nothing. Nothing, no.

22:45I didn't know. So then 2013, 2014, how old were you then at that point?

22:50You were in your— 2013, I would be 36.

22:54Yeah, mid -30s. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

22:55So— So, again, salary guy.

22:58Yeah. Junior partner at this thing.

23:00It's going well. Your kids are in private school.

23:02Yeah, yeah. So then what happens?

23:04So then I came across Bitcoin, right?

23:06So, well, my friend tells me, look, Cesar, you got to look at this thing

23:09called Bitcoin. I look into it, and I was like, it took me about roughly

23:14six months to fully understand it.

23:15So that was from, like, roughly July 2013.

23:17And that's because you read the white paper, and you said, I need to read

23:20it again and read it again, or—?

23:21Yeah, yeah, pretty much. And then, because back then, there was the Bitcoin talk for

23:25it. Yeah, that's right. And that's pretty much it.

23:28But did you see my Bloomberg article in 2012?

23:30Does that have any influence?

23:32Unfortunately, I don't—I read a bunch of stuff.

23:35I actually don't remember what I— I'm just kidding.

23:37But I did write this thing.

23:38And it's funny because I had a kind of a relationship with Mike Bloomberg.

23:42He was kind of—not even mentor.

23:44Like, he was just too senior, but he knew me.

23:46He liked me. He would invite me to certain things.

23:49With Mike Bloomberg? Yeah, with Bloomberg.

23:50And then I got to know some of Mike's team.

23:52Yeah, yeah. And in 2012 or so, they said, Chamath, would you write an op

23:56-ed? Okay. And I was like, yeah.

23:59And I wrote it about Bitcoin.

24:00And I said, everybody should put 1 % of their net worth into Bitcoin.

24:03And I said, it's basically schmuck insurance.

24:06And then they published it in the Bloomberg terminal or whatever.

24:09And that's when I got red -pilled on Bitcoin, where I was like, wow, it's

24:11the most incredibly interesting technical product that I had read about.

24:16And I think the thing that captivated me—I don't know if you felt this way—it

24:20was the only white paper that I read end -to -end where I thought, this

24:24is one of the most elegantly written pieces of non -technical prose.

24:29Do you know what I'm trying to say?

24:30Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not something that is dense in an archive that is just

24:34meant for PhDs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

24:36You could literally give it to your sister, to your brother, to somebody non -technical,

24:41and they would understand it.

24:42Yeah, yeah. And it's only nine pages.

24:44Exactly. You know what an enormous amount of intellectual skill it takes to do that?

24:48Oh, yeah. It's much harder to write it very short.

24:50Much harder. And elegantly and simply.

24:53Yeah, yeah, yeah. If anybody else tried to rewrite that thing, it'd be 90 pages.

24:56So the friend that showed it to you, was he a co -worker of yours

24:59or no, just a random friend in Shanghai?

25:01It's a friend. It's a random—well, not a random—it's a friend.

25:04We don't have any working relationships.

25:05His name is Ron Cao.

25:06He runs, I guess, now Sky 9 Ventures.

25:09Back then, he was at Lightspeed Ventures.

25:11Of course. He was a managing director of Lightspeed Ventures in China.

25:14Okay. So we have a poker house game, like, you know, small stakes, a bunch

25:19of struggling entrepreneurs versus, like, VCs.

25:25So the VCs have all the money and all the time.

25:27David versus Goliath. Yeah. Yeah.

25:29But, you know, it's a fun game.

25:31It's not a very serious game.

25:32So in one of the poker games, Ron said, CZ, you should look at this

25:36thing called Bitcoin. I was like, okay, Bitcoin, okay.

25:39So we talked about it a little bit.

25:41And then Bobby Lee, who was at the time was working for Walmart, was just

25:46about to quit Walmart to join BTC China to become their CEO.

25:49And as part of that deal, Bobby said he will bring Ron in as an

25:54investor, Lightspeed into BTC. Into BTC.

25:57So that's in July 2013.

25:59I was like, okay, so these two guys are pretty serious about this.

26:03So I had lunch with Bobby the next day.

26:05And Bobby said, put 10 % of your net worth into Bitcoin.

26:07He said, there's a small chance you will go to zero, then you lose 10%.

26:10There's a much higher chance you will go 10x and you will double your net

26:14worth. I was like, okay, that sounds pretty serious.

26:16So that's when I started learning, reading the white paper more carefully.

26:20Took me six months. So it was till the end of 2013, I started like,

26:25I'm convinced now. I'm ready to go.

26:27But then Bitcoin went from $70 in mid -2013 to like $1 ,000 by end

26:32of 2013. So you already went more than like 15x.

26:36How did that make you feel?

26:37I was like, I'm too late.

26:39I was like, I wish I got in early.

26:41Yeah. Because back then, right?

26:43It doesn't matter when you get into Bitcoin, you always feel late.

26:46Yeah. Right? Because everyone you talk to in the Bitcoin industry has bought before you.

26:50And did you talk to anybody while you were learning about it to say, like

26:53you have a community in Shanghai?

26:55There's a very small community in Shanghai.

26:57And then I was basically talking to anybody in the world that's willing to talk

27:00with me. And then I had a couple of friends in Taiwan.

27:04They used to, they worked for TSMC back then because, and then they were trying

27:08to do a mining chip for Bitcoin.

27:11So two of those guys left TSMC to try to do this startup.

27:14Startup never, never really took off, but that was one group of guys I was

27:18talking to. There was another couple, they were mostly miners.

27:23There was another guy called, his nickname is Fish, Silver Fish in China.

27:28He's like a big miner.

27:30He runs the F2 pool even today.

27:32Oh, sure. So those guys were based in Hangzhou.

27:34You know, I went, they came to Shanghai, I talked to them, et cetera.

27:38So there was a group of guys that you talked to.

27:40And then the biggest thing was in December 13th, 2013 -ish, there was a Bitcoin

27:48conference in Las Vegas. I flew there to meet everyone in the industry was there.

27:54There was a 200 people conference.

27:56Vitalik was there. Matt Rosak was there.

27:58Charlie Lee was there. A bunch of guys were there.

28:03And the same guy still today.

28:06And then at the time, just before that, it was the Silk Road arrest of

28:10Ross Wuberich. So the media was like, no, this Bitcoin is only used by drug

28:15lords. And when you go to the conference, it was like a bunch of kids,

28:18a bunch of geeks. And they're very nice people, right?

28:22So you can talk to Vitalik, you know he's a very nice person.

28:24Were you still working at that company while you were doing all of this?

28:27Moonlighting? Yes. So this is kind of the - You tell your partners, hey guys,

28:32I'm just going to go to Vegas for a couple of days.

28:33I'll be back. Pretty much.

28:34Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then when I got back, I told the partners, we should

28:39do a Bitcoin payment system.

28:40Because BitPay was kind of the big player back then.

28:43BitPay just raised $4 million US dollars in 2013.

28:47So they was kind of the large player.

28:49Actually, the employee - Can I tell you a very funny, I have two BitPay

28:52stories. Sure. I was very focused on trying to prove the transactional capability of Bitcoin.

28:58Yeah. I went to my local car dealership and I bought a car with Bitcoin

29:06using BitPay in 2000. 2012 or 13, that Range Rover is probably $90 million.

29:14And then even more stupidly, there was a real estate development in Lake Tahoe called

29:20Martis Camp. Beautiful. And I had owned a couple of lots and I said, you

29:24know, it would be great if I actually could prove that you could buy real

29:27estate with Bitcoin. And I called the guys at BitPay and they were like, yeah,

29:31we can facilitate this transaction.

29:32No problem. I bought a piece of land.

29:35And then again, I thought this is an interesting story.

29:37And the Wall Street Journal wrote about it.

29:38Now that piece of land is a billion dollars.

29:42But you cannot calculate this way, right?

29:44CZ, I calculated this way every day.

29:46You can't calculate it this way because - Stupidest purchase ever.

29:49No, no, no, no, no.

29:51That's the bucket of money mentality, right?

29:53No, no, no. It's true.

29:53Right. So even if you didn't use Bitcoin, you would have used the money to

29:57buy the land. You could have used that money to buy Bitcoin.

29:59Yeah. Right. So, yeah, yeah.

30:01So you're like, hey, we should do a version of BitPay.

30:04Yeah, yeah. And your partners are like, what are you talking about?

30:06Exactly. And now at this point, you still hadn't bought any Bitcoin.

30:10No. At this point, I had maybe one Bitcoin.

30:13Yeah. And one Bitcoin was like only a thousand bucks back then.

30:15Yeah. So, yeah. So then what happens?

30:18And then, so I tell my partner, look, I think this is the biggest thing.

30:22This is the biggest thing in my life, right?

30:24So I think there's three fundamentals.

30:27Back then, I realized there was like two fundamental technologies in my life.

30:30There's the internet. I was too young to do too much with it.

30:33And there was this Bitcoin thing.

30:34And I was, I was 35, 36.

30:36I wasn't going to miss it.

30:37The next thing that's going to come along is going to be 15 years later.

30:39Did you feel old when you go to Vegas and you see all these young

30:4222 -year -old kids and you're like, I missed it?

30:44Did you think that at any point or?

30:46No. 35, 36 is still okay.

30:48Okay. So it's still like doable.

30:51You know, you don't feel super old.

30:53Today, I feel that. But I thought, look, the next thing that will come will

30:56be 10, 15 years later.

30:58And that's AI, right? So today, I say like, there's three fundamental technologies in my

31:02life. But back then, like, that's the, that's the, that's the thing.

31:04Right. So for me, it was very clear.

31:06I got it. I got to do something in this industry.

31:08Right. So, and so I told my partners, look, I'm going to, I'm going to,

31:13I'm going to quit. And we're going to do work in the Bitcoin industry.

31:16That's what it's called back then.

31:18And then, and then I was, I also need to buy Bitcoin and I don't

31:24have many money. So I don't have, so I just, I said, okay, I'm going

31:27to sell my apartment in Shanghai and then buy Bitcoin.

31:30But selling the apartment takes time.

31:31So it took me like a solid few months to sell it.

31:34And it was it. It was only.

31:36You sold it, where did you, you just got a rental apartment?

31:38I sold it at the time, actually, my family also moved to Tokyo.

31:42So my family moved to Tokyo.

31:44We lived in a rental apartment.

31:47In Tokyo. In Tokyo. And then I was traveling in Shanghai.

31:50So that's kind of the time I started moving, started separating from, from the, from,

31:55from the family as well.

31:57So I was spending a lot of time traveling.

31:59Right. And so I sold the apartment and for roughly $900 ,000, like just under

32:05a million bucks. And then started buying and I got paid in trenches because, you

32:10know, you get a first down payment, you got paid in trenches and every trench

32:13I get, I just buy.

32:14Well, the first trench at $800 and the Bitcoin's dropping $600, $400, kind of averaged

32:20to about $600. Incredible. Yeah.

32:23Incredible. So now you have your Bitcoin position, but you still don't have a job.

32:26Yeah. Well, I was looking for a job at the same time.

32:28But you were looking for a job in the Bitcoin industry or you were just

32:30looking for any job? In the Bitcoin industry.

32:32That was very specific. It didn't take me that long to get a job.

32:36Like the gap was probably from the time I said, I'm going to quit until

32:39I finalized the job was probably only about two to three weeks.

32:42Oh, wow. Yeah. And so who hired you?

32:44I first discussed with PTCC.

32:45Bobby, he wanted to hire me and then, um, uh, but then, uh, blockchain info

32:50came along. Uh, I bought me the Roger Ver, uh, so, and then at the

32:54time blockchain, uh, blockchain info was, I was the third person to join the blockchain

32:57info team. That was, uh, uh, uh, Ben Reeves, who's the founder and that was

33:01Nicholas Carey, who was just to see hired the CEO.

33:04And I was like the third guy.

33:06And so I was like VP of engineering because Ben, we want to reserve the

33:09CTO title for Ben. So, uh, uh, so yeah, I joined, I joined, uh, blockchain

33:14info and flew to, uh, New York in London, like three hours north of new,

33:18uh, London. Um, uh, I spent some time there, you know, figuring out what to

33:23do. Yeah. And how did that go?

33:25Uh, that didn't go very well.

33:26We expanded the team to 18 people.

33:28And then, um, uh, Peter Smith joined, uh, as a CFO wanting to raise money

33:32for blockchain info. Coinbase just finished raising it, raising around 30, raising $30 million.

33:39Um, and that was a big one in the industry back then.

33:42Um, Peter Smith somehow maneuvered himself into the CEO position, pushing like Nicholas Carey to

33:47the product manager kind of role.

33:48Um, but the culture kind of changed a little bit.

33:51So, um, uh, I left, um, a bunch of the developers I hired left.

33:55Um, and then, um, Ben Reeves, Ben Reeves sold quite a lot of his position

34:00and also left in a few months later.

34:02So that was, that was Mike's.

34:04So that was only like a few, I think I was only there for like,

34:07uh, six, seven months. So that didn't work out too well.

34:10Uh, but I learned a lot, uh, from that, uh, experience.

34:13Yeah. You learned what not to do.

34:14No, no, like blockchain info.

34:17When I joined the, the Ben Reeves said, look, we have no company.

34:20We have no office. Everyone works remotely.

34:23We just pay everybody in Bitcoin.

34:24And so that's something I learned from that company.

34:27And I still look, that's still very heavily used in Binance today.

34:31So I learned a lot.

34:32I also learned that, you know, that company, the whole marketing big at the time

34:36blockchain info was the largest user platform in the industry.

34:39Right. So they had about 2 million wallets, uh, more than Coinbase at the time.

34:44And, um, uh, the entire marketing was one thread on Bitcoin talk .org.

34:50One thread, the thread is 150 pages.

34:53Um, Ben Reeves just replies to that thread.

34:55And that's how you grew to a 2 million user platform.

34:58I was like, okay, so you can do some, you can do quite a lot

35:00of guerrilla marketing to be successful.

35:02Wow. So I, I learned a lot.

35:04Um, but the culture changed a little bit.

35:06It wasn't fit for, for me.

35:07And then I, I left.

35:09And then that was when, um, uh, Hei, uh, hired me into, into OKCoin.

35:14Yeah. So I, Hei said, look, why are you working for this wallet company?

35:17Your experience is dealing with, uh, order execution exchanges.

35:21So, so Hei hired me there.

35:23Yeah. As a developer? As a CTO.

35:27As a CTO. Yeah. Um, so, uh, yeah.

35:29So in the process, I think BTC China helped me again.

35:34Uh, so, you know, I was kind of looking for a job again.

35:37Right. So I left and then, uh, uh, uh, Hei was talking to me and

35:41Bobby Lee found out. And Bobby Lee meant, uh, so OKCoin back then, uh, will

35:46offer me 5 % equity.

35:47Um, and then for, uh, sorry, uh, BTC China came along and offered me 10

35:52% equity. And then OKCoin matched it within three hours.

35:55And then I was debating between Shanghai and Beijing and I decided to go to

35:59Beijing to join OKCoin back then.

36:01Uh, Hei at that time had 1 % equity.

36:04Uh, so she hired me to be like the, the, the, the, the bigger sort

36:07of partner in the business.

36:09Wow. Um, so that's, that's how I went to OKCoin, uh, for about eight months

36:14or so. Um, that didn't last long either.

36:16Yeah. Because? Uh, I think there were also culture differences, um, at OKCoin.

36:22Um, uh, there were some stuff.

36:24that i didn't agree with um both in terms of like you know simple examples

36:28like how they run promotions how they how they do fee discounts uh where you

36:33have to ask for it like they they advertise a fee discount but you have

36:36to ask for it to get it it doesn't apply to everybody even though they

36:39advertise as such so small things like that and then um so yeah so that

36:45was in early 2015 i said no i'm i'm gonna leave um so that's kind

36:51of uh uh so that lasted for a few months uh in 2015 yeah 2014

36:56mostly yeah so how do we get from there to binance so 2015 um i

37:03i with a couple of my old colleagues said we're going to do a bitcoin

37:07exchange in um in tokyo in japan because this is a year after mount gox

37:11and all that yeah yeah so there's a vacuum in japan so um we got

37:15two developers that came to me on the same day i decided to leave okay

37:18coin they came to me said look we somehow they also quit their respective jobs

37:23um i said okay well why don't let the three of us do something and

37:27so i we said okay so i will i will be the ceo and then

37:31i'll be the big guy uh with more equity and then i'll be uh responsible

37:34for fundraising um i and i was paying them a salary out of my own

37:38savings um and i wasn't taking anything so the two developer person uh we we

37:43whipped up a demo very quickly we downloaded the open source software for an exchange

37:47and then we tweaked the ui to be a little bit sexier and then uh

37:52we hooked up you just forked an open source project like this is our product

37:56this is binance no we didn't say it was binance yeah but this is before

37:59this is before minus yeah we didn't say we i was very transparent i was

38:03like this we whipped up this demo up in two days oh in a few

38:05days um and this is a demo that we can show you but this is

38:08not or the ultimate product this is not it's just it's just the proof of

38:12concept yeah it's just yeah so um it's like uh yeah so and then but

38:15and then we had a script that uh took bitfinex uh market data bitfinex was

38:20like a the large exchange back then and we just kind of copied their order

38:23book and the order book was flashing those trades going on so you've got a

38:26very lively uh demo and when the investors saw that it was like wow this

38:30is good technology but it's not just a demo it's it's it's a when they

38:35ask me questions i can answer in very deep ways right when they ask me

38:38like you know how do how do you structure this to be a fast uh

38:41exchange we i can talk about you know in memory matching um uh optimizing database

38:48all all the stuff you've learned yeah so i can go really deep when they

38:51ask questions right so the my not my knowledge is there right so they were

38:55like uh they were like okay this technology is cool but you could you won't

38:58you won't be successful running a crypto bitcoin exchange in japan you don't speak japanese

39:02right i was like okay they have a point um so they said why don't

39:06you sell this technology to other exchanges because most of the japanese exchanges don't have

39:10very good technology i was like okay so then i went to talk to a

39:13few of the exchanges like literally two weeks later we signed a contract with one

39:17with one of the exchanges and then they paid 30 360 000 for the for

39:23the system uh so they made a down payment of 100 180 000 that was

39:28enough for me not to pay salaries anymore so i was happy with that so

39:31we pivoted from a wanting to run our own bitcoin exchange to exchange systems for

39:36provider yeah you're selling software we're selling software and then um in july 2015 a

39:43bunch of chinese companies came to us saying they want systems can i just say

39:48by the way sorry to interrupt you but it's really incredible because there are so

39:52many founder stories when somebody says i've started a company and then somebody says well

39:56how much is it worth or how successful is it and you know let's just

40:00say binance is a 200 billion dollar company uh probably you you Less than that,

40:03but yeah. It's in the neighborhood.

40:05A lot of people think that there is some incredible origin story that is like

40:10lightning in a bottle. But so often than not, the story is more yours, which

40:15is this, it's kind of like moving along, meandering, learning things, trying some other things.

40:21This non -obvious iteration, and then all of a sudden, things kind of catalyze.

40:27But even then, you still don't get the right form because you're licensing it, really.

40:32And people just misunderstand that this is actually more what entrepreneurship is.

40:37It's the resilience and the grit to just keep grinding.

40:40For sure, for sure. I think most people idealize entrepreneurship, like they just hate it,

40:45and they go somewhere. No, it's like the Facebook story.

40:47You hack it together in college, and oh, it's now a million users.

40:51It's Facebook, it's Microsoft. Exactly.

40:53And also Google. These three are like college, garage, and they just - Exactly.

40:58But the reality, Binance or Tesla, it's like a grind.

41:01It's a grind. It's a grind.

41:03You have to go so many different ways.

41:05Yeah. And it wasn't obvious from the beginning.

41:07Yeah. Right? So I think those three are the exceptions that kind of just hit

41:10it from day one. Exactly.

41:12But then that kind of shaped the people's perception.

41:14Like 99%, 99 .9 % of the other successful businesses are not like that.

41:19Right. Right? So if you look at now, any other successful company.

41:22Yeah. So the same here.

41:24So get us to the founding moment.

41:25Yeah. So we did - So you're licensing the software.

41:27We're licensing the software. That business went pretty well.

41:30So we've had like 30 different exchange clients.

41:32Wait, no way. Like over - Over multiple years.

41:35Over two years. In two years, we signed up.

41:37Yeah. So this is a multi -million dollar - Oh, yeah.

41:40Licensing business. Yeah. And it's a SaaS business, right?

41:42We call it exchange as a service business.

41:44So we charge a fixed monthly fee every month.

41:47And this is platform. Business is paying us.

41:49It's a very steady business.

41:50Every new client - So every new client increases the revenue.

41:55So every new client is like a step up.

41:57Exactly. So it's a very, actually a very, very good business model.

42:00But then in March 2017, the Chinese government shut down most of our clients.

42:05And then by May, we were like - Right.

42:08And they don't touch you because you're the software vendor.

42:10We're the software vendor. Exactly.

42:11We don't run any business.

42:12Exactly. So we're the software vendor.

42:14So, but then our businesses, we have no clients, right?

42:18So we lost our clients.

42:19And so by May, we were like, oh, okay, we need to pivot.

42:23But by April, May, we were like, figure out how to pivot.

42:26By end of May, we was like, okay, actually three guys who've worked for me

42:30said they want to do a Polonex copycat.

42:32Polonex was the biggest exchange back then.

42:35And then I said, well, let me invest.

42:37We have some extra cash.

42:39Three days later, they want to do some on -chain chat trading software.

42:42I was like, no, we're not going to invest in that anymore.

42:44And then I said, well, why don't we do that?

42:46We have the exchange system already.

42:47We still need to customize it to do a crypto -to -crypto -only trading.

42:50My gosh. So in May, we said, okay, we're going to do a crypto, we're

42:55going to do an exchange again.

42:57The team said, fine, sure.

42:59How big is the team at this point?

43:0120 people. So, and we had tech people.

43:04We don't have marketing because we're a 2B business, right?

43:07We have two sales guys, two sales guys plus me.

43:11And then we said, well, now we can run our own, let's do our own

43:14crypto -to -crypto exchange. So, and then, so that was the end of May.

43:19And then June 1st to June 10th, there was a guy who was a BTC

43:23co -founder, Lin Ke. He ran an ICO in China.

43:28He raised 15 million U .S.

43:29dollars in 10 days. And then I looked at him.

43:33I was like, he only had one document and one website, no product, nothing.

43:39He raised 15 million U .S.

43:40dollars. He raised 15 million U .S.

43:41dollars. But if he can do that, I might be able to do that too.

43:43You needed venture funding. You're like, if I get the $15 million, I can build

43:46out a team. I can invest in some marketing.

43:49I can be in the J -curve and not feel the pressure.

43:51Exactly, yeah. So originally, we were going to go to the VC funding route, right?

43:55But then when I saw that, I was like, well, and everyone talking about ICOs

43:59back then. I went to a conference in mid -June 2017, and everyone's talking about

44:04ICO. Everyone's like, CZ, you've got to do an ICO.

44:06You've got to do an ICO.

44:08So by mid -June, June 14th was the date.

44:11And then I said, okay, call the team, we're going to do an ICO, write

44:14a white paper. And so did you have a name at that point, like in

44:19the Bitcoin community or in the crypto community, either in China or in Japan or

44:22somewhere? I had a little bit of a name.

44:24Even working at Blockchain Info, quite a lot of people know me.

44:28Blockchain Info was the most popular platform back then.

44:30And OKCoin was also like I was a CTO.

44:33I was quite active on social media.

44:35I was also kind of managing their international markets, non -English speaking or non -Chinese

44:40speaking markets, because nobody else, I was the best English speaker on that team, even

44:44though my English is not that great.

44:45But so I had a little bit of a name.

44:50People know me in the community.

44:52Because you needed a bit of a name or some kind of pedigree to actually

44:55do an ICO at the time.

44:56Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is an advantage of when you get involved early in

44:59the industry, like you go to a few conferences, like there's 200 people.

45:03And you go to like, the second time you go there, people know you.

45:05Right. But the third time, people are like, oh, you know, you're the expert.

45:08Yeah, you're the OT already.

45:10Right. So I had a bit of a reputation.

45:13So I thought, well, Lin Ke, the guy who did the ICO in China, he's

45:17quite well known in China.

45:19But he's not known internationally.

45:20I have a little bit of both.

45:21I said, well, I can probably do an ICO and raise the same amount.

45:25So we did. So who were the buyers of the Binance ICO?

45:30To be honest, even to this day, I don't know.

45:33Even to this day, you don't know.

45:33Right. It's like, I think.

45:34But are they Chinese? Are they Japanese?

45:36Are they people from all around the world that kind of knew you?

45:39Was it that your white paper was really good?

45:42Okay. So I think in terms of demographic, it's probably like 80 to 90 %

45:48Chinese. And there were some like international guys who bought it.

45:52And I think the data shows that there was about 20 ,000 people who bought

45:55in the ICO. 20 ,000 people.

45:5720 ,000 people. So, and this is like a brand new brand.

46:00Some people know me in the industry and that was it.

46:03So even though the exchanges were put out of business in China, the ICO was

46:08allowed? No, the ICO wasn't banned back then.

46:10It wasn't banned. Yeah. It was not not allowed.

46:13It was not not allowed.

46:14Exactly. So let me just make one clarification.

46:18The exchange clients that we were serving were mostly stamp purchase exchanges, not crypto exchanges.

46:24Okay. Crypto exchanges were not banned in March.

46:26Crypto exchanges were banned after we started.

46:28I see. So that was in September.

46:30We're talking about like June, July, kind of for me, 2017.

46:33Wow. You're really threading a needle.

46:35Yeah. So we didn't know that that was coming.

46:38We just saw like, you know, those.

46:39How much of the company did you sell?

46:41No, we didn't. It was just the coins.

46:42We launched the token. You had to do no equity participation.

46:45There's no equity involved. It was just, we launched a new token, BNB.

46:49Yeah. It's still there today.

46:51Yeah. And then we said, look, we're going to sell 60 % of it for

46:54$15 million, roughly. Right. So because we're talking Bitcoin.

46:59And what were the original tokenomics that you designed for the BNB token?

47:02Well, we said a bunch of things, but the main one that was going to

47:04be live very quickly was going to be, if you hold BNB, you receive 50

47:08% fee discounts when you trade on Binance.

47:10Eventually the platform that gets launched.

47:12That was the main thing.

47:13But we also said, look, it's going to be a, it's going to have, eventually

47:16it's going to have its own chain, its own decentralized ecosystem.

47:19There's like three or four things.

47:20So then you guys must have been ecstatic.

47:23You're like, wow, we raised 15 million bucks.

47:24We're now going to launch this exchange.

47:26But then September comes around and then exchanges themselves were.

47:29So then what do you do?

47:31Yeah, September comes around. September 4th, like seven different departments of Chinese government issued a

47:36memo together saying that, number one, crypto exchanges are no longer allowed in China.

47:41ICOs are no longer allowed.

47:42Mining is not allowed. Crypto mining.

47:45We said, well, we're going to move.

47:47Well, we said we have to move.

47:49By then, it was clear that while at the time China was one of the

47:52largest user base, they had like 30 something percent user base from China.

47:58But we still have like 70 percent from the rest of the world.

48:01We said, look, if we cut off that 30 percent, we can still survive.

48:03We can actually survive pretty well.

48:07So we said, well, I just said, look, let's move.

48:09Let's move. Let's move to Tokyo.

48:11Back to Tokyo. Back to Tokyo.

48:12You love Tokyo. I've been back in and out of Tokyo.

48:16I know it. And by the way, at that point, do you speak Japanese as

48:18well? I speak very little Japanese.

48:21What would I call taxi Japanese?

48:22Taxi Japanese. I can say like, no, thank you.

48:24Go left, go right. In a restaurant, when I order, I say this, this, this.

48:28Not the full menu names.

48:30Yeah. Sushi, I can name most of them.

48:33Okay. Yeah. So that's my Japanese level.

48:35But, you know, I know Japan.

48:36I know Tokyo. It wasn't, it's not like a new country for me.

48:39Right. So I said, like, let's move to Tokyo.

48:41And we had like 30 people then.

48:42Right. So. And everybody moved?

48:44Everybody moved. Wow. Back then, eight years ago, I think very, like maybe one or

48:51two of the people were married.

48:52And nobody had kids. So it was like a very easy move for the team.

48:56Yeah. So everybody just packed up and moved.

48:59I remember one girl cried, one product manager.

49:01She cried because her boyfriend is in China.

49:05So she cried, but she moved with us.

49:07And she's not married to her boyfriend.

49:09So anyway. Incredible. So. Yeah.

49:12So we moved to Tokyo, like when China did that.

49:15And our platform continued to grow.

49:17Yeah. So when you first launched Binance, was it an instant hit or did it

49:21take energy to find that product market fit?

49:25At first, few zealous users that would tell everybody else, like, how did the virality

49:29start? How did the liquidity really get built?

49:31So Binance, I would say the product was growing pretty well, but the token price

49:36went down from ICO price.

49:38It went down 30, 40 percent.

49:40It took about three weeks to recover.

49:42So when we launched the product, because at that time, crypto is still pretty hot.

49:46I think the product market fit was there.

49:49It wasn't a new idea.

49:50It's just a crypto to crypto exchange.

49:52So then the ICO was critical then, right?

49:53Because these people say, well, I own this token.

49:56Now I can trade at a fee discount.

49:58Yeah. So that's why I'm going to choose Binance.

50:01Yeah. But was it also architected better?

50:03Was it materially faster or more reliable?

50:06Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure.

50:07It was. It was. So back then, when we launched, even using your eyeballs, you

50:12can see that placing an order on Binance is so much faster than on a

50:15competing platform. Oh. And so the performance of the exchange system was visibly.

50:19And back then, 2017, who were the big platforms that you were competing with?

50:22There was Polonex, Bittrex were the biggest ones.

50:24And then there's a few Chinese ones.

50:25There's Huobi, OKEx, OKCoin back then.

50:29And then in the Western world, Coinbase was there.

50:33Gemini wasn't there back then.

50:35Gemini was later. So Bitstamp was there.

50:39Bitfenix was there. Now they're kind of really, really small.

50:42So you're now in your late 30s.

50:44Yeah, yeah. And this thing is working.

50:4640s now. 40s, sorry. 40s.

50:48How did you internalize the success?

50:52You're like, what is this?

50:54Like, what's happening? Like, are you saying that to yourself?

50:56Or, yeah, it was... there were some really surreal moments where you were like, is

51:00this real? Yeah. In a good way.

51:02So like, what's her revenue?

51:05I forgot the number, but she said like a couple hundred Bitcoins.

51:09I was like, that's crazy.

51:10We can't be making them.

51:11Like, are you sure? She's like, yeah, I'm sure.

51:13Like, this number can be correct.

51:15We must be off by like a magnitude.

51:17And we double check, double check, triple check, like, correct.

51:19I was like, that's crazy.

51:21And then there was also a period where three weeks in, when the BNB price

51:25was recovering. So BNB, I sealed at like, about 10 cents.

51:29It dropped to like 0 .0, uh, dropped to six cents.

51:33And then, um, Hei joined.

51:35We announced Hei joining. And then for the next two, three weeks, um, every time

51:40I, you know, you go to sleep, wake up, the tokens up 20%.

51:43You go to a meeting, come up, the tokens up 20%.

51:46You go to the bathroom, come back, the tokens up 20%.

51:48I mean, it must've been very quick where you're like, wait a minute, I'm rich.

51:53That came a little bit later.

51:55That came in early 2018, about six, seven, seven, eight months in.

51:59Forbes put me on the cover.

52:01Uh, that's when, like, well, I said, well, how did they even know to find

52:04you at that time to put you on the cover?

52:06I actually don't know, but Forbes was doing a crypto edition.

52:10I see. So with all the crypto guys, and then, um, they already had a

52:13picture of Vitalik doing a fancy hand gesture, which is really cool picture.

52:17So, um, yeah, so, yeah, so they, they invited us and they, they contacted our

52:22PR department, which maintains contact with them.

52:25Uh, which was really Hei's team back then, um, like team of four or five

52:29girls. Um, and Hei says like, well, Forbes want to do a special feature with

52:34you and take some photos.

52:35I think you should go.

52:36I was like, I don't want to go, but they said we're a new brand.

52:38Forbes can still help us, you know, uh, increase the brand.

52:41With awareness. Yeah. Yeah. So I said, okay, fine, I'll go.

52:44So I went to do the photo shoot.

52:46That was like my first photo to put makeup on me.

52:48And then the first time put makeup.

52:50CZ, what is, what is money?

52:53Well, is it important? I mean, don't take this wrong way, but you got rich

52:57old. Yeah. So did it matter at that point?

53:00What is money when you're in your forties and you make it?

53:02It still matter, uh, but my money is not everything.

53:05I think I was old enough that there's a couple of things that happened to

53:08me. Number one is I was older.

53:10Uh, it's like 40 something.

53:11So I'm not like a young 20 year old that just, you know, Lambo's big

53:15parties too old for that.

53:17Uh, so I have also, my personality is quite stable.

53:19So I don't get too excited on things.

53:21Um, also the other thing, not to brag, but, uh, I went from like a

53:25barely financially free to like, you know, cover Forbes.

53:29And I was like, wait a second.

53:30Like how, how, how rich am I?

53:32I don't even know. I don't like, when I look at my wallet, nothing changed.

53:35Like Forbes cover and nothing changed for me.

53:37Um, but then people say, look, now you might be a billionaire.

53:40I was like, am I really a billionaire?

53:41Like it doesn't feel that way.

53:42I was like, even like a month ago, like not a month, like at that

53:46time when, when we fled, well, when we left China to go to Japan, uh,

53:51I booked economy classes for a red eye flight.

53:54And he was like, no, maybe we should upgrade to a business class so we

53:57can lay down sleep. Like, okay, that makes sense.

53:59That's, you know, so like I have those kinds of habits.

54:02So, uh, when you make money successively, like, you know, you, from what, from the

54:061 million, you become 10 million.

54:07You might want to buy some fancy cars from to a hundred million.

54:10You might want to buy, you know, some yacht, or something to a billion.

54:14Then you have, I didn't go through that stepwise process.

54:16I just went from like a relatively okay kind of thing to like, you're on

54:21the cover of Forbes. Yeah.

54:22So, um, and so I didn't develop quite a lot of those habits.

54:25What does it mean now?

54:27Now? I mean, depending on the day you're a deck, a billionaire or a centi

54:32billionaire, what does it all mean?

54:33I, it doesn't mean very much to me.

54:36I think money. Two things.

54:37Number one, you have to take care of yourself.

54:39You have to have food, shelter, you know.

54:41Which is a very minimal amount of money.

54:43Which is very minimal. Like, you don't need that much for that.

54:45People can confuse themselves and create all kinds of complexity, but it doesn't take much.

54:48It doesn't take much. So that I for sure have.

54:51So I have a very, I don't have a luxury life, but I have a

54:54very comfortable life, I think.

54:57And then the other. Sorry, what does that mean?

54:59If you look at my house, my house, like the living room water leaks every

55:03month or so because the house is too old.

55:06But that's the house that has, that's the right size for me right now.

55:10No, it's not. We'll just fix it whenever it leaks.

55:13So that still happens, like that happened a month ago.

55:16So like people think I live in a very fancy house, you know, there's other

55:19crazies. I live in a decent sized house, but you know, it kind of fits

55:22all my family members. But it's not a, it's an old house that I bought

55:26third or fourth hand. But it's in the right location.

55:29It works for you. It works for me.

55:30It's in the right location.

55:31It's functional. Things break once in a while, it's fine.

55:34Would you say it's because you're practical or is it just because you're just not

55:39moved by? I'm function driven.

55:42You're function driven. If it functions, I'm okay.

55:44I don't care about the fanciness.

55:45I don't care about style.

55:46I don't care about colors.

55:47I don't care about glittering gold.

55:50If it's functional, I'm okay.

55:51Right. So if it solves the problem, I'm good.

55:54Do you ever have bouts of insecurity?

55:59Uh, not really. I'm, I know my weaknesses.

56:02So I'm, and I learned to deal with it.

56:04So, uh, I'm not, I hope I'm not super arrogant.

56:08Uh, so I don't think I'm arrogant.

56:10I've only gotten to know you in the last couple of years.

56:12Yeah. I saw videos of you, I think it was in the late teens, early

56:162000s. And my immediate reaction, because that's always been my struggle, is sort of these

56:23bouts of insecurity or ego.

56:25I thought, man, this guy's really calm.

56:27Yeah. I'm calm. Yeah. So I described this one.

56:31You're very well regulated, very self -aware, it seems.

56:34Yeah. Other people's emotions may go like this, like happy, sad, happy.

56:37I'll feel happy, sad, happy, sad.

56:39But my amplitude is very moderated.

56:42It's narrower. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

56:44So it just allows you to manage in many ways.

56:47I mean, success is somewhat illusory.

56:49If you're like working on a problem, nobody knows the toil.

56:52Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody really wants to hear about the toil.

56:55They want to have a very simple way of pointing to something and say, oh,

56:58wow, look at what you have.

56:59But if you're working and you have no time to enjoy it, nobody understands that.

57:03Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you launch this thing, it's going bananas, but there were

57:08some hiccups. Yeah. Do you think that you got too addicted to the growth at

57:16any point? I wouldn't say I was addicted to the growth, but I was addicted

57:19to the work. Okay. The work was actually very satisfying, very rewarding.

57:23What was the average day for you?

57:25What were you trying to do?

57:26I was basically doing like 20 plus meetings a day, like scheduled calls or meetings

57:31and then plus other random stuff and then having to respond to people on Twitter

57:35and stuff. So, but it was very rewarding because there's a sense of fulfillment that

57:42it's very hard to describe.

57:43It's not the money. It's not the growth.

57:45Yeah. It's a, you know.

57:46So what was it? When you were running Binance, I don't know if you do

57:51this, but sometimes people fixate on the leading indicator.

57:56Like revenue is a lagging indicator, right?

57:57Revenue and profits are just, they're here.

57:59That's from six months ago, a year ago.

58:01Yeah. Manifest today. What was your leading indicators?

58:05What were the North Stars that you really cared about that said, this is the

58:08health of the system? Yeah.

58:09Yeah. I think it's really daily active users.

58:11It's not trading volume. It's not revenue.

58:13Why Dow versus those other things?

58:15I think as long as you keep helping, serving more users, then you're giving them

58:20value. So I believe a product is valuable when people want to use it.

58:25So the more people who want to use it, even if your revenue is zero,

58:28you have value. So any product that people use, the more people you use, the

58:33higher value, right? So that's kind of always my philosophy.

58:36Whereas you can optimize for revenue, you can optimize for profit short term, and you

58:43can lose the long term growth.

58:44But I believe long term, if you have a large number of people using your

58:46platform, that's where you create value, not just for yourself.

58:49You also create value for your users.

58:51People choose to use you because there's a value in using you, right?

58:54So that's kind of my North Star.

58:56And also knowing that, related to that was knowing that hundreds of millions of people

59:01are using us, we help them, right?

59:04So the way I view it, if they pay like a commission fee, then they're

59:07willing to pay it because we must have given them some higher value.

59:10The double -edged sword of the DAO is that some of those DAO are bad

59:18actors. Yep. When was the first inkling that you had that that may be a

59:24problem and that you have to take that seriously?

59:27It was like, I think - What does that first meeting look like where they're

59:29like, CZ have good news and bad news?

59:32Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's actually a very clear point.

59:34I think it was like Christmas Day, January 1st, or like, you know, New Year

59:38Day, January 1st, 2018. So this is like six, five months after, you know, we

59:42were kind of large, or five months after we started and we were number one

59:46exchange already. On that New Year's Eve, December 31st -ish, 2017, a U .S.

59:53Homeland Security guy reached out to me.

59:55His name, I think, is Joseph.

59:57I always remember his name was Patrick or Joseph.

1:00:00I'm not sure which one.

1:00:00Okay. He wrote an email, and then I got the email and said, like, well,

1:00:04he wants our help to help track some hackers who may have moved funds off

1:00:09the EtherDelta hack. EtherDelta was a decentralized exchange back in 2017.

1:00:13They got hacked. They went down.

1:00:15So this guy who works for the U .S.

1:00:17government emailed us, and I didn't know how to deal with it.

1:00:21Nobody already knows how to deal with law enforcement.

1:00:24So I, you know, got a couple guys to huddle together and say, well, how

1:00:28do we help this guy?

1:00:29And then we gave the information that he requested.

1:00:32We verified who, first of all, we had to verify who he was.

1:00:35And then afterwards, he thanked us.

1:00:38And then I said, hey, Joseph, can you recommend somebody that we could hire that

1:00:43can interface with law enforcement in the future?

1:00:45He recommended someone, but the guy was based in the U .S.

1:00:48And we don't have a U .S.

1:00:49entity. We couldn't hire anybody in the U .S.

1:00:51back then. So we kind of had to let that go.

1:00:53But that was the point.

1:00:54It was like New Year's Day.

1:00:57Where you were like, this is going to happen more.

1:00:59Obviously. Invariably. A lot of large numbers.

1:01:01Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the day when I realized, look, we need to have

1:01:05somebody who has experience working with law enforcement.

1:01:07And so what did you do?

1:01:08So we eventually hired more guys.

1:01:12Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Obviously, like you're not looking at the transactions.

1:01:15So you wouldn't know. But if we fast forward a little bit, the claims that

1:01:19then the U .S. government under President Biden made at you was essentially that people

1:01:28like Hamas or people like other organizations were using Binance and you didn't do enough.

1:01:33Yeah. So on this point, I may have some legal restrictions on what I can

1:01:37say and cannot say about, you know, the plea, et cetera.

1:01:40So I'm not a lawyer, but I try to stay very clear from that.

1:01:44But overall, though, I would just say the Biden administration overall is quite hostile to

1:01:48crypto. I mean, they openly announced war on crypto.

1:01:51Yeah. Right. So it's good to see this new item.

1:01:53administration changed 180 degrees. I think this is good for America.

1:01:57This is good for the world.

1:01:59So I think it was, I wouldn't blame the previous administration, but I think they

1:02:03just didn't understand it. Why do you think that they were so hostile to it?

1:02:06It's fear of the new.

1:02:08It's as simple as that.

1:02:10I think they, probably in their heads, there's some degree of, let's not disrupt the

1:02:15current financial system, the banks, whoever else.

1:02:19There's probably a lot of lobbying from those industries as well to them.

1:02:22So that kind of brainwash or affect the thinking, however you call it.

1:02:26So that's human nature. I mean, if you think about it, it's understandable.

1:02:30It's not ideal, but it's understandable.

1:02:32So you're running the exchange.

1:02:33Things are going well. From 2018, 2019, 2020, it's kind of like you're really coming

1:02:40into your own. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:02:42You eventually opened a U .S.

1:02:43entity. Yeah, in 2019, yeah.

1:02:45And why did you feel the need to do that?

1:02:47So 2019, there was some news about, no, U .S.

1:02:50governments basically, in my layman words, chasing BitMEX.

1:02:53There was some BitMEX in the news.

1:02:54There were some also Bitfinex stuff in the news.

1:02:57I think the U .S.

1:02:58government froze, at least the Poland government, froze like $600 to $800 million of their

1:03:03assets when their market cap was only like $4 billion.

1:03:07That's like a large chunk.

1:03:08And then they got sued later on by the U .S.

1:03:10government saying that they don't have enough reserves.

1:03:12So we saw those news and we're like, okay, well, the U .S.

1:03:15government is looking at this industry and we better register.

1:03:19And, you know, again, I asked my friends, many of them have legal backgrounds, and

1:03:24then they sort of a general consensus was, okay, we should operate in a registered

1:03:30fashion in the U .S.

1:03:31So this is 2019. So we registered Binance U .S.

1:03:35and it's a separate entity.

1:03:37It's a separate deployment. It's a separate matching engine, separate liquidity.

1:03:41So, and Binance U .S.

1:03:43has been regulated from day one, yeah.

1:03:452019, 2020, 2021, things are just generally working.

1:03:50Generally, generally, yeah. Then you start to see some of these other folks start to

1:03:56pick up steam. SBF and FTX start to really, tell me about that.

1:04:02How did you meet him?

1:04:03Because you ended up owning a lot of the equity.

1:04:06Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, well, we invested in them only 20 % as equity at

1:04:10some point, and then we exited a year later.

1:04:13Yeah. We didn't stay there for very long.

1:04:16I think I first met him in January 2019 in one of the Singapore conferences

1:04:20Binance organized. I think at the time, FTX did not exist.

1:04:26Sam Bankerman -Fried, SBF, was running Alameda, and they hosted an after party in the

1:04:32Singapore Aquarium on Sentosa. And they had divers in the fish tank, you know, holding

1:04:39a sign with, etc. So they were like a VIP client.

1:04:42They were like a large trader on Binance.

1:04:43So we're friendly to them.

1:04:45Yeah, right. Yeah. So that was in January 2019.

1:04:48And then a couple of months later, they came to us saying, like, they want

1:04:51to start a futures platform.

1:04:53They proposed a futures platform, some kind of a JV.

1:04:56I can't remember exactly, but I think they proposed 60 -40 in our favor.

1:05:01We want, I thought about countering, like, we had all the users.

1:05:04They don't have anything back then.

1:05:06I thought about counter proposing, like, 95 -5, but I don't think that was very

1:05:09polite. They're still, like, a trader.

1:05:11They're still, like, a VIP client.

1:05:12Yeah. So we declined that.

1:05:14We said no. Because they were a crucial part of the liquidity pool.

1:05:18Not a crucial part. They're a large trader, but, you know, Binance, they were new,

1:05:22too. It wasn't like they were there for, like, many years.

1:05:25Okay. They were only there for, like, you know, probably six months or a year.

1:05:28I don't know the exact dates.

1:05:31And then... Now, a little bit later, they came back with a better offer and

1:05:36said, look, in summer, they came back with a better offer.

1:05:40We still said no. And then in November, they came back and said, okay, look,

1:05:44we're going to offer you this really, really attractive offer.

1:05:46But then FTX was launched.

1:05:47At some volume, they said, look, we're going to basically give you 20 % at

1:05:51this price. And there was a swap of tokens, BNB versus FTT tokens.

1:05:56So we got some initial FTT tokens.

1:05:59At the time, BNB tokens are much more liquid.

1:06:02And FTT tokens are less liquid.

1:06:04So we've done that deal.

1:06:06And then almost as soon as we did that deal, I keep hearing from my

1:06:09friends, like, you know, SBF badmouthing us in the Washington circles in the U .S.,

1:06:13et cetera. I was like, come on.

1:06:15And then they also did some other stuff, which is kind of annoying.

1:06:19They pay five times salary to our VIP account managers that had access to our

1:06:27VIP database. And then so that girl goes working for, if we match that girl,

1:06:32then we have to 5X everybody.

1:06:34So it was like, okay, you go work for them.

1:06:36And then the day after the girl works for them, our VIP clients get called

1:06:40saying, look, are they going to get a better rate on FTX, et cetera.

1:06:43I'm like, so I called Sam and said, like, can you stop doing this?

1:06:46We're like, we're your shareholder.

1:06:48At the same time, he's like, look, CZ, can we do a one -to -one

1:06:52panel on a crypto event, right?

1:06:54So I'm fine. And we're an investor.

1:06:56We want to help promote.

1:06:58I actually want multiple exchanges to be successful in the industry because then we won't

1:07:03be the ones that get targeted all the time.

1:07:05Yeah. But there was always like, no, I always keep hearing there was some badmouthing,

1:07:09some other, this and that.

1:07:12So a year later, I think it was mid, early 2021, we said, and they

1:07:18were claiming to be like raising money at, you know, 32 billion valuations.

1:07:23We're like, well, why don't we exit?

1:07:26Actually, so in our investment clause, we had veto rights on any future rounds, right?

1:07:30So if we want to block them, we could.

1:07:32I didn't want to use that to block them.

1:07:34Oh, wow. So I was like, you know, even if, why don't we just exit

1:07:37and we can compete, right?

1:07:39So, and then we thought, we talked about exit.

1:07:43And then we exited, I think in, if I remember correctly, it was in July.

1:07:46The deal was finalized and the transfer was done in July, 2021.

1:07:50And this is like a full year and a half before they had issues.

1:07:54At the time, we didn't know.

1:07:56Right. Because there was some rumors that a lot of their issues started after you

1:08:01sold and they were somehow conjoined.

1:08:03I'm sure you've heard of that, but you can put all of that to bed.

1:08:07Yeah. So that's categorically not true.

1:08:09And also because of the competitive nature in the businesses, even though we're a shareholder,

1:08:13I never really, I never asked them for financial statements.

1:08:16Oh, wow. So I just, no, I just didn't ask for it.

1:08:18I'm a very passive investor.

1:08:20So when I invest, I don't get involved in their business.

1:08:23Yeah. And they also, they're slightly competitive.

1:08:25We have, we had a futures platform.

1:08:27They have a futures platform.

1:08:28So I try to stay, you know, let them do their thing.

1:08:31So post this, the thing with the FTX thing that most people talk about are

1:08:35a couple of things. One was the way in which the restitution happened was suboptimal

1:08:40to some of the holders of FTX.

1:08:43People who had cash money there.

1:08:46The other thing that people talk about is the value of some of these investments

1:08:51post. What do you think in the aftermath of all of this?

1:08:55It says anything at all about the industry or crypto in general or?

1:09:02Yeah. I don't understand the whole bankruptcy process, whether that's fair or not.

1:09:06I read a lot of different things online.

1:09:08Also, just to be transparent.

1:09:10There's an ongoing lawsuit between the state and us.

1:09:13They want to try to claw back some of the money that we got like

1:09:16a year and a half before.

1:09:18Right. So there's probably limited stuff I can comment on that.

1:09:21Yeah, but again, I'm not an expert there, but I did hear some complaints about,

1:09:25you know, some Chinese users are not eligible, et cetera, et cetera.

1:09:28But now from what I read is because of their appreciation of crypto, now in

1:09:33U .S. dollar terms, they have enough.

1:09:36Right. Even though if people held crypto back then, they probably have gotten more.

1:09:40I don't know what the deal is.

1:09:42When did things at Binance start to get complicated for you?

1:09:48You mean with the U .S.

1:09:49governments, right? Yeah. For me, like they started asking for information, the information requests, which

1:09:55we always comply, right? So that was like 2021, 2022 -ish.

1:10:00And it was like late 2022, it was getting more hostile.

1:10:05And then I think early 2023 was more clear that they were making, we either

1:10:11reach a deal of some kind or they're going to indict us or stuff like

1:10:14that. There was like, it became negotiations.

1:10:17How do you deal with that as a person?

1:10:18Do you think, I can't believe this is happening?

1:10:20Like when you're in this meeting and your lawyers or whoever it is are telling

1:10:23you, hey, CZ, I think there's going to be an indictment.

1:10:27How does that meeting go?

1:10:28So number one, I'm not a legal background, so I have to rely on a

1:10:32lot of other people's advice.

1:10:33That's generally the harder part for me because I don't have experience there.

1:10:37Like no one has experience going through this.

1:10:39You go through this once, you never want to touch it again, right?

1:10:42So no one really on the receiving end have any experience.

1:10:46You have a bunch of lawyers and the lawyers are, the lawyers I think are

1:10:50good, but how you organize lawyers actually is quite tricky.

1:10:53If you hire a bunch of expensive lawyers, they all have different specialties and they

1:10:57all have different opinions. And they all want to seem like the smartest person that's

1:11:00driving the decision. And also they all want to take a lot of time to

1:11:03analyze. They get paid by more time they spend.

1:11:06I'm not saying that they're unethical.

1:11:07They want to do a really good job.

1:11:09But then they go in all kinds of different tangents.

1:11:12So you get dragged in a lot of different places.

1:11:14That was the most troublesome part for me.

1:11:16If somebody told me like, these are the three things you got to focus on,

1:11:19this strategy. We also didn't have a strong legal team.

1:11:24Our team is young. Our legal team didn't have this type of experience dealing with

1:11:30this type of issues. So that was always tricky.

1:11:34But I kind of look at, when I come, by the way, where was the

1:11:37entire team at this point?

1:11:39Still? We're all spread out.

1:11:40Now you're everywhere. Now we're everywhere.

1:11:42We're spread out. And I think 2023, I was in Dubai.

1:11:46I was in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, splitting time.

1:11:49So yeah, it was very stressful.

1:11:51But the way I deal with stress is I just look at the best and

1:11:54worst case scenarios. Right? So I'm going to ask the team, what's the best case

1:11:58scenario? Okay, you pay a fine, you get a, you know, you get a DPA

1:12:02or then this thing's over.

1:12:04Then, okay, so that's the best case.

1:12:06And then the worst case is, okay, so they were going to ask you to,

1:12:09they're going to try to put you in jail.

1:12:11Stuff like that. Was that the worst case though?

1:12:13Because at the time, it seemed like the fact pattern was folks would get some

1:12:17sort of probation or... That would be the worst, worst case.

1:12:20But also, yeah, so before me, nobody got put in jail.

1:12:23But they could ask for it.

1:12:25Yeah, right, right, right. There's actually another worst case, which is you fight it.

1:12:29And then you're, if you can't agree on a term, you fight it and you

1:12:34stay in the UAE, which is a non -extradition country.

1:12:37And, you know, and now you have citizenship.

1:12:39And so they, there's almost a zero chance you'll get extradited.

1:12:43But then your travel is going to be limited.

1:12:44Anytime you, if you cross to a different country, even if that country is a

1:12:48non -extradition country, country, there can still be a chance that there's a deal being

1:12:51made, right? It's kind of leaving fear.

1:12:53Plus, it also creates complexity, just that government to government level, if folks are allies

1:12:58and it just creates a lot of noise.

1:13:00It creates a lot of noise.

1:13:01It also creates a lot of pressure for the UAE government, potentially.

1:13:04I don't want to trouble people who gave me a citizenship.

1:13:07I don't want to be the trouble causer.

1:13:09Right. But, you know, the worst case scenario is like, you know, you don't go

1:13:15there, they indict you, and then they put you on the red notice list.

1:13:18Stuff like that, right? So those are potential possibilities.

1:13:23So how did you resolve it?

1:13:25It took like, the negotiations was basically daily calls with like 12, 20 lawyers on

1:13:30call for like more than a year.

1:13:33More than a year? More than a year.

1:13:35Back and forth with the President Biden DOJ.

1:13:37The President Biden DOJ. And the most common thing I hear from my lawyers is,

1:13:41we've never seen them this hostile on a case like this.

1:13:45Right? We have never seen this before.

1:13:47This is, like, that's the most common phrase I've heard.

1:13:49At some point, you just become desensitized to it, or do you keep internalizing it,

1:13:53personalizing it? Do you think, why is this happening to me?

1:13:56No resentment, or just more, how did you deal with it?

1:13:59I'm just... It takes successive steps, and there were a couple steps which are really

1:14:03hard to take. The step where you say, look, in the negotiations, right, they come

1:14:08to a few points where you say, look, we're just going to have to say

1:14:10no. And it's like, look, we just can't agree to that deal.

1:14:14They wouldn't back off, and I couldn't agree to that deal.

1:14:16So I just have to say no.

1:14:18And then there was a couple weeks that elapsed.

1:14:20You don't know what's going to happen.

1:14:22Purgatory. So you could get indicted.

1:14:24They can indict you at any moment.

1:14:25Right? So that's their choice.

1:14:27You already said no to that.

1:14:30There were, like, a couple periods like that.

1:14:32And then in those couple weeks, you're mentally thinking, okay, I can't travel anywhere.

1:14:38So I might have to get used to this life of just living in one

1:14:42country and be very careful, et cetera.

1:14:44There might be some sealed indictment that's not public at any border that you cross.

1:14:50And interestingly, they come back after two weeks and they say, okay, well, can you

1:14:53negotiate again? And then you're like, what do you think is happening over there?

1:14:57Well, no, I think that's a, now looking back, that's a very useful negotiation tactic.

1:15:03For me, for anybody in my situation.

1:15:05The silence. Yeah, the silence.

1:15:07For anybody who's going through this on the receiving end, you only go through this

1:15:11once. You're not experienced. This is your life.

1:15:13I mean, there could be a sealed red notice against you.

1:15:16And this is the life they have to deal with going forever.

1:15:19And they don't, like, these things can stay there for, like, decades.

1:15:23For them, they do this every day.

1:15:25This is, like, this is their daily job, right?

1:15:27So, and, but they, I think they're smart enough that they know two weeks is

1:15:30about the optimum time. Because longer than that, you really get used to it.

1:15:34And when they come back to negotiate, you're going to say no.

1:15:36Right? It's like, look, I'm already used to this.

1:15:38So, if you leave the guy in the situation for too long.

1:15:40Interesting. So, they're very skilled in this type of mental work.

1:15:46Right. Whereas, yeah, so there were some really tough periods.

1:15:49And for this type of stuff, you don't get used to it.

1:15:53It's mentally challenging. How did you get yourself to a place to agree to the

1:15:58final terms? After a lot of negotiations, we're like, okay, basically said, okay, I evaluated

1:16:04a single, single charge of a banking secrecy evaluation, which is a registration failure, which

1:16:08is a federal crime. It's serious.

1:16:10But no one went to jail for this in history.

1:16:14And there's no, there's no...

1:16:16Sorry, that charge, that's more technical.

1:16:18How does that relate to the perception of what was in the media, at least

1:16:23in America, which was money laundering and aiding and abetting?

1:16:27folks and not doing KYC and not doing AML versus the actual charge, are those

1:16:32two things connected and they're equal, or these are sort of disjoint perception versus the

1:16:37actual specifics? Sure. I can try to explain my understanding.

1:16:40I'm not a lawyer, so I want to make a small disclaimer here.

1:16:42This is my layman understanding.

1:16:44Could be wrong. There's a first, my understanding is there's a first level is like

1:16:48banking secrecy act violation, which is a failure to register.

1:16:51Basically, you serviced, we serviced US users without register as a financial services company in

1:16:55the US. So that's a you thing.

1:16:57That has nothing to do with the user themselves doing anything nefarious or bad.

1:17:00You did not register with the proper authorities to say, I'm going to take on

1:17:04US customers. So that's number one, right?

1:17:06So that's the kind of bait layer.

1:17:09Okay. On top of that, you can say, look, you didn't have adequate KYC AML

1:17:12procedures. So all your procedures are not strong enough.

1:17:18So that's another level. Even if you're not registered, you're also supposed to have KYC,

1:17:24et cetera, AML procedures. And those things are not, those things, people think that's a

1:17:29black and white thing. In reality, it's not.

1:17:32It's how well you do it.

1:17:33Which systems do you use?

1:17:35How do you do risk?

1:17:36How many people do you have?

1:17:37What's your standard operating procedures?

1:17:38Yeah. Yeah. So there's actually a lot of details.

1:17:41And then quite a bit above that, in my understanding, is if you have somehow

1:17:45known and facilitated bad transactions.

1:17:49So you can have a weak AML program and that didn't catch all the bad

1:17:53players, but you don't know that.

1:17:55Right. So it's not like you're intentionally facilitating that.

1:17:57It's not robust. It's not robust.

1:17:59It's relatively naive, but it's there.

1:18:01Yeah. Versus this is, I know this to be bad, and I'm enabling it to

1:18:06happen regardless. Yeah. Right. And there's a next level, which you're personally handling the transactions.

1:18:11Right. Right. So which is, you know, Charlie Schramm handled transactions for Silk Road, for

1:18:16Ross, right? So that's how, no.

1:18:18So there's different levels. I don't handle any transactions at all myself.

1:18:23That's just not my thing.

1:18:24I just don't do it.

1:18:24And so they said, okay, Binance, number one, we didn't register.

1:18:28KYC AML is weak. So those are things we can find.

1:18:32We can agree on that.

1:18:33Layer one, layer two. Yeah.

1:18:34So we can agree on that.

1:18:35For those single charges, without any other additional stuff, no one ever went to jail

1:18:39in U .S. history, even till today.

1:18:41Right. So, and then the government, we couldn't agree on the two additional.

1:18:46The government wanted to add two additional charges.

1:18:48They call it enhancements. The three and four.

1:18:50The three and four. They said, somehow, I've personally facilitated, but they couldn't provide any

1:18:53evidence. They were trying to lean on the company.

1:18:56Somehow, something happened in the company, you know, et cetera.

1:18:58They were trying to use.

1:18:59Were they able to point to a transaction or something?

1:19:01No, they wasn't. So these two enhancements, the court outright rejected.

1:19:05But we decided to, before I went to the U .S., we said, we agreed

1:19:08that we will argue that in court.

1:19:10Right. And also based on, I don't want to get into the sort of privileged

1:19:14conversations, but like the understanding I went, before I went, was no one went to

1:19:18jail. The worst guy who got punished was Arthur Hayes of BitMax.

1:19:22He got six months of home confinement for BitMax.

1:19:26And when I look at that case, he had much more direct interactions with clients,

1:19:31whereas I had much less direction.

1:19:34Basically, I don't deal with clients at Binance.

1:19:37I deal with users on Twitter, but not like, you know, Binance backend kind of

1:19:40thing. So I felt pretty confident that, you know, we should be in a fairly

1:19:44strong position and that's the best thing forward.

1:19:46Right. So you're like, we agree with this.

1:19:48We agree with this. We're going to really debate this in court, layers three and

1:19:52four. I'm going to come to the U .S.

1:19:53Yeah. And we're going to hash it out in court.

1:19:56Yeah. So you land in America.

1:19:58Yeah. You go into the courtroom.

1:19:59Yeah. You start this process.

1:20:01What happens? So, yeah, there was quite a lot of details there.

1:20:04There was quite a lot of details there.

1:20:05There was quite a lot of details there.

1:20:05First of all, the first, like the first day you go and plea, right?

1:20:09So the plea, the agreement are already like debated.

1:20:11By the way, sorry, you're staying in a hotel?

1:20:14I was staying in a hotel, yeah.

1:20:15I was staying in a hotel in downtown Seattle.

1:20:18Is your family with you or no?

1:20:19My family went to join, well, not my kids, but my sister and my mom

1:20:25went to join me. I didn't want my kids to go, they have school.

1:20:30And then my partner has a business to run.

1:20:32I was already like no longer running the business.

1:20:34So I didn't want to drag her away from that.

1:20:39So my sister, my mom, and my older kids were with me.

1:20:45And then, yeah, so that's, and then I was staying in a hotel.

1:20:50And then the next morning, going to court.

1:20:52Going to court, the first part of the process is the plea, right?

1:20:55The judge asked you, do you understand this paragraph, this paragraph, this paragraph?

1:20:58Just say yes, yes, yes.

1:21:00The paragraphs were already like negotiated out of the wazoo by the multiple Sony lawyers.

1:21:05Over -lawyered. Over -lawyered. And you, so, you know, and then the lawyers debate about,

1:21:13you know, the, they didn't, the first case after the plea, they didn't debate about

1:21:18the charge. They debated about my bail, my bail condition, right?

1:21:22So I got a post bail.

1:21:25My lawyers argued I should be allowed to go back to UAE waiting for the

1:21:28sentence three months later. The government argued that I may not come back.

1:21:33So they want me to stay in the U .S.

1:21:35And they said they will not restrict me in my movement in the U .S.

1:21:39because I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't possess any harm to

1:21:42the community. They argued about that.

1:21:45The magistrate judge, the first judge approved me leaving the U .S.

1:21:49to go back to the UAE for three months, which would, which would have been

1:21:52great. And then the, the, the government appealed that.

1:21:55My lawyer says like in his 40 years, he'd never seen an appeal on a

1:21:59bail condition. Wow. And then he said, well, this guy is a tone deaf because

1:22:03there was, this will piss off the courts, which will actually be my favor.

1:22:07And guess what? Two weeks later, the court ruled in the government's favor and I

1:22:11was kept in the U .S.

1:22:12So I was kept away from home for three months.

1:22:15When three months came, I was free to travel in the U .S.

1:22:18So I was like, well, I'm stuck in the U .S.

1:22:19So might as well travel.

1:22:21I had a sister, my sister have a place in the U .S.

1:22:23So I was staying with my sister for a bit of the time.

1:22:25And then I was traveling just cool, just to try to keep myself cool, chill.

1:22:30All right. And then three months later, the government requests for another three months extension.

1:22:35So now I have to stay in the U .S.

1:22:36for another three months longer waiting for.

1:22:38Now were your kids at this point coming to see you at least so that

1:22:40they could come see you?

1:22:41No, I didn't ask them to come and see me.

1:22:44So you didn't see them for six months?

1:22:45Yeah. Well, actually, I didn't see them for a year.

1:22:48Yeah. And then so that government asked for another three months extension.

1:22:52Then on April 30th, 2024, that's my court date.

1:22:56And then a week before that is when both sides submit their request, the government

1:23:01requests for 36 months, which is twice the maximum sentencing guideline for the worst case

1:23:07scenario for me, right? So the court said, like, then this court had never seen

1:23:12a government asking the court to ignore the sentencing guideline.

1:23:15Did you find that out for the first time sitting there in the court?

1:23:19No, just a week before the court because the government had to make the submission.

1:23:22There's a written submission before.

1:23:24How did you react to that?

1:23:25Well, not good, right? So, and then my lawyers also, my lawyer tone changed.

1:23:31Before they said, oh, you can probably get home.

1:23:33They said, like, the judge most likely is going to split the baby.

1:23:36So if the government is asking for 36 months, you're asking for probation.

1:23:40The government most likely picks up a number in between, right?

1:23:43So, uh. I was like, okay, that's not good.

1:23:45Wow. Yeah. And also five days before my sentencing, on April 25th, Senator Elizabeth Warren

1:23:52went on TV to declare war on crypto again.

1:23:56So this is like five days before my sentencing.

1:23:59And she wrote an open letter to the DOJ saying all this stuff, which is

1:24:05actually most of it is not correct.

1:24:09So, yeah, so then that's, and April 30th, I got sentenced, and then the judge

1:24:14said a bunch of really good things about me.

1:24:17I have all the excerpts in the book.

1:24:19And then at some point the judge says, but, and then you're like, okay, that's

1:24:23not good. Wow. Yeah. And then I got four months.

1:24:25That's how they start the sentencing.

1:24:27They're like, he's telling you all the good things.

1:24:30And then he gets to the but, and you're like, oh, my God.

1:24:33Pretty much, pretty much, yeah.

1:24:34Wow. Yeah. So the lawyers still debate, and the sentencing on the April 30th, is

1:24:39the lawyers debate in court about, no, this, that's when the two headsets got rejected

1:24:44by the court. Like my lawyers argue like, no, this and that, this, I never

1:24:49touched any of the transactions.

1:24:50I'm not aware. This thing's just layers three and four of the accusations got thrown

1:24:54out. Yeah, so, and then they argue about, you know, what the recommended sentencing should

1:25:01be. My lawyers, of course, argued for either probation or home confinement at the worst

1:25:06case, right? And then the government argued, like, this guy's a really bad guy.

1:25:12You know, this case is really big, and we should punish him really, really hard

1:25:16with double the punishment of any legally recommended punishment, 36 months.

1:25:22So the judge landed at four.

1:25:24How did you deal with that?

1:25:26It was difficult at the beginning, right?

1:25:29It wasn't a four month.

1:25:30It was, am I going to be safe?

1:25:32Yeah. Right? So if, like, if you tell me, like, look, I'm going to go

1:25:36to this place for four months, I'm guaranteed to be safe, I'll be okay.

1:25:40I'll be like, okay, fine, I'll just deal with it.

1:25:42But the uncertain part is, like, also, right after the sentencing, a bunch of the

1:25:49big media wrote that I'm going to be the richest person to ever go to

1:25:53U .S. prison. And then my lawyers plus prison consultants, they say, well, given all

1:26:00this coverage. What is a prison consultant?

1:26:02That's a whole industry of some guy who advised you what prison is like and

1:26:07give you advice and stuff like that.

1:26:08How to live, how to.

1:26:09But, yeah, so that's a whole big industry that's growing because of the prison population

1:26:14is growing in the U .S.

1:26:15So anyway, so the prison consultants, like, given the high profile coverage, you are probably

1:26:21the biggest target for potential extortion in prison.

1:26:25So your safety is going to be an issue.

1:26:28So that's the thing I was worried about then.

1:26:30I was like, so how do I deal?

1:26:33Like, you know, you go in and you don't have anything, right?

1:26:37Like, how do you, how do I make sure that I stay safe?

1:26:42That's like the top consideration, right?

1:26:44So you're really thinking about how do you do that?

1:26:47So, well, you know, you talk to a lot of people who, prison consultants are

1:26:51usually like ex -guards, ex -wardens.

1:26:54There's another group of guys who, people who have been to, but those guys are

1:26:58in prison, but they are working there.

1:26:59They're not inmates. There's another group of guys who've been into prison, prison.

1:27:03Like, no, they, they were there for, like, as an inmate.

1:27:05So you talk to a lot of those guys.

1:27:07And then you figure out what prison is like.

1:27:10Do you make friends? Do you not make friends?

1:27:12You get advice on like, you know, if somebody comes up to you on the

1:27:15first day and they're really, really friendly, don't take anything from them because now they

1:27:18will ask for 10 times more favor back later on.

1:27:21If you don't, then they, you know.

1:27:22diabetes and stuff like that.

1:27:24So I got a lot of different advice, but at the end of the day,

1:27:27you just got to go and face it, right?

1:27:28So what I learned is actually the U .S.

1:27:32prison system is so vast, two million people stay in U .S.

1:27:35prison. The U .S. government spends per annum more on prison than on education or

1:27:40schools, right? So that's how big the U .S.

1:27:44prison population is. And there's 50 states and every state has a different system.

1:27:51There's state prisons, there's federal prisons, and each one is like a mini city.

1:27:55Like the prison I went in has 2 ,200 inmates.

1:28:00It's like a small city.

1:28:02And they each have their own rules, et cetera.

1:28:04So I got some advice, but many of the advice are not really useful.

1:28:07But when you go in, you just got to deal with it.

1:28:10So you get sentenced on April 30th, you said?

1:28:12Yeah. And when do you start?

1:28:14So when you get sentenced, we don't know which prison you're going to.

1:28:17The court makes two recommendations.

1:28:19And then usually you will receive a letter.

1:28:24But you can be in the hotel or doing whatever, and then you have to

1:28:27check in basically on some date, like you have to go.

1:28:30So in my case, the judge ruled that I don't need supervision, which is very

1:28:34unique. Then I don't have to check in.

1:28:37So I just have to sit, I just have to wait for a letter that

1:28:40comes to my sister's place, which is the address I registered with the court.

1:28:44In fact, the government, the DOJ, in their request, they asked me to be pre

1:28:49-mended, meaning that I'll be taken away in handcuffs.

1:28:52I think they really wanted that photo for PR reasons.

1:28:55But the judge said, look, he's not a risk.

1:28:58He's not a flight risk.

1:28:59He's not a risk to society.

1:29:00I'm not going to do that.

1:29:02In fact, the judge added one sentence that he does not need supervision, which is

1:29:06actually a very interesting legal clause I'll learn later.

1:29:09So this is why when I finish my sentence, I don't have probation.

1:29:12There's no parole. I don't need supervision.

1:29:14Oh, wow. So there's some really interesting stuff, well, interesting stuff that you learn.

1:29:19How was that period for you?

1:29:22Did anything bad happen or was it?

1:29:24Luckily, nothing too bad happened.

1:29:27It's a really bad experience overall, but nothing like no physical harm.

1:29:31There's no fights. There's no real extortion.

1:29:35What I found, like, so my prison consultants tell me, like, no, when you go

1:29:39in, don't join any gang.

1:29:40Stay to yourself. Just, you know, just stay to yourself.

1:29:44Be quiet. Stay out of sight.

1:29:46Right. The minute I walked into the prison gate, the guard says, well, you're going

1:29:50to need some protection here.

1:29:51I hear the Pacific Islanders are hiring, so you might want to join them.

1:29:55Like, that's, like, this is literally, like, the minute I walked through the gate, one

1:30:00guard was saying this to me.

1:30:02Wow. I was like, what does that mean?

1:30:05Right. And then, you know, after the whole day, the first day was, like, the

1:30:09first day is putting, like, they take you through so many processes, you strip search.

1:30:13I talked about CNBC, like, you know, they strip search you.

1:30:17And then you move to your unit, which is, like, you know, 200 inmates there.

1:30:22It's, like, three rows of cells, 20 cells each facing each other, three floors, and

1:30:27there's a comment area in the bottom.

1:30:29And there's, like, 200 macho guys looking at you, and, you know, you walk into

1:30:33a cell, and then, but what I actually found out is they organize prisons by

1:30:38race, so by ethnicity. They group, so if you are a Chinese dude, they group

1:30:44you with the Chinese dudes.

1:30:45And if you're, like, a white guy, they group you with white guys, black dudes

1:30:48group with the Mexican, Spanish guys, no, they put them in one group.

1:30:53This actually does avoid a lot of conflicts.

1:30:55You are more likely to get along with people of your own ethnicity in terms

1:30:59of culture, customs. You are more likely to get along with them.

1:31:01there was one or two Arab guys they pray they have a different schedule so

1:31:10they put you in groups by ethnicity and the guards actually the prison encourages because

1:31:15it reduces fighting and once you're in a group if you have a problem with

1:31:21somebody else in some other group there's a group rep and the rep will talk

1:31:24about it there's like a hierarchy like union reps kind of like union reps and

1:31:31then they come together and they hash out yeah they say look stand down we've

1:31:35worked through it so there's a system to it but I didn't know any of

1:31:40this so I walk in and then this half Asian looking dude comes to me

1:31:46and says look my name is Chino welcome to our group he says car, welcome

1:31:51to our car I was like what should I shake his hand, should I not

1:31:55am I joining this gang it's crazy yeah and this guy is a Filipino -German

1:32:01mix there's not enough Asians so they kind of group anything that's kind of Asian

1:32:05and they also group the Native Americans plus Pacific Islanders like the Hawaiians into the

1:32:11same group so our group only has six people out of this 200 people and

1:32:16I was sent to a low security prison I should be eligible for a minimum

1:32:20security prison which is one level lower where most of the white collar crimes go

1:32:25but because I'm not a U .S.

1:32:27citizen they put me into a low which is where all the drug laws are

1:32:31so wow yeah so it's a crazy experience I have quite a lot quite a

1:32:37lot of details about this part in my upcoming book what was the first thing

1:32:40you did when you got up?

1:32:41a good shower a good meal when you first get so the shower is like

1:32:46literally like you know box this big this is like a this is like a

1:32:52cowboy bar door like that covers the middle part they can see your legs and

1:32:54see your head but it's hard to take a shower without touching the wall so

1:33:00when you get out of prison the first time it's like taking a shower you

1:33:03no longer need to touch the shower wall that's like a luxury that's a luxury

1:33:07and also there's very limited fruits very limited protein like proper protein there's a lot

1:33:16of carbs a lot of like you know bread flowers fried stuff very little veggies

1:33:23very little protein very little fruits I haven't seen a whole fruit for like months

1:33:28when I saw when I got out and saw like a plate of fruit I

1:33:32was like wow that's a luxury I haven't seen for a few months wow did

1:33:36you immediately just go back to the UAE?

1:33:37yeah yeah when I left prison it took me about 26 minutes from leaving the

1:33:44the prison door to getting on the airplane and flying out what were you thinking?

1:33:48were you saying to yourself I understand where they were coming from and I was

1:33:54at least vindicated on the parts that I felt were overreach I can see where

1:33:59they were coming from with these first two things did you say that to yourself

1:34:03or did you say this was a total railroad and this is completely unfair and

1:34:10how did this happen to me?

1:34:12why did this happen to me?

1:34:13what were you saying to yourself?

1:34:14I have some restrictions on some on what I can say about the agreement the

1:34:18plea etc so I I'm just talking emotionally emotionally I just want to be I

1:34:23just want it to be over with and remember that when I first got out

1:34:27this is still the Biden administration the election has not happened and it wasn't clear

1:34:33who's going to win it wasn't clear the US policy is still the same you

1:34:37went in when? I went in on May 3rd I think it's 2024.

1:34:41And you got out four months later.

1:34:43September. September 27th is the day I fully got out.

1:34:46The election was in November, right?

1:34:49And by the way, sorry, at that point, you had been in America for a

1:34:51year. You hadn't seen your kids in a year.

1:34:53Yeah, yeah. So at that point, I just want this whole thing to be over

1:34:57with. And I thought they will continue.

1:34:59Well, I thought if the policies continue, then it will still be anti -crypto policies.

1:35:05Well, just whatever. We'll just survive however we survive.

1:35:09So, yeah, so that was kind of the mentality.

1:35:12So when you get back, had you come to terms as well with the fact

1:35:16that you couldn't run Binance per se and that that was part of the plea?

1:35:21Yeah, so I'm actually okay with that.

1:35:23Stepping down was really, really hard.

1:35:25I actually cried out of it.

1:35:27And the only other time I really cried was like, you know, when my father

1:35:30passed away a few years ago.

1:35:33But after a few, after coming back, you know, I was actually quite happy not

1:35:38to run Binance. I have a lot more free time.

1:35:41And then if I stepped on myself, people would say, hey, this guy ran out

1:35:44of stamina. But now I can't run Binance.

1:35:47So it's not my fault.

1:35:49It's not your problem. It's not my choice.

1:35:51Right. But after a while, I was like, you know, there are other very useful,

1:35:56meaningful things I can do with my life.

1:35:59I think overall, I'm in a very fortunate position, right?

1:36:03I have resources. I have enough money to do whatever I want to do in

1:36:07terms of enabling projects and businesses, etc.

1:36:10Including like, you know, Giggle Academy, free education, stuff like that.

1:36:13Yeah, I want to talk about that in AI.

1:36:15Yeah, yeah. But before I do that, let's just do a little bit of the

1:36:17final coda here. Tell me about the process to start getting a pardon and getting

1:36:22it and what you had to do.

1:36:25Yeah, so on the pardon, I don't think anybody knows what the pardon process is.

1:36:31It doesn't seem like there's a process.

1:36:33Like, I don't even know what the process is.

1:36:34So what the process is, you find a lawyer who writes your petition, who put

1:36:38all the arguments, why you should be pardoned, why, you know, you were overly prosecuted,

1:36:43etc., etc., right? And why are you a good person?

1:36:46And a pardon, what is it for?

1:36:47Is it effectively to recognize over -prosecution?

1:36:51No, pardon should you erase everything you had before.

1:36:55So you're now a normal person.

1:36:56But the reason to be considered for it can be anything.

1:36:59It can be anything. It's really just the discretion of the president reading the petition.

1:37:03I think so. Well, based on my understanding, based on my understanding is the Constitution

1:37:09grants the U .S. government, the U .S.

1:37:11president to give pardon. And that's about as much detail as it says, I think.

1:37:17Right, okay. And then how he does it, so it's really about the social norms

1:37:21in that moment and then how he interprets those social norms.

1:37:24Yeah, and then, you know, historically, most presidents pardoned on the last day, right?

1:37:29Exactly. And then Biden, I think, started pardoning in between.

1:37:34And he also did pre -pardons.

1:37:36Which is a bit new, which is new and also crazy.

1:37:39Well, it was very new, yeah.

1:37:40It was largely around COVID for that, but yeah, that really caught a lot of

1:37:45people. And he also pre -pardoned his son for some period.

1:37:49That's right. Biden - It wasn't just the COVID stuff.

1:37:51It wasn't just the COVID stuff.

1:37:52It was like a period where nobody, where there was a period of time where

1:37:55nobody even talked about. That's right.

1:37:57It was like, why do we need it?

1:37:58That's right. But anyway, so the process, I believe is, there's no process that the

1:38:02president can do whatever they want.

1:38:04And then, so you assume that petition and then you wait.

1:38:08And then there is a pardon star in the White House.

1:38:12I think her name is Alice Johnson.

1:38:14She also went to prison for many years.

1:38:16She wrote a really nice book.

1:38:18which I read. But your lawyers, you know, your pinker say, you need a status

1:38:22update. You need a status update.

1:38:24There's no, no, no. And then suddenly it happened.

1:38:27So that's kind of my, the extent I know about the pardon process.

1:38:33I don't think anybody knows.

1:38:34I don't think there's a fixed process.

1:38:35I don't think anybody knows what that is.

1:38:37The question that some people can kind of jump to is they think, what must

1:38:40CZ have done to try to get it?

1:38:42Do you want to put that to bed?

1:38:44Well, I didn't do much.

1:38:45I didn't do anything. And then, but I think, look, without a pardon, it's quite

1:38:50hard for Binance to enter the U .S.

1:38:52in a proper way. Because you're the UBO.

1:38:55I'm the UBO. Yeah. So I'm the UBO of Binance and Binance U .S., right?

1:39:00Without a pardon, Binance is severely limited to do stuff in the U .S.

1:39:05If U .S. wants to become the capital of crypto in the world, you cannot

1:39:09not have the largest player.

1:39:11You cannot have U .S.

1:39:13people not be able to access the largest liquidity pool in crypto.

1:39:16And also, we're also one of the largest crypto ecosystems.

1:39:20So I think my guess would be that, look, the president is a pro -crypto

1:39:26president. You obviously know. He's had his own issues, like the debanking.

1:39:32Exactly. Where he's felt what it feels like to be targeted.

1:39:35Not only debanking, he got 34 criminal charges.

1:39:38Yeah. Right? That as well.

1:39:40And he got, like one of the, I don't know all the other charges, but.

1:39:42That as well. When I was in prison, I saw on the prison TV that

1:39:45he got 34 criminal charges.

1:39:47That's right. And one of the charges was he brought some document to his bathroom

1:39:50to read. That's right. That's crazy.

1:39:52Right? So I think the fact that he went through that deal, the Biden DOJ,

1:39:56would probably help me a lot to get the pardon because he was sympathized.

1:39:59He knows how aggressive that DOJ was.

1:40:03Right? So that probably helped me in some way.

1:40:06So how do you spend your time now?

1:40:07I'm still getting pretty busy now.

1:40:08So I do Giggle Academy, you know, this free education platform.

1:40:12I consult with many governments to help them to put in so sound crypto regulatory

1:40:18policies. I get involved on the investment side.

1:40:21We invest in the blockchain, AI, biotech.

1:40:25I'm a very active team doing investments.

1:40:29And then - This is within Binance or outside of Binance?

1:40:31This is outside of Binance.

1:40:31This is part of EasyLabs.

1:40:33And then I also help, like mentor, coach a few guys in the, a few

1:40:36funders in the BNB chain ecosystem, et cetera.

1:40:39So being in all of those things, I'm actually pretty busy.

1:40:42Tell me about Giggle Academy.

1:40:43So I thought, you know, it's possible to develop, fully digitize all education content.

1:40:49And why is that important?

1:40:51There's some numbers. I think 700 to 800 million adults do not are illiterate.

1:40:58Two or two thirds of them are women.

1:40:59And on top of that, there's about 500 million kids who are not in school.

1:41:03So if you add all of that up, that's like 1 .2 billion people who

1:41:06are not educated. 12, 13 % of the world population.

1:41:11Yeah. And these are all in really poor areas.

1:41:15There's just no schools around or they just couldn't afford to go to school.

1:41:18And the schools are not very good today either.

1:41:21The schools are, you know, the schools average you out.

1:41:24You have a classroom. How is the software designed?

1:41:28So it's just an app on a phone or a phone or a tablet.

1:41:32It's just an app. I believe that we have enough technology with, you know, gaming

1:41:35understanding of human psychology with AI.

1:41:38A single app can deliver all the education content you need.

1:41:41And we can do that for free.

1:41:43Have you looked at versions of this like Alpha School?

1:41:46And do you have any opinions on that?

1:41:47Yes, yes. I think Alpha School is great.

1:41:49Alpha School is really, really good.

1:41:51But, you know, it's high cost.

1:41:53High cost. All right. So it's...

1:41:57I think Joe's software is called TimeBack.

1:42:00I think that's what it's called.

1:42:01Have you had a chance to see?

1:42:03I have not played with a lot.

1:42:05I did meet some of the funders there and some of the key executives there.

1:42:10They solve a very hard problem of making the existing education better, where I solve

1:42:15the other end of the problem, making the education accessible, hopefully better later.

1:42:20And so your goal would be that this is widely proliferated.

1:42:25Are there schools in your view of how Giggle works?

1:42:28No, I actually don't want to do schools.

1:42:30I want everyone to learn from one app.

1:42:33The software is very reward -oriented.

1:42:35Yeah. Badges. Yeah, yeah. I'm just going to ask the obvious question.

1:42:40When I looked at it, I was like, well, badges is like a trail of

1:42:44breadcrumbs to tokenize and earn and payments.

1:42:48Am I just making this up?

1:42:50No. So I thought really hard about this, but I will for a very long

1:42:54time resist issuing a token on Giggle Academy.

1:42:57This is pros and cons.

1:42:58When you issue a token, you can do the rewards, you can learn to earn.

1:43:02Learn to earn, exactly. You can do a bunch of stuff.

1:43:05You can incentivize teachers. You can create content.

1:43:08Yeah. That's good. But for me, I want to avoid the token because of me.

1:43:15Right? Because if I do a token, everyone wants to buy the token.

1:43:18And everyone on the platform - People want to speculate on the token.

1:43:20People want to speculate on the token.

1:43:22Then I won't be able to tell these people.

1:43:24Are they real kids learning?

1:43:25Or are they just farmers that are trying to farm the token?

1:43:28Yeah. I want to - If I issue a token, if Giggle issues a token,

1:43:32everyone's going to - I have to be honest.

1:43:33I think Giggle sounds really incredible, but that was where my reptilian brain went.

1:43:38Everyone thinks about that. It's a very obvious thing, right?

1:43:40Yeah, exactly. But I want Giggle to be a real free education platform instead of

1:43:45a token platform, instead of some crypto thing, right?

1:43:48So if there's a token, then people are going to focus on the token.

1:43:52So your goal is that you'll just deficit finances and just continue to kind of

1:43:55proliferate this? Yeah, yeah. So that was my goal.

1:43:58But what happened is there's a community project that donated like $12 million.

1:44:0412 million? 12 million US dollars based on MemeCoin.

1:44:08And this is not something like - And I've only spent like maybe $3, $4

1:44:11million on the entire project so far.

1:44:14Yeah. So now, you know, it's actually net - Like, you know, it's hard to

1:44:17give money away. Yeah. So it's hard to give money away with a positive impact.

1:44:22With positive impact. It's very, very difficult.

1:44:24Yeah, so - Very difficult.

1:44:25So, yeah. So my plan is to - I will fund it for as long

1:44:27as it needs to reach that goal.

1:44:29So, of a fully digitized delivery of education in a gamified, sticky way.

1:44:37Let me ask an AI question for a second.

1:44:39Yeah. You said that AI is this third pillar of your life that you see.

1:44:43These big waves, right? Yeah.

1:44:44One of the most interesting things about AI is that when you basically get one

1:44:49level below the English and you start to look at the embeddings and the layer

1:44:52of embeddings. Yeah. What you start to see is that it's this machine -readable language.

1:44:57It's not English. Yeah. And there's a richness of information there.

1:45:00It's perfect for agents. Yeah.

1:45:02It can traverse it. You can cipher, query it.

1:45:04You can do all this stuff that allows you to make really incredible leaps in

1:45:08productivity and otherwise. Yeah. It stands to reason that agents are also participants of commerce

1:45:14and need payments and, you know, and I think you've said this, is like probably

1:45:18the largest user of crypto at some point in the near future.

1:45:21Describe that vision for us.

1:45:23Yeah. I think it's fairly straightforward.

1:45:26I think, as you said, right?

1:45:27I think it's very clear.

1:45:29Soon, we're going to, each of us is going to have like, you know, hundreds

1:45:31or thousands of millions of agents working for us in the background.

1:45:34And there will be... transacting there will be there will be moving money around right

1:45:37so uh in theory if i want to listen to this podcast you know your

1:45:42people should pay a few cents to to listen to it um whatever economic model

1:45:46that you want you more than that it's easy sure of course sure but there

1:45:50was some economic model right right uh right now uh you know even last year

1:45:54we talked about agents buying tickets for us it's not quite there yet but you

1:45:57will get there right uh they will book restaurants they'll pay they'll pay for hotels

1:46:01for us um and then um the agents can transact a million times more than

1:46:06us yeah and they are not going to use banks uh banks just won't be

1:46:09able to support banks won't onboard and aml kyc and it doesn't even make sense

1:46:14you can't do a kyc they can't swipe it doesn't make any sense right so

1:46:18uh but also what agents will do is they'll transact at a transaction volume and

1:46:22at a rate yeah it'll make the traditional networks head spin exactly they're just not

1:46:27going to be able to support it yeah right and also um even stuff like

1:46:30investments and trading right so today you know you open the binance app you look

1:46:34at a chart you have to like you know click on price level and you

1:46:37have to type in the price and a green or red button that shouldn't be

1:46:40the interface the interface should be like hey look convert 10 percent of my stable

1:46:43coins into bnb and then you'll figure out okay if you have a large position

1:46:47you will do slowly over time uh if you have a small position which won't

1:46:50be one one market order um all of that stuff should be just happening in

1:46:54the background all right so the agent can do this for us uh you soon

1:46:57you will be able to what is the most viable payment system today that agents

1:47:01could rely on i'm actually not too sure i don't think there is any one

1:47:06that's super that's what crypto project today do you think oh you mean crypto yeah

1:47:10that agents could use theoretically again it's early days i don't want to speculate i

1:47:14don't want to name any specific projects um it will cause some token price fluctuations

1:47:19um but quite a number of people are working on uh so especially recently with

1:47:24a more like a ai agent social network thing so it's getting more and more

1:47:28hype yeah um and uh yeah so i think you'll get there let me ask

1:47:32you about crypto in general for a second what is the role when you see

1:47:37a lot of stuff around free speech what is the role of privacy in crypto

1:47:41one of the things that i struggle with if you ask me am i a

1:47:45bitcoin maximalist i would say no even though i was early i think my biggest

1:47:48issue with it is that there's a lack of fungibility which i think is problematic

1:47:52to get to mega scale and then there's a lack of privacy i agree it's

1:47:56probably the biggest thing that will hold bitcoin back from being ubiquitous where does privacy

1:48:01play as the world evolves as you see it i think privacy plays a very

1:48:04fundamental role in our society but right now as you said i also think that

1:48:09bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies do not have enough privacy features yeah um i think when

1:48:14bitcoin was designed it was going to be pseudo anonymous but the fact is every

1:48:19transaction on the blockchain can trace especially now you have a centralized exchange with kyc

1:48:23exactly um and you know if you have like it's actually very easy by the

1:48:28way we go always back to the same argument which is it always goes back

1:48:31to the corner case of while somebody's using this for something illicit and i say

1:48:35there are those use cases but the overwhelming majority is you buy a pack of

1:48:39gum but tomorrow you may buy you know you may want to buy a certain

1:48:43movie or a video game you may want to buy the cigarettes and it's not

1:48:47for me to judge yeah and dollars are fungible in that sense there's complete anonymity

1:48:54we have no idea about what it was used before that i got my hands

1:48:58on it well there are actually real applications where privacy is extremely important uh if

1:49:03you book a certain hotel and people know that hotel address like blockchain hotel address

1:49:07the receiving address they will know that you will be in right so There are

1:49:13real use cases where privacy is very important.

1:49:15This is why people don't publicize their home addresses online.

1:49:19That's right. In many countries, if you review somebody, in Japan, if you review somebody's

1:49:23home address, that's illegal, right?

1:49:25So there are real use cases for privacy, which Bitcoin, most cryptocurrencies currently do not

1:49:33provide. There's a counter argument, okay, law enforcement wanted to track down bad guys.

1:49:37That can be done, even with, no, that can be done.

1:49:41I'm supportive of that. But there's fundamental privacy issues.

1:49:45So I do think that in the future, as an industry, we need to figure

1:49:49out how to evolve the privacy features, which no one's really focusing on right now.

1:49:54There's a few privacy -focused coins.

1:49:56I shouldn't say no one.

1:49:58But they don't have much market cap.

1:50:02They don't have much size.

1:50:05Tell me about the book.

1:50:06It's coming along. It's always a longer project than I anticipate, right?

1:50:11What was the point of it?

1:50:12Was it, is like catharsis or is it to make a point?

1:50:16Is it to tell the story?

1:50:17All of those things? A bit of everything.

1:50:20It started because I was bored.

1:50:22Because I was, well, I started drafting when I was in prison.

1:50:24It was just to keep me busy.

1:50:26Because I don't want to deal with, you know, I don't want to be chatting

1:50:28with, it just keeps me busy in prison.

1:50:31So I started drafting it and typing on a very dumb terminal and sending it

1:50:35to my assistant. And then once I got out, I was like, well, I have

1:50:39enough that if I spend a bit more time on it, I can have a

1:50:42book. And then, but editing a book takes so long.

1:50:48Every pass takes like two, three weeks if you want to edit a book.

1:50:51Because like, no, right now it's like 95 ,000 words.

1:50:55So it's like 300 pages.

1:50:57And then I'm also editing the English and Chinese version.

1:51:00So it just takes longer.

1:51:03But the point of the book right now, I think, is just to get the

1:51:06story out. I think there's many misconceptions about who I am, what I went through.

1:51:10What are those misconceptions, do you think?

1:51:12Well, there's a lot of negative media about crypto.

1:51:14There's a lot of negative media about CZ, Binance, the entire industry.

1:51:20And to some extent, I think there's a lot of negative media about Trump, the

1:51:23party, etc. That part is not too heavy in my book.

1:51:26I just, you know, it's as simple as we talked about on this podcast.

1:51:30But just for people to understand, like, you know, who I am, to some extent,

1:51:35by extension, who Binance kind of is from my perspective.

1:51:38Is it an important story for your children?

1:51:42I think so, yes. Yeah.

1:51:44Why? I think it's important for them to understand.

1:51:46Like, no, they see, they, of course, are more on my side.

1:51:49They know all those medias, not the right stuff.

1:51:52But they haven't, I didn't have time to explain the story to them in this

1:51:56level of detail. And I think it's important for them to read this.

1:51:59And they will understand a lot more detail than what I'm able to tell them

1:52:02verbally or in person, etc.

1:52:05Even though the book doesn't contain everything, but it's as much as I can put

1:52:08in. What do you want for your kids?

1:52:10I want them to live a healthy and happy life, however they define it.

1:52:15If they're happy just being a normal person, then that's good for me.

1:52:18If they want to do startups and, you know, build companies, then that's great.

1:52:23If they want to be artistic, etc., that's great.

1:52:25If they want to do humanitarian efforts, charity, that's also great.

1:52:30Whatever they figure out what they want to do, I just want to be there

1:52:33to support them. Yeah, that's...

1:52:36How similar or different is that from what you got from your parents?

1:52:39Pretty similar. My parents didn't have pressure on me.

1:52:42My parents didn't pressure me to be this and that.

1:52:46Like, they're not even like normal Chinese parents where they want you to be a

1:52:49doctor or engineer. Or lawyer engineer.

1:52:51Or lawyer engineer. That was my parents.

1:52:54My parents didn't do that with me.

1:52:55My parents were like, you can do whatever you want.

1:52:57My parents said to me.

1:52:59It's very un -Chinese. Very un -Chinese.

1:53:01My parents said, don't hurt yourself, don't hurt other people.

1:53:04So don't do drugs. Don't get into crime.

1:53:09And then don't hurt other people.

1:53:11So that's as simple as I got from my parents.

1:53:15And yeah. I think there's a lot of people that probably hear this and they'll

1:53:22probably think that, and I think this is a real compliment, by the way, so

1:53:25don't take this wrong when I say this this way.

1:53:28That could have been me too.

1:53:30Yeah. I think that we glorify success in a way that makes it seem like

1:53:34it's impregnable. It's like this very quixotic thing that happens.

1:53:40And it's not that. No.

1:53:44And the reason why I can say that is that when I spend time with

1:53:47you, and I'm sure now with the people rounding two hours with you, they'll think,

1:53:51man, this guy is really normal.

1:53:54It's a normal, I'm a normal dude.

1:53:56Exactly. Yeah. A lot of people say that, like, you know, to me as well

1:54:00in this weird way, it's like you're just a normal guy.

1:54:02And it's like, there's something really valuable about working on things that you like because

1:54:07then the time just passes.

1:54:08Yeah. And you kind of just put your head up and you're like, wow, okay,

1:54:11there's something new to try.

1:54:12Let's go try that. Let's go learn something.

1:54:14I want to give you a chance to speak to all these people who are

1:54:16probably thinking to themselves, wow, that could be me.

1:54:18Absolutely. I think, number one, I'm a normal dude.

1:54:22I know I'm not super smart, but you don't need to be super smart to

1:54:25be successful. You can't be too dumb, but you don't need to be super smart.

1:54:29There's a lot of other things like, you know, principles, values, emotional quotient.

1:54:33A lot of those things come into play.

1:54:35I think there's a lot of luck as well.

1:54:40But I think for most people, you are in a situation where you are.

1:54:44You usually cannot change the situation.

1:54:46So what you can only do is change yourself, right?

1:54:49So if you just push yourself a little bit every day, you don't have to

1:54:51push yourself too hard. You push yourself too hard, you're going to burn out.

1:54:55You're not going to last long.

1:54:56But you want to push yourself to like 120%, 110%, 130%, somewhere in that range

1:55:01where however you can last long.

1:55:03And if you do that for like 30 years and you get lucky, you will

1:55:07most likely be relatively successful.

1:55:10You might not be a billionaire, but you'll have a very comfortable life.

1:55:14Do you think that it's important to maybe dispel the myth that being a billionaire

1:55:21is not everything it's cracked up to be?

1:55:23Oh yeah, absolutely. So in our life, there's a few, I kind of picture a

1:55:29spider web graph, right? Money is only one tangent, right?

1:55:33So once you have enough - It's one thread.

1:55:35It's one thread. Having more doesn't help you.

1:55:37In fact, there's health, there's family, there's other things that can keep you happy, like

1:55:42your values, contribution, positive impact.

1:55:45Like that's intrinsic internal rewards that you feel very happy about.

1:55:48A lot of those things are extremely important.

1:55:51So once you have enough money on this graph, more doesn't make you happy.

1:55:55Sometimes you'll have more, sometimes you'll have less.

1:55:57Then how's your health? Also, there's another element, time.

1:56:01How much time do you have?

1:56:02Can you use your time the way you want?

1:56:04Are you working on the stuff you want?

1:56:06Are you spending with the people that you want to spend with?

1:56:09And are your family healthy?

1:56:11You'll be, you'll be very lucky if your family's all healthy.

1:56:14Like that's already a huge gift.

1:56:17So, and then your mental health is also important.

1:56:20How do you deal with pressure, et cetera.

1:56:21But I somehow am very lucky to have a very sort of stable mind.

1:56:26So I think all of those things are extremely important and all of those things

1:56:28you can improve on. and in terms of you well ,elsett You have to and

1:56:30So cool, and for instead of just money.

1:56:32A lot of people only chase money but they sacrifice everything else.

1:56:35They work really, really hard.

1:56:36They don't have free time.

1:56:37They're not spending time with their family.

1:56:38Their health deteriorates after 10, 20 years.

1:56:41They don't enjoy the time that they're spending on these things.

1:56:43Yeah. Even to get the thing that they have so much of that they don't

1:56:46need. Yeah, yeah. So this is also the part, like I'm actually very grateful that

1:56:50I don't have to run Binance anymore and I have more time.

1:56:52Yeah. Whereas before, like even though that was very enjoyable, but on my other quotients,

1:56:57I was not doing well.

1:56:58Yeah. Yeah, so yeah. CZ, thanks for joining the All In Podcast.

1:57:01Thank you. Thank you for having me.

1:57:03I'm going all in. I'm going all in.

CZ's Untold Story: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of Binance's Founder