Lykken on Lending

Today, we dive into the fascinating world of technology, finance, and real estate with a special guest, David Levine of Liquid Hearts Club, affectionately known as Moto. David shares his remarkable journey from pioneering online mortgage trading platforms in the late 90s to his current ventures at the intersection of real estate, finance, and blockchain technology. David and Moto discuss the evolution of the web from Web1 to Web3, the transformative power of decentralized finance (DeFi), and the revolutionary impact of blockchain technology on the real estate and mortgage industries. Learn about the challenges and opportunities of decentralized systems, the importance of maintaining core values in the face of innovation, and how technology can enhance our lives in profound ways.

[David] Listeners, We’re in for a real treat today. We’ve been talking about technology and all of the changes that are happening, Isn’t it something how some people seem to get ahead of the curve and be at the right place at the right time with the right technology solutions. Joining me today is David Levine, also affectionately known as Moto. David, good to have you joining me here.

[Moto] Thanks so much. It’s wonderful to be here, David.

[David] You and I met 24, 25 years ago when I had the privilege of going to work for one of the companies that you had started, again this is back right around 1999. I had been trading online on a new platform called Pedestal. It was a way we could trade mortgage loans. It was new, innovative. as I was leaving Pedestal was so impressed with how I was trading and my vision, I got caught up in it. But I also had just heard about Ultra Prize and a friend of mine, David Matthews, who you had hired to be the President, Chief Operating Officer, if I recall correctly you had hired him, which was a brilliant move, by the way, David Matthews is brilliant as you are. And it’s a perfect combination. David Matthews is excellent on execution, putting together teams. You’re brilliant on innovation and looking over the rise and that was what’s coming. So it was a great combination. So I told Matthews, we’re selling the company. I’m going to go probably go to work for Pedestal. And he said over my dead body. so I started working with Ultra prize. You guys made me an offer. I couldn’t refuse. it was thrilled to be joined up with Matthews, but then David, that started a longstanding friendship. One of the things I admire about you, your marriage. You and Monica have an amazing marriage. I just admire values of who you are and what you’re about and so many people who are entrepreneurs get a little on the crazy side and they lose sight of the core values. You have those David, and I applaud you for those. And so, I’m really excited to share with our listeners, your vision of some of the things you’re doing David’s going take us on that journey, but to start this journey, David, let’s first start talking about your journey to where you’re at today and what you’re doing.

[Moto] First of all, thank you so much for having me here, and for me, technology is extremely personal. I actually live in West Virginia and most technology entrepreneurs back in the nineties when Silicon Valley was rising would have moved out there and I had many opportunities, but my wife and I said, as soon as we were pregnant with our first, where would we have wanted to grow up? what life would we want to have as children? And I told her about this little town in West Virginia called Shepherd’s Town and she was really pregnant and not thinking straight and we’re walking down the street and I was like, let’s just stop into a realtor. And next thing you know, we’re buying a little house with on five acres in the woods on the river away from everything as far from technology you can imagine, but actually this was 1995 and it caused me to think about technology in a very different way, in a very personal way. How you get bandwidth, what’s important, what’s not important and all that. So, what we’re going to be talking about mostly today is this intersection between Real Estate, Finance, and the Blockchain. And what I do, my superpower is I have these lenses or these glasses. And when I walk through the world where I meet with people, when I do whatever, I’m always thinking about how our lives could be enhanced by technology and what’s cumbersome, what isn’t working, what’s this, what’s that? The real moment for me of coming into this space was actually back in 1994. I presented a paper at the first International Conference of the Web at CERN Particle Physics Lab. There was about 315 people there, which was the entire worldwide web community at the time. The keynote speaker was this guy named David Chaum, who was talking about digital cash. And he had a company called DigiCash. He was talking about this possible dystopian future, where if the internet evolves, Commerce is people are expecting, people using credit cards for everything and there’s a record of everything. He was this privacy advocate, from Berkeley cryptography. He said, governments could wind up exerting a tremendous amount of control over your daily lives, governments…

[David] Very fortuitous, especially when you look at what some of the plans have been, it seems.

[Moto] Exactly. And he said, Cash is fundamental. It’s important. It’s fungible and we can’t let that go away. So, he invented this system where you could actually pay somebody in quote cash in a way that’s non traceable. We wound up running a car and saying, Hey, let’s just drive around Europe. And we went to Prague and all these different places. And I said, let’s end it in Amsterdam where David Chaum had his company. And I basically camped out there as a fan boy. And I said, I want to work with you. And I wound up two years later doing the world’s very first cash transaction on the internet when he was right.

[David] What year was that?

[Moto] That was 1996. I sold a poem to a friend of mine who worked at Naval research labs for a penny. My claim to fame is I did this 1996. So, this was a good eight years before the Bitcoin white paper was published, right? I first got into Real Estate Finance, what we call in in crypto tradfy for traditional finance when we had a client that was a local bank in West Virginia, but they had set up a branch doing mortgage origination in Southern California and they had a liquidity crunch. They were I guess this was now 1998. RFCs to buy a lot of their loans. They were buying a lot fewer. And we were just having one of these technical meetings about something completely different. And I said, Okay, Steve. He was Steve Day was the president of the bank. I said, why don’t you bring in your CFO and just explain the whole process. So he went on the whiteboard and, went step by step, origination, secondary market securitization, how the whole thing works. I was like, okay, this looks like a classic liquidity problem, marketplace problem. So we actually got in their private plane from this bank in Charleston, West Virginia. And we flew to FBR. Freedman Billings and Ramsey, which was a big investment bank, that focused a lot on this. And we met with Manny Freedman.

[David] Oh my gosh, Manny M. I remember Manny real well.

[Moto] And I mapped the whole thing out on the board for him and they funded it. They invested a few million dollars in my company and we wound up building this exchange. So that’s the origin story of my involvement in mortgages and my involvement in crypto.

[David] But it’s a great story. And the part that I love about all of this is that, you are you’re in the moment. You seize on opportunities on that. And some would say you’re sometime unconventional. Anyone watching this video, you’re wearing the hat. I love the hat, David. It’s just perfect. And you’re the Mad Hatter pulling things out of a hat. That is just outstanding. So playing on that, let’s bring our listers up to speed by starting to talk about web1, web2, and now web3, walk us through that. Some know about it, but many, unfortunately don’t.

[Moto] Sure. I am fortunate being a gray hair like you that I’ve seen this evolution for myself. And I remember the early days, how exciting it was where you were constantly discovering things. And there was really only one website that anybody cared about. It was called the what’s new page at NCSC, the national center for supercomputer applications in Urbana, Illinois. You would send them an email and, give them a link and they would list it and every morning you’d wake up and see what the new websites were. That’s literally what was happening. So that was,

[David] Again, put it into the context of a calendar. What year was that?

[Moto] Oh gosh. When I started, that was probably 1993. Mosaic browser came. So, that’s when they started the what’s new page was 1993. what was really interesting about that time is, it was incredibly freewheeling, like you were just discovering all this cool stuff. Until there was this aggregation with portals. So, there was Yahoo, which was a big one, and Excite, and Lycos, and AOL. And all of a sudden, the only way to discover things was if someone was paying for that to be listed toward the top. And it started changing the whole character of the web in terms of the commercialization of it. And I actually remember this day. When I got an email from David Filo, who is a co-founder of Yahoo saying, Hey I found this site you had developed. It’s really cool. Do you mind if we list it on Yahoo? And it was like, that’s how young Yahoo was like, David Filo and Jerry gang, like writing emails, list your site. And web1, because it’s all websites and links, the power went to the portals for aggregating all this. So that was the one learning thing. And then Web2 started in about 2008. It became important with the growth of Facebook. So what started happening was. Instead of portals being important, it shifted to platforms and those platforms to monetize their platforms, they started making it harder and harder for you to escape. It basically took over the media, in the beginning you would read all these news articles, see snippets and you’d go to links and then they started basically deprioritizing anything that had a link. So you would publish directly on those platforms. It wasn’t just Facebook that happened then with Google started giving you summaries and making it harder and harder to leave Google. Amazon, you started being able to do everything on Amazon and not other stuff, instead of buying things in different places, you buy almost everything from Amazon because they’ve captured you in this platform. So that’s what Web2 is. So Web2, the platforms, it’s really about APIs And algorithms. So it’s the search algorithm.

[David] For those that don’t know what an API is.

[Moto] It’s short for Applied Programming Interface, where if you want your data on one of these systems you would need to conform to their quote API. Now, the reason this is important is. You right now log into almost everything with your Google or your Facebook, maybe your Apple account and that’s their way of controlling more and more of the internet through an API. Because you only need one identity, one account and all of a sudden it doesn’t really matter if you’re on these other things. You’re there. Spotify is a great example of that. So, it’s really about centralization and control. So that’s web2. So why is web3 so significant?

[David] And where were you at on that trajectory? that’s just really getting off the ground now,

[Moto] Just getting off the ground. I don’t know exactly when it was coined, but in terms of the history of blockchain, you had the Bitcoin white paper in 2008. You had the Genesis block of Bitcoin, which I want to come back to cause it’s actually very important for the real estate finance industry. You had a protocol called Etherium come out probably 2015, 2014. It really all exploded in 2016 when Ethereum came out with ERC20, which allowed anybody to create their own coin on top of Ethereum. So, 2016 is when Ethereum became really important. 2017 was the first really major bubble. Where everybody was buying coins and trading them in these ICOs. Now it became quote web3 just more recently, I would say 2021, 2022, where you had NFTs, which were like coins, but they were visual and you could issue a limited number. People started making those represent things like properties and title deeds. People started experimenting with all kinds of different things. What really grew up in that era was something called DeFi for decentralized finance. Which was contrasted with trad fire, traditional finance, centralized finance, which is all controlled by banks, mortgage bankers, et cetera. To explain the power of this, let me just loop back to that Genesis block of Bitcoin because this is a great story. So Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, put in the Genesis block, the headline from the London Times of January 3rd, 2009, that was about the British Chancellor proposing a second bailout of English banks. And he felt that was so important that he literally inscribed that in the software, the very first Bitcoin that was ever created. So why was that so important? What happens with centralized finance is there are individuals and institutions in control, you’re not in control. So that same warning that David Chaum gave about privacy, Satoshi Nakamoto was giving about large banks and large financial institutions and governments. Governments had full control over your money. They created your money and banks could decide whether you got your money or not. They could put it into different things and fail and it’s not your money. So, he came up with this idea of decentralized money. He said, there are three primary principles, decentralization, there’s no central authority. It’s trustless, meaning You don’t have to show your ID. Like you don’t have to go to the bank and say, yeah, okay. This is a guy I trust versus that’s a guy I don’t trust. Like cash, You make your decision, right? and then the third is immutable. It couldn’t be changed. If I gave you. $20. I couldn’t rewind the clock and change the ledger and say, no, I didn’t really give you $20. I really gave you $10. Those three principles actually made digital cash in a way that is profoundly what he was going for was self sovereignty. He wanted individuals to be just as empowered on the internet as they were in the “real world”, with paper money.

[David] Which paper money is anything but real.  And we could go into a whole bunch of different ways down the road of what this means and the implications of it, but this is significant, especially when you look at the fed and our treasury able to print cash at the little rate that they do creating inflationary trends, only to then say that we need to solve them by raising interest rates or doing all the things. It’s the manipulation of this and this begins to lay the seeds, the roots, the foundation for a much more stable economy, a much more stable financial. I’m footing underneath us individually and as nations.

[Moto] It’s totally true, because without that central bank, again, it’s decentralization versus centralization that’s really the fundamentals of it. So with web3, what started happening is. I started thinking differently as an entrepreneur. I started thinking about products differently. I started thinking about software differently. And I came up with this little phrase for myself that the way to gain power is to lose control that basically

[David] that’s the same things we’re taught in Minnesota. It’s just counterintuitive.

[Moto] Let it go. And that’s what web3 is. It’s this flourishing, this incredible innovation that’s happening on a daily basis and I just I’ve become an evangelist. I just can’t wait for more people, particularly your audience, which is in such a crucial sector of the finance industry, when we all start really using this new technology, it will be the tail that wags the dog. It will change the United States. It will change Europe and it will change the rest of the economy.

[David] Yeah. We’ve watched Bitcoin absolutely revolutionize how the wealth creation from that, and it’s been volatile, which I think keeps people away from that. But let’s answer this question. Why is Bitcoin so revolutionary?

[David] We talked about that a bit because it tried to solve the money problem, right? So, what I’d like to do is now contrast that with this next stage of the value problem, right? So money and one of the problems, like you said, with the problem with Bitcoin is that it’s volatile. It’s great if you’re a speculator, it’s great, maybe you put a certain percentage of your wealth in it and that’ll be great, but you don’t want to use that as a daily form of transaction because have I just paid you $12? I paid you 50.

[David] At the rate of the volatility, intraday volatility can have wild swings where that’s, what’s really eroded that as far as being a legitimate tradable, fungible type transaction.

[Moto] So people think about it like gold, they want to store some value in it as essentially a hedge against. The local inflationary economy. And in the US that has some value if you’re in Argentina or all kinds of places. Right now in Nigeria where all the places where there’s rapid inflation, it makes sense to put your money in Bitcoin. Now what I’m focused on is this new sector called Real World Assets.

[David] You’re going to have to break that down for us.

[Moto] Yeah. So real world assets are like real estate is a real world asset. My phone is a real world asset.

[David] Is that another term for tangible asset?

[Moto] It’s well, commodities, basically anything that has a value outside of its digital presence is a real world asset. One of my favorite examples is the Bowie bonds. wanted to take the money off the table and basically created these bonds where people bought all those future cash flows for his intellectual property.

[David] What’s so interesting about that is a good friend of mine, CJ DeSantis, his wife is an attorney also, both of our attorneys and he also has a computer background, but his wife was the one that worked on the Bowie bond. And some of the innovation that we’ve been able to touch through friends and networks like this, but that was really innovative where you could basically sell future revenue into a bond and in a cashflow such as, royalties, which was extraordinary.

[Moto] Exactly. So let’s go from Bitcoin, which used a technology called proof of work, which is incredibly inefficient, but very secure. All of these different miners. Solve puzzles in order to create a minor.

[David] You have to explain what minor is, you and I were recently at the Blockchain Conference together out in Santa Clara and working on a project that’s very exciting to me that we’ll talk about it another time, I need to really get my head wrapped around this and there’s miners, If you could explain the various components of blockchain and the role of a miner. Pretty interesting!

[Moto] Sure, it’s really cool. So basically any computer can do it. It’s become a real industry unto itself where you have these GPUs, graphic processing units, solving these problems, these puzzles and basically what happens is every node someone says, okay, I’m going to pay David Lykken one bitcoin. So I need to transfer it from one address on this blockchain ledger to another. He has address, I have an address. We’re transferring this between us. If David has the private key, this is how the blockchain works. There are two keys that unlock accounts. There’s one key that unlocks it. There’s one key that presents it. So, the public key is your address. So I can send a Bitcoin to David at his address and everybody knows that address. Now, if I’m holding my private key, I can send something out of my account to David’s address.

[David] Right, to my public address.

[Moto] To his public address. Now it’s locked to that public address until David uses his private key to send it somewhere else. In Bitcoin to actually add something to ledger and particularly to create a new bitcoin, you have to do all of this computation and solve a problem. And the first computer to solve that problem gets the reward for producing that next block. So it’s an incredibly inefficient system, but it was the first one that worked there. So, what people have done, these miners is set up enormous rigs just computer computer, and they look for  the cheapest electricity. So, there was a lot of mining in Iceland where they have geothermal.

[David] because it is intense power, intensive. That’s the thing I was learning about that as a fact.

[Moto] What’s interesting, a friend of mine actually bought a dam in South Carolina just to mine Bitcoin, he bought it from the local electric company, but what happened? So, there are a couple blockchains right now I’m building everything on Solana because it used a different system. It’s called proof of stake and there’s a specific type of proof of stake that Solana uses called proof of history and this proof of history Basically solves the distributed. So, I’ve been in decentralized computing for a long time and there are all these systems that people have developed. One was called CORBA – Common Object Request Broker Architecture. There’s different ways that people try to get fully distributed, decentralized omputing to work. The founder of Solana came up with this way for all of the systems to check their local clocks and not need to stay synchronized in a way that others, he created this incredibly high performance blockchain that’s still very secure and completely decentralized.

[David] The most important thing we walk away from this is the importance of a decentralized system. So, we are back in control. And that’s, again, minors play a key role in that.

[Moto] Exactly. So now let me totally bring this home for you, the real estate professional. TradFi is paperwork and it doesn’t matter how sophisticated your systems are. You’re still talking about boarding loans, and you’re talking about boarding wet loans, right? So, the paper is still wet. You’re walking across the shop floor to where it’s going to dry right? Servicing everything that you do is based on what was happening in the 1800, so you’re using computers, but you’re doing in this incredibly arcane way and as David said, you have a centralization of your fiat currency and even the term fiat. The US dollar is a fiat currency. It’s by fiat of the government, just like it was by fiat of the king. You have banks and corporations that then agree. I’ve now transferred this amount of money to you for this value. You have appraisers. Ultimately, that whole pathway where you have aggregators that have aggregated enough of these loans to chop them up into security. So, you have rating agencies that have, this, and this, and here’s the value, and then it goes here. And then you have the Salesforce putting those into pension funds and putting those into private equity funds and whatever, right? So, you have this incredibly arcane system. And what happened in 2008? Because you had the property owner way over here. Okay. And you have the investor way over here and you have so many hands in the pot.

[David] Oh, I know. So inefficient.

[Moto] And expensive and opaque, right? Who knows what This person who says, okay, this is a totally solid jumbo loan. If you saw the big short, that might’ve been sold to a stripper in Miami. it just exposes this, both the inefficiency and lack of transparency. So, what do we do to replace that web3? I actually never finished what web three was compared to.

[David] That’s right. I didn’t mean to take you out a different path, but yeah, finish that up. Related to it. This is really good.

[Moto] Yeah. So, you had portals in web1, you had platforms in web2, and you had protocols in web3. Protocols are agreements. They’re ways to communicate. They’re, agreements on what a block is, what a token is, what value is, right? And if you have all those agreements, you don’t need all of these documents and you don’t need all these central authorities. We wrote a protocol that I call MOSH, it stands for Massively Multiplayer On Chain Shared Hallucination. It’s a concept when I first got involved with the internet, the thing that intrigued me the most was the system at Xerox PARC called the Moo. Which is Monthly user Object Oriented environment. things like muds, multi user dungeons and all this. And then we got into massively multiplayer online games. So I started thinking about this question of value. And why people all agree that this dollar bill with George Washington’s face is worth one third of a loaf of bread or whatever it is, right? what you’re really valuing the asset is the bread. What I value here is my house. Someone’s telling me that this piece of paper is worth, I’m in West Virginia, so let’s say 1/700th of my house, right? So, you show up with 700,000 of these and you can now buy my house, right? But this piece of paper is as arbitrary as anything else, right? It really is, except that we’ve agreed on it. So, because we’ve agreed on it, I call that a shared hallucination.

[David] Actually, very good term because that’s what it is. It’s absolutely as a shared hallucination.

[Moto] Okay. So we have this protocol and I thought what are the elements that everybody has to agree on? So, one is identity, so we have something called a profile, which is a type of token that manages identity and we have attribution which is basically if you’re a mortgage banker or you’re a realtor, you need attribution so you can get paid, right? If I’m selling a house, and this is totally decentralized. I don’t have a real estate office. I don’t have an MLS system. It’s totally decentralized. There needs to be some indication on the blockchain that this party that I’m going to get paid this percent when this transaction happens. So, we’ve created a token called a badge that does that attribution. We created a token called a pass for access. So, it could even be used for keys to get into the house if you own it, but it could get into chat groups, for example, if the pass is used for KYCAML. Where we don’t have to store your identity on chain, if you’ve gone through a process and you’ve gotten a pass that says you can do this deal, it could say you’re a mortgage banker. It could say you’re a realtor or you’re a financial advisor. If you have that, it can be associated with your profile and your identity, but it doesn’t have to encapsulate that. So, the pass is very important and then the coin is money, so there’s all kinds of tokens out there for money so right now we could trade soul which is the native token for Solana We could trade Bitcoin or Etherium or Bonk. Recently, there are all of these meme coins where you can trade with, which stands for dog with hat, it went through the roof. People got 20,000 times their investment, putting money into these crazy meme coins, right? that’s what’s cool about it. Anybody could create their own form of money, right? So there are coins. And then the final part, which is really the most important of this protocol is the asset. So, now instead of going through that crazy TradFi Rube Goldberg Contraption, where so many things can go wrong, I as a homeowner or commercial property owner can also be the issuer. I can basically take my title and offer it on chain and I can do it under exemptions from registration. If I could sell it to anybody according to the laws, but let’s say I want to get together with other property owners or I’m a big commercial property owner. I can take all that property and basically issue a security on chain. What’s called a security token. People who buy that on chain can also trade it and it’s liquid through these decentralized finance things and basically if you promise a certain percent yield or you promise a share of I own let’s say my commercial property downtown in Shepherdstown, right? There’s one tenant, she’s been in there probably ten years paid like clockwork the first day of every month, right? Simply put that property. It’s a small shop. It’s in West Virginia. It was appraised at 300,000. I could say, okay, instead of going to a bank, why don’t I just sell shares on that to the public? I could do that under reg CF regulation crowdfunding. I could do that under reg D and just sell it to accredited investors. What’s cool is there are these exchanges and there’s a system called Jupiter, which is an aggregator of decentralized exchanges. They have an initiative called the giant unified market initiative where you can now trade stocks on the blockchain. You can trade bonds, you can trade real estate gold, all of these different things. And so if for some reason Gina, who’s my tenant stops paying rent, and I stopped distributing yield, then the price of a share and the shares, what we’ve done with this protocol, because we’ve added different protocols on top of ours and if it’s an undeveloped property it could be a hectare or an acre. And let’s just say I bought a huge portfolio or I bought 10,000 of a huge commercial portfolio. What I would get is a bunch of tokens, digital assets that then I can trade. So I can say, you know what? I want to keep these properties in Australia, but sell these properties in Guam. Cause I think XYZ is going to happen. And this is just beginning to radically revolutionize real estate finance.

[David] This could dramatically shift it and change it forever.

[Moto] And what’s so interesting is this is what we tried to do back in 1998.

[David] Your ability to see over the horizon, see what’s coming timing is everything. But the concept of what we were doing together back then at Ultra Price with the company you created is now because of where technology and things are at, it can actually be fully realized.

[Moto] because I remember I take the train up to DLJ or Bear Stearns, and take the trip, the mortgage trading desks out for a Korean barbecue, whatever was popular at the time, take him to Atlantic city and gamble, but get the trading, but it wasn’t really liquid. We called it a liquid market, but you had to do a lot of research and all that. What’s really interesting here is there all of these big hedge funds that are trading crypto and trading in Mortgage backed securities and directly trading in real estate. They’re building all these quant high performance trading systems, right? and they’re doing it on the lawn and these high performance crypto networks. We’ll think about it. Now they can actually provide liquidity so that anybody can trade real estate assets between the United States and Croatia, right? And they can say, okay, here’s my theory. This is what’s going to happen with electricity in Texas. The reason the big short type stuff won’t happen is because of the radical transparency and the liquidity, right? It all works together as an actual market, not a fake market where like people are going to be able to see how much liquidity is there. So all of this, and to explain how new this is, the giant unified market initiative, I don’t know if they call it gummy or gum, but was just announced, probably maybe six weeks ago. There’s very little happening and so it’s incredibly inspiring being on the cutting edge again, and really not just the cutting edge of technology, but the cutting edge of culture, it feels just like the way the internet felt back in 1994, 1995, when anything was possible. It felt good for a very short period of time particularly for influencers who suddenly got a whole bunch of attention and could do things, but that constant struggle against the centralized platforms, tweaking their algorithms, where all of a sudden your website doesn’t rank, tweaking the algorithms, where all of a sudden no one’s seeing your Instagram posts, it’s all up to them. And now, Web3is like web1, but with all the power of web2. And I really think real estate finance, the mortgage industry is going to be the one that benefits the most, at least those people who are willing to gain power by losing control, who are willing to say, you know what, I’m going to try this as a realtor instead of talking to my buddy, this mortgage banker, I’m going to help my friend tokenize all this and then I’m going to have, the mortgage banker is going to help price this and get buyers and they’re going to get paid on chain by providing that next step.

[David] Really good. That’s really good. But the thing that’s really kept so many people. I’m going to say out of it, there may be guys like me, I’ve been interested in this, but all the concerns about scams and how to keep this safe, talk to that, David. How many people, people just went all in.

[Moto] Absolutely. $44 million or something. I don’t know. $44 billion. I don’t know. Some crazy number.

[David] I think that’s what keeps people going, ah, this is just one of those fancy things that computer nerd heads are going to be working on. But the reality is, this is coming and it is getting secure, but speaking of how it is,

[Moto] let me answer your question on both those. Both of those were caused by centralization. FTX was a centralized exchange. He had the keys. Your coins, your keys, not your coins, not your keys. I had, fortunately it was a very small amount of money on FTX. I think it was like 80 bucks. I had it there. I don’t remember. I was trying to do some trade and then I forgot about it. So when I went back when, and it was. Starting to crater. And I got in on time and I got my 80 bucks out and I was like, Oh, phew. But a lot of people had a lot more than $80. Think about that. What we’re building is something completely decentralized. All the other scams, because you’re scrolling Twitter and someone or, and this is in DeFi what people are doing. It’s a Twitter X Telegram or Discord. They’re learning about stuff and people put up fake links. They hijack accounts and you connect to a website and it drains your wallet. There are a million scams out there, phishing scams, etcetera. What we’re building, It’s so fully decentralized that we can’t even scam you, you can’t because you don’t need to connect to our website to do anything. All of the important infrastructure is open source, right? all of our software is all open source. Once you actually get into the industry and you understand it, I remember the early days of the internet where it’s like, Oh God, I would never put a credit card in a website. What are you talking about? That’s crazy.

[David] You thought I would put that out there for someone to use? Oh my gosh. Oh yeah, by the way, I signed all these things and I have all the carbon copies that were being tossed in the ditch and it’s got your credit card number and your signature on it, it’s some of the statements we made back then not realizing how fraud  prone our current system was, the positioning to get safe. And I think the key again. Is decentralization, which seems counterintuitive. The feds going to try to convince us that no, it has to be centralized to be secure because we are in control. We’ve been doing great monetary policy. Oh yeah. By that one, not so much. Anyway, the fact is, leaning into or turning into a skid and driving on ice and you’re spinning out and it’s turning. It seems counterintuitive, but it’s really the key to this thing. There’s so much about this and David, I think that, we’re rapid wrapped this thing up. I could go on and on. you do such a good job of articulating. There are certain aspects of the complexity to this, but how can people participate in this David and learned more number one and participating.

[Moto] Yeah. A couple different ways, but the easiest, and don’t be scared when you see this website. It was very much built for what we call DGNs. DGNs are those traders, they’re web3 natives. So you’ll see a lot of imagery that doesn’t look business oriented, but it’s MOSH. two M’s, M O S H dot AI. Go in, it’ll ask for your name and your email address, you’ll get an email from me. There’ll be other ways in. We have telegram groups. We have a website that will actually help you make these transactions and actually help you tokenize your own real estate and here’s the main call to action, go ahead and fail. I started writing code for the blockchain back in 2016. I’ve made so many mistakes. I’ve made so many bad trades. They pulled the rug out. Just try the right things. I put in a hundred bucks. I thought I was going to get something and they were like, sorry, but just learn the basics, like download a phantom wallet which I think is the easiest one to use.

[David] Any particular phantom wallet do you recommend over others?

[Moto] Phantom is the brand. So, in terms of blockchain wallet, I found it’s the easiest to use. Download the app for iOS or Android. It’s P H A N T O M. And then also get the what do you call it? the chrome plug in. But really most importantly, I’m here, I’m available. My own personal website is moto dave dot com. M O T O D A V dot com. I answer all my email. As you can tell, I’m super passionate about this. And if you’re out there listening, I’m happy to coach you, support you because everyone’s going to do it at some point. I don’t know if it’s 10 years, 20 years after we’re long gone, but it is going to move from the old way.

[David] What was so surprising about that blockchain conference in Santa Clara, were at, it was a huge conference center and it was loaded with booze. I opened my eyes to the extent that this is a tsunami that is already cresting on our shores. And like the great book, the book that I keep telling everyone, The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleiman, he talks about this and some of the things that are changing. Folks. You’ve got to start getting it. As soon as we hang up here, I’m going to go download my phantom wallet. I’m going to add the Chrome extension and start getting it. That’s a great tip to start playing with it. So that’s good. That’s awesome. David, thank you so much for being here today. Again, if you could cover your website and the way people can reach you?

[Moto] Yeah, so you can always send an email to motodave@gmail.com. You can come to my personal website, mododave.com. So that’s probably the easiest way to remember. The protocol is mosh.ai and my company is at Liquid Hearts dot club. So a lot of ways to reach me, those are the easiest.

[David] Listeners pay attention to this. Start getting into this. Start understanding it. It is, it’s coming so fast. If you could have been at that conference to realize how much traction is already happening and there’s nobody better to walk us through it than my friend, David Levine, David, thank you so much for being here. Greet Monica and all three of your kids. Sorry about that.

[Moto] Daisy wasn’t born until

[David] Oh, that’s right. We were working together. There was two. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. That’s right. And is Daisy the one that is the aeronautical engineer?

[Moto] Yeah. She’s the brains of the operation. She’s building experimental aircraft, so the aircraft she’s building, doesn’t have any moving parts. It’s all jets of air that steer it and all this. It’s crazy business,

[David] Crazy fun. I would love to sit around your Christmas dining room table. Listen to the conversation. It’s gotta be phenomenal, David. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for sharing this. And we’re starting our journey to gather listeners. Let’s get into it and get ahold of David, please. I appreciate it. I’d love to hear from you what you think of this podcast and this interview. It’s coming. You don’t believe me, go grab the book, the coming wave by Mustafa Suleyman. It’s amazing what’s happening. Our world is changing. Are you going to be up on it? Encourage you to join us in this journey. Thank you.

[Moto] Thank you.

Important Links

• Mmosh website
• Moto Dave website
• LinkedIn – David Levine

Serial technology entrepreneur with several international patents and over thirty years of experience in software, video game tech, fintech, blockchain, renewable energy and AI.

Moto has been an internet trailblazer since becoming fascinated with the MOO (Multi-user Object Oriented) text-based virtual environments developed at Xerox Park. He founded one of the world’s first Web development firms, wrote one of the first books on the Java programming language, presented a paper at the 1st International Conference of the Web at CERN Particle Physics Lab, participated in the world’s first anonymous “cash” transaction on the internet with David Chaum’s Digicash, pioneered streaming video, B2B fintech, massively scalable 3D worlds, big-data geomatics and much more.

Before diving into tech, Moto studied philosophy at Yale University, was awarded the Rackham Memorial Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Michigan and led his band Senator Flux on tour, in the studio and on MTV as a singer-songwriter and front-man for 4 full-length studio albums on international labels.