Sazmining Podcast Episode 32: Sheldon Bennett on the Future of Blockchain

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Synopsis: 

On this episode of The Sazmining Podcast, Will speaks with Sheldon Bennett, CEO of DMG Blockchain Solutions. They discuss differences between gold and crypto, Bitcoin as a global reserve asset, blockchain technology, and more.

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Will Szamosszegi (00:00):

There's always this debate between like the gold bugs and the

Sheldon Bennett (00:03):

Bitcoiners, you know, there's value to paper. Everybody understands why there are pulp mills. Why there are logging companies, why you're making paper.

Will Szamosszegi (00:10):

If you just start taking even a little bit longer of a time horizon, you just see that Fiat's going down, Bitcoin's going up. You might not wanna hold on to cash. You might wanna hold onto something like

Sheldon Bennett (00:20):

Bitcoin. The blockchain technology and cryptocurrency will become predominant in generations to

Will Szamosszegi (00:25):

Come. It's definitely different than it was like three years ago or something four years ago,

Sheldon Bennett (00:28):

Putting it into a blockchain and managing it, controlling it as government is just the next step.

Will Szamosszegi (00:32):

Bitcoin mining is bad for the environment. That's just something that I feel like people who are pushing it don't really understand the fundamental value of Bitcoin. Well, Sheldon, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast, man. I'm looking forward to it.

Sheldon Bennett (00:45):

No, my pleasure to be here.

Will Szamosszegi (00:46):

So you've been doing a lot of stuff in the mining space. You previously at bit fury, and then you made that transition DMG. So what in the first place got you interested in, uh, blockchain technology in this whole world of craziness that we're

Sheldon Bennett (01:00):

In? Um, it's interesting. I actually got interested in crypto and blockchain a long time ago and didn't really do much about it, but I got interested when I was in Cisco systems and we had these, you know, engineers and sales guys and they were always playing around with new technology. And one engineer was playing around with some GPUs and, and stuff we had in the lab. You know, he was talking about Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining and <laugh> all this kind of stuff. And he was telling me all about it and I didn't think much of it. I went home and tried to get the stuff working on my home computer, cuz back then this is 2010. You could kind of do it with a GPU and you could Bitcoin mining. He was going on about it. It was worth like nothing, a penny or something

Will Szamosszegi (01:40):

That's real early.

Sheldon Bennett (01:41):

Um, it was just, just for fun. Right? And so I was messing around with it and I remember like getting my wallet going and getting everyth going. And I was just about to start mining and one of my kids came over and he wanted something from me in, in, in the house and pulled me away and I never went back to it. I never got it up and running. Oh man. Then years later, uh, years later I end up in this world of crypto. Um, and that's just through some introductions of friends of mine that were in crypto. They, you know, invited me to get involved in bit fury, so kept on what I was doing and kind of pushed forward. And that, you know, when, when you're working, you kinda get distracted from it and, and I never came back to it, but that's when I first started hearing about cryptos back in 2010 and just engineers, uh, that were messing around and just like technology told me about it. Uh, I was on the sales side, not in engineering side at that time. And first kind of became familiar with

Will Szamosszegi (02:32):

It. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah. So my understanding is, I mean, DMG has been in the space for a while and you guys have made some moves towards becoming vertically integrated. So could you talk a little bit just about what that means, what you guys have done and, and how that looks today? Yeah.

Sheldon Bennett (02:47):

We've been playing own with the wording. I think we're kind of settle on vertically integrated kind of copying oil and gas company. Not saying they were an oil and gas company from a carbon point of view, but, but the idea was, uh, you know, oil and gas companies have this sort of upstream, midstream, refining distribution, R and D you know, and they kind of cover the whole gamut, right? They're not just one part of the whole piece. And so when we started DMG, we always wanted to do more than just mind Bitcoin. And the reason for that was a couple one. My background when I was in the big four accounting firms is I, I did a lot of work in compliance and fraud and forensic and you know, Bitcoin started out of this sort of very negative publicity. And we thought if we're gonna build, you know, a large public company, we're gonna have the general population thinking Bitcoin's bad.

Sheldon Bennett (03:30):

And so let's go, uh, for the compliance side of Bitcoin. And so we went, when we went public in 2018, we did that and bought a company called block here, which was a technology company that, you know, would follow crypto wallets and transactions in the blockchain. And it was, you know, well known company at the time. And it's company similar to Doy for trace and elliptic and companies like that. And we took that technology. We took some of my background and we started doing a lot of forensics work, um, around crypto transactions with law firms and accounting firms. And we got involved in public audit support. And so the reason we did that is that we were trying to market ourselves as the good guys in crypto versus all the bad guys. You heard all the news, like in the news, you're always hearing about an exchange being robbed, people being grant square.

Sheldon Bennett (04:12):

What year was this? So when we got involved in, uh, buying, uh, blocks here, we finished the transaction in the beginning of 2018, but we started that process in 2017. We went public as a company in 2018 as well. But we formed the company in 2016 in the, in the fall of 2016. And we went public through an RTO. So this reverse takeover on the Toronto venture exchange, when we started the company, you know, we were just like, we got a bunch of minors. We started mining. <laugh> like everybody else. But we also realized that, you know, we couldn't get a banks interested in us. They were always suspect we couldn't get financing. We couldn't get, you know, the simple things that, you know, if I was running a convenience store or if I was running a mechanics shop or I was running, whatever else, there's a whole full service out there that would support a company.

Sheldon Bennett (04:55):

But if you're in crypto, it was like being cannabis before it became federally regulated, right? Nobody wanted to do business with you cuz they thought there was something wrong with your business. They thought you were doing something illegal. Now Canada's never said anything is illegal. Everything we do is legal. You know, there's nothing illegal about it, but it was just that perception that the media had pounded into everybody's minds over and over with Mount GOs and silk road. And all these things were Bitcoin was being used as this medium of, of value trends. We knew at the beginning that if we wanted to build a public company, we wanted to build trust in our name and brand. We had to get involved in more than just being. And this is why we started getting first in the forensics and compliance. And then we started going in getting in more and more as you'll see, you know, into our core, what we call core and core plus you'll see, we got involved in a lot more software with the pools, with helm, with exchanges now, with wallets, all these types of things that we're trying to do to bring sort of safety and security and regulatory compliance into the Bitcoin space.

Will Szamosszegi (05:49):

Yeah. And on, on that topic of core and core, plus can, can you dive into a little bit more about like what the thinking was behind that and, and what that means?

Sheldon Bennett (05:59):

Yeah, so, um, <laugh>, it's actually quite simple thinking when you go back to vertically integrated, we were just trying to get a way that we could explain to our investors and people interested in our company, what we do. So everybody knows what a Bitcoin minor is. You know, everybody knows hive and hot and marathon and RT and they bind Bitcoin and farms and all my other peers out there and they basically do one thing and they do it quite well. And that's, you know, putting the machines in, giving them power, getting Bitcoin out. And that's really our core business. It's like an energy business. We're taking energy and we're turning into and we wanted to talk about more than just the Bitcoin generation. And so our core business is Bitcoin mining and it's always gonna be Bitcoin mining. We call core plus basically our software business, everything beyond Bitcoin mining.

Sheldon Bennett (06:38):

And so, you know, once that Bitcoin's created, um, there's a whole world that it lives in, so it goes into a wallet. So that's our core plus, right? It can go into exchange and be sold for cash or traded for other coins. So that's an exchange side of our layer to exchange. We were introducing. So that's core plus, and then you have all the Southerns that we can do around, you know, moving it around, lending it to, you know, all the different financial, transactional services you can do with it. And so our goal as a company and being vertically integrated was not just to make a Bitcoin and have it sit on our balance sheet, which is, there's nothing wrong with that. And lots of companies do that. And some C companies have a lot of Bitcoin in the other balance sheet. Oh yeah. Um, but uh, our, our goal was, and, and you have to sell it a little bit now and then to, to pay your pay your power bills and so on and so forth.

Sheldon Bennett (07:21):

Our goal was to say, well, once a Bitcoin's made, let's not stop there. Let's keep interacting with it. And in that ecosystem, try and make transactional fees. And when I give an investor, uh, presentation, I have this slide that they all like, and it it's, it's an iceberg. And at the top of the iceberg over the water is Bitcoin mining. It's a $16 billion business give or take, you know, whatever you numbers you want to put in. And the bottom, there's this $2 trillion, you know, underwater business, which is the central finance. And that's all the stuff like coin bases in there and Gemini in there and fidelity and all these guys that are transacting and living in the world of Bitcoin, but they're not making. And so we're making it and then we're moving into the bigger market of it moving around and we really want to be in that market as well. We want to make it and we want to interact with it continuous.

Will Szamosszegi (08:02):

That graphic sounds fascinating. And I've never, I've never heard it said that way, but that's, I can see that being very compelling and going into that, you were talking about the, like the pool side. Um, I, I understand that you've done as of it's 20, 22 now. So as of last year, uh, you, you were doing a cooperative pool with marathon, is that

Sheldon Bennett (08:23):

Correct? Yeah. So we started this idea with marathon called the digital currency minus for north America, the DCM, and a, and the idea was that we would kind of create a pool that everybody in north America could join and we'd have like a council with kind of rules and they would vote on what we wanted to do and bring all that together. So we'd run the technology pool fees would be collected and then it would be like a nonprofit and we would distribute those pool fees back out based just on covering our operational costs. And we moved forward with that for a while. Then everything kind of broke open with Elon Musk and Michael sailor got into it all energy and this and that. And so, um, what happened is, uh, marathon decided, well, we're gonna keep the pool idea. We're gonna call it Mari pool.

Sheldon Bennett (09:03):

And so we run this Mari pool for them on the technology side, it's their, their pool. And they got really involved with Michael sailor. And so did we and much of other companies and sort of this digital, the Bitcoin mining council BMC, and so of Michael sailors, all out of the voice of that, um, marathons there and pretty much everybody else. And so we kind of decoupled and said, well, let the Bitcoin mining council take on the narrative of what's going on in Bitcoin and we'll run the pool as marathon. And we'll invite people in that want to join this pool, you know, instead of bringing the pool and sort of the, the lobby side of Bitcoin together to want into a pool, let's just separate them out and let that do its thing. Because in, in the original plan for DC M and a, the digital currency minor in north America, part of the funds that were generated from the fees was to go into paying for an advocacy group for Bitcoin minors.

Sheldon Bennett (09:51):

But that's kind of gone into the Bitcoin mining council. So we're kind of duplicating it and we thought, well, let's not duplicate it. Let's just let Michael sailor and the group there, you know, be that group. And let's just have this as a mining pool. So it was a great start at both sort of lobbying and having sort of an industry group for Bitcoin miners north America. It was a great idea. And I think that's why the Bitcoin mining council's been doing so well was that we had people like, like us in marathon and others thinking about this, how do we bring everybody together that can work together on issues for Bitcoin minors, north America? It didn't end up being in the, in the marathon pool, but the concept's still not really gone. The pool that we're doing called Terra pool with Argo. We still have a lot of the concepts and ideas of that, of having sort of a cooperative pool, not a really a for-profit pool so much as a pool that everybody would pay into.

Sheldon Bennett (10:37):

We look at the operating costs, pull them out and then pay out, proceeds back to the members. So Terra pool, which is up in operating, we haven't done any press releases on it, really, cuz it's beta. But if you look around, you'll see some information. Actually I think we tweeted out some information about it, but we're looking at probably in January, end of January, beginning of February, looking at taking on other parties besides, uh, Argo and DMG. I mean, then we're looking at, you know, growing that pool over time and we're busy right now, putting the rules and regulations together, cuz it is a clean energy pool. So you need to be on some type of clean energy or path to clean energy to, uh, to join that pool. So you can't be, you know, on a coal plant, a hundred percent coal and, and uh, no plans of doing anything but using coal power to, to create Bitcoins and, and being terrible. But you can, uh, be on some power. That's not, you know, a hundred percent clean and rack it off with proper wrecks and be on a path to renewable energy. Yeah.

Will Szamosszegi (11:27):

Um, that that's great. And I mean, you touched on so much there, so which is, which is awesome. Cuz first off the narrative piece, right? Like the narrative that Bitcoin mining is bad for the environment. That's just something that I feel like people who are pushing it don't really understand the fundamental value of Bitcoin and they don't understand how mining or the energy sector actually work at a deep level and they need to talk with people who are experts in this people like you. So I mean with that like background, what, what are your thoughts on, you know, Bitcoin mining, energy consumption, Tulsa.

Sheldon Bennett (12:00):

I give this example before and I'll give it again is, and I like to use paper cuz everybody knows what paper is. Right. We all use it some way, shape or form. You probably have paper around you right here. Right. There you go. Right. And I mean, I gotta printer it right behind me. <laugh> um, so paper is fundamental to how we basically live our lives. Do business communicate, right? And it's everywhere. Money is paper too. And I mean you have credit cards, but the fundamentals of, of, of money is paper as well. Right? Um, coins and paper, you know, there's value to paper. Everybody understands why there are pulp mills. Why there are logging companies, why you're making paper, right. But then you bring in the digital age and we have PDFs and we have emails and we're not writing letters anymore. Like we used to, we're not sending out flyers.

Sheldon Bennett (12:41):

Like we used to, we're not using paper like we used to in the past. And so there's this idea with, with Bitcoin and things that are digital people that use it value it, people that don't use it don't value it. And so when you look at paper, do I think that, you know, a pulp mill should be cutting down this many trees, right? And adding these chemicals and pulping, refining, and using all this, you know, uh, energy and P all this pollution they create cuz pulp mills make a lot of pollution. Um, should they be doing all that to create paper wouldn't we have a whole digital economy and we don't really need paper. We have DocuSign, we have PDFs. We have all the stuff you need. So why is it okay to spend so much money on energy and pollution and logging and deforestation and all the stuff that's considered bad for paper, but for a digital world, why is it considered bad to Bitcoin mind secure the money system that people are adopting and using and it's growing.

Sheldon Bennett (13:37):

Why is that bad? And this, this is to me is a generational discussion because the new generation like my kids and myself and that we get it, we we're we're okay with energy being used to secure a blockchain to secure, you know, digital things because we use them, we see value in them. But my mom and dad, you know, they don't have Bitcoin in their bank account. They don't use Bitcoin. They have no use for it. Um, they use paper <laugh>, you know, so they don't see value in it and because it's not something they're using. And so it's really sort of a usage case as usership grows, the debate starts to disappear because when you use something and when society uses something, they don't question the resources, really that go into it. They just question the output of it. Is it doing what I wanted to do?

Sheldon Bennett (14:21):

And so if you start talking about Bitcoin, that way and energy for Bitcoin that way, and you start looking at other resources and you know, some of these legacy resources that are being used, you kind of go, well, wait a minute. Why are we putting so much into that? Why are we doing this when the economy and the way people are operating, the way people are interacting are going this way. That's the way I like to think about it is it's a generational change is a technology change and there's gonna be winners and losers and there's gonna be debate throughout it. At the end of the day, you can't stop change.

Will Szamosszegi (14:47):

No, that's a very good point. I mean, I'm trying to think of what I, I heard the other day, the comparison with, with the energy usage, how in mining it's so different than any, any other industry, like people aren't looking at Tesla cars and electric vehicles being like, oh, well they're getting charged from the grid. That's primarily fueled off of non-renewable energy sources. It's just kind of, the lens is so distorted.

Sheldon Bennett (15:11):

He talks about the pollution in the different countries that create the raw materials for batteries, right? <laugh> you don't talk about these things. You don't, you know, here's another one. Um, you can be a diamond minor to make diamonds, right? People like diamonds, women seem to like the more than men, but is a store value. It has value it's tradeable right. So the energy and the devastation, you could say environmental impact of mining diamond. This is well known. There's a whole blood diamond trade that, you know, the Kimberly process has been trying to stop. I mean, it's a, it's an industry that has its issues, right? But you don't see people saying we should stop the diamond industry because you have a usage case. You have engagement rings, raving, rings, presence, whatever, all related to diamonds. And then you have industrial use for diamonds. And so Bitcoin isn't there yet, but it's getting there.

Sheldon Bennett (15:53):

And then of course, there's the other side of diamonds. You can make diamonds with enough energy. In some, in some carbon you hear about these artificial diamonds. You don't even have to mind diamonds anymore. They're exactly the same from, you know, a composition point of view. You don't have to cut into mountain sides. So you don't have to do all these things in, in, in different countries to, to pull diamonds out when you can just have labs, make them, but it takes a lot of energy and nobody questions the energy to make a diamond because there's a population out there that wants it, uses it and recognizes it. And nobody asks about the energy used to create a diamond. If you make a lemon lab, whether it's renewable or carbon based, there's no questions about it. So it's just because Bitcoin is easy to see. It's very transparent. It's easy to measure. It gets lots of questions. It's an easy target to have lots of questions. Yeah.

Will Szamosszegi (16:37):

What about your, your thoughts on gold? Because I know that a lot of there's always this debate between like the gold bugs and the Bitcoiners, and is a clear competition between the two in terms of, you know, store value asset. What, what are your thoughts on, on that whole debate and, and gold versus Bitcoin?

Sheldon Bennett (16:52):

You know, um, it's a good debate. <laugh> I, I think as technology goes forward, the cryptos will prevail in many ways that that's personally mine. Gold's, Gold's interesting. I mean, you know, I've done some work in gold in the past, in the mining sector and you know, it takes a lot of energy, a lot of work getting harder and harder to get it's finite, as we know, it's value kind of goes up and down, depending on what's happening in international markets and what's happening in the world. It has a use though. You can actually use it in manufacturing. You use electronics, you use in different things. So Gold's a bit different because you know, it has a few different dual uses. It's been around for a long time. It's a well known commodity. It has a long history. Bitcoin's newer. It's not as well known.

Sheldon Bennett (17:35):

It's trying to find its place in the world. It's kind of found a couple of good niches. I think it's gonna find some more over time when you go look at environment energy, I don't know the numbers, but you know, I know what Bitcoin does versus what gold does. And I think for the amount of energy put into Bitcoin, it probably is doing more than gold. When you look at a store value and you look at, you know, transactions bringing, you know, commerce to unbankable people. I wrote, uh, an accounting and accounting journal, a bit of a paper about Bitcoin, where I talked about how there's this whole world that's unbankable that S in north American EU and other places don't know. Yeah. When you look at south America, you have to look at parts of Malaysia. You look at south, uh, Africa, uh, places like that.

Sheldon Bennett (18:16):

People may have a cell phone because they've leaped from telephones to cell phones. And they may only have SMSs cuz there may not be smart phones, but you know, there are companies that can, you know, open Bitcoin accounts on cell phones and run them on SMS for trading and buying and exchanging doesn't necessarily have to be a smartphone and you become bankable. All of a sudden you have your wealth in your phone that can buy and sell, can open up and you sell goods for, for Bitcoin or other coins. And you know, if you had to open a bank and get a merchant account and all that cost and all that effort, it's like, unheard of you can't do it. Right. That's why cash is so surveillance in many economies. And so Bitcoin solves all of these problems and other coins do too. I mean, let's not just say it's only Bitcoin, but cryptocurrencies solve a lot of the problems for the unbankable as well.

Sheldon Bennett (19:01):

And I think that that's a story that you never hear north America. You don't hear the story of. So when, so in, you know, south America that now, uh, it has a thriving business because he accepts, uh, and takes Bitcoin for payments and he pays with it. Whereas before couldn't afford the a hundred dollars a month for a merchant account to take visa, MasterCard, nobody had a visa MasterCard, right? <laugh> and it was three hours to get to a bank and the bank would never even open an account. Anyways, there's this dichotomy of like north America or Western nations are using Bitcoin as a store value. We're looking at layer two as you know, for it to trade and transact more. But then you have this other side where it's like other, other cultures and other parts of the world are using it as a store value from a different point of view, anti inflationary, their currency's not trusted.

Sheldon Bennett (19:44):

It's easier to trade amongst people around you in the same town or village that story's never talked about. And so there's a use case that Bitcoin is giving sort of financial independence and freedom to a certain part of the population. And then there's this other use case where like financial institutions and people in, in, in Western countries are, are building an asset class that, you know, wasn't there before and you know, is getting up there with the idea of gold. I mean, Gold's much bigger, but the idea is that it, a store value is part of that asset class. And that's why I was saying earlier, the story of Bitcoin's not over as just what we think of a store value. It's gonna change. I think over time, it's gonna, you know, I think the layer two side of the transactional side is gonna start coming out more.

Sheldon Bennett (20:24):

I think it tying to, you know, the us D dollar currencies around the world are gonna tie in more over time. And I think it's just kind of getting going and it's with the adoption and people starting to use it more and more financial regulators starting to really look at it as an asset class that they need to understand and figure out how to work with. And I say, work with not close down and shut down other countries and close it down and shut it down. I think, you know, north American or the Western countries will work with

Will Szamosszegi (20:47):

It. I think like on that point too, you, you touched on something that I, I keep referring to as well, which is like, we're still at the beginning of this, of this book, you know, like we're still in the first, second chapter of like where Bitcoin's going. I mean, you know, better than, than anyone as a minor, we can kind of see how the difficulty will. We expect the difficulty to adjust over time. And last Bitcoin's being mined in roughly the year 2140. So mm-hmm, <affirmative>, I mean, we're just over a decade in, I mean, on that note, I want to kind of hear some predictions, like, uh, like, do you have any like any predictions you're comfortable sharing? Do you have any price type of predictions, which are always very tough, but also just industry, future predictions, like where you think it's going,

Sheldon Bennett (21:33):

You know, I never write about price, so <laugh>, I don't <laugh> I should predict that I'll be wrong. I mean, I, I, I like when I see all these articles saying bit Bitcoin to be, you know, a hundred thousand dollars in December and of course we're in January and it's, you know, 42 or something. So yeah, that,

Will Szamosszegi (21:49):

I mean, it's a big narrative at that point where, I mean, you had a lot of big prominent people, people who were looking at at charts who had big followings saying, Hey, based on these indicators, X, Y, and Z, we see this thing reaching a hundred K and it, it just didn't happen.

Sheldon Bennett (22:03):

You know, Bitcoin's like that it <laugh> seems to do what we wanted to do, but it's a survivor. It keeps going, it keeps growing. You know, I will say one thing with what we're trying to do in DMG, you know, as a Bitcoin minor, obviously we care about the price of Bitcoin. I mean, it's fundamental to our financials. It's fundamental to our capital expenditures and what we wanna do as a company, you, our core business, but in the core plus when we get the transactional side, what a Bitcoin goes up or down, it's just like, when you buy and sell stocks, your broker doesn't really care if the stock goes up or down, as long as you're doing a transaction, cuz that's how they make their money. And so as we move into that sort of software side, that stack software for us as a company, whether the Bitcoin price is going up or down or whether there's lots of tra well, hopefully there's, there'll still be lots of transactions and lots of needs for wallets and exchanging.

Sheldon Bennett (22:49):

You know, we'll, we'll see that as a growing side of the bus, you know, the whole idea of Bitcoin, uh, over time you talk about, you know, another a hundred years or so before the last Bitcoin's mind. That's true. But during that sort of ramp up to the, the last Bitcoin being mind, the goal of the protocol was that there would be more transactions and transaction fees to pay the minors. And so that's a big part of it. So, you know, we're kind of betting on this future transactional side of Bitcoin, by getting more involved in the transactional side, not just the mining side of Bitcoin,

Will Szamosszegi (23:16):

Are you part of this, uh, camp of people who think that Bitcoin's gonna be like the global reserve asset?

Sheldon Bennett (23:21):

I think it's too early to say something like that. I think it's a nice idea. I think when you see countries, uh, adopting Bitcoin as a legal tender, this kind of adds to the narrative and the story that it could become. I could see in the future central banks in different parts of the world, taking a chunk of Bitcoin and putting it in their reserves in the future. So it could happen. I, I wouldn't put a big wager on that. You have to realize, or at least I think everybody realizes this <laugh> I shouldn't say you have to, financial institutions are highly regulated and they move very slow. And so things that we think they should have today, they may have in a decade <laugh>. So, you know, when you look at, you know, when they look at reserves, uh, whether they're cash or gold or other assets, it's gonna take a while for them to get comfortable with a new digital asset to be reserved.

Sheldon Bennett (24:06):

So as much as we may think is the greatest thing ever. Um, there's a lot of other people coming, going back to the paper versus Bitcoin discussion, you know, mills versus versus the servers. And there's a lot of people out there that aren't ready for it, or don't believe in it, or need more sort of empirical evidence of it's value. If you're, you know, a crypto minor and you go to a bank and say, Hey, I'd like to take a loan for 10 million and they come and they look at you and they say, okay, let's take a look at your cash flow. Cause that's usually what they wanna see, how much cash you generating to pay back this loan. When they look at your cash flow, happy or sad, whatever your cash flow is, they look at the history of the cash flow attached to the asset.

Sheldon Bennett (24:39):

So if you're like a pig farm, or they look at your pig sale and they look at the commodity market for pig, if a lumber producer, they look at the lumber price and the history of the lumber price, where it's going, what happens, the movements in it. And they kind of go, they get to know the asset that is backing the future cashflow that pay them back. And so when you're Bitcoin minor, you have this very short history that banks go, well, we don't like this. There's not very much empirical data here to help us make a decision on whether or not giving, you know, a bank clients money to you will get paid back because one, what you're in is new and two is very volatile. And so going back to your question, it's gonna take a while of seeing this asset one, settle down a little bit.

Will Szamosszegi (25:17):

It's pretty nice when it's going up.

Sheldon Bennett (25:19):

<laugh> yeah. Yeah. So one settled down a bit and two to be understood, uh, better. Uh, what is, why is it only $42,000? You know, why is it not a hundred? I mean, if that's what some of the, the better minds in finance were saying, it should be looking at the metrics and it's not there. This is why traditional finance aren't that comfortable with it yet. It's gonna take a little while because they, they like to know what that paper price is gonna be or what that pork belly price is gonna be or whatever, you know, that commodity is. They like to understand it and have some comfort around where it's going to go and what can impact it. And they don't understand Bitcoin yet. And I think, I think very people do very few people do understand it, cuz it is so new.

Will Szamosszegi (25:56):

That's a huge piece of it. Cuz when you look at mining, you think, okay, well this should be easy to finance this type of a business, right? You're generating a tremendous amount of cash flow if you're selling your Bitcoin and you've got low cost energy, but we're still, we still kind of seem to be at a point now where financial institutions are still trying to get comfortable with it. So like, I'm not sure if you have a sense of this, but like from the mining side, like how do you think that this is gonna progress? Like where are we today with the financing for minors? It's definitely different than it was like three years ago or something four years ago.

Sheldon Bennett (26:27):

Yeah. Three years ago it was impossible or pretty much impossible <laugh> mean we, we did some financing, but it was very expensive. You know, it was like 18, 20% considered like credit you could put on your credit card for like the same thing. Yeah.

Will Szamosszegi (26:38):

That's right. Get like an annex card <laugh>

Sheldon Bennett (26:41):

Yeah. But um, what, what happened when Bitcoin shot up to $60,000, stayed there for a while and finance institutions started getting in there and you know, buying it and getting more familiar with it. It was, it really helped the public companies cuz the public company valuations went up and that allowed them to go to the markets and raise money. We raised money, pretty much everybody raised money. That's one of the good things. What being a public company, you have this opportunity, you know, you don't wanna upstate your shareholders too much with dilution, but at the same time you grow a company, you cash to do it. So that ability to raise money really changed the narrative because now Bitcoin miners could go and buy product. So we could go put to micro BT and Canon and Bitmain and others and buy it with cash and not need financing.

Sheldon Bennett (27:21):

But also because we were creating more Bitcoins and we had cash, we weren't desperate to get financing. Like you would've been in the past or saying, I'll pay your 20% cuz there's no other way I can get these machines. Right. And so what's happened is financing has come down a lot and you'll see some really interesting deals in the public companies where they're doing all sorts of bonds and a ventures and different things. And instead of paying, you know, 18%, this is getting down below 10% and I think it's gonna continue to work its way down. I saw a deal where somebody who did a deal for 8.7, 5% on, uh, for some financing, uh, for crypto minus who in the public companies. So when you see things like that, it's kinda like, okay, well this is getting to be okay, you know, eight, nine, 10%, um, for a volatile industry.

Sheldon Bennett (28:03):

That's not that well known this isn't a kind of acceptable number as it gets. You know, what better known and better track record and payments are happening. And people are seeing that we can pay our bills. Then you could see it's coming below 8%. So I think it's getting a lot better. The flip side to that is there's nothing to buy <laugh>. So you know, this chip shortage is a different side to this and, and the price of this. And I I've been fairly vocal about this idea that if you're buying Bitcoin minors and your ROI calculated out is gonna be two years or something like that. It's a pretty crazy buy to make with, especially if investors money, because two year ROI on equipment that maybe will last three or four years with technology. I mean, who knows what's gonna exactly happen, but if you're spending two years just running the stuff to pay it off before you actually are generating real cash and profit from it, these, these are scary numbers.

Sheldon Bennett (28:48):

We try to do 12 months or less on our equipment purchases. And, and it's because of things like this, you know, when we were buying equipment at $60,000 a Bitcoin and it's like, okay, we can do pay off in eight months on a purchase, you know, at 70, $80 a te hash or whatever it may be. But if it's, you know, a hundred dollars a Terra Ash, then you're at, you know, 18 months and it's like, well, who knows what's gonna happen, cuz great. If Bitcoin goes up, you pay it off faster. But if it goes down, then you're into two years and plus, and so you're buying equipment you're gonna run and you're never actually gonna make any money on it before you're looking at trading it out and getting new stuff to keep up with the difficulty. And so when you look at what happened and when it went from down down to, you know, $40,000, $42,000, all your ROI is that you're calculating at 60,000, that were eight, nine months are now 16 months, maybe 24 months, who knows right on, on what you paid for Tara hash.

Sheldon Bennett (29:38):

And so it's a scary business from that point of view. And, and when you're a public company and you have investor money, you really have to think a lot about what you're buying and how you're buying it and what your ROI is on it. Because at the end of the year, you're gonna have an audit and your audit is gonna look at that equipment you bought. They're gonna look at what you paid for it. They're gonna look at how much it generated in, in cash, right? The expenses to run it. And they're gonna say, will it in the future, create enough cash, right? To cover its cost. And if it won't, then they're going to impair that asset on your balance. And so if you have like a hundred million dollars of Bitcoin mins on your balance sheet that you bought and they're all running, but they can only make you $50 million in the future on their lifespan of when they're, you know, the technology side and the auditors work this stuff out and we help auditors do this.

Sheldon Bennett (30:23):

They're gonna take your balance sheet from a hundred million down to 50 million. Do you know what that does to your stock? Do you know what that does to the, you know, to ability the, of the shareholders, if, if you're the company that had the write off so much value. So it's really important to get the stuff right. And like I say, I'm, I'm not saying I'm great at this. I mean, we're all struggling through this because it's such a new industry, but you know, we get a euphoric about the price of Bitcoin and we just start throwing money at minors and equipment and all this stuff. And then, you know, three months later it crashes down and we're like, oh my God, cancel that. Do I do it? <laugh> and if you just be more pragmatic, you say, well, we know it's gonna go all over the place.

Sheldon Bennett (31:01):

What's our minimum cost to make a Bitcoin, where do we think the difficult is going? And does this purchase make sense? Can we pay it off in a reasonable amount of money knowing gonna run for three to four years? And that's kind of the way, you know, I'm hoping that it gets more like that and that'll help because you know, the man in the manufacturing cost of making a Bitcoin minor is not near what Bitcoin miners are paying for it. And you know, if you talk to other Bitcoin mins and ask them, you know, about the price of Bitcoin miners, you know, when the M 30 came out, uh, we got the very first order from micro BT and it was something like $20 a te Ash, the cost to make it really hasn't gone up that much more, right? It's the same chips. They still make the M 30 S it's the same chips, the same fans, the same controlled board.

Sheldon Bennett (31:43):

So all that same aluminum case. But you know, now it's 80 to a hundred dollars. A te hash manufacturers are doing quite well. I'm sure there's been increasing costs and supply chain issues, but not, you know, big. Yeah. Yeah. So we good for them. I mean, I mean, that's the side of capitalism that, that works well, right. Make money when you can. I mean, I don't complain when Bitcoin $65,000, they don't say, oh, that's too, too expensive. I, I wanted I'll get, sell my Bitcoin for $40,000. Cause 65 is too much, you know, I don't do that. Right. <laugh> yeah, I get that. But, but it is a problem because it, uh, it does really hurt, you know, large industrial size minors, even small mins when the prices are so expensive and, and the future revenue and ROI is so hard to figure out, going back to sort of the MI you know, the empirical data and what's going to happen in the future. So volatile it's, you know, there's this, there's this concept in a lot of people's mind that Bitcoin mining is like so lucrative and you're, everybody's so rich, it's a hard business. It's it's like any other business business, if it was easy, everybody would do it. Right. Yeah. But it's a hard business. And especially at scale, it's a hard business.

Will Szamosszegi (32:45):

Yes. So it's like the, it's one of those things where you have so much, there's so much knowledge out there and so much to learn. So you'll have people come into the space and they might have capital, but if they don't understand what they're doing, then those are the people who are gonna get wrecked. You know, it's like, you could have $500 million, but if you're going in, and if you're buying minors at six X, the price of your competitors, and you're locking in a bad power contract, then you're gonna be in, in some big trouble when the market turns around,

Sheldon Bennett (33:13):

Even that the power engineering of making all the phases work properly. Yeah. The power properly, the breakers don't go. All the sizing properly is a big thing. The network engineering is, I mean, the networks that we have to run so many individual servers and running, 'em all through a proxy, into a pool and all that is a huge amount that can go wrong. And there's a huge amount of security in there too. It's a, it's a lot, I mean, this is not a garage business anymore, and it's getting more and more sophisticated. It's getting very competitive. It's a very expensive capital intensive business on the other side of it. It's a very lucrative one if you get it right. Yeah. Um, and a lot of people look at how lucrative it is. <laugh> and I dunno if they all look at how hard it is,

Will Szamosszegi (33:53):

They're all looking at this like chart. And they're like, I would've gotten in here <laugh> and then like, but some people are getting in up here.

Sheldon Bennett (34:00):

It cost me $6,000 to make one it's 10 X, I'm gonna be a Bitcoin minor. And it's like, okay. Yeah. Well go, you know, run 10 or 20 machines, fine, go run 12,000, go draw, you know, be like marathon and run a hundred thousand. This is a completely different world. Right.

Will Szamosszegi (34:16):

And when you were talking about kind of how you view these ROI calculators, it brought up an interesting question. Cause let's say that, let's say you through a thought experiment, let's say you were a minor, you have capital, right. And you're at a point in the cycle where the ROI calculator is at, you know, putting in 1.5 to two, two years to get your return. It, it's kind of like, you're, you're Strapp because you have this capital, you're trying to make a return on it, but you might feel like it's not the best time to go and put your money into minors. Like what can miners do in that type of situation? It's

Sheldon Bennett (34:49):

See what miners are doing. So, um, when we didn't like the prices of Bitcoin or minors, sorry. Um, we went and bought some Bitcoin. So we went and bought, I think it was $12 million worth of Bitcoin. Um, and not that we, you know, preferred doing that, but we went and bought it. I mean, it's way cheaper for us to make it. But when we couldn't find mins that were, you know, under a hundred dollars, a Terah hash, um, we weren't willing to buy them eventually with what happened in China with the crackdown. A lot of mins came on and we bought miners for like 50 to $60 of te hash. We bought hold, thousands of them got them over. Um, and you know, and, and, and that's giving us a great ROI because we, we got a great price on them. And then, you know, we got some of the bit main contracts that protect your price. That helps as well. Um, but so, you know, one thing and, and, and I think you just saw this, you know, with bid farms, they just went and bought, what was it? 42 million worth of Bitcoin. They bought the dip. And so one thing you can do, if you believe that a Bitcoin minor should have a lot of Bitcoin on his balance sheet is you can go buy it. Um, as Michael sailor says, just buy Bitcoin, <laugh> you wanna hedge?

Will Szamosszegi (35:52):

Yeah. Apex property.

Sheldon Bennett (35:53):

Yeah. And, and like I say, I don't think it's a bad thing to buy Bitcoin if you're a minor. I mean, we bought it. We think there's value in buying it. And we put it on our balance sheet. It sits in our treasury account. We may buy more, we may sell some of it. We kinda look at what we want to do, but you know, one thing to do, if the machines are too expensive is to buy Bitcoin, it's a more expensive way to get Bitcoin. But if your goal is to have Bitcoin as a Bitcoin minor, it is a way to do it.

Will Szamosszegi (36:17):

Yeah. And I mean, I, I'm not sure what your thoughts are on this, but I think that if you just start taking even a little bit longer of a time horizon, you just see that like Fiats going down, Bitcoin's going up. You might not wanna hold on to cash. You might wanna hold onto something like Bitcoin. Yeah. <laugh>

Sheldon Bennett (36:34):

Yeah. I think everybody should consider putting a little bit into Bitcoin, even if it's, they always say it on those commercials, like, you know, for your RSPs, if you're in Canada, just put away $300 a month on your check and don't even see it, you can do the same thing with Bitcoin. Just put like $50 coming out of your calendar every month with your exchange and just buy a little bit of Bitcoin and grow it over time. And you'd probably be, I would assume pretty happy with it. Just looking at the, the history of Bitcoin so far, just like you would be pretty happy with almost any, you know, stock or bond or mutual fund that you would buy into over time or real estate, you know, in general things get more expensive and are worth more over time. So, yeah, except for paper I'll I'll, I'll I'll continue on paper. <laugh>

Will Szamosszegi (37:11):

Yeah. All the listeners are learning a lot about paper today. <laugh>

Sheldon Bennett (37:15):

I mean, my background, I pick out paper, I love paper and, and pulp and paper. I mean, my entire family is in the forest industry for, for many generations. And I was, oh, wow. I started, I was a student at UBC, this university of British Columbia, and I was a tree planter, you know, <laugh> to pay my, I tuition every, uh, every summer. So I went off on tree planted. So anyways, I should pick out paper, but its the idea is, could be an industry it's just, there's there's a change in what's happening, the change in behavior and a change of use and, and the, yeah. So anyway, yeah. It's an easy one for, to pick up cause I know it well.

Will Szamosszegi (37:49):

Yeah. I, I can tell I've learned a lot about it. So I got a couple more questions here and we've touched on all these. This is, this has been awesome, but just beyond like DMG and everything else, when we're looking broadly at Bitcoin and blockchain in general, like what about like everything excites you the most?

Sheldon Bennett (38:09):

I'm excited about the layer two exchanges. Um, now at the same time, I don't like it. So I'm excited because I like this idea that we can get a lot more transactions happening in a block. Right. I don't like it because I'm a minor and I want those transaction fees <laugh> so I like it when I'm in exchange because I'm getting lots of transaction fees. And then when I go put that, you know, clear that out into a, a public block chain, I get one transaction, not a whole bunch of, I think it's really interesting. I think there's, I think what happens with scale is there's gonna be, if, if things go the way that we hope they go, as you, people that are enthusiastic about crypto, that's gonna be so big that nobody's gonna care because there'll be so many transactions trying to get into the different blockchain.

Sheldon Bennett (38:50):

And so I, I, I think it's a good thing what layer two brings because it's bringing more adoption. Um, and so I'm pretty excited about that. And what's going on in that and us getting involved with Bo Sonic and a layer, two exchange, I'm pretty excited about that, but bigger than that, what I'm excited and what I think is really going to be important this year is regulation. I think the us government, which is probably one of the most important are going to figure out or substantially figure out what they want to do in the world of regulation and crypto, they put it off long enough to see what happens. There's been enough court cases. There's been enough publicity there's been enough, this and that there's enough funds in it. There's enough big money looking at it, doing stuff with it, not doing stuff with it that they kind of have to make up their mind.

Sheldon Bennett (39:35):

And you're seeing more and more like a crypto report supposed to be coming out soon from the us government. And there's different branches of the government too. Like they all kind of look at it and study it and figure out what they wanna do. Right. And I think that's gonna come together and be more cohesive. And I think this is a good thing. Well, I hope it's a good thing. If it goes the way we want it to go, it goes to way, you know, China or Russia, places that bandit, this is not good. Yeah. But, uh, I don't see that happening. Um, so I think that by, you know, financial institutions and the players and the interested parties by them, knowing what the rules are, it will be a catalyst for growth and it'll expedite adoption and investment. And I think it'll be a great thing for Bitcoin itself and all the cryptos.

Sheldon Bennett (40:19):

And I think for the price as well, it will start to get more sort of price discovery of crypto when the rules are better known and understood. Uh, and, and the larger financial institutions will know how to act and play within those rules and will have the tools to do it. And so we talk about, you know, our software stack, our software stack around regulatory compliance is fully focused on what are the rules that allow a bank to transact in Bitcoin right now they can't do it. They have all sorts of problems. But if we know the rules, we can create the software to achieve the goals of those rules to allow banks and financial institutions and other, you know, regulated entities to get into this business. If they get into it, going back to my, you know, my parents, I was saying, you know, they bank and they don't bank.

Sheldon Bennett (41:07):

They don't, they don't touch Bitcoin because their bank doesn't do it. If, if a bank starts offering Bitcoin accounts, there's a huge customer basis. That's gonna say, well, okay, I'll put a hundred bucks into Bitcoin every month for my retirement or $50 or I'll buy some of it and see what happens. Well, when that starts happening on mass, just think about what's gonna happen to the industry. Right. Then you'll have a real asset class that's been discovered and accepted. Yeah. And I think that's really what we need to have happen this year is it really has to be a focus on a great discussion and great help and great interest with regulators and understanding and getting through the hurdles of making crypto an asset class that is understood and can be used.

Will Szamosszegi (41:46):

Yeah. I mean, that is pretty wild to think about how much, like all the people who don't have access to it today, if something like that happens just Bitcoin's being opened up to so many more people. Well, what do you think is gonna happen with the governments? I know like E everyone's was talking about El Salvador becoming like a, a Bitcoin country just fully adopted by, by the president. Do you think that that's something that like this, this year we're gonna be seeing a lot of

Sheldon Bennett (42:11):

Maybe the countries like that? Um, I don't, I mean, that's not on the top of my mind of what's gonna happen in government. Um, I think it kinda goes back to that dichotomy. I was talking about where you have sort of Western nations and non-Western nations and you have inflationary issues and volatility and non-Western nations. And they have, they have different issues running that, you know, their countries, when you look at a Western nation, you know, uh, we have great controls of our finances. We have a lot of money. We have lots of ways to access and use it. We have visa, we have MasterCard, we have interact in general. We don't need Bitcoin to pay for things. Right. Very true. We'd like it, we we'd like it, but we have an infrastructure that works and it works fairly well there. When we talk about this idea of friction, like it's expensive to wire trans.

Sheldon Bennett (42:56):

If I wanna wire transfer a million dollars to Japan, I'm gonna get like $1,500 in fees. If I wanna send a million dollars, uh, Bitcoin into Japan, it's gonna cost me 8 cents. We talk about this friction, right? Of, you know, the cost of doing business is still quite high with our infrastructure, the way it is and the way banks work, that's a problem. And I think that crypto and blockchain will start taking on that more and more in Western countries. But when you kinda look forward, I mean, when you look at governments, I can see them using it as an asset class. I can see people using it on a layer, two kind of exchange side, but I don't see governments going right out and saying, you know, we're gonna make Bitcoin our central currency. I think you'll get government saying, you know, Canadian government, you work in Bitcoin, it's considered a barter transaction, you can do it. It's legal. So on and so forth. I can't see the G eight K government ever saying Bitcoin is a legal tender in Canada. They might create their own coin. That could be paired up with Bitcoin or something like that in the future. But I don't, I don't see governments giving up their ability to control their monetary policy and handing that over to Bitcoin. That's a

Will Szamosszegi (43:55):

That's point. <laugh>

Sheldon Bennett (43:57):

Yeah. Yeah. So, um, you know, that's, that's a very powerful tool that governments have to manage their economy, manage standard of life of the citizens to, to do a lot of things. And I can't see any government saying, you know what, we're gonna to give that over to Bitcoin and let the future of our monetary policy be greatly impacted by Bitcoin. Now, when it's really hard to manage your monetary policy and the finances of your country, and you, you know, as a government, you have lots of volatility and stability issues then maybe Bitcoin or other assets like that could make a lot of sense. And that's what you're seeing with a few governments trying this out, but they're in a different situation right. Than more of the Western countries out there.

Will Szamosszegi (44:35):

Yeah. That that's true. The us is in a very unique situation compared to a lot of other countries. Like it it's wild when you see some of these countries who just have very weak currencies that are collapsing so much compared to the dollars. And then you think, well, over 85% of the dollars in circulation have been printed, like since March of 2020. So it's like, wow, those currencies must have really gone down a lot in purchasing power. It's

Sheldon Bennett (44:58):

Yeah. I mean, the world economics is an issue for economists, but it it's an interesting world out there. Right. And like, you know, we'll go back to what we were originally saying at the beginning. I mean, it's early days for Bitcoin and crypto in general, you know, it's, it's, you know, a decade a bit more than a decade and that's not very long in the world of finance and in the world of, you know, economics, it's just starting and technology's moving so fast. I think that it'll grow quickly. As many of the other things have grown quickly, but it's early. I mean, I remember going from the capital raid tube, you know, TV to the LEDs and the LCDs and all the different types there. I mean, we went from this big box to this flat screen, to that something that you can barely see now. Um, and they're huge. So that technology, if the general mass likes it, the general population likes it. Look how fast it moves. Look how fast you wiped out Cal rate. It's it is amazingly fast. I mean, you go back and watch movies from the eighties and they're all in this big boxed, you know, monitors and TVs, right. The eighties. That's not that long ago. Even the nineties.

Will Szamosszegi (45:57):

Yeah. That's fascinating. So final question. This one's, this, one's an interesting one. I'm always interested to see what people say to this one. So it's actually the Peter teal question. So the question is what is one belief that you hold to be true that the majority of people would disagree with

Sheldon Bennett (46:14):

Dewan? One belief that I think is true that most people disagree with me on.

Will Szamosszegi (46:19):

Yeah. And it could be crypto related Bitcoin related, or it could just be in general, could even be about paper if you wanted. <laugh>

Sheldon Bennett (46:26):

<laugh>, I've talked about paper a lot. Um, my belief in Bitcoin, it's a precarious one. So everybody believes that since I run a Bitcoin company, that I am like super fix, you know, fixated on the fact that Bitcoin will rule the world. I think I'm more fixated on the fact that the blockchain technology in cryptocurrency will become predominant in generations to come over, you know, a few odd paper currencies. I really believe that. And, and there are a lot of people that don't see that, that way it's like Bitcoin works and it's not broken. Don't fix it. It is a great technology and it should be pervasive around the world. And you as the CEO of a Bitcoin company and a public company that does this, the shareholders, you should a hundred percent believe that that's the future of commerce. And I believe that Bitcoin is a part of a future of commerce.

Sheldon Bennett (47:14):

And you've heard me say this throughout the podcast. There's Ethereum, there's one narrow. There's a bunch of others out there. I honestly believe that. And I'll make a bit of a star wars analogy cuz everybody likes star wars. Um, I, I, I kind of believe that like when I was a kid, whether you talked about these Republic credits and all these sort of different planets around the war around the universe had their own currency, and then you had this empire with Republic credits, that was the currency above all the currencies. Right. It's kinda like the us dollar right now. And I, I think, oh, I kind of believe this idea that you're gonna have a bunch of cryptocurrencies based on nations. That will be just like the cash system. And a lot of people say, well, that's just stupid. I mean, we already have a cash system.

Sheldon Bennett (47:55):

Why would you need get cryptocurrencies? So why would you need a Canadian dollar crypto and a us dollar crypto and an Australian dollar crypto and whatever. And I think it goes back to monetary policy. I think you're gonna have individual currencies for countries that are wrapped in crypto, like a, like a Bitcoin or whatever you want to call it. And companies or countries are working on this and you won't have a unifying one. I really don't. Don't think there'll be a unifying, like Republic credit. That's taken everywhere. I think it'll be every country will have this for controlling a voluntary policy and doing all these things. And I think we're closer to that than we understand because when you look at visa, MasterCard, American express and all that, that is almost a cryptocurrency, it's a digitization of cash, putting it into a blockchain, um, and managing it, controlling it as a government is just the next step. And so when you're asking me, you know, what do I believe? I believe that you're gonna have digital currencies based on blockchain in every country, in the future, not an overall one that runs the whole globe. And I think a lot of people believe there's gonna be one is all, it only makes sense that you only have one doesn't make sense to have more than one. Right? Why put all the energy and time into it?

Will Szamosszegi (49:00):

I love the star wars analogy there that, that actually wrapped it up so perfectly.

Sheldon Bennett (49:04):

<laugh> you remember that we don't take Republic credits here <laugh> so when they're on 10 to lean there trying to do that anyways. Um, but yeah, when I was a kid, I, I remember that like Republic credits. Well, they're on a different, planet's like being a different country. Why would you take that's weird. <laugh> it's like,

Will Szamosszegi (49:21):

Yeah, well, yeah, I actually, uh, I, I think we're closer to, to that type of a system as well. Um, that, and I feel like most people outside of crypto, when they, when they hear something like that, it just sounds so crazy. They're like, what are these guys been talking about? But you know, maybe 20 years in the future, we'll look back on this episode and say that, that you got it spot on. Uh, thank you so much for, uh, for coming on. This has been a lot of fun and, um, I, I personally have learned a ton. This is, this was, uh, an incredible conversation and we're gonna have to do it again sometime.

Sheldon Bennett (49:52):

Yeah. You get me back on, we'll talk about that power issue. <laugh>

Will Szamosszegi (49:57):

Yeah. That's for the, the next episode, for sure.

Sheldon Bennett (50:00):

All for me, happy to come.

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