Revolutionizing Real Estate and Finance: The Blockchain and Crypto Breakthrough - with Debbie Hoffman and Eric Lapin

00:00:13 - Mike Mills

Howdy. Howdy, everybody. This is Mike Mills with Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance. And this is Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance. And today I'm welcoming two people that are going to join me to get on a topic that can seem a little in depth, it can seem like a lot, but if you break it down to some bare essentials, it's really not that difficult to understand. And the reality is that you need to understand this. You need to understand the concept of blockchain and the concepts of crypto and the concepts of NFTs and all of these things because it is impacting our life. Whether you realize it or not, or whether you understand it or not, it is coming. The train is coming, and you need to be ready. So to help me kind of sift through all the pieces of this, I'm welcoming Debbie Hoffman and Eric Lapin to the podcast. Hello, guys.

00:01:00 - Eric Lapin

Hey, Mike. Hey, Debbie.

00:01:02 - Mike Mills

How are y'all doing today?

00:01:03 - Debbie Hoffman

Good.

00:01:04 - Mike Mills

How are getting I don't know what the weather is like, I think. Are you in South Carolina, Eric? Is that right?

00:01:10 - Eric Lapin

Charleston.

00:01:11 - Mike Mills

Yeah, Charleston. And then Debbie, you're on the east coast.

00:01:13 - Debbie Hoffman

Cleveland.

00:01:14 - Mike Mills

Cleveland, Ohio. We actually have a branch in Ohio. It's in Cincinnati, I think. I'm not sure. Well, here it's 108 Deg. So I'm inside in the air conditioner, but everybody else outside is walking around melting on the asphalt. How are you guys feeling where you're.

00:01:31 - Eric Lapin

At not melting today? It's actually pretty comfortable out here, which is rare. So normally we would be melting like you in Texas. But I think debbie, did you move there because of Johnny Manziel about seven, eight years ago?

00:01:44 - Debbie Hoffman

Right. I'm here because it's a lot better than being in Florida right now.

00:01:48 - Mike Mills

Oh, man. Yeah, I lived in Florida for a year, and that was not funny. That the humidity there. I didn't have to worry about my know that wasn't a problem, but I know that's a concern for the ladies out there. All right, so I wanted to bring you guys on because this whole topic related to blockchain, you got to throw crypto in there because people at least understand to some extent what that is, even though it's a negative term sometimes to some people. But blockchain, crypto, NFTs, all the stuff related to web three is another term that people still have no idea what you're saying when you bring it up. But I wanted to bring you all on because you all been in this world for a long time, and especially relative to everybody else's knowledge base on this. You've experienced this and gone through different iterations of it and are up to date in how all this stuff works. So I wanted to kind of nerd out a little bit with you all because this is a topic I love and love to talk about. But also, too, I wanted to help my audience, which is primarily real estate, agents and mortgage professionals, investors to help them understand what this technology is going to mean to our industry and how quickly it's coming and what you need to be ready for. So that way when it does really trickle down to your day to day life, which not quite there in different aspects, but it's coming, people are at least familiar and know what to expect. So before we kind of get into the weeds a little bit though, I do want everybody to kind of understand y'all's background. We have BIOS and whatnot, but I'd rather you explain it yourself. So Debbie, why don't you start first and tell us a little bit about what you do, how you got into this space and kind of go from there.

00:03:18 - Debbie Hoffman

Sure. Thanks Mike, I appreciate it. So my background is I'm a lawyer and executive and I've been in the mortgage industry my entire career starting in commercial, moving into residential and I'm also a board member and a professor. So started down this path, really, of blockchain and background in real estate finance, because when I was first an attorney, I was doing deals, and we would go to the client site and we would find mortgages and notes and all the ancillary documents all over the place, many of which were missing. And we would spend months on site trying to find these things. And so when I learned about blockchain in around 2016, it was an AHA moment and I said this could fix so much of what I've seen in terms of the mortgage lending industry and we can get more into that. But that's kind of the background.

00:04:08 - Mike Mills

Okay, and then Eric, how about you buddy?

00:04:11 - Eric Lapin

Yeah, been in the industry for over 25 years with a lot of that 15 years in the banking side. So risk worked for three banks prior to the crash so anywhere from origination to servicing to capital markets, warehouse lending as well as correspondent lending, whole loan sales, non performing loan sales and then fixed income. So when I was at Credit Suisse, really learned a ton about the back end of fixed income assets and really learning about that back end of the business. And then after that really focused more on the technology side, innovation and got into the title insurance space working for a couple of the large underwriters on that side and a couple of roles of corporate emerging technology roles as well as corporate development. So in those type of roles I got to sit at a seat that would see anything from business development to strategy to consumer related to business related to marketplaces exchanges, all of that. So it was very helpful. And then back in 2012 is really where I got the interest in learning about digital currencies and really learning about crypto and this asset that everyone was talking about, Bitcoin and Ethereum and then starting to learn about those as we've seen in the iterations of all this types of stuff. There's two different ways to look at it, right? You've got blockchain for business uses and then you have people that just merely look at crypto from an investment standpoint or some sort of betting. Really? Yeah.

00:05:48 - Mike Mills

What's, like gambling on the stock market? Same thing. It's just a different debbie, I'm going to ask both of you this to some extent because I want to hear your answer on it, just to establish not only we have been dealing with blockchain and this technology for a while, but specifically related to real estate and mortgages, which both of you have extensive history. And that's really what I want to focus on. But before we can do that, like I was telling you before we got on the amount of conversations I have on a daily basis with people, and I even bring up blockchain or crypto, first off, when I say blockchain, very few people still blows my mind. It's 2023 and very few people still know what blockchain is. I get blinks back like, I've never heard of that. If I say crypto, then I get the oh yeah, okay, so you're one of those. So there's that. So if you were talking to a layman that came in and said, okay, tell me what is explain as simply as you can what blockchain is specifically so we can help understand that a little bit and then why? You think that the understanding or adoption of it has had such a struggle for just the common person to be able to wrap their head around?

00:07:00 - Debbie Hoffman

Sure. So you know what, Mike, I didn't say properly my background that so I ran a company, I started my own company in Symmetry Blockchain Advisors in 2017. And I literally toured the country teaching mortgage executives what blockchain. And the difference was between that and crypto. And so just you asked the question, and I just want your listeners to know, if they don't know this, they're not alone. I mean, literally, I would go from I felt like I was on the tour. Unfortunately, it wasn't a rock band tour, but it was a crypto blockchain education tour. And so basically the bottom line is blockchain is the protocol on which Bitcoin was originally built. And there are thousands of blockchain protocols and there's only one bitcoin blockchain protocol. And all the other cryptocurrencies that you might hear out there, ethereum, is another one you might have heard of. They are all built on different blockchain protocols. So the most basic concept is that there are two different things. Crypto in blockchain. Blockchain is a protocol. Crypto is a currency built on blockchain. Okay, so let's establish that. Why hasn't it gone mainstream? Mostly, I would say, because of the media and the news, it always is harping on the nefarious players in the crypto market. And so what people can't get beyond is even executives. Honestly, I've spoken to many, many mortgage executives and they can't get beyond the fact that there's these nefarious players who can potentially break into a blockchain or crypto and make something bad happen. And there's so much more to it than that. But it's really the media and the name that gives blockchain kind of a bad name. It doesn't say all the amazing qualities that we can talk about that it can do for the mortgage industry.

00:08:37 - Mike Mills

Okay, so Eric, how would you answer that question?

00:08:39 - Eric Lapin

Too very similar. It's a term that's been used for years, but it's called TradFi traditional finance, which is what we're all used to today, which is banking, mortgage lending, consumer lending, any way that we do either payments or lending, the transfer of money and underwriting risk and making those credit offers. It's called TradFi traditional fi finance. And then you have what's called DeFi decentralized finance. And there are ways that, especially in the United States, because of where our regulation is going and some of the recent determinations we've seen from the SEC, is there's a test, it's called a Howie test, H-O-W-E-Y that has four bullets to it, four prongs that you either pass or fail. You know, to date, you're seeing that the United States, for example, a lot of these groups are passing that, whereas Bitcoin is failing it, which is a good thing, meaning that it's not a security. It is a distributed ledger technology, with blockchain being part of that distributed ledger technology piece. And the use for business use cases is becoming more and more apparent that the immutability of the data, the assignability, the transferability, the accuracy of the data can also be amended by having anything that was put in the chain incorrectly and then have it put in correctly afterwards so you have that audit trail. So especially as we see in title insurance, you just want to make sure that you see the underlying asset and the proof of that ownership, and that can be utilized in a chain, and then a token is created of that which makes it digital and easily transferable.

00:10:31 - Mike Mills

Well, I think it's one of those things where it's funny to me or it's ironic, that the thing about blockchain that adds the most benefit to these circumstances is the immutability or the security of it, right? It is the fact that you can't go in and mess with it, right. Once it's recorded, it's there. There are decentralized blockchains and there are centralized blockchains. There are blockchains that are private that companies are creating for themselves, which is maybe we can get into the whole idea of the digital dollar and the Fed trying to create their own blockchain, which I'm not necessarily in favor of. But then the flip side of it is there's this expectation that it isn't safe. That because the digital age that we grow up in now, where people hack your data and they get into your phone and run your credit or not run your credit, but open up credit cards, get into your bank, whatever. So it seemed as so unsafe, and yet the irony again is that, no, actually, it is the most safe, and that's why we're trying to move in that direction. So, Debbie, why do you think is it just the media? Is that what you think it is? Or is it the legacy system that's been existing that's really pushing against it right now?

00:11:44 - Debbie Hoffman

So, Mike, it's a great question because let's just take this from the beginning. Bitcoin was the first blockchain. It was built in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. Nobody knows if that's a person entity thing, right? But anyway, it's come a long way. We've had so many like I said, there's so many different blockchain protocols. So the first one and those thereafter, there's not so many security questions anymore with Bitcoin. But there are security questions on blockchains that are built. But the more that they are built, like any technology, the better we're getting at recognizing what the potential security breaches are. And if you look at the studies, most of the security breaches on these things are from the inside. So it's like any other kind of technology. And so you've touched on all the amazing characteristics of it, and one of them is immutability. And this a lot people don't understand, but it's transparency that you can actually see who went in and who touched it and who made a change on the ledger and the original one. So people get confused because Bitcoin, you can't see exactly who went in. You can see wallets.

00:12:54 - Mike Mills

You can see the hashes for the wallet.

00:12:56 - Debbie Hoffman

Right. But you can't see that it's not so that you can see where that exactly is, or it's not as traceable.

00:13:03 - Mike Mills

Unless you're the federal government and then you can search IPS and they can find it. So you could still yeah, good point.

00:13:09 - Debbie Hoffman

But I guess the thing I'm trying to say is that what people don't recognize is the characteristics and how long we've come from the original one and what is being and another one on that point, Mike, I want to make sure people understand is maybe we'll get into it. But is energy like the original one, the way blockchains were built took a lot of energy. The ones that are being built today, there's a much more conscious awareness of that. And it's not the same kind of proof, basically, to add blocks to the chain.

00:13:39 - Mike Mills

Yeah, to build the blocks, it doesn't require the same output that it did. And the technology, the mining systems are getting better and more efficient. And there was an issue with the chips and all that kind of stuff that was occurring during COVID that caused all kinds of issues as well. So, yeah, I mean, it is becoming more and more efficient. Eric, when we talk about real estate and mortgage, specifically, what are you seeing are technologies that are currently being utilized that are utilizing blockchain within the industry right now and then is it starting to trickle down yet? We'll get into some of the stuff coming later, but how much is actually being currently put into play or that's.

00:14:13 - Eric Lapin

Being used today in the mortgage industry? I'd still say it's very little in the United States. A lot of it's being done in the healthcare and energy space, educational space is using it as well. In the lending space, you are seeing some banks that are starting to adopt it and you're also starting to see some of these consortiums come together where banks work with one another to create a stable coin. And what that means is it's basically using a means of a currency that is acceptable by all parties involved, that's backed by some sort of an asset and that asset is a viable asset. So when something is utilizing a fiat US dollar is a note, it's a fiat currency and a lot of people don't realize that. But when you're backed by the fiat US dollar, even though we've recently downgraded, there's still a lot of value to that. Some of the issues that we saw in the news in the last six to twelve months with some of the companies involved in crypto that went out is they were backed by algorithms. There was nothing there to it. So there's definitely a big difference to those things. But in lending, I mean, we are seeing some of the mortgage companies utilize the transfer of money from an escrow upfront that can be used as some sort of a cryptocurrency. They have underwriting guidelines on loan to values that can be useful for that, for assets. And then there are companies in the servicing space too that we've spoken with that are looking at for the same reason that you just brought up earlier, and Debbie talked about that whenever there's a data breach, that's because there's a centralized data, everything's coming from one server. It's not spread across yeah, it's not spread across one. So when you have a block in each one, this group that would hack would have to go to each one of those to get all that information. So the chances of that happening are very slim and nil compared to what we see in today's business. It's actually better. We are seeing also use cases with lenders that are also looking at utilizing digital identification. So when you have the banking side of it, up front, KYC, which is know your customer, KYB, Know your business. BSA Bank Secrecy Act, a lot of that starts on the front end when consumers are involved with getting relationships with businesses, that you're starting to see this digital identity that is also anchored to a chain, which is one of the things that we're working on as well for digital identity through a qualified borrower medallion. And we can chat about that later, but we're seeing some growth in that in the lending industry.

00:16:51 - Mike Mills

Debbie, what are you seeing from because you spend a lot of time on the education side, obviously you're an attorney and a professor and you're talking to people and I noticed you serve on a lot of boards, so you're heavily involved in the Web Three community, let's call it. What are you seeing or what kind of questions are you getting from people out there related to this? And where's the disconnected understanding, do you think? There we go.

00:17:22 - Debbie Hoffman

The biggest question that I think so generally the basic understanding, which I think has come a long way in the past two years, it used to be people just didn't understand it, but now it's definitely coming a long way. But one of the bigger misconceptions I think is probably now around Tokenization and NFTs and where that can play into the blockchain itself. And I also think that people are focusing so much on the crypto and liquidity, especially in our industry, on the actual protocol and what blockchain as a ledger can do. Supply chain. I always start my conversations when people are saying, well, I really don't understand that. It's always about your supply chain and the uninterested parties that can connect through this ledger that is open to everybody in the supply chain in a certain app. So I think again, it goes back. You asked me what do we think? It's still an understanding and use case. And you give Eric or I a use case that you think that what can we do in our particular where we play in the mortgage lending space or whatever in some other space? And Eric and I could probably come back and be like, blockchain would be helpful here, but you might not want in certain scenarios and in others maybe.

00:18:51 - Mike Mills

Gotcha sorry, I'm not sure if it's my Internet connection or yours, but you're kind of cutting in and out a little bit. But I think I got the most of we debbie mentioned use cases, so situations in which this comes into play. Now your company specifically you guys are actually working on, which is help explain it to me because I kind of read through some of it and this is a thought that I had had in my brain that I don't know how to put together any of this technology. But when it comes to credit modeling, for example, within the mortgage space, credit is obviously a big player. We're looking at people's credit to determine their level of qualification and if they fit. And I had always thought once I kind of got the idea of what blockchain was, is that how far away are we from me as an individual owning my own credit? Meaning I don't need equifax, TransUnion or experian for me to present to a potential lender my viability as a borrower, because if I have all of my personal transactions on my bank account, if I have all my payment history. If I have all my assets all on my own personal blockchain that I choose to share, give a key to for a potential lender, then to me that's the ultimate freedom right there. Because now I don't have to worry about mistakes. I don't have to worry about somebody trying to steal. I mean, I know there's obviously there could be issues down the road, but you guys aren't doing that necessarily, but you're working in that direction, I feel like, with what you're doing with I think it's called Passport and Ricky, is that right?

00:20:19 - Eric Lapin

Correct. So empowering the consumer with their data so they can have virtual credit is what we're doing. So if you take aside and we were talking about this pre call. We live in a web two world, which is basically read and write in social media platforms. So you have email, you have texting, you have social media. That's how we share and distribute information. And when we're doing a lot of that, it's done through the Internet, which is open source. So the ultimate goal is when you think a step beyond that into an open protocol, where you have participants in payments and lending and regulation, and at the center of all that is the individual. It's you, it's me, it's Debbie, it's all of us. Where there was a term coined June of last year by Jack Dorsey, who's CEO and founder, he was Twitter, now it's block. He was also square, but it's called block. And what we're doing is basically working down that path of we're not changing it. We're basically augmenting and allowing the consumer to control the use of their data, the sharing of their data and the monetization of their data. So when a qualified borrower is providing their bank account information and transaction data, ricky is the intelligence that sits on top of that direct source data, direct from my bank account. So we know it's accurate data. Right. So the intelligence that comes on and this has been learned through many years of working with regulators, that there's a lot of questions that come into models. There's a lot of models out there. Some work well, some don't work well, and it's hard to determine when it's a black box. So what we've chosen to do is, and this has been worked on for many years, over a decade, is go down that path of artificial intelligence, that's not machine learning. Go down that AI path that's utilizing linguistics and mathematically determining someone's ability to pay based off cash flow discretionary. We can see rent histories that are coming in there. You can see if it's eight months checks and three venmos and one PayPal, the linguistics will pick all that up and it removes the gibberish. You see all of it?

00:22:31 - Mike Mills

Yeah.

00:22:32 - Eric Lapin

So we're not saying get rid of FICO. We're saying FICO is great, that you're in debt and how did you handle that debt?

00:22:37 - Mike Mills

What we're saying get rid of FICO.

00:22:42 - Eric Lapin

But we're saying what's the holistic view and true ability to pay of a consumer? Well, this is it. If you're looking at assets and you're looking at how you handle debt together. And now you tokenize that. We call it a medallion, right? So we all have our own medallions that we will then share into a exchange where the lenders can say I like that medallion, but I didn't know that it was Debbie Hoffman or Mike Mills or Eric Lappin or Shaquille O'Neill or Juan Lopez. You don't know. You just know. All right, I see the soft score, I see the Ricky, they've got a positive cash flow. So it's 120 ricky. I like this deal. I'm going to present an offer now. And now me as the consumer can say, all right, I got a couple of offers here. I like the one from Mike. I'm going to go with Mike now. I then send my information. The PII is now sent and now we're doing business together and it's for that permissible use. So everything's permissible use, it's owned and possessed and shared by me, the consumer. And this is for not just mortgage, this is going to be for any loan. So any credit, you may be approved for 500,000, but I'm going to do 40,000 for this Toyota Forerunner. I'm going to get a business loan of 100 grand because I want to start this. It's virtual credit.

00:23:52 - Mike Mills

So it's almost like a debt marketplace, to some extent, is what you're thinking, where I can go in and say, I'm looking for this much in a loan, or I'm able to take this much in additional debt and then where I want to allocate that to based off of the different lenders that present offers, to some extent. Is that what you're looking at?

00:24:07 - Eric Lapin

Right, but when you deal with a consumer, they don't need to know all the underneath of all this. So we're B to B to C people, we realized it's just get loan, that's it. All right, for what?

00:24:18 - Debbie Hoffman

How much? That token is essentially a blockchain token. I mean, I just want our listeners to understand why it's so important that that token is built on the blockchain, right?

00:24:29 - Eric Lapin

Yeah. So the identity from that and there's various vectors of data that are utilized, but that digital ID, or did it's called, is anchored on the chain, but it can be sent in any format. Traditionally neo blockchain, whatever the end is going to be used is, we can do that. And really it's basically cryptographically issued loan officers that is going to be generated from a consumer app that the consumer says I want a loan.

00:25:02 - Mike Mills

Well, I think the thing that the consumers struggle with, again, there's some irony to it is that crypto blockchain all of this takes the people's security of their data, which has been such a major concern for people over the last several, you know, after all the Wikileak stuff, and everybody's like, I want my information. I don't want Facebook selling my information. I don't want Twitter selling. I want to control it myself. I want control of my own data. Right? It's been a big trigger for a lot of people these days, and I don't think people miss that. But what they miss is that this technology can be exactly that. Where you control your data, you control who has access to it, you control who sees it, and it makes the privacy sector or the privacy aspect of what every person wants to live their life under much more attainable. Because now you control your data because, look, the Internet is awesome. You can't say that because we're not better off than we were 20 years ago. Now we have new problems, we have new issues. The access to information at the tip of your fingers is fantastic. But now you got to sift through information to figure out what's true and what's bullshit. You got to go through both, and that can be a struggle. But your own personal information, I think, is something that, again, there's an irony in that people don't understand blockchain, but they're so concerned about their personal data, and yet those two things solve those problems or that solves that problem. So, Debbie, from your point of view, you'd mentioned NFTs before we came on and kind of chatted about that. Why do you think specifically you said a lot of people that you're dealing with always relate NFTs to art, which obviously that's a use case of it, but there's so much more to it. So explain a little bit of that and what an NFT is and tell people about what other things can be used for so they have a better understanding of that.

00:26:50 - Debbie Hoffman

So it's basically a mint of particular information at a particular period of time, and people think about that more about a mint of a painting or something that happens in sports and something very specific at one period of time. But if you look at it from a lending perspective, think about it from a loan and all the information that's going in one particular loan at one particular time. And if you put that in an NFT, that can be exchanged. So it's just a different use case. And it's a use case that has a practical application as opposed to a lot is just more the art is fun and it's ownership of things, but it's ownership of something that represents something else. Whereas if you do it in lending, it's ownership. It's a token. It's an ownership of something that has meaning on the market.

00:27:40 - Mike Mills

Yeah, well, and that's where the digital wallets come into play. And I think, again, once you get into the world a little bit and you start digging through it, you start learning these things. Me personally went through this experience, but the understanding of the hot and cold storage where. Do I keep these NFTs? Where do I keep my tokens? Where do I keep my data? And whether it's just a housing mechanism that you have through your web server, through your phone, or if it's an actual physical device that you can plug into your computer and upload data when you choose to or not. But again, that just adds to an extra layer of security and in the lending world. Because one of the questions that I get asked every single time I talk to a borrower when we do pre qualifications, when I ask them to send me their data, especially if it's a little bit better for the wrong reasons for the younger generation. Because the younger generation is like, sure, here you go. Because in their mind, everybody already has my stuff anyway, so who cares? It doesn't matter. But if I'm talking to someone over the age of, say, like 50, then it becomes, well, is your network secure? I mean, can I print these off and mail them to you? I'm like, you're going to stick them in the mail? My email is secure, I promise. So it's one of those things where it's a big concern for consumers because they're so worried about people stealing their information and stealing their data, but yet the tool that's available that the technology is fully vetted and works right now, that solves all those problems. The adoption of it is so incredibly low, especially in our world. Eric, do you think that has more to do with regulation? Do you think it has more to do with ignorance? Do you mean why is it that we can't get this thing across the finish line?

00:29:10 - Eric Lapin

I think it's a lot of it, but at the top of it, I'm going to go with what Debbie said. The media put so much in our head, and they scare a lot of people. With Sam Bakeman Freed is what I hear about from people. Still bertie Madoff was doing the stuff prior to blockchain. He was fraudulent with fiat currency and paper stuff, right. And typing out statements from his IBM from 1986 or whatever it was. But 89% of consumers agree that they want to own their financial data and they should be able to have control of that and who has access to it. So when you're talking about data from the receiving end of the creditor, the lender or the payment provider, as long as that data is direct from the source, and in our case, it's direct from the bank accounts that the consumer logs in and grants that access, then you know that the intelligence on top of that will be made off of direct source data and not data that's incorrect. Which we deal with still today. A lot in the mortgage industry. The other thing is we're in the Fourth Industrial Revolution right now, and if you look up Fourth Industrial Revolution, it's really the disruptiveness of technology. It's the use of artificial intelligence. And I do think we're going to need regulation on how that's being used. I believe it can be used as great tools, not as replacements. We're just going to reallocate what people do, certain things will be able to do more. I think you're going to see a lot with consumer engagement, you're going to see a lot with security, you're going to see a lot with relationship type of roles as opposed to the staring and comparing stuff that we've seen for a long time.

00:30:47 - Mike Mills

Debbie, I saw a post recently you're part of, or at least you're going to Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance soon.

00:30:55 - Debbie Hoffman

Yeah, that's right.

00:30:57 - Mike Mills

So my CEO for our company, her name is Kate Decay, she's part of Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance and I think she actually you're on the forgive me because I've never gone to these things, but it's like the board for emerging technologies within the industry, or what's it called specifically.

00:31:11 - Debbie Hoffman

So there's an emerging Tech fund. I'm not on the fund, I'm a judge for that. So they have a pitch competition, which is amazing for new technology and that can be adopted by the industry. And I can tell you more. So basically the fund is a collaborative. The TMC, Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance is a collaborative of small to mid sized mortgage lenders who want to be able to have the benefits of basically competing against the larger lenders. And so this fund was formed so that they can almost sandbox innovative technology together because they can't necessarily wells Fargo might have its own sandbox to be able to look at blockchain and figure out where can we use this in mortgage lending? Whereas Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance, the fund can invest in these new technologies and determine collectively whether it's something that might be able to be useful to all of them. And so what's really great about it is this pitch competition is going to showcase these various companies and what they're doing. And I think, yeah, it's great to know whether it works or not. It's also great to be able to get the juices flowing on what else can we do. And so just by having people be exposed to this is a great thing for the mortgage industry.

00:32:31 - Mike Mills

So when you just said what we can do, so that's kind of the next place I want to go with. We know a little bit right now that these technologies exist. They are functional, they have been demonstrated to work and have uses and have very effective uses. But the adoption is the issue that we're dealing with right now, which like you said, you started your company, whatever it was seven years ago and we're five years from it and here we are still struggling to get people to take it under. But so, Eric, from what you're seeing, what do you think within the next five or ten years that we're actually going to see direct impacts to real estate and mortgages, specifically when it comes to blockchain or what type? Of either companies or technologies or use cases, really, that we can have that are directly applicable, that will actually start to impact, especially on the real estate agent, mortgage lender, that level. Not necessarily the secondary guy who's dealing in capital markets and working to sell his mortgages to this investor and buy them, but the individual that's on the ground, boots on the ground, working in the industry, when are we going to start to see that kind of impact hit us?

00:33:40 - Eric Lapin

I think we're seeing it now and I think it's going to be quicker. So the five to seven years Debbie talked about, it seems like a very long time, but I think the next five, we're going to see more advancement, mainly because of the sharing of information, the better security, the knowledge that I think people are. I know you mentioned earlier, Mike, that you're still getting those questions and I do too, but it's getting to the point where people are really starting to they're going to have to do some research on their own, ask people that are experienced in that area, say, what should I really know? How does this affect me? How does it affect the greater good? And there's some things like conscious capital that we were chatting about, that there's 50 million people with low or no FICO in the United States. There's a third of the workforce in the United States will be Hispanic AmEricans by 2030, and 25% of Hispanic AmEricans and 30% of African AmEricans feel they never had a good chance to build credit. And democratization of data, especially in financial services, is empowering the consumer, but it is also going to help the loan officer, it's going to help the real estate agent. For years I've been talking about disintermediation of the real estate agent. There's a lot of value to a real estate agent, especially for first time home buyer and for those moving out of state and for people that are just not familiar with all the legalities and process. So I think they're just going to be better informed on how to work with a customer to explain to them that if you share your information, your approval can go quicker by about 20 to 30 days. Here's why. You're going to be asked for less documents. It's going to be less painful for you to have to attach PDFs. Number three, if you live in an area that has a digital title plant or ercording options, it's going to be a lot quicker. You can do it by a camera and you could do it all by digital, should you choose to do that.

00:35:32 - Mike Mills

And this will help with cost, too, because one of the bigger issues, obviously we're dealing with right now is home prices are through the roof and interest rates are much more elevated and high, higher than they were. So that's creating an issue with people's affordability. But if we can make the process of getting the loan smoother and more efficient, then that would reduce costs.

00:35:51 - Eric Lapin

Yes, agree.

00:35:53 - Mike Mills

So you would have at least some reduction. Yeah.

00:35:55 - Debbie Hoffman

Debbie yeah. I just want to say we actually also have come a long way in all this from post Pandemic because there's more of an acceptance of the electronic delivery of, you know, pre Pandemic. How many states allowed just take notarization as an example to be electronic. So when we talk about the seven years pre to now and how slow we've moved, a lot of it is because the regulations really a lot because of the Pandemic have helped us kind of move at a little bit of a faster pace going forward. I think that's my explanation of it, too.

00:36:32 - Mike Mills

So we have somebody here in Texas, he's going to be on my podcast in two weeks. His name is Lee Bratter. He's with the Texas Blockchain Council, which is they're a big advocate in Texas, which I love, with the state government on coming through and figuring out regulations that they can put in play to start making Texas one of the leaders in moving in. That like, that's what we're trying to get to. And I love you know, I've been to a couple of their meetings and I'm thrilled that we have somebody in our state that's advocating for this. And either one of you can answer this one, but how much do you think I call them the legacy financing system, or what was the word you used earlier, Eric?

00:37:13 - Eric Lapin

TradFi.

00:37:14 - Mike Mills

TradFi, yeah. Traditional financing. How much of the old school boys club, whatever that's been existing in this world for a long time, is literally fighting against this whole application or this whole adoption of it? Because again, if we're talking about giving people the freedom to own their information, we're talking about keeping finance decentralized. So that way there's not one entity that's controlling access to this or making the marketplace. I mean, it's the most capitalistic thing that could possibly exist, where you're opening up the market to anybody that can participate. And yet all the legacy companies that have been around for a long time, the big banks, the blackrocks of the world, although I know they're filing ETFs and all that, but that's just a way to control it. But at least in my opinion. Am I being conspiratorial here or is there a concerted effort to keep this out? And either one of you can take.

00:38:06 - Eric Lapin

That, I'll take first. I think this is where we're talking about. This is where you're seeing the open network, open source approach to looking at decentralized finance, but with a centralized finance regulatory control on it. You can have CFI meets DeFi, centralized meets decentralized. So the technology piece can be decentralized, possession and control of the consumer based off of source data. Not just the data that we're doing here, but any data, any data that is going to be utilized and permissioned by the borrower can be used in any decisioning. And this is for the lending piece. When you get into the payments, know you're already seeing you brought up Fed now a little bit, know we're really seeing that a lot of money movement is going to be it's here to stay. And that's the thing. As far as those that are afraid of it, there's a couple reasons for that. I don't think it's conspiracy with what you're saying at all. I think it's just more of it creates competitive markets, data sovereignty, the network effects are there. You already have personal data, entity data institutions, regulatory, all working with one another. If you have a shared framework of how to do this and the regulatory bodies are involved, I think it works very well. It's just you now have pathways that are digitally storing that data and then it's immutable and it helps with audit trails because we get in trouble when we have audit problems.

00:39:37 - Debbie Hoffman

Debbie yeah, just that last point brings me to that we want to make sure people understand what you were just saying. So with a blockchain, you can have all these different nodes and different, I guess, peepholes into what is on the chain. So think about a regulator who could have a node and could be able to see certain aspects. I'm not saying everything. And so when they do audits, instead of having to take all your information and all again, taking it from a mortgage loan perspective and having to take a whole sampling of loans and putting them in a room and putting a regulator in the room and being able to look at certain things. The concept here is that they could have real time, direct access to specific things within your books and records on the blockchain. Am I making sense? I want to bring that point forward.

00:40:34 - Mike Mills

Yeah. No, you're saying that you can grant them access to specific parts of it. It doesn't have to be all of your data. It can be some of your data and they can get into it and still do an audit, whether it's a company or an individual or whatever the case may be, you can grant access to it without having to compromise the entire data set. Right, right.

00:40:50 - Debbie Hoffman

And so having a regulator be able to do that is huge because you're not I mean, it's authenticity, it's real time. So it will help with audit trails tremendously well.

00:41:03 - Mike Mills

And again, that's where I struggle sometimes because knowing what I know, and it's limited, but knowing what I know about all this technology, it seems pretty evident. I mean, it wasn't even I don't know what you all's situation was when you first got into it, but I kind of started dipping my toe into it right before the pandemic hit. And then kind of especially during that period of time, because we all had a bunch of time on our was I was going through and going to YouTube University and all this stuff and what hit me right away was the functionality of it. There wasn't even know sometimes you read stuff you're eh, it doesn't make any me dig a little further. I mean, it was immediate. I was like, absolutely okay, I get it. You have multiple servers that can all control the data. In order to go back and change it, you have to hit all those servers, which makes it nearly impossible to make it corruptible. So now you have this technology that makes something completely, almost completely secure. And so the applications for that are mind boggling. There's so many things that you could do with it and yet here we are. You guys have been in it for ten years and we're still at a point and I know at some higher levels they are certainly starting to implement it. But I just can't wrap my head around the fact of why we haven't further moved. I mean, there are companies like I'm talking to another guy in a couple of weeks that's doing fractionalization of property, right?

00:42:21 - Debbie Hoffman

Yeah.

00:42:22 - Mike Mills

So their company right now and this is for anybody who doesn't know how this works. This is primarily being used more so in commercial properties. But you are seeing some residential you buy a commercial apartment complex, warehouse, whatever it is, you transfer the title of that property into an LLC and then you tokenize or fractionalize the LLC and then sell off the token. So you can buy a piece of a commercial building for $100 if you want. You earn a dividend, it might be a nickel, but you're going to earn a dividend off of that.

00:42:50 - Eric Lapin

You're in the game you're in the game of generating some additional income and assets.

00:42:54 - Mike Mills

That's right. And then when you swap life, you get to benefit from it. Tell me about that, Eric.

00:42:59 - Eric Lapin

Yeah, so fractionalization, I love it. What you're doing, like you said, is you're taking an asset and it's done a lot on the commercial real estate side where an LLC is set up and it allows tens or hundreds of individuals who have LLCs to come in and partake in that investment. And that is also another example of the tokenization of that too, where so.

00:43:22 - Mike Mills

Much liquidity now because you have so many people that are capable if I wanted to be a part of a syndicate, I've got to put up 5100 thousand dollars in order to be an investor in that. But if I want to buy a token on a fractionalized property, I could do it for $50, I could do it for 100, I could do it for 1000. So now, just like what Robin Hood kind of did for stocks where they fractionalized stocks where you could purchase it with pennies. That's what these companies are doing for real estate, which I think is fantastic. But again, they're struggling with the same thing you guys are is the education of the investor as to, okay, how does this work and why is it secure and all that. So we are seeing it creep into certain spots of our industry that are starting to kind of slowly move in that adoption range. But then you run into the issues with regulators and what they're allowing and what they're not. And that's where I struggle with understanding why, if this technology is so useful and mean, it works. It's not like we're testing it. I mean, it works. So why is the adoption so slow from the big boys?

00:44:20 - Eric Lapin

You want to know why I think it is? Go ahead, dobby.

00:44:23 - Debbie Hoffman

I just want to real quick, I want to add on fractionalization. It also allows for a lot of foreign investment, and I would say it's almost like akin to crowdfunding property the way you would crowdfund an investment. But maybe the downside and Eric, I want to hear your opinion on why but maybe you can't move into your commercial space when you buy into a real estate through fractionalization, you're just owning a piece of something.

00:44:48 - Mike Mills

Yeah, but I can't have an opinion on the Apple board of directors because I own 500 stocks in Apple. So, I mean, it's the same thing.

00:44:56 - Debbie Hoffman

It's not yeah, you're right. Okay.

00:45:00 - Eric Lapin

It's not solving home ownership. That's still an issue here for years. But it does help with assets that can be accumulated by those that couldn't afford the whole thing at once.

00:45:13 - Debbie Hoffman

Right.

00:45:14 - Eric Lapin

One of the reasons why I think it's slow there's a couple is whenever there's competitive markets that are created, there's always a group that doesn't want competitive markets.

00:45:24 - Mike Mills

That's right.

00:45:24 - Eric Lapin

And when the competitive market is coming into play with this, we also have to think about it from the government. And whether you like government or not, whether whatever your belief is, there has to be some sort of regulatory body to make sure that we stay in a lane of some sort.

00:45:43 - Mike Mills

There's got to be rules to the game. There's got to be rules.

00:45:46 - Eric Lapin

We've proven as humans. If we don't have yellow dotted lines, people will be all over the road. We can't do that.

00:45:51 - Mike Mills

Absolutely.

00:45:52 - Eric Lapin

So I really think it comes down to when I think there's going to be another regulatory body created with people from other regulatory bodies that are going to then manage this digital currency space, really understanding what is the value of a stablecoin and really understanding which blockchains are being conducted and producing a product that's being done legally. And then lastly, the government's got to be able to find it and tax it.

00:46:17 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:46:18 - Eric Lapin

And when they could do all that, then they'll come out with it. And I think they're getting there now to the point where I think a lot of them understand. And I learned this at a recent event I was at last week, that you've got a lot of very smart people that were traditional finance, that are also in decentralized finance. And some big, big name global companies were there, and they were saying, we're getting to that point where I think we're going to have something drown out here probably by 2024. But I think it's going to be for the betterment of all because it's going to really help society and help the underbanked and the underserved and allow those that were usually invisible to now become invisible in these markets that were never seen before. So I think if it's done the right way, you can have data sovereignty and the control and use of that data back in the hands of us.

00:47:03 - Mike Mills

Well, I'm glad you said if it's done the right way, because I'm with you, man. Regulation makes it to where the mass adoption of it makes it much easier. Right. That's one of the when we were before we came on, you brought up Ripple, which know, they've been in that.

00:47:21 - Eric Lapin

About I was talking about the plant based milk.

00:47:23 - Mike Mills

Yeah, but the company been in is it three years now with the SEC, that they've been in this litigation with them, and I don't even know the know at this point what exactly they're dealing with about the security versus what they're defining themselves as. But I'm all for regulation. But what you said, when it's done the right way and the problem sometimes that we run into with regulation and which, you know, easy transition. This is what's happening, I think, with AI. Right now to some extent, is there's a big push in Washington to get AI regulated because they say they don't want some crazy person building some sentient AI in their garage and figuring out how to make a weapon or whatever. Right? And I understand that argument 100%. But the problem is that the regulation also then centralizes who has control over those technologies. Because with AI, for example, if the federal government says that I have to have a particular license and I have to be either Google or Amazon or one of these massive companies in order to be able to develop this technology, well, that takes the little guys and kicks them all out. So if you take that same application and you move it over to blockchain, and you say, okay, well, you can develop your own blockchain or you can develop your own data service, or you can develop your own coin, or whatever the case may be. But you have to have this much money or you have to apply for this application. Then it starts to shrink the field. And so then it makes it really challenging for the small upstarts to come in and do this. And the great thing about Web Three as a whole is that it is what we experienced in the 90s with the Internet because it allowed companies like Facebook and Google and Amazon to come out of nowhere, essentially, in this new technology and develop these titans that are now running our world. Right, well, the same thing, I think, is very likely when you look at Web Three and AI, that the companies that start now and have the most impact immediately, it always centralizes. But at this point, I don't want the game getting rigged as the world moves into this direction to where we're limiting it to only a select few that have money to play in the game.

00:49:27 - Eric Lapin

Does that make totally, I mean, Mike.

00:49:31 - Debbie Hoffman

I want to, again, take a branch off what you're talking about in terms of regulation. What we're seeing now so much is regulation by enforcement actions. So I think for a long time, the pattern that I've noticed is we didn't know. We kept saying we need some regulation or the companies are going to move outside of the US. And now we're seeing, okay, the US. Actually, the regulators do understand this and they have lots of expertise. And I recently heard somebody, one of the agencies talk about how many on staff they had and it was phenomenal how many they have educated in these specific areas. But what they're doing is more than lawmaking is enforcement action. And what enforcement action does is it makes like you can't prepare for that because you don't know what it know. The greatest example we saw this, I guess it was this spring, early summer, was in Coinbase, and where they had said they had had a request, is this okay? And then instead of getting an answer, the SEC went after them. So we'll see. I mean, it needs to flatten out a little bit, and enforcement is not the best way of regulation.

00:50:33 - Mike Mills

Yeah, well, because that costs you money to play the game. And if you don't have enough money to sustain know Chase Bank, for example, I was laughing the other day because we deal with the big banks all the time and what they impact on our small business. But Chase Bank was fined. I think it was I'm going to get the numbers wrong. I did a thing on it a little while ago, but let's just say it was $25 million because they deleted it was something like 100,000 emails that got moved off of. And there were seven federal investigations for different reasons that needed access to those emails. And they completely deleted them and were like, oops, this company we hired, they got rid of it. Sorry. Right. And then they paid their $25 million. Appreciate it. So they can do that kind of thing because they're sitting on massive amounts of cash. But the little guy that's trying to start his blockchain in his garage or his little AI bot that he's worked on his computer, he has no shot because if the federal government comes in and then says they can't pay that, I mean, there's no way. So it's this world where we are in a place where generational wealth could certainly be created for a lot of people in the next. The Gen Z's and the millennials of the world that are growing up with this technology and knowing how to use it, knowing how to move forward with it. But we have to exist in a place where we can also have regulation because it is important and it brings adoption to the table, but also make regulation to where it's you know, I don't mean to whatever, but marijuana regulation is a good example of this. Right. When you look at different states that wanted to legalize the sale of marijuana, colorado was the initial one, and they made licenses available to pretty much anyone. You had to apply for it, you had to meet certain restrictions, but it wasn't limited. Well, then you go to a state like I don't know, it may have been in Ohio, but where they were trying to pass the Nick Lachey, the guy that was from, like, 98 Degrees or the 90s or whatever. I can't remember. It was, like, Michigan or somewhere in the Midwest. They were trying to pass it as well, but their legalization of it in that state limited it to, like, 20 licenses. There was only 20 that were going to be granted, and there 15 of them had already been basically spoken for. Well, the people spoke and they voted that bill down. So to the country, it looked like, oh, they don't want to legalize it, but to the state they were like, no, we want to legalize it, but we want people to have access to it and people to be able to do and not just limit it to a few. And that's what I fear a little bit in this industry with Blockchain and with AI is that this technology that's emerging, that the people that are in those legacy systems that have the cash are going to create rules to where unless you have the money to participate in the game, then you're not invited to the table.

00:53:20 - Debbie Hoffman

Right?

00:53:20 - Mike Mills

You know what I mean?

00:53:21 - Debbie Hoffman

And it was Ohio.

00:53:22 - Mike Mills

It was Ohio. Okay, yeah, sorry, my memory slips on that. All right, speaking specifically so, Eric, you said you brought up a term, we kind of explained it a minute ago, but I want you to dig a little bit deeper into the whole Web Five idea because I know what web three is, and you can even say, here's what web two is. Here's what web three is. Because I still again, people don't know blockchain. They probably don't know what we're talking about when we say web two, three, and five. So give me a little bit of context to that.

00:53:48 - Eric Lapin

Yeah, it's a term coined by Jack Dorsey last summer. I encourage everyone to Google that. Jack Dorsey, Web Five. But if you realize Jack Dorsey is fascinating, there's a webcast or a podcast with him. Just recently on Spotify, I just listened to and. What's great about him is at the crux of everything he talks about and the reason why he went from web two to web three and skip four and just call it five.

00:54:19 - Mike Mills

Where's the four?

00:54:20 - Eric Lapin

Yeah, there's no four because it's basically taking the web two, which is the information of the email and the text texting and the social media that we're used to. Now you go to web three where you now have the tokenization and now that augmentation of the use of that data. And then they add what the web two and web three together and call it web five. And web five just simply says possession and the control of the consumer or the individual. And that's a term that Jack Dorsey coined. But the idea is really from 2012, a book that I read years ago called The Intention Economy and Doc Searles is the author of that. And it says putting the commoditization back to the consumer where the corporations don't control what they do, or how they do it or how they share it. So it's been around a while, but now we have the intelligence to do it, we have the data, we have the technology. And by moving more towards open source type of doing business, which is really what the internet is, that helped the entire world become connected, businesses spawned up from it, information was being shared. So think about privacy, security, fair value exchange, a competitive marketplace, earning referral fees, and most importantly, financially underserved and underbanked that are becoming visible. That's what I think all of us on this call and a lot of people our industry are trying to solve, which we can it's here today, we can do it. I think it really just comes down to, as you said earlier, Mike, that what's holding groups back from really accepting this. Some of it has to really be from the people that don't like it to really understand why don't they understand it or why don't they want to understand it? Is it self preservation on a job? Is it saying, well I don't want to do this, it's too efficient, I won't make money anymore. That's never a way to have anything for betterment of society and the greater good. There's always ways to earn income. It's just a different way of doing it and you make it more inclusive for everyone. So I think eventually, I think very quickly, we're going to see some movement with the regulators. And I'd like to ask this to Debbie, but with all the work that you've been doing and working as the professor and teaching the classes that you do, have you learned from any case studies? Just even in 22 and 23, where we're starting to see the use of ethical artificial intelligence and the use of data that is actual source data to determine some sort of decisioning instead of worrying about, well, can I trust it? We don't have to trust data that's direct from the source. It's the truth. So throw that away. That's what's called zero knowledge proof. That's a whole nother thing, right, Eric?

00:57:13 - Debbie Hoffman

Yeah.

00:57:13 - Mike Mills

We need truth, Eric. Everybody has their own.

00:57:17 - Debbie Hoffman

We need a whole other hour for that because yeah, there's so much to talk about there, but it's kind of a do want to can I reiterate, Mike, that just like so much of this. Also, as Eric was saying, it's information for the there's ways to help the unbanked and the migrant worker and all that through use of blockchain and use of whether it's types of cryptocurrency or tokenization. Eric talked about so much of it in the product that his company is working on. But there's so many more use cases there and I think that's another really intriguing topic when it comes to real estate and finance.

00:57:56 - Mike Mills

Yes, I think the access to this type of stuff for individuals that especially I think you're going to see it more and more and I think we already are globally, maybe before it gets to the US. Because we have these legacy systems in place already. But I use the example a lot of times because blockchain essentially what it can ultimately do is cut out the middleman. It can take the third party intermediary that has all the technology and services back and forth between the end user and the customer and it kind of eliminates that piece. Because I use the example of, like, a villager in Afghanistan, right, that the country's ripped of know there's all kinds of stuff going on, but he has a right, and on his phone he can have access to a web wallet that he can put his crypto in. And then if he wants to sell his herd of goats to the villager across the street, they don't need to have bank of AmErica in between them to transact. He can send directly from his wallet to his wallet. Now they need a currency that they can both trust, right, that they both use and spend in different ways. But at the end of the know they have something that they can both rely on and they don't need a middle party. And I think that's part of the reason that there has been the pushback is just because there are services, like you said Eric, that are going to be eliminated to some extent and people are fear losing their job or losing their money or losing what they do. But just like anything else, when the electric light bulb became a thing, the guys that were lighting up all the lampposts and the guys that were riding their horses and putting out the candles at night, they all got jobs and they figured out ways to do something different. Now, I do think we have to do a better job as a country and maybe statewide to help people when they're in a transition period if their industry is starting to take a turn and see, okay, how do we educate people and new types of careers and new types of skill sets? I think that's the biggest solution to all of this is more of what you guys are already doing out there, which I think is great, which is where I found you, where you're out there talking to people, educating them on the process, or educating them on the technology and what all's involved. So that way people understand it. And when they understand it, the fear of it starts to go away. And that's why I wanted to have you all on, is because I do feel like there's so many applications, and it gets hard because even like, when Eric starts talking and going through what's happening, like I'm sitting here, I don't I don't understand half of that, but okay. I mean, it sounds so with my tiny like I'm still trying to wrap around all this stuff, but I think what you all are doing right now, which is putting the word out there and helping people better start at a basic level. When I do loans, loans are not complicated. They're really pretty simple, but people don't do it every day. And so when they talk to me and they only buy one or three or four houses in their life, I've got to break down every single step of the process to, this is how payments work, this is how your interest rate affects your payment, this is how much money you need, all that kind of stuff. I got to make it as simple as possible because I have to relieve the fear. Once they have the knowledge and the fear is gone, then they're much more trustworthy, much easier to work through from the rest of the process. And I think more of what you guys are doing is really what we need to have. And I appreciate you all we're almost at an hour here. I appreciate you all hopping on with me and kind of walking through this. But before we go, Debbie, is there anything you would like to kind of leave everybody with and anything you have upcoming or whatever, but just kind of where are we going to go with this thing? And are we going to have this mass adoption in the next ten years? Am I going to be out of a job? Like, how's this going to work?

01:01:32 - Debbie Hoffman

I'm going to encourage everybody to don't walk away from here and be like, I don't understand this, and I'm never going to understand it. Start following things, do some reading, follow things on your social media, wherever your channels connect with Eric and me and of course Mike, no doubt. And just continue to educate yourself, and eventually it will happen because it's not going away. You can't go backwards from technology. It's only going to go forwards.

01:01:54 - Mike Mills

That's right, Eric?

01:01:57 - Eric Lapin

Yep. I think that for everyone that's in real estate and lending just know that the consumer, especially as the other generations are coming up, are demanding this. And because of that, adoption happens and scale happens. So, yeah, get educated. Reach out to us. There's many great podcasts, podcasts and articles to read from novice all the way to experienced and personally very passionate about change and also the betterment of everyone. And I think that there's more and more people that are getting there. And I appreciate you having us on this call today.

01:02:37 - Mike Mills

Yeah, real quick on the education thing, I'll tell you guys how I got into it is I heard about bitcoin from some I don't remember how it came across my eye. I looked at it and kind of did a little bit of digging and watched some videos or whatever. But what I did was I took my money, which was, I think at the time, I did like $100 and I put $100 in. I went and opened a Coinbase account and bought $100 worth of bitcoin. And when you put $50.25, whatever it is, when you put a little bit of your money into it, then you start paying attention. Because now when I checked my account and it was at 125, I was like, what? And then you buy a little more, and then I bought some ethereum and then I started buying Internet computer. So you start going through the good thing about crypto, whatever you want to carry a negative or positive connotation to it is that it is a very good avenue for people to get into. Because if you start doing just a little bit, don't get crazy, okay, because it's still very speculative and it's very new and there's a lot of shysters out there. But if you just dip your toe in that water a little bit, you're going to really start to consume more and more information because when you have an interest in something and it impacts you, you tend to learn much, much quicker. And I think that may be a good avenue for people, even though crypto is a scary thing to some folks. But it is a good place to start to start learning this because that's what opened my eyes up to everything else, is just kind of getting in that lane and then seeing the whole road and being like, oh, my gosh, there's so much more to this that you don't even realize. And it's going to revolutionize how we do everything. And at this point, it's just a matter of time, I guess. All right, guys. Well, again, I appreciate it so much. Thank you. I don't do three person things very often because I try to get it all within an hour. Most people listen 30 minutes of it anyway. But I do appreciate you all stopping by. And we'll definitely have to do it again. I'm trying to do more and more blockchain Web three crypto type podcast because I do think that's where it's headed. And I think the more I understand it, the better I can position myself to still have a job in ten years.

01:04:44 - Eric Lapin

Yeah, absolutely.

01:04:45 - Mike Mills

Well, thanks, guys. Appreciate you all stopping by. Thanks for everybody that hung around to the end. And next week, I will have a local realtor on. We'll get more into real estate stuff, but then go right back into Crypto the week after that. So everybody have a good weekend and we'll see you then.

01:04:59 - Eric Lapin

Have a good thanks, Mike. Bye, Debbie. Bye.