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Real Estate is a Rich Man’s Game - Blockchain is About to Unlock It
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In this episode, we sit down with Matthew A. Schneider—Founder and CEO of Building, Inc. and a leading voice in PropTech—to discuss the radical modernization of the "built environment." Matthew shares his journey from day trading and fiction writing to identifying the massive data fragmentation that makes real estate a "rich man's game."
Matthew explains how Building, Inc. is creating a "Carfax for buildings," replacing archaic paper boxes with a secure data platform anchored by blockchain. From the shifting geopolitical power of the BRICS nations to the urgent need for Gen-Z to embrace "boring" but essential careers like civil engineering, we explore how verifying the truth about our properties can move civilization forward.
We dive deep into the reality of tokenization, why "Building Certified" assets will drive the next wave of institutional capital, and how to stay competitive in an era where infrastructure and energy are the ultimate currencies. Matthew’s insights prove that the most successful founders are those who ground disruptive tech in the hard reality of bricks, mortar, and verifiable data.
What to Expect:
The "Carfax for Buildings": How Matthew is using blockchain as a digital notary to create a "golden copy" of property data that banks, insurers, and developers can finally trust.
Tokenization vs. Hype: Why tokenization isn't just about crypto—it's about the ultimate verification of real-world assets (RWAs) like deeds, contracts, and private equity.
Global Wealth Transfer: A look at why Saudi Arabia and Dubai are leading the race in digital deeds, and what the weakening of American hegemony means for the next 20 years.
The Infrastructure Gap: Why the AI race isn't limited by software, but by energy—and how China is quietly outpacing the U.S. in producing the engineers and power needed to win.
Building as a Verb: A call to action for Gen-Z to pivot from "sensationalist" careers toward the architects and engineers who will build the next century of infrastructure.
The Members Room is a space for founders, creators, and business owners to share their journey—hosted by Alex Thiakos.
Guest – Matthew A. Schneider
INSTAGRAM: /@realmattschneider
X (TWITTER): /@mattschneid3r
YOUTUBE: @building-inc
WEBSITE: building.inc
Host – Alex Thiakos
INSTAGRAM: /@alexthiakos
Members Room
INSTAGRAM: /@membersroom
TIKTOK: /@membersroom
Matthew Schneider, thanks for joining the podcast. I appreciate it. Of course. Thank you for having me here. Founder and CEO of Building Inc. That's right. New new tech um log into blockchain technology on tokenization. We'll get into that, those topics, because I still don't understand a lot about that. So if you want to get started, we'll talk about um what problems do you personally experience in real estate that led you to start building?
SPEAKER_00There's a lot. There's real estate problems, there's people problems, there's like macroeconomic issues that we're facing, and I was I started to culminate all of that and decide, hey, someone's got to do something about this. So it started four or five years ago when I was looking at real estate just as an investment product. People want to find something to invest into, they'll go to stocks, they'll go to bonds. What about real estate property? And I knew someone who was investing in real estate at the time. And the first major issue I realized about this industry is that it's really socioeconomically locked. It's a rich man's game. That's that's a big issue. So I was working on a marketplace at the time to connect real estate projects that needed funding, like real things in our cities, new restaurant, new office building, new apartments. They need funding, they need access to more capital. So we were connecting investors to these properties. It was a really difficult venture to kick off. And so at one point I pivoted and I said, Well, now that I know more about real estate and its real struggles, like it's got capital problems, but it also has data problems, and people don't really trust it. There's not a whole lot of transparency, especially not compared to other investments. There's problems on site, so in the field, just how people are doing their jobs, whether that's architects, engineers, and contractors. There's issues with how we do urban planning and zoning and policy. The technology is really difficult to implement, and some of the solutions out there really suck. So there's like a dozen different issues that I was recognizing at once that are actually all connected in some capacity. And I was the one to start to connect those dots and say, I do think that there's a really interesting relationship between how a subcontractor, like an electrician, is doing his job or her job and uploading paperwork, which becomes data, which becomes information about the buildings, which influences how expensive they are to insure or finance, which then determines what your city skyline looks like and how robust your infrastructure becomes and what connects to that. And this set the foundation for building, which ultimately, in the company it's called Building Inc., it's ultimately this data platform for real estate. That's the simplest that I can make it. We're handling property data, but we're handling it. Uh we're working with all sorts of people who upload that data, that want to do things with that data, that make decisions off of that. We want to drive those decisions, whether that's do we add another story to this building, or how do we replace the HVAC? Or what does the city need to know about the carbon footprint for this building? Or if I'm going to demolish this and put in a new lane on the highway, what do I need to know about the materials that went into this building so that we can repurpose them somewhere else? There's all sorts of data, but we're helping to collect that data about these properties, about these cities, and then aggregate it. Let people trust that data, say, okay, I know I'm working with, I can verify this, not running around in circles. Like, who's responsible for this? Where's this paperwork? I don't even know if this number is right. Good clean data, and then using that to go out and build things.
SPEAKER_01That actually makes a lot of sense now because you know, I used to work for um a real estate company, and we look my boss would ask me, hey, go find me um go find this map of the uh you know seward system of the building. And I'd have to look through a bunch of different like papers in a big box and try to find it. I don't even know what I'm looking for. So it's great to have a website that centralizes everything and you can verify through uh the blockchain. Is that true?
SPEAKER_00Right, that is a big element. So it's good to have data, but it's better to have data you can trust. That's the big differentiator. Real estate is becoming data rich. Buildings are full of geometry and physics, there's people involved with them, there's dollar signs, but we have to go one step further and also say, how do we trust the numbers that we're working with? And a really simple analogy that I like to pull up is Carfax. Like, if buildings all came with a Carfax, we would know what's the information, how is stuff repaired historically, what do I need to know looking forward? Like, what's the next thing that's going to go wrong? And with real estate, it's interesting because there's actually dozens of stakeholders. There's there's so many people who are involved, so many different companies that need to be looking at this information to make decisions. Um being able to give everyone the same information, like a golden copy, the one true source of truth for what's what's going on in this property. And that could be a skyscraper, a$200 million project, it could be a data center, it could be a warehouse or a hospital. So it's really important actually to have something that all these people can trust because you can't have mistakes at that scale. It it critically impacts people and their livelihoods and and and our cities. So when you start to incorporate a blockchain, and this is a very interesting use case, and this is one of the things that differentiated our company from a lot of the different solutions out there, is that I don't view blockchain so much as like some sort of investment tool. To me, it's a notary. So sometimes when two people will sign a piece of paper, a third party will witness it to attest that both people were there when they signed the paper. That's notarization. The blockchain is a virtual notary. So when I send you money, when I send you an asset, when I send you something from my wallet to your wallet, it's on this ledger online that says person A to person B, the transaction occurred, but that transaction cannot be, you can't go back and rewrite that historically. It's immutable. And that's that's the notary function where it's not just that I moved money from point A to point B, or I moved a document from point A to point B, or assigned a document, but you can trust it. Any anyone can trust it. It's not dependent on whether I'm trustworthy, we don't have to bring in another company to verify it. It's inherent in how a blockchain is designed, and that's that's really interesting. So now taking that back to real estate where we have dozens of people involved, hundreds of people involved, hundreds of documents, and hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, you definitely want some sort of functionality where you can trust all the numbers, all the paperwork, all the transactions, and all the people involved. And a blockchain offers that. So we started to say, how do we use this really cool technology to bring trust into one of the most opaque and yet critical industries in the entire world? And to me, it's not just the most critical, but everything that people know is real estate. It's the built environment, it's it's the roof over your head, it's how you're going to walk safely to school, it is the school as well, it's where your food is grown. So everything is real estate. So we the fact that we've gotten by on like shoestring and bubblegum, just holding everything together barely is quite impressive, but I don't know how long that can continue. I mean, so making the decision now to bring in quintessential technology and right our wrongs, have trust in this massive industry, and not just move it forward, but I think like move civilization forward. That's the scale and the impact that I'm working with, and what I think is truly possible. That's why this is so exciting. That's why so many people are talking about blockchain, that's why the whole world is talking about blockchain. Not just because it's a crypto thing, but yeah, like we're literally transforming industries, not just real estate, also logistics and supply chain and healthcare and agriculture. This is this is bigger than the internet almost.
SPEAKER_01But I feel like that's what people don't understand is whenever the common person hears blockchain, they automatically tie it to crypto. And I think that's gonna be a big hump that at least America, I don't know about China, all these other countries actually know what they're talking about, but how America is gonna get over that hump and realize that blockchain isn't just crypto. This could this technology could be used for so many other different things. And what do you think that's gonna take to get everybody to understand that?
SPEAKER_00Well, you need more conversations like this. Podcasts that are willing to ask what is an alternative use for blockchain. I don't want to talk about crypto. I want to talk about how the world around us is changing and evolving, what the real use cases are. And I'm in a unique position where I am a founder, I'm an executive, I sit on a board of directors for an organization, but I'm also a researcher. And so I like to think that I bring very grounded perspective to the conversations, whether that's in an interview, I cast a panel, a keynote, and say what's the reality? I don't want to over-hype something, I don't want to be overly optimistic. I want to say, what's the pros and cons, the strengths and weaknesses, challenges, challenges and opportunities for this technology. You have to be a realist like that. That was the mistake that I made with my first company, where I said, well, what if we use all sorts of technologies to help people invest better? But I didn't ask myself, why does this not already exist? If it's a great idea, surely someone's tried it. And there the reality was people did, and they failed for a myriad of reasons. And I just ignored those. I just looked at the potential upside, which was household name, robin put for real estate, get people investing. So when you ground yourself in reality, you are preparing yourself against being blindsided by just how difficult it is to run a business or to implement a technology. And that's the thing with blockchain, is if it were a silver bullet and as spectacular as some people will hype it up to be, and it's great, but it doesn't solve all of your problems, then you wouldn't need people trying to convince you to use the technology. You would already be using it. A really good example is artificial intelligence. You don't have to convince someone to use ChatGPT, they use it once and ask a question, and it responds like a human being and answers with all of the world's knowledge at your fingertips. That is self-evident. The value within that was self-evident. With blockchain style always self-evident. So I think that this manages expectations and lays the foundation for me to run a really strong business because I know exactly what I'm doing with. I'm not overselling, I'm not getting people too excited, and then charging them something that they don't really want long term. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01How do you get majority of property owners are from the ages of you know 40 to 70 or whatever it is. Like, you know, the baby boomers, our parents kind of age. How do you convince those people that this is something they should use? Because though that's your customer base, isn't it? The people who own the properties.
SPEAKER_00Right. It's the real estate developers, the asset managers. The reality is that I've been using that word a lot. What I recognized is that there's a change, there's a demographic change happening, and a wealth transfer that's occurring. New leadership is stepping up into the built environment, and people are saying, we don't want to be an archaic firm anymore, or a company that's outdated and falling behind. What can we do to get ahead? So younger folks, people who are maybe native to technology or more open-minded to it, are stepping into senior roles, executive roles, and using this as an opportunity to get ahead in the market. This becomes their competitive edge. They said we we see other people are starting to adopt technology, we're not going to be the last one to do it. And we're not going to let an overage board of directors stop us from becoming a very competitive company. So that's working in working in our favor. But now your question was for those who have not yet conducted that transfer of leadership, maybe just passing down the company to a child or bringing in fresh blood. I have to say I don't really work with them, to be honest. And you can't as a startup, you don't have the capacity to spend months trying to convince a firm that your technology is the latest and greatest. I will just find someone who is motivated. Exactly. Right.
SPEAKER_01And and that's the new technology. Wants to get into the new technology.
SPEAKER_00Right. And that's that's the younger folks. So I start there. I say, you want to be data driven? That's great. You want to be innovative, you want to be bleeding edge, you appreciate that the world is changing and that you have to stay on the bleeding edge. Great. You're my customer base.
SPEAKER_01So let's let's fast forward 20 years from now. Building ink is a lot bigger than it is today. Kind of the use case is going to be I want to buy a property, so can I go on to building ink and kind of see all the like like we the example used before, the car facts, but like the building facts of building, see what's wrong with it that is that I can confirm on blockchain. Is that kind of the use case?
SPEAKER_00So, yes and no. Yes, and that you're going to be using our tool to look at property information, to trust it, and we call that the building certificate. And that's why I chose a name that's so simple. It's like, has this been building certified? Just like Carfax. Just let me say. The difference is that we don't publicize this data. In fact, we don't even have it under our control. Our platform is just a steward of that property owner's data. That's because there's a lot of intellectual property and competitive edge in some of that data asymmetry. So you don't want everything being publicized. There still has to be controls and compliance. So it's not fully decentralized? Well, it's the decentralized component is that all of this data being handled on the platform is getting a digital fingerprint on the blockchain. It it's not just us looking over information and then giving it a check mark. It's not the property owner, it's being verified with the blockchain. Now there still has to be people involved because a blockchain doesn't have the intelligence to look at your lease report and say this is a real lease report. But assuming that someone signed off on that, you can then blockchain that give it the digital fingerprint so that it's trusted. What would happens in real estate is that if I do hand you a document, you will probably go to a third party and say, Can you please verify this information that Matthew just gave me? Then, six months from now, we might be handling that same document. Nothing's changed, but only you and I know that. So now we bring in another person who says, I need to I need a third party to consult and confirm that you guys have not been delivered the document. And this happens over and over across tens of thousands of documents, and it's costing me time and money. So if you could just say you don't have to take an hour for it when this document was produced and signed off by the city or the accountant or the accountant or the attorney, it got a digital fingerprint and it hasn't changed since. How can I trust that digital fingerprint? Because we don't control the blockchain. The blockchain is decentralized across millions of computers, and was just baked in a way that it's immutable. So that's the decentralized element. Now, we want the data to be accessible to some degree, because that's the point of collecting it all so that it's accessible, but it has to be accessible to the right people. So the first instinct is not to give it to your competitors and say, here's how we're running our property effectively, and here's all of our vendors. But the insurance company will need to know. The bank will need to know, your investors need to know. So those are the right people to put that information into the hands of, and we have all sorts of gates to ensure that the right people are getting access to that, and and that is very aligned with something from the SOC2 compliance, so just your controls over this information and who can see it, because you don't want your secrets getting out. Now, some of the information will be more publicized, and this goes into something that I talk about with capital and markets. So, right now, real estate is treated as a financial product, which means people are putting money into it, they're using it as collateral a little bit, but it's not finance ready. So, what's going to happen is using blockchain to verify all this information is going to make real estate a lot more reliable. And when it's more reliable and more trustworthy, we're more willing to put money into it, and a lot of money. The banks are willing to treat it better. Oh, private credits or private equity. They're willing to play a little bit more fair with real estate once they can start to trust it. Now, what's something that people do trust? Publicly listed things. Apple stock, Tesla stock. Never mind the volatility. All of the numbers are there, all the reporting is there, and there's big consequences if you're not transparent about it. We're trying to move real estate in that same direction. Or we say, this building that I'm sitting in right now is actually privately owned. It's not on any sort of stock market or exchange. But what if I could still trust it? Because there's no regulatory body that is taking whatever the address is of this building and checks in every month and says, How are you guys doing our paperwork? How does everything look? So if I could still take a random building like this in a random place in Chicago, and it's as trustworthy as a stock, a publicly traded stock, that's pretty revolutionary. And then I would be just as confident investing into this as I would Apple. Because I know the transparency is there, I know the data is there, the frameworks, and if the property owner were lying, there would be real consequences right now. There's no consequences. I can make up whatever. Nobody's checking. If Apple's budget's numbers, there's huge consequences. You can't do that. So that's that's the direction we're starting to move in. It's not just the data, but if we can trust all the data about all of these properties, we can start to finance them better. You're gonna see real estate open up like never before. Well, a really good platform is essential to that. What information is actually being made readily available?
SPEAKER_01Like someone trying to poach a tenant of yours. Someone trying to sort of look through all the data, the leases and everything. They usually wouldn't be uh available unless they were sunk property.
SPEAKER_00So is it a tenant who is trying to get access to the let's say um you know Starbucks does this a lot.
SPEAKER_01Starbucks, I don't know how long the lease has left, it's got maybe five years left. And I know they're paying some market and they're gonna want to move out and get a new building. And I'm a developer, and I can look, verify that the lease has five years left, so okay, I'm gonna try to poach them in a few years and build them a new property down the street. How do you avoid, as a property owner, giving that information out? The lease information?
SPEAKER_00Well, it depends on who has the lease information. If the tenant is willing to share the lease information, then the property owner has no control over that. That's out with them. The question is, does the tenant also know what the property owner is paying for insurance? Does the does the tenants know who the subcontractors are? Do they know what the taxes are on the property? Those that's other information that is probably not available. So, of course, if someone were to leak information that they are familiar with, that's a problem between them and uh another company. But presumably they don't have access to other things that they should not have jurisdiction over. And so that's how you can implement controls where if someone were to have access to this platform, to your data room, to your war. Room. You only let them see certain things. The accountant needs to see financial things. They may not need to see the blueprints. They may not need to know a hold on to the 3D model or the building, the BIM. So imagine a computer software where your architects and engineers are literally designing where every single wire, screw, and pipe is going to go in that building. That doesn't have to be shared with the accountant. And you wouldn't want it to be because that's real intellectual prowess. What it takes to design a property successfully is not gathered overnight, takes expertise, and you want that in-house. So you can set up these controls that say only certain people can see certain things at certain times. And this is very interesting because if I were to invest in a property as if it were Apple, then I would say I want to see all of the numbers and all of the data. And this is another thing that blockchain does that's very, very interesting. And it's called a zero-knowledge proof. The best example of a zero knowledge proof is if you go to a bar, if I give you my ID, you're going to see my address, my height, my weight, all my details. It's a lot of information when you're just trying to check if I was thorn in a certain year. So what's the alternative? You're going to eyeball the person. If someone has a gray beard, you know right there that they're over 21 without having to see their address and all the personal information. So if you apply that same principle to something like real estate, where we can see a valuation for property, and we can see that 100 different inputs on a spreadsheet made up that valuation and is all blockchain verified, and we just see the verification portion, we just see the gray beard, but you don't see the underlying details, then what you've done is you still have the same trust in the system without revealing all that information. If that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's it's essentially saying because the blockchains cannot be manipulated, you can trust them inherently. And that means when the blockchains verify something, we can trust the out outputs, even if we don't see the inputs.
SPEAKER_01And I I I heard this uh technology. If you want to talk about, we're gonna get into tokenization a little bit as well. Um and I'll have a follow-up question too, if you wanted to explain what tokenization is. In the simplest terms, I'll go explain to a five-year-old.
SPEAKER_00Well there's I can only simplify it so far. But if we think about what a blockchain is, well, I'd have to ask the five-year-old if they know we don't know what he is. I presume no. So in real time, I'm trying to reword this. Just saying, I want to be able to move money, I want to send money to you. I want to send information, but I want us to be able to trust each other when we do it. Now, it doesn't just have to be a made-up currency, it doesn't have to be a bitcoin, doesn't have to be a meme coin. I can do that with something real, I can do that with a paper contract. And so when you say I want this paper contract to be secured by the blockchain, you've tokenized it.
SPEAKER_01When I say here's like the ultimate verification is tokenization.
SPEAKER_00Correct. So it's just moving something onto a blockchain, but really what you're saying is I want this contract, I want this ownership, I want this right to something, uh I I have a concert ticket, whatever. I want it to be secured by the blockchain because I know blockchains can be trusted. That's tokenization.
SPEAKER_01So in essence, nothing will ever be able to be forged again. Fake.
SPEAKER_00Well, not necessarily because block blockchains verify as it is. If I give you a contract and I say, well, here's the contract, here's a signature on it, but it wasn't my signature, the blockchain can't see that it isn't my signature. It can just verify that the contract existed and that it moved over to you. That's where we bring in something called attestation. So as I sign it off, if someone who is responsible and licensed and regulated, like a lawyer, an attorney, also says, at this moment of time, this contract is good, and then we blockchain it, then that's a really good way to verify it. So, because we have their NTEP ASTEP attestation embedded into the verification. So then six months from now, you look back, you see, here's the contract, here's the digital fingerprint, and here's the identity of the person who signed offer at that time. I can also then uh connect that to their license for conducting law in the state of Illinois. So there's all sorts of things that attach to it. But interestingly, if I hand you that contract and it were a forged signature, then you take that to court and you say, here's the contract that they that we signed on, and it's verified by the blockchain. The court can look at that and see, we do see that the original contract, which is verified by the blockchain, was illegitimate. Because maybe last minute I say, No, Alex has the wrong contract. Here's the real one, and I hand you a you know proper contract, and I say, He's crazy. I don't know where he got that other one full. And you're gonna say, dude, this is literally, this is what you signed, and here's the blockchain to prove it. So it doesn't necessarily prevent the fraud in the first place, but it does expose it.
SPEAKER_01And my follow-up to the whole tokenization thing is No, you're in real estate, talk a lot about real estate. Do you believe that real estate will be tokenized one day? Ownership, deeds to properties, all this kind of stuff will all be tokenized in the next 10, 20 years.
SPEAKER_00I think in the next 20 years, I think all sorts of real-world assets will be tokenized, and that's happening gradually, whether that's money market funds, bonds, private credit, all sorts of financial instruments, they're being tokenized so that they can operate on blockchains, so that you take out a lot of the trust that's necessary, or cross-checking information, double-checking the numbers, settlement times, just making sure we're all on the same page before we do something critical because you have a billion dollars at stake, you definitely cross your T's, dot your I's and double check. So lots of tokenization is going to occur. Interestingly, real estate has been really slow to adopt this, and it goes back to people not really understanding the industry and overhyping what the technology can do. People will say blockchain can fractionalize ownership. If you really think about what a blockchain is, that's not a true statement. So why are we talking about that? Blockchains are really supposed to be ledgers and notaries, so that we can peer-to-peer move information and trust it. And it's notarized right there and then. So why are we talking about fractionalization? What people will say creates liquidity. Liquidity is how quickly you can get cash for something. So cash is cash, therefore it's the most liquid. Next is if I hand you a gold bar, you can easily get your cash value for a gold bar. If I hand you something that you're not really sure what the worth is, and you don't even want to buy it in the first place, how am I supposed to get the cash equivalent? I probably won't, which means it's illiquid. Imagine I have to pay rent. Landlord says, I need$1,500. So I show up with this microphone stand in its microphone, and I say, Will you take this for my rent? You go, no, I don't know what this is or what it's worth. I just want the cash. So then I have to figure out, okay, how do I sell this and where do I sell it? Do I go on eBay? So that's liquidity. So now people are saying, well, we want liquidity in real estate. Big properties are worth something. If this building is worth$20 million, how quickly can I get$20 million cash for this property? Historically, it's very illiquid. You can't find the buyers, it takes months to do all the paperwork. So people started saying, Well, we'll use blockchains and that would make it more liberal. The way that they approach that is just inherently incorrect because it assumes that money is just floating around freely on blockchains. Why do people think that? Because they look at all the coins and they say, well, this coin has a huge market cap. For Bitcoin is worth$90,000, it's worth$2 trillion across its market cap. So that's a lot of money. That's money on the blockchain. So why can't that money just show up in my property if I create on the blockchain? And it's just a misunderstanding of how capital markets works, because at the end of the day, you still have to buy find a buyer. So where blockchain does help out, and this is one of the big things that I qualify when I go to handles or whatever, I say, sure, it could help with liquidity, but not in the way that you think. The way it's going to help is that all the paperwork and all the due diligence and all the repairs and all that type of stuff that does take a lot of time, if that's been verified, it's got the carfax, then you're willing to buy really quickly, which means the money gets in my hand. So that's how it increases liquidity, but it doesn't just make money magically show up at your door.
SPEAKER_01So now in the future, there'll be a coin that says, like, for example, this is 100 elm lane, this property. Let's just say 100 elm lane token, and that's the certification that I own this property, this token. And if I list it, let's say on a website, that's linked, and I could be totally botching this, but it's like linked to let's say Building Inc. where you can see all the facts and everything. You negotiate with the buyer, and then he purchases that token with whatever currency he wants to use on the website, and he just clicks a few buttons, clicks it now. The token gets transferred to him. Is that kind of how it works? Kind of kind of sorta.
SPEAKER_00So the big caveat is that in the US, property deeds are handed handled at the county level. So there's 300, 200 registrar of deeds that are working with outdated technology. So if you wanted it to be as simple as moving a token from me to you, you have to get buy-in from the county. So that part is still going to be slow. Still gonna be some paperwork, and you're gonna get a paper deed, and it's gonna be held at with the county. But everything leading up to that, uh, the verification, the money, the capital stack, so the equity in a property or some of the debt, that can be tokenized and that can be transacted really quickly. Now, what's interesting is that there's global instances. The first two that come to mind are Dubai, so the Dubai land departments in the UAE. I worked with Vara and some local companies, uh, so their virtual assets um regulator to say, what if we did take deeds, property deeds, which are handled in the most old-fashioned way, it tokenized them, so that I can send you a token and that's the property right there and then it doesn't have to be registered anywhere else. We trust the blockchain, it's like just send send me the token. So they're they're pulling that off. The next place is actually Saudi Arabia. They just passed sweeping regulation to say property should not be so outdated. What if we start putting our deeds on a blockchain-based infrastructure? You know it can be trusted. We also know it can move stuff, so we trust it with our real estate, and we're gonna move our real estate there. The US is a little bit behind. So, in other words, we're beating around the bush in order to do what we want to accomplish. Of course, we want real estate to transact completely on the blockchain, but it's not ready. So we're finding other things where we can supplement blockchain and speed up that process while we wait for the real bread and butter, the real magic, which is going to be here's the token. Yeah, and everything's in it.
SPEAKER_01We talked about it before the the show. You're you're traveling all around the world, uh, doing you know, speaking events, uh panels. You had a story about how you almost went to Iran, and it's interesting because when we think about the people leading the race in tobacco, in blockchain, you don't think of Sayyidina Iranian.
SPEAKER_00Well, Iran is not so much leading the charge, but they're very interested. So, what those regions have in common, and China and India or Brazil, is that they're all BRICS nations. And so, right America is still the crypto capital, I would say, and the EU has done a lot, but they might be plateauing. And the BRICS nations are starting to accelerate things because they recognize that the US dollar is weakening substantially, and so you can't have a global economy based off of a weakening currency and backed by a government that is increasingly unstable. The reason why the US dollar took precedent everywhere is because people trusted the US. We paid our debts, we have responsible leadership, and the dollar, while it was inflationary, it was not out of control. That's no longer true. So people don't want to associate with the US dollar, it's still embedded everywhere, and we will go kidnap your president. I mean, we just attacked Venezuela this morning, right? So we are willing to do things to make sure that people play with the US dollar, but that doesn't work if you are a legitimate scaled country like China. We are not going to attack China. We can attack Venezuela, we can get tough on Iran or Iraq, we can destabilize countries. But for the big players, they're getting out of our grasp, and we call that American hegemony, which is where we kind of control the world. That's weakening a lot. So China, Brazil, South Africa, and there's a whole lot of countries joining BRICS, they're saying, what if we find an alternative way to remove value, have a different currency at the core of it, and bring it back to gold? That's where the conversation really settles. Gold and silver are economic canaries in the coal mine, and so what you're seeing is that these are becoming more and more valuable, which signals that the American Empire is weakening quite a bit. And so, well, why don't we take what's the most tried, true, and tested, and also increasing in value asset and do that with gold. What's interesting is that because gold is all tracked, it's mined, it's put into uh vaults and treasuries and cuss it's because it's uh it has good custodians, and then everything has a VIN. That means there's some sort of paperwork with some sort of tracking mechanism behind that. You could blockchain it. So you can actually tokenize gold, and then you can use that as a new currency between Iran and Russia, the two most heavily sanctioned countries for to now. And their currencies have blown up. Like the Iranian real is I mean it's kind of fluctuated. Sometimes it says it's 50,000 for one US dollar, sometimes it's$200,000 for one US dollar. So they need to find an alternative if they want to do trade with other countries because nobody wants the real. Same thing happened with the uh uh Russian rupee. So they're saying, what if we use the blockchain? Two countries, three countries, we can all trust it, it's blockchain, and then we start to transact on it, and we have new forms of currencies that are reliable and politically agnostic. Everyone agrees on goals, so everyone's going to transact in coins. That's cool. You could also do that with real estate, you could do that with oil, silver, all sorts of uh other instruments. So it's not so much that they're ahead, but they're so much more eager because it gives them financial freedom. One thing that people don't know about Iran is that they are not part of the SWIF system. So all the central banks and anyone who wants to move money is participating in the SWIFT system. It's a very Western ideal. And those are SWIFT number whenever I send international money. That's right. That's right. And that's because you're settling in US dollars. Both banks have US dollars in their reserves, so they can afford to move US dollars from one to the other. If you don't have access to that system and you don't have US dollars, then you can't do business with the world. So Iran has been cut out from doing business with a lot of the world because they don't they're not part of the Swift system. If they're saying, how how can we truly have a country with financial freedom and and the ability to do global trade if you're sanctioning us and saying we're not allowed to play with you? We we did the same thing with Russia.
SPEAKER_01America has disallowed Iran from being involved in the Swift system.
SPEAKER_00They so ultimately they call the shots, they don't control SWIFT per se, but if America wants it, America gets it. And so, but we have our allies in Western Europe as well, and so we all get on the same page and we say, okay, the system is going to now exclude this country from participation because we believe that they have violated human rights, or they don't share Western ideals, they're not democratic.
SPEAKER_01Do you think America as an empire over the next 20 years will fall to the BRICS nations? And I know the the BRICS nations have tried to shift over to their own currencies and America shot it down. Do you think there will be some point where it will shift to America's not number one anymore? The BRICS nations are, and do you think it might take like a world war, some catastrophic catastrophic event?
SPEAKER_00What's well what's interesting is that the BRICS nations stopped themselves from creating a new currency because you can't get Brazil to use a Chinese yon, or you're not going to get Russia and India to agree on something. So they they couldn't all come to agreements and say we're all going to use this new currency that is set up by China, that's set up by South Africa. But they do have unique trade agreements within each other's, which is really what BRICS is establishing as saying it's an alternative to the Western trade agreements and to the Swift network. Um, in terms of the American Empire fallen, it depends on how you classify fall. Because number one, well, and it also depends on number one, you know, in what is it GDP, is it population? Because if you take the aggregate of the BRICS nations, it's billions of people, and their purchasing power already surpasses the US and some of our Western allies, which is incredible. So in some ways, they are number one. Now we can military.
SPEAKER_01Military the ultimate number one, I guess, because whoever's the strongest, whoever you're the most feared to go to war with, I guess, is always number one, right? Right.
SPEAKER_00And that works to a certain extent, and that's why we've been doubling down on our demonstrations of power more recently. That's why Trump tried to institute the parade, and we are attacking other countries. It's to say we're still in the game and we're increasing our military funding. Just try to maintain that number one because the logic is there that you could be number one if you have the strongest military. The thing is, it only goes so far because we'll say that we disagree with China on trade, which is kind of what's happening with Taiwan. Like, well, we're trying to trade semiconductors and manufacture here, and who does Taiwan belong to? The US and China are not going to directly attack each other. Like we have fan we both countries have fantastic powerful militaries. Why don't we just start bombing each other? Or we just nuke each other, and then the real number one would come out on top. So if you don't use your military because you don't want to blow up the world, then the military is only goes so far as a demonstration. It's it's more used for country number 51 and beyond, where it's like too small, too irrelevant, they couldn't do anything that end the world catastrophically. Another perspective is infrastructure. We were starting to talk about this, even if China doesn't want to call itself number one in urban planning and development and infrastructure. Uh there's I mean, there's really interesting statistics about their their academic institutions and how many engineers they produce every single year.
SPEAKER_01Just about to ask you that. I heard a statistic about that too.
SPEAKER_00What was the statistic that you were?
SPEAKER_01Chinese uh China pushes out more engineers every year than America has total.
SPEAKER_00It's one of my favorite stats. Now, how true is it? We're not completely sure. It depends on how you run the numbers. Like, there's a lot of different types of engineers, right? But I I I have used that in the past to just demonstrate the scale. At which these comp these countries are operating. It goes back to the population. When China has 2 billion population and India and Pakistan have 2 billion population, they're already number one. They're half the world right there. And those are countries that are friendly with us, but not necessarily in our circle. So now they're producing all the engineers. They're producing people who are going into manufacturing. They can control all the labor and the production and therefore global trade. So that's that's a huge component. Then if you look at like renewables, so in the next few years, China is going to produce more by solar alone than the entire US in all of our different sources, whether that's uh solar, wind, natural coal, right, for electricity. So they've just been mass-producing these solar panels and implementing them everywhere. Now I think solar is a phenomenal solution, it's not the end all be all nuclear is better for sure. But when you see how China is playing their cards and they're saying, we're gonna be quietly number one, and we're gonna do it in ways that aren't measured. China has less GDP than us. Who cares? Our GDP is made up. Right now, our GDP is just like open AI, tech. Yeah, and people moving money between each other and not it doesn't produce anything.
SPEAKER_01Because America doesn't produce anything anymore. Right. It's all technology is pro making our GDP, but China's GDP is mostly production.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, right. And what's interesting is I like talking about GDP because it's the most irrelevant thing, whether it's GDP ROS or per capita, when you're paying off your credit card interest and a company is profiting off of that, there's some GDP right there. It doesn't make anything better, it doesn't contribute. When if if I pay you$20 to dig a hole and you pay me$20 to fill back in the hole, we just had$40 in gross domestic product and nothing was accomplished. So it's it's a weird metric to be number one, and that's kind of how we rank the world right now. So people will say uh Mississippi has a greater GDP than a bunch of European countries. It's like, what what what really constitutes GDP in Mississippi? And does it actually mean that you're more productive? Does that mean that you have more robust infrastructure? Because we all make that joke because we know that Mississippi, in terms of how it ranks among the US states, is in and maybe subpar. Right, 45 to 50. So China, it's so interesting how they have quietly cast us giveaways that are not ranked, mostly because it's more qualitative, not quantitative.
SPEAKER_01And I hear a lot about Chinese cities and how beautiful, how large, and all these brand new buildings, but that doesn't get talked about in America. Why is that?
SPEAKER_00Well, the Chinese real estate sector is very interesting because it does have its own problems. It's going through a bubble.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I heard they can't fill the buildings either. Yeah, as well. Well, a lot of them. They're all brand new buildings.
SPEAKER_00Right. Right. So I I have to mention that so that I don't glaze them outright. However, they are very effective at developing cities, urban planning, having affordable and accessible infrastructure, or uh like public transit, for example, where you can get across the country or get to your job.
SPEAKER_01They have the speed, uh, what do they call the trains that are going 200 miles an hour?
SPEAKER_00Right, right. So they have high-speed rail, but then they also have trams, trolleys, uh buses, shuttles, and and all sorts of different things or bicycles that you can just pick up off the road. You hop on it, you take it to your destination, someone else pick it up from there. And you know, it's either super, super affordable or free, and then it's also in really good condition, which is a big difference between the lime scooters that we have with the lime bikes uh or around the US, where it's just in such shabby condition. It's gross, or they'll be lying in the road, or it costs you three dollars per minute to ride it. It's not very, it's not very effective. So people look at that, or they look at the buses, and um, you know, there's been high-profile cases in the US where people are taking the bus and they are attacked, or or there's just nasty stuff happening in our metros. That is far less common in China, but that's more of a political question than a real estate question. Because even develop it, the question is can you get people to use it? Then you do need authority, and that's one thing that China is very affected at, and it gets a lot of disapproval from the US, which is that they have strong authority, very strong policing. Where if you are jaywalking or if you are dumping your trash onto the street, or if you do attack someone, there's no flexibility, there's punishment, there's consequence for doing that. But you have to ask, is that the price that we want to pay to live in a civilized clean society? Because right now we have the ladder in a lot of US cities, and people complain about how dirty it is. So it's like, where do you want to sit on the spectrum?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because I I heard uh China's got cameras in the street that can detect if you're jaywalking and immediately like bill you at your house.
SPEAKER_00A lot of that's science fiction and American propaganda. So the the social credit score system, and this is we've gotten certainly done around it. Yeah, but if you want to talk about like uh the US has all this stuff being quietly implemented. That's Palantir, that was Doge, which acted as a backdoor for a lot of these AI companies, where they're going to start cross-referencing your health data and the FBI statistics and all this stuff that really has sat in silos and say, well, this person committed this crime or they're not paying up on this, and then using unrelated things as a punishment, which is just as dystopian as the concept of a social credit score in China, where they say, Well, if you disagree with the governments, then you're not allowed to do this. That's already happening in the US, where if you disagree on one thing or you're too outspoken, they'll revoke your visa. Or you're or you're curious social media or you can't get hired. So it's like we we have a lot of the same things. We just give ourselves a pass, and then we say, well, you know, China is this or China is that, and make points out to the booing. That that doesn't necessarily mean I agree with it an outright authoritative thing, but if if you don't want people blowing through red lights, for example, which happens all the time and it kills a lot of people, and you need some sort of consequence, blowing people do that. And guess what? Illinois actually has tons of traffic cameras. The other day I went online, it means it all gets streamed online. You can type in Department of Transportation and click on any camera in the state and watch the feed. So why why is that acceptable? But if that's done in a foreign land, it's dystopian and authoritative.
SPEAKER_01Because like you said, it's they they word it in such a way that it seems they make it seem acceptable. And they make it seem like it's not an invasion of privacy when it comes to this kind of stuff. And we'll get back to the blockchain and everything. I just have one quick question. Uh, you brought up that how Doge was kind of acting as a smokescreen for them to implement certain monetizers uh monetary avenues like Palantir. What do you what do you mean? Because Doge, I feel like it Trump implemented it and then it went away one day randomly.
SPEAKER_00Correct. Well, it was an utter failure. So the Department of Government Efficiency, they were trying to discontinue very minute funding. So people would say, well, USA was spending$200,000 a year on this stupid thing. People would applaud. Cool. We've spent billions and billions and billions of dollars on going into other countries, or we spend it routinely on Social Security and on Medicaid and Medicare and all these things that are like socialism. People are on the one hand saying, Wow, I can't believe all this money is going to the social program. Meanwhile, half of the country's money is going into keeping people over 57, uh, giving them income and giving them health care. So it's like we we have really interesting lines that we draw for a lot of stuff. But getting back to Doge, so Doge had unchecked entry into many of the government's branches and and bureaucratic bodies and all the alphabet groups. Um FBI, CIA, USA, and all these DOTs. So it it had unchecked power to inspect people's information and check for fraud. And one of their ways to check for fraud is they were running algorithms. The algorithms were supplemented by Palantir. And Palantir is predominantly not a US company, no matter how it's painted to be. It's really foreign intelligence and the people and the funders and all that. So the fact that now we have systems in place that probably don't have Americans' best interests in line, because it's not to enhance America or to make us more effective at something or make us more productive, it's to keep people in check, really, and to institute consequences for maybe doing something that's out of line with the current agenda, which I don't really think moves the country forward. So when that exists and they have all this stuff that's inspecting the data and it's not anonymized, and we don't really know what they're doing with it because nobody's looking inside of these companies. That's a that's a huge threat, really, to national security. And we know that on many instances, supposedly allied countries of ours have sold intelligence that they gathered to other countries, including China. So, no, companies like Hallens here should not be part of this made-up department of government efficiency, which just actually did disappear one day. They said they were gonna get rid of a bunch of fraud, they did not. Meanwhile, rampant spending uh proceeds in other places, and now we have all these AI tools in the government that are black boxes. We don't know what's going on inside of them, we don't know what we're doing with that. And then the the relaxation of regulation of artificial intelligence is also really not a great decision. Now, the bills said that it couldn't be regulated at the state level, it could be regulated at the federal level, but they're not going to do anything at the federal level, so it just kind of stopped everything in its tracks. And meanwhile, like you have all the worst use cases of AI emerging now, uh, where people are doing terribly manipulative things, and there's no way to fake videos, fake videos, people committing crimes. Now Grop is undressing kids in Twitter feeds, and people are saying, How did how is there no consequence for this at all? I mean, this is downright terrible. But at the same time, you also have the Epstein files, which is like two sides of that same coin, which is like, okay, yeah, there's a whole lot of terrible trafficking going on. We're also not doing anything about that. So we have a very unserious government in that regard, but uh there has to be regulation of AI. Of course, we want to win the AI race, but you win that with robust infrastructure. Because if you look at Alan Turing and the Turing test and and all of the equations that went into that, so Alan Turing was uh uh he helped crack the Enigma code, and he actually wrote about artificial intelligence 80 years ago. And one of the things that he predicted, and this was continued throughout the next decades, is that our ability to have efficient artificial artificial intelligence is not going to be limited by our computing capacity or how sophisticated the software is, it's just how much energy we have, and that's still true today. So now we're building all these data centers and we we want AI tools, and we have terrible infrastructure, which again is where countries like China are beating us. So our ducks are not in a row, there's so many massive deals going on just for the sake of removing money and making it look like progress. I should get off my soapbox though.
SPEAKER_01So we're building all these data centers which require a lot of energy. And like you said, America doesn't have the infrastructure for that energy. What can America do to improve our infrastructure when it comes to energy?
SPEAKER_00Well, we need people advocating for infrastructure in the built environment, and this is where my software company, my real estate company, has something bigger in mind. When I talk about building, it's not just a noun, it's also a verb, but I want people to be building things. And I think we need a lot more young people. I'm Gen Z, I know that my hairline is deceiving, but running a startup is stressful. So as a Gen Z, I want a lot more people being interested in what the future of the country looks like, and maybe gravitating towards more boring jobs or less sensational careers, where they say, I want to be an architect, I want to be an engineer, I want to be uh a data scientist, I want to do something that is going to move the country forward. I want to be in civil engineering or urban planning, uh, I want to be working as an electrical engineer, whatever, solar panel installer, and being excited about playing a in a central role in what the country looks like in the next 100 years, and saying, I'm doing my part to improve the country and get fired up about that. Everything that we have today is because people thousands of years ago and over this timeline got equally excited and said, We're going to build something that lasts, we're going to build Rome, and it's still going to persist to this day and it's going to inspire people. Where's that same energy now? So you need people to say, we want robust infrastructure, we want the next generation to be better off, we want to transform the world, want we want to get people to space again, or we want more equitable and accessible housing, we want clean places for people to live, good water, uh, clean air, good public transportation, all these types of things. People should be fired up about that. Then they should be designing products, they should be advocating for, they should be having these sorts of conversations, even though it's not as exciting as your family guide clips or whatever your streamer is doing. Those same people are going to complain about how awful the world is. What are you doing to reverse course? Because yeah, I know that things suck right now, and we're not responsible for that. We'll be handitive, but unless the plan is to let everyone die off and suffer and become wage slaves, then someone has to turn something around. So I kind of see that not that I have a responsibility, but I'm embracing the role and the potential, the possibility to inspire people to be part of something bigger and see if they can redirect us. Because other parts of the world are doing it. It's not impossible. There's a lot of countries that are doing things right. Can we take notes and can we apply it here in the US? We are the people who are going to become the elite human capital. Our generation can become the politicians and the lawyers, the doctors, they can be the regulators, the inventors and innovators. There's no reason why not. So then, if we do ascend to those levels of power, why don't we start making decisions that we all agree with and are good for society?
SPEAKER_01Definitely. I wanted to go back a little bit to the uh the whole AI talk we had a little bit. Uh it's not really about the regulations in itself, but it's about who's internal regulations, who's making the regulations. Who do you see is gonna make the regulations in the future for AI? And what do those look like?
SPEAKER_00Well, a lot of it is very politically driven. And I think the first thing that's going to be under attack is true freedom of spook uh of speech. And whether that's how it's produced or how it's censored. And so whatever administration exists at that time that says AI is now being used to distribute this information that we disagree with, they are going to institute that regulation. Because it really can't constitutionally, AI doesn't overlap with all the other amendments. It's really just speech predominantly, it's not gonna change probably quarter troops or something. So that's that's where I think the the regulation and the bills are gonna go into place because people are gonna say this is spreading misinformation about this topic or that. And we saw this both directions, where in the 2021, or really 2020 to 2023 and 4 period, the Biden administration had implemented a lot of policy against what information was being distributed online, and a lot of it was automated. It's not really people posting it, to some degree it's true, but just the fact that it existed in mass, and they said, Well, we don't want you to post about this. So that that went into effect. Now, of course, the Trump administration uh unraveled a lot of that, and part of the deal was that big tech would stop enforcing that, and then they helped fund the Trump campaign, and now there's a lot of favors being returned. So they said if you soften all this, we're not going to tell you to censor this information, whether it's about um like the hunter and buy-in case was very prominent, but so was COVID information. They said, Well, if you say this about vaccines or that, then the coast is going to be limited in visibility. Now we're seeing quite the opposite where people who disagree with the Trump administration or some of the foreign policy are also being trialed and toppled. So is it more free? No? I said I don't know what administration is going to exist in 2028. I I don't even know if I can make a prediction because things are so wacky nowadays. Who knows? But whoever that is, I think at that point AI will be at scale, and the amount of information that's going to be out there is going to be overwhelming to the human sense that we no longer know if we're actually at war with Venezuela or if we did drop a bomb in Iran, because the government and all of its proxies would be able to mass produce robust and convincing evidence that it happened. Let's make that.
SPEAKER_01And but before we get into banking to blockchain, one last question what do you think who do you think is winning the technology race? America or China? Because uh America is from a lot of Americans say is the tech country of the world, because that's where most of our money comes from is tech. We're not really in the in industrial um industry as much as China's anymore. So who do you think is winning the tech tech race?
SPEAKER_00Well, tech is big and broad. Here's an interesting stat. Just came out on a Financial Times two days ago. BYD, the Chinese car manufacturer, doubled Teslas. It was either sales or production units. That's technology, self-driving technology, electric cars. So we're it looks like we've been surpassed there. And then even in like mobile phones, people will say Apple has completely stalled and it's innovation, and the price point keeps going up. We're not getting anything more out of this. Camera quality isn't really evolving anymore. Meanwhile, there's all sorts of new models for devices, or it's Android or another training brand that is slipping my mind right now. Starts with an H. But people are saying there's a lot of sales here, it's widespread. They have all sorts of new models and things that, in terms of specs, specifications, surpass iPhones. So are we still dominating there? You know, that's that's a good question. Then artificial intelligence. Our models, how well they're trained, how effectively they're implemented. That's a little bit more of a gray area. I would like to think that the US is leading for two reasons. We have more robust data sets, a lot of information that's accessible to the models, and then the people who are using the models on top of them. Like you first have to train a model using a data set, and it starts to understand, for example, the weather patterns in in the state. And then you say, okay, now that you understand the weather patterns, can you please look at 2026 and how the stars are going to be aligned and predict. What the weather tweet would look like. So that's training on the data sets and then applying it to uh new use cases. Um, so we we have the data there, and then the other reason is because we have more rampant entrepreneurialism, lots of companies, lots of people trying to find use cases for these for this AI to see if they can become the next unicorn, the next billionaire, and really unlock things there. So you're seeing all sorts of applications emerge where it's not that entrepreneurship is stifled in China, but the risk-to-reward ratio is different because in the US, if you are a successful entrepreneur, you have uncapped potential, and that's because you have the ability to create a monopoly, and so you can really just make billions and billions of dollars. In China, they do a lot of uh they break up a lot of the large companies, and capital doesn't have unlimited power over the country. So look, the the people like Elon Musk who exist in the US and not China is because he does get to become maybe the first trillionaire in the world, and that brings out a different breed of entrepreneurs than it would if you put in all the sweat and work and you can only become half a billionaire. Yeah, follow like that.
SPEAKER_01Getting back to blockchain, over the next five to ten years, what are the industries that will go full-fledged the blockchain that will completely adopt it?
SPEAKER_00So finance is blazing the trail. Alright, finance is very broad. Some of it is how do we create new financial products, some of it's financial institutions and banks, and how they are going to manage money and record it, which is going to impact things like settlement times. So, right now, most people are familiar with wire transfers and ACH, which all has a little bit of a delay because you have to.