Bleeding Edge Entrepreneur Peter Saddington – Buying a BTC Lambo, Being Banned by YouTube, Emrit IoT

By Kirk Enbysk

Serial entrepreneur Peter Saddington joins us on Winner Take All to discuss the current bitcoin bull market, his new IoT project Emrit, and content platform censorship. Peter created a $10M venture capital fund to invest in blockchain and IoT, has founded 4 startups, and authored multiple books on Scrum, Agile, and Personal Branding. Peter has had multiple large channels censored by YouTube and discusses with Applico CEO Alex Moazed how he sees free speech being suppressed on content platforms. Saddington also lists some of his favorite alt coins for 2021, shares what impacts he thinks decentralized finance can have on the the planet, and recounts buying the first bitcoin Lamborghini for $115.

Check out Peter’s project Emrit at emrit.io/

Originally Aired: 02/17/21
#FounderInterview #Emrit #HARDWAREDROP

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Full Transcript:

Alex Moazed (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to Winner Take All. I’m Alex Moazed, and I’m really excited to have Peter Saddington with us today as a guest speaker on the show. Peter, lovely to have you with us.

Peter Saddington (00:20):
Hey, appreciate being here. Thanks so much for inviting me, Alex.

Alex Moazed (00:23):
Absolutely. Let me take a shot here at just kind of bragging about some of your background and then why don’t you fill in some of the gaps for me?

Peter Saddington (00:31):
Sure.

Alex Moazed (00:32):
You’ve founded, what, four different tech startups, you’ve had some acquisitions, and I want to hear… and some that’s currently going which we’re going to hear about here. Big time, crypto guy, I’m sure you made a bunch of money on your crypto investments, including this Lambo story, which we’re also going to touch on. You do a lot from just Agile, Scrum, coaching, you’ve had a business around that, you do a lot of stuff on YouTube, you got a big following here on YouTube and other video content platforms. And I’m sure that some other stuff I’m not covering, but how’d I do?

Peter Saddington (01:08):
I think you’ve I think you did pretty well. I like to summarize up kind of my overall life in three words of sorts. I love Agile, I love startups, and I love self improvement. So I’m a big fan of all three. Agile software development is one of the best ways to deliver software quickly to customers with quality. Obviously, been a perennial entrepreneur for the last two decades, building multiple startups, as you said, I got lucky with a couple acquisitions, for sure. And lastly, I love helping other people. And just like yourself, right? And that’s why you’re on YouTube, that’s why you’re on communication and social media platforms, to help give your voice out to people who might need it. And so I love all three of those. And it’s a great summary.

Alex Moazed (01:50):
It’s great to have you. Many places, we could start with this, maybe we’ll get to Emrit in a little bit here. But let’s kind of start off with some old news, but I have some just hilarious imagery here from this. This guy bought a Lamborghini with Bitcoin for $115, the cheapest Lambo in history. Fill us in on what actually went down here, Peter?

Peter Saddington (02:20):
So the story’s been around for a while now, but it’s certainly a fun story worth telling. So I think it’s important to give a little bit of context that’s germane to this whole idea of crypto and a Lamborghini. But long story short, I got into cryptocurrency in 2011, I read a Ars Technica article on this technology stack. So I’m a developer engineer, so for me, this whole idea of, and what I read is, that this technology stack lost value. Now that didn’t make any sense to me, Alex C#, .NET, Ruby, PHP, how does a tech stack lose value? And this was in October of 2011.

Peter Saddington (02:58):
So I went down the rabbit hole, and I learned about this thing called Bitcoin. And so I purchased my first Bitcoin in November of 2011, at $2.52. And I’ve been DCAing or dollar-cost averaging into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for pretty much a decade now. And one of the things at the time in 2017, I was building a venture funded startup, and we were looking for ways to market and get the name and the brand out there. And there was always this meme idea on Reddit around, “Don’t use your crypto games,” and, “Don’t don’t use your crypto profits to buy a Lamborghini. That’s foolery.” Well, you know what, I’m just the type of guy to do that anyway.

Peter Saddington (03:39):
So I found a guy that was selling a Lamborghini for Bitcoin, and we struck a deal at 45 Bitcoins. And so we did the transaction, videotaped it on YouTube, all this type of stuff. So I became the first person on the planet to buy a Lamborghini Huracan with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. And so in terms of the original investment, it was about $115 worth, so you’re not wrong. It’s the cheapest Lamborghini in history. It was my little 15 minutes of fame.

Alex Moazed (04:08):
And I mean, now technically 45 Bitcoin is actually like a $2.5 million car, but I’m sure that was just a small amount of your overall Bitcoin portfolio here and didn’t leave too much damage to the Bitcoin bank accounts. I think it’s a great example of just this greater sea change, right? Obviously, Tesla is making news with the $1.5 billion Bitcoin purchase and all this kind of stuff. We had Jim Rickards on the show a few weeks ago, and his new book is called The New Great Depression, and he’s not too hot on Bitcoin, but I think he’s just kind of that older guard, kind of like economist investor, they don’t really do get it. He’s still says, “Put 10% of your money into alternatives.”

Peter Saddington (05:06):
Maybe he means gold and silver.

Alex Moazed (05:08):
Nut no, no, that’s a separate bucket. He’s got 10% in gold bullion, and then he says, “Do another 10% in alternatives.” And to me, whether it’s 10% or whatever, but Bitcoin is like the classical alternative. What’s your narrative on kind of Bitcoin investors, what’s going on with Bitcoin these days?

Peter Saddington (05:27):
I’ll give you two great examples that I think any generation can really resonate with. Number one, in 1992/1993, a guy named Tim Berners-Lee built the internet, which is what all of us are using right now, the internet is a protocol. Now you don’t need to know what that actually means. But a protocol is something that you can’t uninvent, you can’t get rid of it. And the internet protocol is expanding to every corner of the globe, today, ad infinitum until every facet of the world has been covered.

Peter Saddington (06:00):
Likewise, Bitcoin is a protocol. I’ve been quoted by saying this, but it is absolutely true, is that Bitcoin cannot be uninvented. It’s a protocol, just like the internet, it will continue to expand ad infinitum, until every facet of the globe is covered with it. And so that right there from a technological, programmatic and mathematical position, Bitcoin, it’s not going to be uninvented, it ain’t going away. And so it certainly should be one of the many options that investors or traders should look into to balance out their portfolio. I would go a little bit heavier than 10%, I’d say 15% is probably where you really should be at.

Peter Saddington (06:40):
But the second thing that I say is that the younger generation, the Generation Z, the generation millennials, right? These guys, they already live in a world of digital currency, what most of the older generation or even the boomers, let’s call them that, what they don’t realize is that there are trillion dollar micro… Micro. Trillion dollar economies already in digital currency in video games. World of Warcraft, is a great example of that. All of the big shooter, shoot them up games, all the big MMO-

Alex Moazed (07:13):
Robots.

Peter Saddington (07:14):
… RPGs, right? Yeah. They’re already working on digital currency, V-Bucks, now some of you guys might not know what V-Bucks is, but it’s a currency in a game. And my niece, who’s 12 years old, would rather have me by her V-Bucks, which is digital currency for the game, than an actual Amazon gift card or rollerblades or roller skates. And so the younger generation is already using digital currency in multiple means. Actually, in most cases, from a recent study that I saw, the average Generation Z or millennial actually engages with over 16 different currencies in usually a period of about a week.

Peter Saddington (07:58):
Now, you might say, “Well, how is this possible? They’re only 17 years old, how can they interact with 16 different currencies?” Because every game that they play has a different digital currency that they use, and they actually spend real money to buy that digital currency. And so we’re already transitioning to a world where digital currency is the norm. And so those two ideas, I think, are the strongest reasons why any investor or let’s just say savvy investor, should probably take a double look at Bitcoin as one of those options for investment for sure.

Alex Moazed (08:29):
My first business, my first startup was a video game character in Final Fantasy XI. And I would sell in-game money for real world money. It was Gil, Gil was what it was called, right?

Peter Saddington (08:41):
Gil, that’s right.

Alex Moazed (08:42):
I made a few 1,000 bucks and bought myself some old used car when I was, I don’t know, 16. I was like, “Oh, this is awesome.” But yeah you’re essentially bringing that kind of financial freedom, and we’re going to get to censorship and YouTube and that stuff in a second here. But when you think about the power of this decentralized network… And I love that word protocol, because it’s actually exactly how I describe Blockchain, Bitcoin, these kind [inaudible 00:09:11], just like the internet, that HTTP protocol, you got to build a bunch of services around it for it to kind of deliver on the value prop where everyone’s like, “Oh, the Blockchain and…” Everything is going to get disrupted by the Blockchain, but it’s… Yeah, there’s the Blockchain protocol, and Bitcoin, they’re all kind of interrelated, but you’ve got to build a lot of services around it.

Alex Moazed (09:32):
That’s why you got… Coinbase is a multibillion dollar unicorn here. Not all the experience and services that that users expect when interacting with Bitcoin or Blockchain, or whatever it may be, are just there out of the box. But that’s kind of the beauty is that the protocol is decentralized, and it allows for all this kind of creativity and innovation to be piled on top, just like the internet, as you said. And also though, in terms of financial freedom, and how you can essentially, to probably the much disgruntled nature of the Fed or other central governments that want to control the monetary system, you can exchange monies outside of their reach. But we actually are starting to see that being encroached upon a little bit, but it is very interesting this concept.

Peter Saddington (10:31):
I think, the three most powerful words around Bitcoin that I repeat all the time is decentralized, it’s permissionless… That permissionless idea, man, I could go on for ages around that. But decentralized permissionless, and it is a financial opportunity. And I think a lot of people would say, “Well, that’s great and all but where’s the application?” Right? “Where’s the applications that are being built upon it?” They are being built, or the infrastructure is being built. And because it’s a protocol, I always like to say, if I level it up just one level, I like to say it’s kind of like an operating system, right? The internet was permissionless, right? It was decentralized, you can build anything on top of the internet protocol.

Peter Saddington (11:13):
And now, like we have Bitcoin, a financial asset class, now you can build all sorts of applications on it, and they are being built, they’re growing day by day, and having been in this world, the crypto world for over a decade, man, it’s amazing stuff, which is why… we might get into it, which is why I’ve dedicated myself to this world, which is why I build in the cryptocurrency space, because it’s that nascent, it’s that new, and it’s that exciting.

Alex Moazed (11:36):
What are some coins that you’re really excited about? A. And B, you had a tweet here recently, where you said, “Bitcoin at 50,000, ain’t nothing yet. It’s only February, and it’s alt season,” you got to translate this for everyone, “Everything going up.” Okay, give us some… What is going on in that?

Peter Saddington (11:59):
Well, everyone in the market loves it when everything go up, right? And so what we’re seeing right now is very much a very similar pattern that I saw in 2014, ’15, 2017, and now in 2021, with Bitcoin, is that we’re seeing a massive rise in the valuation of this financial asset and this asset class. And what happens whenever Bitcoin retraces or pulls back a little bit, because it recently just hit 50 grand, so there could be a pretty significant pullback depending on the MACD and all of the all the charting tools that people use out there. And generally the money that flows into Bitcoin, when it retraces, it flows into the alt coins.

Peter Saddington (12:41):
And so right now is… I mean, you asked me about the tokens that I’m looking at, I’ll give you that in a second. But let me give you this preamble, which is everything’s going up or everything go up right now. There’s so many great projects, if you go to coinmarketcap.com, you can check out the top 100 coins that are out there. And man, I’ll be honest with you, if the pattern rings true that I’ve seen over the last decade, multiple cycles of this, take a crapshoot man, pick some top tier projects and the top 20, top 25, top 50, you’re going to make some money, and it’s going to be an awesome opportunity to learn about cryptocurrency, get your feet wet, and you might lose a little bit, but don’t risk your bread money, right? Start with 500 bucks, that’s how I always recommend it to people. Start with 500 bucks and consider it loss. If 500 goes up to 1500, wonderful, take some profits, try spreading out your risk., try some other tokens.

Peter Saddington (13:34):
So let’s talk about what tokens I’m looking at right now. I’m looking at a lot. So there’s a great token out of Japan called Cardano Ada, which is definitely worth looking at. There’s a great token, I’ve been in this token since 2017, ICX ICON, based out of Korea, it’s the interoperability Blockchain that’s out there and it’s actually one of the most mature ones, I would say, beyond Ethereum. So Cardano Ada, ICON ICX, Helium HNT, which is a work utility token, which is what my company is based off right now, so there’s a little bit of bias there. Also, Algorand, in the DeFi space, the decentralized finance space, Algorand is going to be a game changer in my opinion, when it comes to creating new financial systems and new financial apparatus for retail consumers and institutions alike.

Peter Saddington (14:28):
So those are some that I’m looking at right now. Obviously, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin has to be added in there, and last but not least, I have to give you my favorite coin of all time, it’s Dogecoin. I’ve been mining Dogecoin since 2012, on a Dell XPS laptop, and when this last Dogecoin boom happen, oh, man, my email box, my DMs were blowing up. People were like, “Oh, my gosh, we know that you’ve been mining this thing for like 10 years. How are you making out?” And the answer is, “Not too bad.”

Alex Moazed (15:01):
Usually there’s a fancy race car behind you, does that mean you’re shopping for… you’re getting another race car now with your Dogecoin? Is that what’s going on here?

Peter Saddington (15:10):
There could be a Doge-mobiel coming in the future. The reason you don’t see my race car or the Lambo behind me is because I’m working on go-karts right now for my son. So this particular section of my world has been taken over, and actually, I can give you a quick view. Look at this, booya, there we go.

Alex Moazed (15:28):
Oh, nice.

Peter Saddington (15:29):
So we got the Jeep back there, and we got the go-karts and the tires. So that’s what’s going on in my little world right here right now.

Alex Moazed (15:37):
That’s awesome. Now, with these alt coins, not all of them, but some of them are… Some of the things you’re describing, right? The coins are essentially a part of a business, right? And that business is kind of driving value.

Peter Saddington (15:56):
Very much so.

Alex Moazed (15:56):
And then the coin is kind of interwoven into, say, the services or that business, right? So the business is helping to bring value and demand and awareness to the coin, as opposed to the coin kind of just being a coin. Now that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with just having a coin, but that’s what you’re kind of alluding to is some of the coins, the alt coins, you were talking about, right? They’re kind of co-mingled into an actual business that’s doing stuff around them.

Peter Saddington (16:25):
Whenever I invest in any type of, what we call, alt coins or alternative tokens in the cryptocurrency space, for me, it’s not merely a financial asset class that I can invest in. For me, I actually look at the projects itself. What are they building? How are they creating value for the economies at scale? How are they creating value for their particular market demographic? And are they, for me, as a venture capitalist, this is actually something I really care about, is are they actually pushing the needle? Are they pushing the boundaries of the technology so that retail consumers can use that technology sooner rather than later? And so whenever I suggest tokens to look into, what I’m really saying is, “Look into the projects, look into the leadership, look into their investment partners, look in to their industry partners that they’re connected to.”

Peter Saddington (17:16):
Because just like in traditional finance… Well, someone else one can make an argument for this. But ideally, in traditional finance, when you’re investing in Apple, you’re looking into the thesis and the future profitability and their market share as well as the products they’re going to be delivering, though I think most are not that savvy and they just say, “Apple go up, let me just invest.” But [inaudible 00:17:40] crypto, you have to do your diligence, you have to look at the project itself, and see whether they’re going to have a sustainable runway, see if they’re going to be profitable, see if they’re actually creating something valuable that the market is going to end up buying.

Peter Saddington (17:52):
And the token itself, let’s talk to this for a moment, the token itself is merely, in many cases, one of two things for that project, it’s a monetary incentive for investors to be part of the project and help give cash to the project so they can continue to grow, or number two, the token is used as data transfer within the project itself. So if the project itself is not financial, let’s say it’s a utility or it’s an application, what they’re using the token for is to transfer data back and forth between machines or between systems, applications and so forth. And so the token really is a means of getting work done, rather than just a financial asset that say, “Hey, it’s going up, let me invest in it.” I really recommend you look into the project itself.

Alex Moazed (18:39):
Going into some censorship stuff here, this XRP situation, right? This is like Ripple’s coin, they got into trouble with, what, FINRA or something, about their ICO, their initial coin offering. But then going back to your permission, your permission leg of the tool here, the three tenants of Bitcoin, that permission was, and maybe it still is, regulated, right? You were not able to buy and sell, maybe both, the XRP coins for a period of time, maybe it’s still going, I don’t know. What did I get wrong with that? Or what’s your read on what actually is happening there? And is that inappropriate that the limitation of XRP?

Peter Saddington (19:26):
The first words that you brought into this particular context are the most important, are the three tenants. So let me just repeat those, right, decentralized, censorship resistant and permissionless, very important. And so that is what the original Bitcoin protocol is all about. And the vast majority of cryptocurrency projects out there also live by these particular philosophical tenants. They want their token to be decentralized, not centrally controlled, like the Fed or the government. They want it to be permissionless, meaning anyone has accessibility, anybody has optionality, they can join the project, they can leave the project, they can support it, they can do whatever, it’s permissionless. And the third, most importantly, it is censorship resistant, which means anyone and everyone can be a participant in this and your voice matters, your vote matters, the money that you put into the project matters.

Peter Saddington (20:12):
Now, when it comes to XRP, the reason why they have found the ire of the government regulators and the institutions that be, is that they made a lot of money, and there was a lot of transactional value happening and there was potential as legalities, which is a really gray area, is that they were offering securities to the general public and non-authenticated investors and these types of things, which is obviously a faux pas, you have to be accredited investor in these types of things. And so that’s the reason why XRP caught the ire of the Fed, is because they’re looking at this huge pile of money, and they really, in my opinion, they really just want to figure out how to be part of the game. They want to regulate it so they can be part of the action.

Peter Saddington (21:01):
I could bring another examples of like marijuana, right? The reason why marijuana legalization in America is slow is because they have to figure out how to make money on it, right? There’s always a financial reason for the government or the Fed to take some type of control. And the problem is, is that when they do that, and XRP and the leadership that be, Brad, if they allow that to happen, they are removing the censorship resistance, they are removing the permissionless ideal, and what you’re going to end up with is another monetary system, like the US dollar, or the Yen, or the Pound or whatever, it’s going to be centrally controlled, it’s going to be manipulated, not to our retail investors, for us, but to our detriment, right? They’re going to use it for what governments do, nefarious reasons, right?

Alex Moazed (21:52):
Yeah, if they want to print 7 trillion crypto, they can print 7 trillion crypto.

Peter Saddington (21:57):
Exactly. Then it’s completely worthless at that point.

Alex Moazed (22:00):
So I’ve got here, CoinMarketCap, right? XRP is six, by market cap. I’m kind of learning as I go here. So was Brad complicit in this, did XRP, did Ripple do something to essentially kind of bend the knee to the financial regulators? Or wouldn’t any of these top cryptos be susceptible to FINRA saying, “Hey, Coinbase, you got to limit this activity.” Or was there actually some kind of participation on behalf of XRP, in this scenario, is that what you were getting at it, or did I not catch that?

Peter Saddington (22:37):
No, you’re heading in the right direction. At the end of the day, I just don’t know the details, but I only can read what’s on the mainstream media, which I don’t believe anyway. So when it comes to the details of XRP, this is what I essentially have come to the kind of the conclusion of is that XRP caught the ire and the eyeballs of the Fed, because they’re moving lots of money. They also have government partnerships, and they have large industry players that they’re working with as well, which requires some semblance of regulatory oversight, and some even legislative oversight, it really depends. And so they’re playing in a game in a world of big controlling individuals, right? Big entities that care about control. And that’s my bottom dollar. If you play in that world, you’re touching that world, and they’re going to start clamping down because they want a piece of the action.

Alex Moazed (23:31):
They’ve got leverage… I’m on Ripple’s site. I mean, look, they got all these financial institutions on their site. I mean, these are all banks, and Amex is on here. I mean, so-

Peter Saddington (23:43):
Let’s be honest, if you were a… Let’s say you’re in the top 1,000 cryptos. If you’re 899 on that list, ain’t no Fed going to be coming after you because they don’t see no value in controlling your token, right? And you don’t have industry players that are up in DC, right? All these things play together, all these variables matter. And XRP is plenty, just like you said, the big industry partners which have to be regulated. So if you play in that game, you got to play in the game. And so I think XRP is feeling the brunt of that right now. And it’s going to be interesting to see what the outcome of that is going to be for the rest of the cryptocurrency space.

Alex Moazed (24:23):
I think a lot of ramifications here, so that’ll be interesting to track. So let’s go to YouTube, next topic here. You currently have your channel here, you got 30,000 subs on this thing. vchunting.com, you’re interviewing VCs? You got Tim Draper here, I mean, you’re talking about the Lambos and Bitcoin and the Scrum and the Agile which are so important from a product development standpoint here and how to ingrain that and kind of train that in people building tech products these days. But you’ve had two other channels, maybe more, but you’ve had at least two other channels which had more subs than this, and those things aren’t around anymore. Why? What’s going on with all that?

Peter Saddington (25:14):
Well, my most successful channel, I have to just shill it, is VINwiki, I think we have 1.4 million subscribers. It’s a car YouTube channel, duh, I got cars, so I love that too. So that’s my most successful and not censored YouTube channel. So almost, I think 1.5 million subscribers there. But yes, you’re not wrong. I had two other YouTube channels, one was called Decentralized TV which was just about 100,000 subscribers, and then I had another YouTube, which was Bite Size Bitcoin, at its height, had about I think 60,000 or 70,000 subscribers. And both of these channels were all about cryptocurrency, Decentralized TV, we pushed down about 12 to 16 pieces of content per day around cryptocurrency, so we were the most prolific YouTube channel on the planet, giving out daily news, pretty much on the hour, every hour, out to the world. Bite Size Bitcoin, my other personal channel, was my exploration into cryptocurrency and Bitcoin and helping educate people around the power and a lot around the technicals of cryptocurrency and how to get in as an entrepreneur, and someone like myself and operator.

Peter Saddington (26:24):
And these two channels got censored, it was ridiculous, I think I lost 4,800 videos from Decentralized TV, and over 3,200 videos, so about over 7,000 videos. I mean, don’t even worry about how much time and hours went into that. But about 7,000 videos were all deleted by YouTube, because this was at the height of cryptocurrency back in 2017, ’18. And they just decided that if you were talking about cryptocurrency or Bitcoin, you were anti-establishment, you were anti-government, you were anti the powers that be. You could blame me for that, and you might not be wrong if you were to say that because I generally don’t like controlling agents over my life. I like autonomy, I like the ability to have self-sovereignty over my time and my value and my effort. I certainly don’t like money being stolen from me and given to other people through the means of taxes. So maybe I’ve talked about those types of things in those videos.

Peter Saddington (27:21):
And so we caught the ire of YouTube, and we had no recompense, we had no way to retrieve it, they just shut us off and said, “You’re not important to us.” And so I had to start over again. And so now I have a personal channel, which as you said, has 30,000 subscribers or so. So it’s been a rough journey in the content space, to be honest. And I don’t know if I have any great answers, but YouTube is definitely not doing themselves any services when it comes to the next generation of content creators who are talking about cryptocurrency and the latest technologies in it. They’re not helping out.

Alex Moazed (27:57):
Yeah, I mean, it’s what we talk about on the show, it’s just monopolies, there’s no recourse, as you said, there’s nothing you can do, right? There’s no phone number, what, are you going to submit a ticket? I mean, there’s really no one standing up for these producers. And it’s not just YouTube, it’s sellers on Amazon, it’s creators across the whole spectrum of content, social media platforms and this… I call them the thought police, and it’s information fascism.

Peter Saddington (28:33):
It is, totally.

Alex Moazed (28:34):
And it’s not okay, and it goes against the entire value prop of the business model, right? The whole reason is to facilitate exchange of information and ideas and help people be creative and all this kind of stuff. And because you say, “Oh…” About Bitcoin falls out of Vogue, just like if you want to talk about COVID and all these kinds of things, [inaudible 00:28:59] okay, now, “We’re just going to shut you off.” I mean, it’s very frustrating.

Peter Saddington (29:05):
It’s not only frustrating… I’m sorry to interject, but it’s disturbing. We are now living truly, and people have been saying this for years, but it’s so blunt and obvious in our face that we are living in Orwellian times, where are these monopolies… And you wrote a book on it, so you know. Where these monopolies have been incentivized by various means, good and bad, but often monetary incentivized in many cases, that it’s just better business for them to shut off the other side of the aisle and to shut off other people’s voices or dissenting voices or differing opinions, which is quite fascinating to me, because I would think as an operator and entrepreneur myself, that I would be shutting off a huge potential market segment of customers.

Peter Saddington (29:52):
So that doesn’t ever make any sense in my brain that you would want to censor which meanings that they can no longer shop or get value from you. Now why would I want to censor a demographic that I can make money on? It doesn’t make any sense to me. But I think there are deeper, let’s say, maybe political considerations, monetary considerations that they play in a world of that is unbeknownst to me, and I’m okay with that. Bu find it to be… because I’m in the south, right? It’s like backsliding, man, we’re backsliding. We’re backsliding into the wrong technological oversight. We’re backsliding into these techno overlords, which is fascinating to me because it’s like they’re offended because… They want to censor, essentially, because they’re offended at some level

Peter Saddington (30:41):
And so I grew up in time where my parents used to tell me sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you. But I think we now live in a time where if I don’t like your words, I’m just going to shut you off. And so I think it’s a real slippery slope.

Alex Moazed (30:55):
It is. Now Winner Take All is doing this, you’re doing this, what can you do about it, right? I’m actually thinking about starting some kind of petition here, where… I actually love what Poland is doing, where Poland has this ruling, the justice minister has said if any content platforms unfairly censor creators, and they kick you off, let’s say they kick Peter off… And Poland is going to have like a commission, right? So now you could say, “Hey, they kicked me off. I didn’t violate any laws, this is bollocks.” And they will then say, “Okay, YouTube, you have to reinstate Peter, and if you don’t, we’re going to find you $2 million. $2 million per offense.”

Alex Moazed (31:49):
So to me, that’s the kind of stuff that I wonder if states could start doing that, because it’s not going to happen on the federal level, but I wonder if states could start to do that and say, “Hey, Peter’s in Georgia, if any Georgians are unfairly censored…” And what Poland’s doing is they’re using what they’ve got decades of precedent on, which is freedom of speech, right? So unless you’re violating, like you’re saying fire in a theater, right? Then there’s a precedent around where those boundaries are, and Bitcoin and talking about COVID origination should not be crossing the boundary. But anyway so that’s something which would be great to see in the United States.

Alex Moazed (32:32):
But at the same time, outside of something like that happening, you’re on BitChute. I think you’re on BitChute. We’re doing Rumble, I think we got to start doing BitChute. But BitChute is a top among Alexa rankings, another monopoly, BitChute is number 359 in the United States. And now what’s happened, I call them my five oxymorons. There are five startups, like BitChute, and others, that are top 1,000 websites in the United States that have raised a few million dollars each, but have now been branded. I think BitChute’s also been branded this way as extremist, all right, perpetrating hatred and all this kind of stuff. Which goes back to the content censorship of the tech monopolies is actually now a barrier to entry, right?

Alex Moazed (33:20):
Now they’re saying, “Hey, if you don’t spend $100 million a year on content censorship, well, now you’re extremists and the media is going to brand you as being a fan of hate speech.” What we can do is we can start to go to these other sites that already… 359 is pretty good. Why do you like BitChute? I think that’s what you’re using a lot, right? Or what’s your opinion on where else to go basically?

Peter Saddington (33:42):
Oh, I would highly recommend using multiple different sites like BitChute, I would also recommend, Alex, that you also post your videos on LBRY. check out LBRY, it’s a cryptocurrency platform, it’s decentralized, they can never take your stuff down, and they have a beautiful UI, and they also have auto uploads. So whenever you upload to YouTube, it’ll auto ingest into LBRY, it’ll also auto ingest into BitChute. So what’s great about YouTube still, is that there are open API’s where you can connect these systems, so whenever you upload YouTube, it automatically uploads to other sites as well. So check out LBRY, another great decentralized platform for videos, I use it, I use that and BitChute both.

Peter Saddington (34:24):
And so these are options that content creators have now decentralized options that are permissionless and censorship resistant, right? there on the Blockchain, it can never go away. And that’s what I love about part of the decentralized applications that are coming out now is that we really have a true historical record. I don’t know if we want to go into this just yet, but one of my biggest pet peeves is the doctoring of history and the rewriting of history. I have hated Wikipedia for so long, I think it’s absolute dog poop. And there are other alternatives, check out Everipedia. It’s a decentralized version of Wikipedia, and they can’t doctor or change history.

Peter Saddington (35:14):
I read an article about this, of course, it’s not mainstream article, but I read an article about how we have, right now, and I don’t think many people understand this, is we are in a time in which the greatest revisionist history undertakings are happening right under our noses. And our kids, and our kids’ kids, are going to look back at our times, and they’re going to have a zero real perspective of what really transpired. It’s insanity. And so we live in this world of not only censorship, but going beyond that revisionist history. And so I think it’s even more important for content creators to ensure your place in history, upload your stuff to a decentralized system, like BitChute, and like LBRY.

Peter Saddington (36:02):
Learn from me, I lost over 7,000 videos, we’re talking about thousands of hours of content work. Brother, you know, Alex, how much work it takes to put into this stuff, and it’s all gone. Literally, they erased like three years of my life. And I can never get that back. And I’ll never be able to have people learn about what I was saying about Bitcoin and crypto at the time. There were some really juicy moments, especially when Bitcoin was under $1,000. Those are worth remembering, man.

Alex Moazed (36:29):
It’s 1984, if you haven’t read 1984… Not you, but I mean, I’m getting T-shirts made, Peter, I’m going to send you one. Two plus two equals five, it’s going to be the new slogan of Winner Take All.

Peter Saddington (36:41):
[inaudible 00:36:41].

Alex Moazed (36:42):
And that’s exactly the premise, right? Is when you can just rewrite history, I mean, it is psychological rewiring of your brain when you’re forced to think things that you just know aren’t true. When history is this kind of malleable… there’s no foundation, this stuff psychologically, is just not healthy. So I’m right there with you. And that such a great point, right? Just not even to the subscribers and all this stuff. I mean, just the video content that is now gone, didn’t even have a chance to transition it or any of this, right? It really is a travesty. And the irony is, you think with platforms and the internet, this would be the golden age of information, when it really is kind of like the dark ages in terms of censorship, and these are what Orwellian kind of monopolistic rulers that have co-opted freedom of speech and are effectively our thought police.

Peter Saddington (37:48):
The irony is so thick, isn’t it? In an age of technology that we’re in, in the age of access to information that we’re in, literally… I mean, 20 years ago, ain’t nobody would have the power that we have now in the cell phones, I can access anything now. But the irony is that with all of the access and all the information out there, we are now being funneled to a single narrative, by the powers that be, those that control the media. And we’re actually, in my opinion, we’re actually able to learn less. And the reason is, whenever you go to Google and you type in any search term, you’re going to be shown the narrative that they want you to see.

Peter Saddington (38:30):
And so the only way to get alternative narratives and alternative versions and alternative viewpoints is you have to scroll nine pages on Google, which I haven’t done in over a decade. I don’t think I’ve ever scrolled past page two, let’s be honest. So I use DuckDuckGo. For anyone out there, I use DuckDuckGo right now for my YouTube. Not my YouTube, but my internet searches, so that I get, I believe, a more balanced and objective search results rather than Google which is pushing me towards a narrative where everything is insane. Literally, the world is upside down right now in so many different ways. Black is white, white is black, up is down and two plus two is certainly five, you’re not wrong, Alex.

Alex Moazed (39:14):
Yes, it is. Okay, so I want to hear what’s going on with Emrit here. I could try to describe it, but I figured I might as well let you do it. And then let’s dig a little bit deeper.

Peter Saddington (39:27):
I’ll give you the TLDR. So Emrit, you can check out emrit.io, it’s our website. And what we want to do is… What we’re doing essentially, is building the global IoT network of the future, how people out there can see that is the first global wireless network. That’s what you can look at. Right now we don’t have that, we don’t have a global, free wireless network that you can connect to and you can run applications on. And so this is a combination of two things that I deeply care about.

Peter Saddington (39:56):
Number one, I love educating people about cryptocurrency and getting them into the game. Number two, back in 2017 and 2018, I spent half a million dollars trying to mine cryptocurrency at scale, I learned it was not economically efficient, and it was really power intensive. And it was a horrible experience setting those up because I was sweating like a sauna in there. There’s a lot of great life lessons there. And so what I’ve done is I’ve combined these two passions, how can we get people into cryptocurrency? Because let’s be intellectually honest, in a lot of ways cryptocurrency requires some sophistication, hashing, mining, digital wallets, exchanges, there’s there’s a little bit of sophistication that is required there.

Peter Saddington (40:36):
And number two, how can we get people in the game without them having any of that? Well, what I created and what I built is this, it’s a real cryptocurrency hardware project. It’s a real hardware tangible asset, right? This is a hardware miner. So you can go to emrit.io and get my hardware miner for free. And when you connect that hardware miner to your mobile app, and your wireless, or your Wi-Fi, you will immediately begin mining cryptocurrency at about less than an LED light bulb to run per month, about 37 cents per month on average.

Peter Saddington (41:11):
And so you’re essentially mining cryptocurrency for free. And not only that, on the app, you’re able to have fiat off ramps. And so for the first time… This is really powerful, imagine this, my friend, imagine that you have a mobile app where you can see your cryptocurrency gains and your investments growing from a machine that you have parked in your office. And now that your cryptocurrency is earning on that mobile app, you can trade it for other cryptocurrencies, or you can buy actual coffee with it on a Visa debit card that we attach to it. And so for the first time, you’re in cryptocurrency, you’ve done nothing sophisticated to get into it other than sign up at emrit.io and get our hardware miner for free.

Peter Saddington (41:56):
And now you can learn more about cryptocurrency, earn, and I think what’s most important, and I cannot go without saying this, I believe that we have begun the initial rumblings of a true equitable, universal basic income. Now people will ask, “Hey, Peter, if I get your hardware miner from you, how much can I earn?” “Well, it’s about $25 a month.” And you might say, “Well, Peter, I’m American, $25, don’t mean nothing to you. It doesn’t mean nothing to me, because I’m American, and I’m well off.” Okay, great, that’s wonderful. But you might not be our target market. 90% of the world, $25, is significant money, to 50% of the world $25 to $30 is life changing money.

Peter Saddington (42:41):
If I can get this into emerging economies like Asia, India, Latin America, right? If I can get this in there, which we’re already in 30 countries right now, which is really exciting. If I can get it in there, I’m changing the trajectory of those individual’s lives, they no longer need to have to worry about hand to mouth, they have that covered because they have my hotspot miner for free, and make some $25, which is a lot of money in some of these countries. And now they can be innovative, they can start building, they can spend more time with their spouse more time with their kids, they can be creative. And I remember talking to one of my investors a couple months back about this, and I was saying, “Imagine if there could be a technological explosion in these emerging economies, simply because they no longer need to worry about hand to mouth. They have that covered for them.”

Peter Saddington (43:30):
And so this is the vision that we have here at Emrit is that we want to… Give you our little mantra, we are all our own leaders, serving humankind and activating human potential by being radically transparent, innovative and adaptive. That’s what we want to do. We want to activate human potential and give them products for free to get them into cryptocurrency, earning for free, and then leveraging that income and leveraging those opportunities to create powerful new ideas out into the world. And we’ve been around for just a year now. In February of last 2020 were four people, and right now we are over 30 people and we are growing like gangbusters because apparently when you give the world free hardware that mines them cryptocurrency for less than $1 a month, apparently the demand is not our problem, its supply. So that’s what we’re doing here over at emrit.io.

Alex Moazed (44:18):
Wow. I mean, that’s pretty awesome, man. So now can I ask you a few questions on it?

Peter Saddington (44:27):
Sure, of course.

Alex Moazed (44:28):
These CoolSpots, when you say networks we power, does that mean that they can mine multiple different types of crypto or how does that work?

Peter Saddington (44:38):
Great question. Right now, this miner only mines HNT, Helium tokens. And so HNT is a work/utility token, at least that was the original substantiation of it, and what it does is it incentivizes people to power and help us support this global network that we want to build. The Helium token, for those who are interested, Helium has been around… the project’s been around for over eight years, it’s got a great track record, it’s been growing for almost a decade now. And it’s the fastest growing network in the world, this IoT global network. And we here at Emrit are the biggest deployers of our CoolSpots that are helping power this network.

Peter Saddington (45:24):
And so the Helium token is a token that you get for helping support the network and ensure that coverage exists. It’s called proof of coverage. I’ll give you a simple example. I have one of these, obviously, in my house. And I’ve convinced my neighbors all over my little city here, I live in a little city, to run these as well. So now we have a fully complete network in my town that you can run applications off of for free, it’s amazing. And you get to be incentivized by getting paid about $25 to $30 bucks per month. It’s free money. And so it’s a great way to help support and grow a wireless networks so that people can access it for free. But also, it’s great for your wallet, too. And it gets you into crypto, which is great, because you can now trade this HNT for other crypto tokens, or probably one of the best bets is trade it for some Bitcoin.

Alex Moazed (46:17):
A couple things there. So I can get HNT, I assume $25 a month, you’re saying, “Okay, you can look at here’s how much of an HNT coin you’d get per month, and then you can kind of back out of that a rough value, and that’s how you get into the $25.” Okay, that makes sense. And then for your business model, right? You obviously have a bunch of HNT coins, I’m sure, right? And so if you’re getting more people using this, and you’re bringing more awareness and more demands, kind of back to our point on the alt coins are kind of co-mingled into a broader business model, right? Then that should help the price of HNT rise, right?

Peter Saddington (47:00):
Absolutely. 100%.

Alex Moazed (47:01):
And then the other thing that you’re getting at is you say, “Okay, well, if I had a universe where we had,” whatever it is, “a million of these CoolSpots in Georgia, or in Florida,” or whatever it is, “and these things are all connected to Wi-Fi, then I could essentially provide an alternative kind of like mesh-network communication protocol that people could leverage for their or IoT devices, or maybe really light texting.” Or kind of that kind of stuff, right? Or these kinds of things? Is that what you’re saying?

Peter Saddington (47:41):
You got it, 100%. Everything you said is true. Absolutely. And it’s going to be free, because it’s the people’s network, not a telecom network. And that’s the decentralized power of our project, is that every person who gets a free CoolSpot from us becomes a node in the network. And so you own the network, you get paid to support the network, not [inaudible 00:48:03] huge telecom, but you do, you get incentivized to do that. And so it really does live out the decentralized, permissionless, the ideals of cryptocurrency in that it’s not a big telco, it’s a bunch of individuals, thousands of them, all over the planet who are giving of their, a little bit of internet power, and a little bit of energy to help creating a network that is… it’s a kind of real physical network of these nodes all over the place, as opposed to a technological network like Bitcoin.

Peter Saddington (48:35):
So you really are participating in something real, and something useful for the future, which is I think important, I think in the maturity of cryptocurrency. There’s a lot of projects that are all software, right? But we’re one of the few cryptocurrency projects that actually gives you a real hardware asset, a real tangible asset that makes you money, our motto is, “Get free, get paid.” That’s it. You get our product for free, and then you get paid for doing so. It’s really, really cool.

Alex Moazed (49:00):
Definitely different, But everyone’s going to have their own slant on things. And I mean, I really like to play in the emerging markets. And I think your piece there, your point there is there’s this kind of constant back and forth and in many of these the… You just call them elitist crowds, the think tanks, right? Kind of have this conversation about equity, right? How does the average American share in equity for the rise of industry or whatever it is, right? The growth of the economy, how do they have participation in that, as opposed to kind of being left behind, as unfortunately, we saw that gap widen in ’08, what we’re seeing now with COVID is just unprecedented, that gap just getting wider and wider, unfortunately.

Alex Moazed (50:02):
But I think what you’re also saying there is if you can get this device, and if a lot of the… I don’t know where the HNT holders are, but essentially you’re allowing kind of that currency exchange or that value exchange to go cross border, so you can get your sliver of HNT in India, but the value that would have, relative that purchasing power that it would have in your local kind of rural economy, in a lot of these emerging markets, would be extremely powerful. I mean, that makes a ton of sense to me.

Peter Saddington (50:45):
If we’re going to push the envelope here, Alex, right? And we’re going to push the boundaries of YouTube censorship and stuff like this, which I’m totally okay with, then there literally is a world now that we have helped create, where individuals can truly be, track with me here, truly be outside of our financial system. Think about this, let’s say you’re an India, and you get one of these from me for free. Now you’re making $25, now you can invest that $25 in HMT to other tokens where you can make more money, you can stake those tokens in our application, which I didn’t even cover, which can make you even more money. Or you could see [inaudible 00:51:22] off ramp into a Visa debit card. And we’re going to offer financial services like savings, checking, and even loans because we can collateralize the amount that you earn through the box as collateral against your loan amount.

Peter Saddington (51:36):
And so you literally will never need to go to a bank ever again, because you have your own personal bank, which is a CoolSpot in your house. And so this is part of the vision that I’ve had for a decentralized world, is if I can get people outside, and they’re never ever going to be truly outside, but if I can get people relatively outside the crappy financial systems that are in existence today, and they can be self-sufficient away from them, and have personal sovereignty over their value and time, then I think I’m making a ginormous impact in the world. And this is the reason why I endeavor on it, and we’re grinding 20 hour days to make it happen. Because this is a powerful idea that you can earn and never actually have to interact or engage with the bank ever again. That’s powerful, in my opinion.

Alex Moazed (52:23):
Well, I can tell you, Peter, I’m ordering one, or maybe a couple.

Peter Saddington (52:27):
You could order as many as you want. Yeah, I have a guy in UK, he’s ordered over 300 of these and his passive income is pretty doggone good, let me tell you that.

Alex Moazed (52:38):
It was actually just recommended to me by an advisor of mine, I haven’t read the book yet, but it’s on my list, The Sovereign Individual, which I guess Peter Thiel wrote the foreword for the book.

Peter Saddington (52:49):
Great book.

Alex Moazed (52:49):
I don’t know, have you read it?

Peter Saddington (52:50):
Y. Great book.

Alex Moazed (52:53):
I mean, it just sounds right. I mean, it’s at the top of my list now for me to get through. But yeah, how do you help people take personal responsibility, have that financial freedom, and I think we’re just seeing that kind of that rebellion in… It’s not just an American thing, I think it’s a human thing, no one wants to have the thumb press down upon them. And unfortunately, we’re just seeing that downward pressure in so many ways and monopolies being a polluter of that. So anyway, it’s called Emrit. Go to emrit.io. Peter, it was wonderful to have you on the show. Any last words, my friend?

Peter Saddington (53:36):
No, just thanks so much, Alex, for the opportunity to chat with you. I’d love to come on and hang out if the opportunity arises again, thanks so much.

Alex Moazed (53:43):
Absolutely. That’s Peter Saddington, everyone. Thanks so much, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

 

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