Breaking Boundaries from Birmingham to Blockchain with Kryotech CEO JB Benjamin

Speaker 2: 0:11

Welcome to Side Hustle City and thanks for joining us. Our goal is to help you connect to real people who found success turning their side hustle into a main hustle, and we hope you can too. I'm Adam Kaler. I'm joined by Kyle Stevie, my co-host. Let's get started, all right? Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast. Guys, we're talking crypto today with our buddy JB from CryoTech. Jb, thanks for being on the show.

Speaker 3: 0:41

Hey, how's it going.

Speaker 2: 0:43

It's going great, visiting us from across the pond today, we're sure, england. Hey, how do you like it there?

Speaker 3: 0:52

Well, I'm actually really, as they would say, I'm from around Enns. Anyway, I'm actually from Birmingham. I'm technically a peaky blinder. I grew up on a state of Birmingham during the 1980s and the Poltax riots and freeing the Birmingham Six, and then I moved to Neneatham, which is a village where a state of village is now a population of over 100,000. Neneatham, which is between Coventry and Leicester. I moved to London when I was 22, lived there for about 16 years. Yay. So I met the mother of my children, had four amazing children, three of whom live with me. Yay. I'm the fourth youngest, Cal-L, who is living with his mother. But hopefully at some point sometime soon I will actually get to see at some point. Long story, but typical black guy stuff Baby mama problems up at the Yuzu there is a reason why some stereotypes are true. Yeah, so after living in London for so long, I've done all kinds of jobs. I've been a product manager of one of the world's biggest corporate law practices, which is Freshfieldsbrook House Derringer. I've been a senior lecturer of computer science at my old alma mater, Ravensbourne University, London. Yes, I have been a building site laborer. I have been a triple STS site safety supervisor. I've been a bouncer, security guard, father of four children. I've also been oh my God, I've traveled around most of Europe and while doing all of that, yeah, I discovered lots of interesting things and met lots of amazing and interesting people along the way. But, yeah, my background is so different to most of the other CEOs I meet in this space that you visibly see because there was no silver spoon here, man.

Speaker 2: 2:36

Hey, hey, right here, man, I grew up in a not so great area in America and the not so great areas in America are probably mind-blowingly not great to Europeans. It was funny I went to. I was in Naples. In Naples, italy is kind of, I guess, thought of by most Europeans as a relatively dangerous place for most people, right, yeah, and I looked up the crime rate versus where I'm from, like the city of Cincinnati here, the violent crime rate here is five times worse than Naples, and that's the whole city, that's not just like the part I'm from which is the worst and one of the worst.

Speaker 3: 3:23

Well, you're running it past Coventry or Birmingham. I bet you get different stats.

Speaker 2: 3:27

Oh, maybe, maybe, or yeah. Yeah, there's some places in Scotland that are a bit shady, but I don't know.

Speaker 3: 3:33

Yeah, I mean to be fair, there's places in London a bit shady. I mean, I lived in London for 16 years. Oh yeah, what can I say? About. London. Yes, london is a great place not to live in whatsoever. Don't live there, it's horrible. I mean it's too expensive. Actually, the major oh crazy expensive.

Speaker 2: 3:49

Oh, it's nuts. My wife and I have we've threatened to move to Oxford and maybe me get my MBA there, just because she's a British and Scottish descent and he sounds a lot like you. She bounces around a lot of industries and everything.

Speaker 3: 4:04

Maybe it's like a, maybe it's like a British thing, I don't know, but a person who's got a modicum of ambition and doesn't want to be told what to do. That's what it is.

Speaker 2: 4:13

Hey, I'm right there with you. Have you ever done your Myers-Briggs? Are you the? Are you the commander? Is that what you were?

Speaker 3: 4:21

I am an ENFJA, I'm the protagonist.

Speaker 2: 4:25

Oh, okay, oh. I got a buddy who's that. Yeah, okay, so I know who I'm talking to now.

Speaker 3: 4:30

Yeah, okay, got you, we're quite rad. We always get into trouble.

Speaker 2: 4:35

That yeah, yeah, I would say so. Well, it's cool because, like I mean, you know you're an entrepreneurial type, you've got a, you're buying businesses. You're in the crypto space, which is very fast moving. You're a technologist, you know you're. When, in order to be in this space in the first place, you have to be a forecaster of what's coming next, where is the need going to be, and that just you know. Reading your profile, it just seems like that's. That's you in a nutshell.

Speaker 3: 5:06

Well, I mean, we saw me and my couple of my stakeholders were going through some of my old hard drives and we came to the realization that I actually pitched as a PhD project to the University of Kent back in 2011, what could only be described as mid journey before mid journey was a thing. I mean, I was developing AI stuff and concepts back in 2011, 2012. And my professors were calling me a nutcase because they're saying I was no point. Computer vision isn't a thing. Who cares about? this. You're insane, man. You're insane. What are you thinking about? Roll the clock for us. Here we are on all those mofos and making money off of it. Yeah, Not that there's. I'm trying to say there's anything cynical about it. I'm just saying you'll often find those who call you a mad man generally send end up making money off of the thing that you were peddling initially. If you're not upset.

Speaker 2: 5:55

Yep, that's true.

Speaker 3: 5:57

In friction. I started building Vox Messenger back in 2017, back when everybody believed in WhatsApp and believed in Signal and everybody was like we only need Western paradigms, all owned by the same four white guys. We don't need anything else and only terrorists and pornographers need end to end encryption. Jb, we don't need it. And I kind of prove. I mean, bear in mind, I was hearing this when I was in white combinator, white combinator startup school alum and I was like yo, there's no point, you should be doing trend analysis and blah, blah, blah, blah. Like yeah right. So why am I bothering to build a product for the now, when I should be looking what's coming up next? I knew certain things were coming. I watched the market. I don't just watch the market, I also watched socioeconomics. I watched the political shift in the world around me Next See what's happening and I saw very quickly that either Brexit was going to break us or we were going to have some kind of black swan event either a market, another market crash. I did not predict a pandemic that was going to cause creating a necessity for people to be at home, and that's exactly what happened. That's when, of course, we realized that Zoom had been lying to all of its shareholders about being end to end encrypted for the last five years. And then they were oh sorry, we'll fix it now, but you're going to pass for it, and then the EFF steamed in like no, you're not. And that got fixed. But basically Vox Messenger was started off back in 2017. And it's just been built running organically since then, because I would say my advice for anybody who wants to be an entrepreneur, or definitely an innovator, is do not look at trends, don't look at a, don't look at a trend map. Don't look at a Gartner report on markets, trends and incoming stuff like that. Actually, look at the technology. Look at real problems. Look, one of the problems I was trying to solve with Vox Messenger is how do we create a platform that people can actually trust? Again, is not, is it's not linked to the kinds of people that would do a Cambridge Analytica? You know, is not linked to the same kinds of people who, when you look at their backgrounds, you see they have a long history of trading ethics for financial gain. This is the reason why, at Cryotek, we actually have a manifesto. You know, we have certain guiding pillars of operation. We have privacy before profit. We have humanity before profit, ecology before profit, ethical artificial intelligence. We have their pathway to type two civilization. Everything that we build in all of my companies is leading towards what products that will generate revenue that can then eventually be given back to the consumer as a form of universal basic income, which will possibly be much happier. Consumers buy more stuff. I mean, it's very, it's basic math to us, the negentropic form of consumer capitalism that most of the other businesses are operating under, where they just exploit your data in exchange for oh, I know accessing a platform that literally gives you mental health issues, not talking about you Facebook and Instagram.

Speaker 2: 8:41

We know. We know what's going on there.

Speaker 3: 8:43

You know, bear in mind, there's been a ton of research which was the company whose own research group said yes, this platform is actually increasing the suicide rates in teenage girls. It was Instagram, who's owned by. Yeah, the same groups of people who who gave us came to this cut, the results of which can was felt in the 2018 election, both in the United Kingdom and the United States. Let's not get twisted. Both elections were interfered with using the ability to manipulate public perception and mainstream media systems, utilizing the data collected by much of a kind of Jean Alistair. That's right. Why? The reason being was that the data handed over to came to the list of allowed people to build profiles of individuals they could directly target for the most manipulative messaging, and that had an effect on Brexit as well, here in the United Kingdom.

Speaker 2: 9:33

This is 100%. I'm sure that was a big, a big factor in that, but I mean, this is no secret. Like people know that these companies I mean they hide. They have teams of people trying to create more stickiness in their platforms, and it wasn't just the social media platforms, it's online retailers. Amazon was a pioneer in this. How do we get you to buy more stuff?

Speaker 3: 10:31

Sorry, the people who pioneered it properly. First was Microsoft. Let's not get twisted Microsoft under Bill Gates was, most literally, the picture perfect example of consumer capitalism. On absolute crack, literally, they had market domination, market manipulation, a war test that was bigger than God itself. They could do anything they wanted, until the EU slapped them across the face and said what the fuck are you doing? And made them split everything up and stop having to push inset Explorer.

Speaker 2: 11:01

Well, our food in America is already shit. Now he's buying up all the farmland, so he's going to own our food here pretty soon.

Speaker 3: 11:08

Oh, believe me, Mr Gates owns far more of you than you know.

Speaker 2: 11:12

Yeah, he does. He knows everything about me. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 11:16

It's not just that he knows he owns. Bear in mind a number of the medical companies that he funds have spent outrageous amounts of money patenting individual genomes of the human genome. He owns a lot more of you than you think. But again, look at people's backgrounds. If you look at who's in charge of Microsoft now, sadie Nadella, my God, one of, if not, the most sensible CEO in the current generation of personality CEOs that we are surrounded by. He's not like Bezos, literally putting penis shaped rockets up into the sky and building massive clocks in big, penis shaped mountains. Seriously, bezos has got a problem. Man, or people, must use literally just spunky money out of the atmosphere while ripping a hole in the atmosphere, at the same time saying don't worry guys, it's okay, we'll fix it with Dogecoin. Sadie Nadella is this super sensible CEO. But why is that? Well, look at Sadie Nadella's history. Sadie Nadella literally started right from the basement and worked their ass all the way up to the top of Microsoft. Sadie Nadella is literally the classic story of working your way up. They worked from the post room and now they are the CEO of one of the biggest, if not the biggest, company in the world. This is the reason why, when all the stuff kicked off with open AI and all of those test grill luminos were eating each other alive and we heard that Microsoft was going to take them on, I was kind of like yes sensible leadership in charge. I mean, yes, it's Microsoft. I know most people don't trust Microsoft, but out of a really bad bunch, Microsoft is probably about one of the most you can trust right now.

Speaker 2: 12:58

Which is crazy. And even with AI, you know now that they essentially own open AI, you've got Bing tied into it and you've got all that. Yeah yeah, I mean it's wild, but their stock's also ripping right now. I mean you've got and you know what's funny, everything consolidates. You know you don't have many people like you who are out here that have a purpose. Every like a lot of startups that I talk to these people, you know they obviously want to get, you know, either Aqua Hired or they want, you know, a big company to come in and buy them.

Speaker 3: 13:33

And you have a big exit. Man, you're going to have a big exit. So I mean I'll say that.

Speaker 2: 13:35

Not have a big exit, right, I mean, otherwise you know investors aren't going to get interested. So you have to have this vision for your exit or whatever, and you have a. I mean you have a project where I think a lot of people in the crypto industry have more of this altruistic view of how business should work versus profit first, right, and it's very libertarian, I would say, very kind of. I wouldn't say it's necessarily political left or right, it's more of let's do things the right way for people and politics don't necessarily matter, because I mean, as you know, left, right, they're all part of the same bird, right, it's, it's, it's all part of the same system. And really we, we live in a society where, you know, businesses actually run our countries, Businesses run Europe, businesses run America. It's not our political system that we think it is. A lot of times it's kind of a facade and you know, the more money you raise as a politician, that's who tells you what comes out of your mouth. And they all go to the same parties. Let's be honest, it doesn't matter. You yell and argue with each other in the halls of Congress or the parliament, but you're all hanging out in the same places doing the same cocaine.

Speaker 3: 14:56

You're all eating out the same tape, out the same laps. You all suck in the same car Cause yeah, we know.

Speaker 2: 15:01

That's it, that's right.

Speaker 3: 15:02

Same coin and if you trace all the money back to who's funding, a lot of it yes, it gets it leads you into a place where you get very quickly canceled for saying it. We know, you know, this is one of the the things that's happening. But consumers are changing how they shop. Now Consumers actually care about the ethics and the directionality of the people who are in charge of their tech. So look at the, look at how irresponsible these people have been with our tech. We have auto driving cars which are running off of computer models which are based off of the same four basic computer vision data sets which have virtually little to no diversity, representation of any kind. And, yeah, we're classifying these auto driving vehicles as safe for everybody. The reality is is that the majority of the world is actually very ethnically mixed and sits multiple shades on either side of my shade in the shade wheel. Yeah, so having a computer, having a computer vision system that is built off of four data sets, which is predominantly white, european or white America, means you're going to have a computer vision system that misrecognizes 90% of the population in the world. And, yeah, this is what's the. This is what people are rocking with. We have CEOs deploying this crap or everywhere, left, right and center. This reason why, when I heard that Sam Alton was going to be potentially joining Microsoft, with Microsoft actively in control of him and his team, I was like you know what? That's actually a good thing, because, you know, sam Altman is another personality CEO, is he not? Yeah, everybody's like. Let's go to all of the country, the most ethnically diverse and the most impoverished countries in the world and see if we can get them to trade their rest and their data. For only 40 days of $40 of crypto and a very wishy washy, we promise you universal basic income somehow. I mean, at Crytek, we've actually mapped out how we're going to provide universal basic income. We is part of our tokenized security. We have a mechanism in the smart contract which will automatically spin up a multi-signature wallet at midnight on the 5th of November 2030. And it's basically 60% of the profits from these different applications and platforms are going into that wallet. That wallet will then automatically distribute a sliding scale percentage to every single person that is using any of our products. So all you will have to use to gain access to universal basic income is passing the on-chain KYC and AML and using one of our products and that's it. And bear in mind when I say one of my products these are not going to be my products forever, because we already have it set in stone that once we get to billion dollar valuations and stuff like that, I am being removed as CEO from each of my companies and they will be replaced by autonomous AI mechanisms. The reason for this is because we're never going to have I'm not going to create another Mark Zuckerberg situation and Facebook where we have one person who owns a group of companies that owns 90% of your freaking life. It may be that some of the companies I created end up being in that position, but they will not be under the control of one person In fact, it's highly likely but by 2040, most of them will be under autonomous AI control, with human oversight and guidance.

Speaker 2: 18:09

Technologies like blockchain are going to change a lot of things. For a long time, we talked about that being the next generation of the web. Web three was going to be built on blockchain and you were going to have these distributed computer networks that were running these applications versus centralized systems, and you, as someone who's a cryptographer, understands the importance of distributed computing things like Filecoin instead of a Dropbox, right, it makes a lot of sense to me. There are systems out here. A lot of people probably listen to this, don't know what we're talking about, unless they're big fans of crypto and they're listening or big fans of blockchain tech in general. But we're starting to see some of the people that I talked to political people are pro-blockchain. We've got a guy here from the West Side of Cincinnati here, warren Davidson, big blockchain guy. He's a congressman. We've got another guy, bernie Moreno, running right now. He actually, up in Cleveland, created a conference called Blockland. I mean, there are people Now that are that are pro blockchain.

Speaker 3: 19:17

Yeah, they may be pro blockchain, they're only interested in the financial components of blockchain. I interviewed a guy who's actually got a platform viable platform which he's gonna be testing in the United Kingdom which would actually allow you to turn over voting to an open blockchain If you can buy. One of the biggest problems actually with running a blockchain voting system was actually identification KYC and AML, because if you look at most of the KYC and AML systems which are currently running in blockchain, they're actually centralized systems that run on conventional centralized service. They're bullshit. But we've got a partnership with the cryptify and we're actually bringing to the market on chain KYC AML and even has tags in there. So if some a financial institutional authority checks your KYC, your encrypted KYC AML file, it actually flag up in app that this, this check has occurred and it did so, which basically means you're in that sweet spot compromise between Regulatory obedience and still maintaining your ability to control who has access to what you sort of mean.

Speaker 2: 20:15

Imagine a government controlled blockchain ID system where they could just shut off your ability to vote here in the UK they're already doing it, yeah. Yeah, because you said something that they didn't like. Yeah, I mean, and you guys do. Yeah, I mean. We've got a tax on free speech happening in America.

Speaker 3: 20:32

You guys have it worse. Here in the United Kingdom, just so your listeners are aware, even though we technically are not Nazi Germany, we no longer have the ability to protest, we no longer have a free journalistic press, we no longer have right to freedom of speech, because it's been proven that, depending on what we, if we post something on social media Look, that's that somebody that's the government does not like or is against their agenda you will, as an as an individual, be arrested. This country, you guys think you got it bad in the United States, the stuff we tolerate here in the United Kingdom, every single person out with a gun would be out in the street shooting someone.

Speaker 2: 21:09

Yeah, they don't look at that here.

Speaker 3: 21:10

You know we will talk about excess. This is actually part of that. Everybody's looking for excess and there's a reason why. When you're told, when you're trying to be an entrepreneur, everybody will tell you look at trends, look at this, look at that, look at the other. Because they want you not to bit to actually create products. They can create competitors to the current paradigm. There's a reason for that. Exactly like you said, corporations are more powerful than any government and in the shit that is coming to us, in 2024, the veneer of the of governments, I think, will be largely lost. So the future conflicts will be fought by private armies and private corporations.

Speaker 2: 21:45

We already see that and you're a big fan of of sci-fi, your big Batman guy, you know. But a lot of this stuff. It's crazy, like when you watch Star Trek, like a lot of the stuff, if you really get deep into it, right into the lore and everything else and what happened in a world and how everybody kind of came peaceful and you know it was technology that got everybody there, but I mean the cell phone, I mean there's a lot of things that you see on those shows that actually became reality. You know, you do this even further than that We've moved.

Speaker 3: 22:14

We have if you look at the world around us right now. Actually I Want to bring us to a Star Trek world. Maybe not, you know it's crazy fascist because that's not get twisted. Some of Star Trek and the Federation is actually quite fascist if you think about it. You know a happy medium in between, maybe you know.

Speaker 2: 22:32

Like the replicator. If we ever get the replicator, we're in good shape.

Speaker 3: 22:35

We already have. We've got it's called AI and a 3d printer. It's already here. I would actually say is the future we're heading for is probably closer to what was envisioned in cyberpunk 2077. Actually, me, I've got a Z tabletop board game and what is actually now a massive game by CDG. The reason I say that is because, if you look at the law in cyberpunk 2077, what it did, what it understood, what the author and creator understood really well, is where AI is headed if we treat it in a certain way. The concept of rogue AI is the concept of proliferations of AI, is the concept of a future internet that is broken apart and literally destroyed by constant rogue AI creation, leading to the creation of a whole new internet which then has an effect on our own Augmentation. These are all realities which are coming to pass right here and now. If anything, we're steering, the more and more we adopt this quasi fantastical, quasi religious mixed technology approach to the world around. And the reason I say religious is I'm not just talking about the world war in Middle East, I'm actually talking about some of our CEOs. Here We've got CEOs who are like in the test real range of things. You know. They're transhumanists, they're this, they're that, they're the other, and all of these different kinds of Techno techno religions which have been coming out of Silicon Valley. They all rely upon one revolver on round central thesis, which is that there is a small group of us who are just Innately better than the rest of us, who are innately empowered, because of our intellect, to take charge of others. Now, remember correctly, there's another group of people who did this, and it involves eugenics and it starts going down a whole pathway that is antithetical, actually, to the good of humanity, but the reality is is that all of the CEOs around us, other than myself and I believe, said in a dollar, they all have this they're the new Sanhedrin. Yeah, yeah. It's terrifying, because you do not want people who think this way having access to unlimited resources and money and Influence of power. Because it creates a dangerous bear my. What happens when somebody becomes super rich? They become divorced from reality. Yeah, they become divorced from the reality that the majority experienced.

Speaker 2: 24:47

And you live in in a bubble. You live in a physical bubble, like you're the people you surround yourself with. Yeah, are no longer regular people. These are all people trying to live forever. Yeah, you've seen it. These are people that you know, believe Science, believe they can control nature. They, they, they're so arrogant. That's you know, they do, they think they know what's best for the rest of us, and you saw that in the elections. You just brought that up. Oh, you can't say that because I know best and I'm going to manipulate the system so that this person gets elected because they're gonna allow us to continue doing what we do.

Speaker 3: 25:28

I don't operate that way. I'm operating by different thesis, which is that as soon as I'm able to break the door and barrier on a technological level or innovation level or Societal level, I'll be bringing others with me. That's how you progress, that's how you advance humanity, you know.

Speaker 2: 25:44

Would you know that even in Germany, the kids in Germany in school learn about American propaganda. They've called America in their textbook. It says America is is nothing but essentially drones that buy things. And we are lonely and sad.

Speaker 3: 26:06

Well, unfortunately, Europe knows about consumer capitalism of Freud and Barney's and they know the textbook the United States operates off of and the United States and if you've studied Freud and Barney's and you know, you know the recipe for consumer capitalism. What does it create? Consuming drones. It literally does. And and I love the hypocrisy of Europe, because Europe has exactly the same thing. You know, it's no different in any shape or form. There's a reason why Europe is the 51st state, you know.

Speaker 2: 26:32

In a way, it's true, and you know what the funny thing is, though, even in America, I mean, we definitely live in a bubble here. I mean, this entire country was created to not partake in the problems of Europe. That's why they came here and they cut themselves off. Until World War one, we wanted nothing to do with Europe. We were minding our own business. We were over here doing our thing, and the goal of America was to not even worry about what was going on in Europe. Right, that was the thing, but if you think about it, you know I, you would assume that some of these more Democratic Technologies that you're talking about, that you're actually building, you would think those things like it. As an American, I would think, oh, that's gonna come out of America, that next thing's gonna come. No, it won't, because we're dealing with the same, the same anti uh, free speech issues, anti-protesting issues that you guys are dealing with in places like England, which is supposed to be this place where freedom is a thing too, and democracy is a thing, and, but you don't right. So so it no wonder you're creating the technologies that you're creating, because you're dealing with it in a worse way than we are.

Speaker 3: 27:49

Yeah, it's a necessity. We have no choice here in UK and Europe to start building systems that take us away from the mainstream paradigm. But there's also another component, which is that the world is shifting. In the United States, for example, you guys have a sanctions list that actually stops a business from working with 70% of the world in some, in some capacity or another, which itself, in the 20th century, is absolutely batshit loony. When you have the internet, unified currencies and cryptocurrency, you know, given that we're living in a world that is, that is, more digitally connected, in fact, the, I would say the thing that is stopping humanity from connecting and truly connecting with each other is actually just the egos of the 1% of each of these individual countries.

Speaker 2: 28:33

to some extent, Well, that's why they hate crypto, that's why they hate Bitcoin they. That's why they love the US dollar they. They can control other other countries.

Speaker 3: 28:41

The US dollar, right in here and now, if you look at the financial market, is toxic, is classified as cancer. I mean, if you look at, if you look at dollar debt, look at the countries selling off the dollar debt. Nobody wants it because it's losing its intrinsic value. The minutes the United Kingdom and the United States both moved away from the gold standard in 2002 was the minute that both of our currencies lost any true fucking value.

Speaker 2: 29:04

The United States 90% of their value or something, since like the 20s or something, and I mean it's nuts.

Speaker 3: 29:11

You guys are about to print $8 trillion. What the what the fuck is that pinned?

Speaker 2: 29:15

to people don't understand why we have recession or why we have inflation. Just devalued your currency. If you want to do it, if you want to destroy the value of your currency, give it away for free.

Speaker 3: 29:26

Here's a kicker for all Americans the same, and for all Britons. Really, If you want to maintain control of a populace, you need to maintain a hierarchy, because without there being a visible hierarchy, there is nothing to make the peasants to want to aspire to something. You need the peasants, or us media humans, to want to aspire to something, be it gold, be it cars, be it bitches and hoes being being a hip hop star, because without those aspirations people do not have hope. And if people don't have hope, no matter how miniscule, you cannot treat them like slaves, because without hope they die off quicker, they're less productive. You know, they've suddenly started looking around and they start looking at the person who's whipping them excessively and start saying what the fuck and why the distraction is gone. So instead you create a society where people become mindless drones who consume, consume, consume, consume and aspire to truly vacuous, empty things, If you're talking about People are waking up.

Speaker 2: 30:29

People are waking up and I think the internet is helping. I think when you have communities where people can openly communicate without their you know, without their profile getting shut down by you know the powers to be, I think people will talk about things and people will discuss things, and there's going to be arguments and there's going to be disagreements, but I think, at the end of the day, that is good. I think free speech is good. I think, you know, being able to say stupid things and getting shot down and dragged for saying stupid things is going to be a good thing, right.

Speaker 3: 31:02

So the problem is, though, is if it literally leads to you being shot and dragged.

Speaker 2: 31:08

Yeah, yeah, you know what that, you know what that is.

Speaker 3: 31:10

It is beautiful, but it's not freedom of consequence, and that's what people forget. That's it. Freedom of speech, yes, is a good thing, but freedom of speech is not a license to be an asshole, and that's what we have a lot of. We have a lot of people who will claim freedom of speech to say something really dickish and reprehensible and then to get away with it. But, oh my God, there's. There's some characteristic about me that you're now going to use against me. I can use that as my get out free jail card. Yay.

Speaker 2: 31:34

You know I mean people don't get punched in the face because they're on the other side of the internet, right, and they're anonymous. Profile on Twitter.

Speaker 3: 31:43

You should actually have a little more mutual respect. We actually we should temper. I would actually disagree with the whole unilateral freedom of speech. Actually, in a society to operate and for a polite society to operate, people should actually temper some of the things they say to each other. We need to stop trying to look for drama. We need to stop looking for this?

Speaker 2: 32:01

Oh, they are. Oh, they are definitely looking for drama and they love it, and I think I think our system, I think what social media did to humanity, can be undone. I think that we were trained to be dicks. I think people have the capacity to be dicks, but you just gave them a platform to be dicks, right, and I think we have to untrain that somehow, and it you know it, it unfortunately falls on these, these social media companies, and they have no incentive to do so, to help us or do anything.

Speaker 3: 32:35

Actually got a social media platform and it's called Voxalive. It's basically my version of Facebook, without horrible ads, and you own all your own data and you can actually monetize it, it's got integrated AI and you can even have the AI run your posting for you on your social network, on your platform. We're going to be creating AIs that can affect the actors, mediators, so if there is a post that's creating a shit ton of inflammatory responses, this AI will be able to come in and go and try to explain the argument from both sides for people. Which means, hopefully and you'll also point out to people that in any discussion, the reality is a compromise has to be achieved. A compromise is where neither party is particularly happy but they're less unhappy than if they would be if one person was massively unhappy and you start teaching the people. You know we're not saying that. I'm not saying that you would actually take people away from the internet. What we're going to do is we're going to help to teach people better coping mechanisms for dealing with true freedom of speech. You know you have to be able to take it on the chin. If somebody takes it, cause you a dick. And just because you're living in a state that has an open carry law doesn't mean you just go straight away.

Speaker 2: 33:39

You have to be responsible with your rights is what you know, especially, you know guns. You're going to kill somebody. Some speech could lead to actual violence, and that is. That is a fact. Now, what would you say to people who are other entrepreneurs? Now, I feel like you have to somewhat be a crazy person to be an entrepreneur in the first place. You have to be someone who, who really wants to change things or do something and be passionate about it enough to see it through when you're taking your journey, starting multiple companies working in the blockchain world, coming from all this other stuff yeah, that's, that's one solution.

Speaker 3: 34:23

He's part of my answer to your question. The carry-on yes.

Speaker 2: 34:27

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Cause sometimes you have to. You have to get yourself back to, to like calm yourself, because you could go in so many different directions when you're an entrepreneur. If you're not focused right I mean you, you it could get crazy.

Speaker 3: 34:43

I would actually say the biggest problem you have with being an entrepreneur is that you're gonna have a lot of people attacking you on your ideas and if I hate to use this common term snowflake. But if you're somebody that is, that is not great at dealing with conflict and is not great at standing up and say you know what? I think you're a bunch of fucking idiots, are my idea rocks and I'm still going with it. If you, if you're one of the, if you haven't got the tan acid, you can keep doing that, and I mean keep doing it, sometimes every bloody day and sometimes every minute of every day. I mean, I'll give you a situation to give you the scenario. I started building Vox Crypto in 2000,. Sorry, vox Messenger the post content, video of Wolf's first post quantum encrypted video messenger actually to hit the market. I started building 2017. Had released in 2018, in a period when people still trusted what's happened. Signal humans communicate better in privacy is proven that when you, when you have oversight of a human, when you make them feel watched, when you make them feel monitored, it makes them feel degraded, accumulated prisoners. You make a person feel observed and watched. This is I was being told continuously that what I was built, what I was believing in, and what I was believing in and what I was building was a pointless waste of time. And I was this, that and the other. And if I had listened to any of that, I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have a platform with over 80,000 users on it, I wouldn't have acquired a competitor company. I wouldn't be about to be forming a group company where I wouldn't be able to. I wouldn't be getting about to be doing a massive raise or we're going to be raising about $1020 million on a $50 million valuation. Just a guy from a council estate in Birmingham when we're at school. You see, I was really lucky. I was, even though I was a born in the council state. I know I was homeschooled. I actually believe that gave me a massive advantage over my peers.

Speaker 2: 36:29

Oh yeah, Going through the British school and getting indoctrinated, yeah it's right.

Speaker 3: 36:34

I mean, I was a senior lecturer of computer science and my old alma mater, ravensbourne University, London, and when I was dealing with university students I was comparing them to me as a university student. I was a university student. Most of my teachers hated me because I was so much into my research. I was ahead of whatever they were giving me, but when I was had the students all coming to me, I was finding out that they didn't even have the self initiation to work out when to do a Google search, so, muted by the school, you know, by the schooling system, I say something cool I need you to research this, this and this. Now, for me, growing up, that would have been I could do that kind of research task by the time I was six and seven. But this is. These are teenagers, these are 18 year olds and 21 year olds and 22 year olds who are like looking at each other and going Sir, so when do we look for this? And I'm looking. I'm like I've just seen you playing your phone for half an hour. You didn't know there was a thing called Google. And, by the way, I'm a very unconventional teacher. I have a very unconventional teacher actually in the middle of a class. That are you ever kidding me? And I went on a 10 minute time, right, luckily enough this was actually the one of the kids told one of their parents and the parents actually said yeah, he's bloody right. Why don't you know how to use this? Get off TikTok. This generation. Is I really fit?

Speaker 2: 37:48

That's their whole thing, is their online persona.

Speaker 3: 37:51

Yes, but that online persona is a lie.

Speaker 2: 37:54

It is, it's 100% a lie. And I think some people they and I friend just tell you a story you know we'd go out to night clubs and stuff like that and he would just make up stories, tell girls, well he, he got, he was successful off his stories. So he never really had to change his life, right, because the stories were getting him what he wanted. But that's just an example, that's just. That also applies to these online personas, right? The online persona is now you know somebody at the nightclub telling you the things you want to hear. Yeah, and I actually I actually said to him one time he said he said, do why you lie to these girls. And he's like, because that's what they want to hear. They don't want to hear that I'm a plumber, you know. They don't want to hear that that's what I do for a living. They want to hear that I'm an executive and I fly on jets and I, you know, drive a nice car and all this other stuff. That's what they want to hear and I think that's what we're missing in a lot of these kids and I think they're missing authentic relationships because they have these online personas. I mean, look at LinkedIn, how many people are a CEO on LinkedIn, right? Like how many people are you know? They can put it out there and they could seem important, you know. But I think that we are. We are mixing our online lives, these virtual lives, with our personal lives in our reality, right? And I think, as a an entrepreneur, you have to be honest with yourself on how hard things are going to be, and you can't look at other people online and their success and think that that is your thing. That's how people get depressed. That's how you know issues start happening with people and they think that they're not doing good. Entrepreneurship's hard. It's hard. You're not going to make a ton of money right away. These 23 year old people that say they're worth $40 million are lying to you. They're renting cars and taking pictures.

Speaker 3: 39:44

Yeah, Worth like 60 million or something. It's mental when you look at it, but I'm like dude, I've still got like a little three bedroom house. I still got my recommendations on. I got a piece of ship 2014 Mitsubishi showgun that I still drive and it's got a bump hanging off and even when I, and even when I have my foot, I have like a cash million. You know, this year alone into CryoTech, I've brought in over 300,000 pounds in cash into that company and dig in another 200,000. Yeah, it doesn't actually mean anything, it's just more money than those quicker that's it you know, no money, no problems.

Speaker 2: 40:17

That's how it works.

Speaker 3: 40:19

Yeah, and I hate to say this, most of these kids who are who will get into the crypto space and are doing the pump and dumps, who are building these little scam projects, their objective again it's about what they, what they state, has learned and society has largely told them the indicators of successor. Having a Ferrari is an indicator of success. Having a Kim Kardashian lookalike is a sign of success, apparently, because everybody is being taught that they will keep following the quickest route to riches methodology. And the quickest route to riches is actually the quickest route to consistent poverty and depression. In reality, actually, if you keep chasing trends, you're not. If you're chasing trends, the only person making the money is the trendsetter. So be a trendsetter, don't be a trend forward.

Speaker 2: 41:04

Yeah, you're just buying their course and that's how they're making money. It's not at whatever they told you. They tell you $200 million in real estate maybe, but the bank owns $198 million of that $200 million in real estate. They don't own the real estate, or their investors own the real estate. Right, they may have just done a syndication deal, they don't actually own all that stuff.

Speaker 3: 41:26

So you know For example, I know CEOs and companies who have spent years building their company up and then, because of chasing, chasing financing from VCs, they'll do crazy things, like they'll give up a load of their equity and this VC firm functionally becomes their employer. And then we're like, yeah, but JB, you've got to understand, man. I've got stability now. You know what I mean. I got like a regular wage coming in, but I'm still working for myself. You know what I mean? No, you're fucking not, dude. You're working for somebody else who's giving you back a bit of your own equity. So you're back working for the man whatever happened for working for yourself. You know you're literally undone the thing you spent years doing.

Speaker 2: 42:06

That's right. But yeah, man, jb, this has been awesome, man. I really appreciate it. You've got so much energy. You've obviously been super successful. You've, you know, gone from. You know working for people to owning multiple businesses, acquiring businesses. You know being in at the cutting edge of technology. You know trying to change the world, man, and that's that's what we try to do out here when we build companies. So tell people how they can get ahold of you or how they can find your business and what's your. What's the next thing?

Speaker 3: 42:40

Well, it's really easy. You can either type in JB Benjamin to Google. It's so unique, there's nothing. There's no other name like it on there. So that's a very quick one. I'll just type in CryoTech into Google. You'll find us. Alternatively, just search for a box messenger or box crypto in the Google Play Store. We are going to be on iOS from next year, but again, ios is a bit of a pain in the ass, extremely expensive to get onto, but we're on it. Yeah, it's one of those you can also find me on. Twitter if you search for JBWB 2020. You can regularly jump into a live stream because I'm live streaming on my Twitter account all the time and even though I'm the captain of personal privacy, because I'm a CEO, I fully realize that I now have no privacy, because for you to trust me, you need to know everything about me. So I also post regular links. I invite people to message me direct on Twitter. My phone number is out there. If you manage to get a hold of that thing, feel free to message me on box messenger. I will reply. Yeah, if you find it, and we are like yes, great, you earned this, you get this, you get. You will be replied to and with the live streams I do on Twitter, I'm often streaming on a lot of jungle because I'll be working, but I do post links so you can actually jump in the stream and feel free to ask me any question.

Speaker 2: 43:56

JB man, keep that energy going, man, and I really appreciate you being on the show.

Speaker 3: 44:00

No, he's been great for being here. There's been great having a chat with you all about it.

Speaker 2: 44:06

Thanks for joining us on this week's episode of Side Hustle City. Well, you've heard from our guests, Now let's hear from you. Join our community on Facebook, Side Hustle City. It's a group where people share ideas, share their inspirational stories and motivate each other to be successful and turn their side hustle into their main hustle. We'll see you there and we'll see you next week on the show. Thank you.