And I'm so excited to have Yat Siu on again, the co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, one of our favorite guests. Just so happy to have you here in New York where all the magic is happening, right? Capital of America, if not the world. It feels like this reinvigoration of innovation here in the U.S. It was very cool because, you know, it's like a new wave of people coming back and not being afraid to build here again, which we'll touch on later. Some certain articles about Animoca that have come up. But what is your sentiment right now? I mean, Bitcoin just hit a new all-time high today. Yeah, over 109,400 plus.
Mhmm, I mean, first of all, great for the industry. It's sort of a lot of people had hoped that this moment would happen a little sooner. You know, I think we had a rocky Q1, but it's great to see Bitcoin at all-time highs. But also it's good to see the energy. I mean, yesterday at the event, you could see it. To me, it felt a little bit like the sort of energy that we would see in things like Consensus or Token 2049, but transplanted literally on sort of the mayor's home or something like that. Right? So that's kind of, that was that was kind of interesting. But the other thing is that America has always been typically a leader in disruptive innovation. And if there's one thing that America has been good at, it's this whole cycle of innovation, creative destruction, recreation. It's one of the few places that can do that in a cyclical manner. And it was disallowed to do that in crypto for a long time. And in some ways, I would argue that because of it, the U.S. has sort of fallen behind a little bit, but is now accelerating in a really big way. And I was just commenting about that to a few people. And there's a degree with this is that, just think about it, right, in almost any— certainly in technology, but probably in any industry in the technological IP space, America is typically a leader or at least on par with, you know, global companies, whether they're in China or somewhere else, for instance. But when it comes to crypto, they're actually somewhat behind for the time being, which of course will change, like never bet against the U.S.
Right. So so we wouldn't bet against it. But for example, when you look at a company like from an exchange, somewhat, Coinbase is great, but the biggest exchanges are not American. Right? I mean, just think about it for the night. It's like it's true. But whereas New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ on the sort of trad fi side, or derivatives or ETFs, America is by far the biggest.
capital market in the world.
Exactly. And so why is it not for crypto? Obviously, because of the previous regulatory framework. And then likewise, when you think about, you know, our space, which is like in, you know, blockchain gaming, NFTs and culture and entertainment, you know, we sort of, you know, because as a public company, we have to announce the results. And I think a lot of people, especially in the U.S., are surprised when they see, you know, our revenue size, which is like $300 million, close to $100 million EBIT, sitting on $4 billion of assets. They're like, what?
How is that possible? Because they can't imagine that in the U.S. And as a result, we don't really have a peer in the U.S. yet. Again, I expect it. But this would not mean this is not normal in a normal context. Right? You know, if it's A.I., social media, you know, mapping technology, like you name it, America is up there. So we think it's a unique situation, which is also one of the reasons that we want to spend so much time here, help build the ecosystem. We do have a lot of investments in the U.S. We just didn't want to talk about it before much. And I think it's our time to come here. And I think New York is a perfect place to do it, which is why I've been here already five or six times just this year alone.
Wow. And I know that that wasn't the case previously. In fact, I haven't seen you much in the U.S. at all.
I mean, we— it just didn't make sense. And we focused really, you know, a lot of us about to focus on Asia. I mean, Asia is our core market.
But when you think about it, Asia also advanced in crypto much, much more than the West. And I think, you know, it's almost inconceivable to think that America is a growth market in the technology area. Normally, it's the other way around. You mature the technology in America and you sell it to the world. And here it's almost basically the other way around.
Yeah, that's really interesting to kind of flip that around. And so then let's go back because I haven't talked to you since the shift in administration. Right? Last time we talked, and it's funny that you say that because actually Anthony— Anthony Scaramucci, who was on the podcast last April, he said that, too, he said like the U.S. is at heart like innovative and a risk taking culture. Right? And it always goes there sooner or later. And I like what you said about it being cyclical because it is and it always comes back sooner or later. It does. So he said never bet against the U.S. just like you. And it felt like at that time, just dire circumstances. We had Gary Gensler raining down on everybody from the SEC and it just was not pretty. Everyone was going offshore. And now Trump won. Right? And I remember you saying on a previous podcast that your hypothesis was that Kamala would win because it was a Swifty World we were living in.
Yeah, I thought she had the youth vote.
Yeah, right. Yeah. So you thought that maybe that would influence things and that they would go with her. So what was your takeaway after you saw that that was, you know, that Trump ended up winning?
So first, I mean, for our industry and broadly speaking, I think for capitalism, at least. And as many people know, I am a pro capitalist, being in Web3. Obviously, Trump winning is definitely better in that regard. And and just to be clear, it wasn't that I was taking sides. I was just observing on the fact that I think young people were more likely to vote for, you know, basically who Taylor Swift would endorse and generally celebrities.
It made sense to me when you said it. That's really logical.
It made sense. But what actually happened, though, was that Kamala didn't win the youth vote. She won the female youth vote. And specifically, she did win the votes of a lot of women, particularly in coastal cities, but she did not win the young male vote. And that's actually interesting. And, you know, it occurred to me that we are dealing with a different macro demographic issue, which I didn't really think about that before, which is the fact that young men are feeling disenfranchised as well. Right? In some ways, you could say the Trump vote is a vote on hope and opportunity, but hope and opportunity means different things to different people. Like from our perspective, it's like hoping that the crypto industry will do better and that it will be more pro capitalist and entrepreneurs. And, you know, many, many, many investors in VCs, particularly, you know, in California, who are very, very blue, typically decided to vote red specifically because they were afraid of the fact that, you know, this another administration would be very anti capitalist and anti growth and anti entrepreneurship. So that made a lot of sense.
But what I did not expect was that the young male vote was expecting for a different type of hope and their hope was a fact that they wanted to feel more heard and they wanted to have maybe, you know, maybe more classical relationships. They wanted to, they were disenfranchised as well. And it comes from some of the data points. For instance, young women are more likely to graduate from universities than young men. You know, women are starting to make more money than men, for example, right? And so you have the situation where, you know, and then you hear these other stories where, you know, like, and again, I'm not gonna comment on the veracity of it all, but you know, then you have like, you have people like Elon Musk that apparently have like, you know, like children with 15 different women and growing. And there's a general sort of thing about sort of, you know, people with wealth and power, you know, basically having all sorts of relationships if they wanted to. And then you have a lot of men, particularly young one, young men who have none at all. Right? And it's not that the pop, it's not because of a population issue. It's a fact that women are looking for men that have, I guess, certain type of profiles that they no longer fit. And you can see this, by the way, even on TikTok and other shows as well, where, where sort of people go like, and again, I don't think it's entirely true, but it's like, you know, women when someone who's very wealthy, good looking, six packs, I mean, all that type of stuff.
Again, some of it's embellished, right, just to be clear. But it's this sort of impression. And the reason why it catches fire is that men feel like they're being excluded. And so who was the, who was the president that represented some kind of traditional values, that presented sort of this idea that, you know, we're going to set back things away a little bit as it was.
Right. Well, women felt that women rights were being trampled on in a way, many of them are, for men, it was sort of young men was like, those of their hope and opportunity of will set things right to benefit sort of, you know, our environment, our structure. And, and I think, you know, Scott Galloway speaks about that a lot, right? He sort of made this comment around how young men were disenfranchised, and Trump represented that hopeful for them. So, so, you know, if they have if they were able to appeal to them, maybe, you know, but it wasn't, right?
It wasn't the case. And, and, and, and Taylor Swift is very much female empowerment as well. Which probably sort of, sort of was not really appealing to that particular vote. And four to eight years ago, that would have been entirely different. Right?
We were in a different time then.
We're in a different time, right? And I think probably the, the woke culture as well, the whole DEI thing. And again, I'm more for diversity, but I think if you go extreme, that's when it becomes really, really complex.
The pendulum needs, it just swings right back.
Yeah, it just went too far away. I remember having a, and no judgment per se, but just the fact that maybe because I was an American, I got away with it in a way, but we're talking about design interfaces with someone who was handling UX, UI in the US with someone at Apple. Right, and we talked about interfaces and then this was fine and helping, then they gave some comments around how we should think about some of the UX designs. And then I made this faux pas where I said, 'Well, we have a white and we have a black interface.' That was a mistake. I should have said dark, right? And the context of that was that I can't say that. Now coming from Asia, we just don't think about it. It's just a thing, it's just a color, right?
I would say in a lot of cultures, it's not a thing that you think about.
It's not a thing, right? But it was definitely a thing here in America. And I didnt, I wasn't offended or anything. I was just like, 'Oh, okay, fine.' I just took it as a culture context, kind of like how in Japan, maybe you bow instead of taking your hand. I didn't think of it as anything beyond that. But later on when I shared the story, particularly to people here in the US, they were like, 'Oh, this is ridiculous. What's going on here? Can we even just talk about colors?' Because obviously I wasn't talking about race. I was making a context of-
It's a pendulum thing. It swung so far out...
It flung so far the other away. So I think that's also part of that. So, but anyway, I think at least for the crypto industry and for business, it mostly turned out positive for the time being, but let's see. Because the one thing that Trump is for sure, he's unpredictable. And I think a lot of people felt, when the Trump coin came out and the Melania afterwards, I think a lot of people in our industry felt somewhat disheartened as a result as well.
In our industry, yet I talked to a lot of, well, Normie people, I don't know how, Normie's who said, 'Oh, that's cool. Trump is in crypto.' And so it was kind of like everyone within crypto is like, ugh, and then-
It depends which side you're talking to, but yes.
Yeah, but like just as like, oh, a meme coin, like what are the repercussions for us in this space because of that? Not necessarily because of who he is. And then outside they were like, 'Oh cool, Trump is in crypto.'
But I would say the one thing that I do worry about, and by the way, you see this in other places around the world, it's not just an America phenomenon, is that I think what was the statistic? Something like the probability of, I think it was only 3% of Democrat women would date a Republican man. I think something like that, right? Like it was a really, really sort of radical percentage. Does, isn't very good either because it does mean that politics actually fracture society, which before you could have a happy debate about it, you could disagree. And then afterwards, in the way the election, in the past, how it works with presidencies in the past in America is you disagree and then you commit. You're like, 'Okay, fine, you're the president.'
And you become friends because he's your president.
Exactly, we're all rallying around the president. We may disagree, but we're committing to America. And now it doesn't feel that way, right? You're like, 'You're not my president, even though you're American.'
It seems strange, right? And likewise the other way around too. And so I think that, I think to me is more dangerous because at heart, there is sort of this element of--
Yeah, and it's polarization. And there is a sense of, I think it's important to be a patriot to whatever country you want to be a patriot to. And that means you set aside your differences and come together because at the end of the day, you do all want the same thing.
100%. And that's why actually we got stopped in Times Square today by CNN and I'm like, 'You probably got the wrong people because we're super into crypto and therefore we're happy about what's happening here.' You know what I mean? I'm thinking this in my head. And then we'll touch on what this means for the nation and stuff. You did say Trump is unpredictable, which is, I mean, absolutely true. There's been a lot of rattling shakeups with the tariffs and that, which I essentially think will just become noise as a negotiation tool. You know, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, Trump understands whether he does it as a strategy or he's intuitive around it. He understands attention. And so he draws attention and he wields attention as a form of power. And his administration and a team around him understand that very well. So when you create this type of sort of, you know, shock therapy with tariffs, you draw attention and you wield power. The outcome, however, when you wield power, isn't always predictable. It's kind of like when you throw a hammer at something but in a somewhat sort of uncontrollable way, you're trying to, you know, there's a nail, but you just slam it. You might break a few things alongside that you might not intend to break. And that's exactly what happened. But you certainly shocked the system. And that's exactly what he did. Which also means that tariffs the second time around won't work anymore, right? Meaning that from an unpredictability standpoint, there's going to be the notion of, okay, I need to make an impact or I need to be heard. What is it going to do? It probably won't be more tariffs because, you know, if like-
It doesn't have the same shock.
No, it doesn't have the same, but everyone expects it. Like if, you know, okay, we made peace with China. If they suddenly come and say, oh, back to 140% taxes and tariffs on China. I think the whole world would just go like, 'Okay, fine, again.' Right? Like there's gonna be sort of-
It's not going to impact the market any which way.
And this is by the way, how we cope as humans, right? It's very interesting to see from an attention standpoint where if there's, you know, like if you live, like for instance, if you live in Israel, or, you know, and you're used to this idea that there could be a bomb or something happening, people adjust to it. Like it's kind of normal, right? Or for instance, like when you live in Japan, people live very normally in Japan, but they also live with the fact that there could be an earthquake any time. And there could be tsunami. And you know all these predictions about what's going on in Japan, which will happen between now and the next 150 years. In other places around the world, America, oh my goodness, you know, I could die tomorrow. It's shocking. But for people living in those areas, it's like, it's normal. Or apparently, I mean, there's all sorts of people living in Ukraine. They're not leaving Kiev. They're just like, yeah, you know, life goes on.
I always find that fascinating as well. Like, wow, you're not shaken up about the-
Exactly. And maybe they were shaken up in the beginning. And again, the shock of the missile or the potential death or the rockets is no longer shocking. Which seems, wow. Yeah, and I think this just says something about human resilience in history, right? Like as humans, we've always been resilient. Like there's something that happens, we get shocked, and then we adjust, and then it becomes the new normal. And I think that's why we should always expect something new from Trump, because he tries to shock us, get attention, yield, and wield power. And then the old stuff doesn't work anymore. So let's try something new.
Wow, I like these analogies that are happening here. And I like the, you always have incredible outlooks on things and takeaways from them. So like, what do you think will be Trump's next thing? He shocks that-- now that we're on the topic.
The fact that he will try to shock us is a given. How he shocks us, I don't know.
The only thing I think about that is that at the heart, the thing that he cares about are the markets, right? Like really the state of the economy. So...
Yes, but I think, again, I'm not a psychoanalyst here. I don't really know Trump, but I do think that Trump cares about his legacy. And I do think that Trump does want people to love him. And I think the, regardless of that, there's one thing that as humans, we all want is love and attention of some sort, and maybe not from the masses, but from the right people. Introverts might just desire the love of, small group of people, but very sort of intimate group. Extroverts might desire the love of a large group of people, for instance, like it all depends what character you are. But we are social creatures for a reason. So our sense of belonging comes from that. The biggest penalties that we have in life is when we go to jail, which means we're excluded from society, right? So we are social creatures by definition.
And so I would say that the actions that he wants to do, like to me, making the markets good is a reflection of two things for Trump. One is obviously he wants to be remembered to having this incredible legacy of success. The outcome and result of it is that he's loved for it. Right? And I think that's why a lot of people were hopeful with Trump, because I think of him as a peacetime, sort of a peace loving president, because he wouldn't want to be remembered for someone who created war and destruction, for example. And certainly that's a narrative I've heard. Again, I don't know him.
I would agree with that. Yeah, and I certainly hope for that. But I think that's what he seeks for. So improving the markets is not just about improving the markets and because he's a businessman and understands it, but I think it's also how he thinks and believes that he will be remembered and loved for.
Very cool. I really like that. And I hope that that's true, right? Because that would be a good outcome for everybody. Sure. Speaking of it being a better atmosphere here now and going back to it, for the first time in this industry, we have tailwinds, right? We have momentum behind us and we have like a light touch regulation, like it says in the article. And so that's really exciting. So when CNN approached us, it was like they really wanted to get an answer out of us because he said he was from Sweden, my husband and stuff. So they're like, 'Oh, so I guess you'll see that New York is kind of empty. Tourism is going down. Did people judge you for coming over here to the US? Are they kind of like not wanting to--' Back in the day when you were an American, you'd go to Europe and say, I think it was Bush times or polemic time. And I was like, 'No, and I don't want to stay here and speak badly about my country and the way things are going now.' Actually, we're in the crypto industry and for the first time we feel like we have a home here. And so actually overseas people are coming back.
I mean, the other thing is that if maybe, they say in the office statistics that a lot of Europeans aren't coming to America and that may be true, but New York is as congested as ever. I was late from the time I thought it got here because there's tons of cars out there. So if there's no tourists and no people here, I certainly ain't seeing it.
No, me neither. The hotels were all fully booked. I mean, it was wild.
So he said that. I was like, didn't want to get into it. I'm like, man, I'm not going there. I'm not going there.
Exactly. So, and again, just because one thing is true doesn't mean that it's a causal thing. And it's a typical thing where people often, outside of wanting to prove a certain point, true or not, that people often think of themselves as more important than things really are. So in other words, if a certain nation of people say, 'I'm not going to go there,' good for you, but is that really, does it really have an impact? Well, you believe so because in your circle, that matters. But for the rest of the world, that's not true. And it's the attitude that a lot of people had, for instance, in China as well, when people were demonizing China, right? And saying, oh, you know, people aren't visiting, tourism is down, whatever. But you know, like the actual export economy for China, for instance, is single digit percentage of the GDP. Tourism and travel within China is massive, right? The domestic economy is booming, for instance. It doesn't really need, I mean, of course, export is good, but it doesn't really need the export business as much as other people like to say, because it comes from a perspective of, you know, you need us, right? When that's not really true anymore, right? Of course you want global trade and what, and it comes from a perspective of, because I'm important, and my world is more important than yours, without actually sort of reflecting on the fact that maybe the world has changed, right?
But then reflecting on the macro factors, it made me think about the fact that they're out there in Times Square sort of cherry picking people to try to like continue that narrative. And I guess that's just how politics are and you know, but it just seemed like the fractionalization, like you said, like we should try to come together as a society and build it up again, right? That's just like what my hope is, at least now with our industry being able to thrive again and innovation for the time being.
I think if there's one thing that is unifying ideally is that if you can have an area where prosperity is more shared, then I think you can create more happiness out of that, which is, you know, typically rising middle-class generally means a more happier society, right? And I think definitely if you look at the last 20, 30 years, that hasn't been the case. The middle-class has been squeezed out in most countries. Wealth inequality is rising over time. And this is certainly true in some places in Asia as well. And that breeds unhappiness and that breeds polarization. And then you're looking for, you know, things to demonize as a result as well. And it's very easy to demonize people that have sort of, appear to be successful or have money because it seems unfair. And I think one of the big strengths of America is that you've made money, you know, you've achieved something and that's commendable. And I want to do the same thing. And among certain circles that is beginning to die, but that has a lot to do with the way that America has been unnecessarily extractive in the way they do business as well, particularly with the big tech giants and big tech companies. And I think crypto and blockchain and web3 will change, is already changing that. Because just think about how wealth and money is broadly shared across the ecosystem. One of the things that I really do love about our space, you know, sure, there's funny stuff with, you know, like meme coins and so on. But at the end of the day, we're more than willing to put the money that we made crypto back into crypto. Everyone in the industry plows it back in, makes investments, supports companies, builds projects, you know, buys shit coins, like all sorts of stuff, right? But they're back in the ecosystem, which is not actually what happens in Web2. So, you know, like we ourselves are prolific investors, you know, we have over 573 portfolio companies, but we're not alone, right? So many other companies are redeploying back in the ecosystem. And then you look at the giants of Web2, the biggest companies in the world, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, even Google, what seed, early stage investments do they do? Almost none.
And yet those are the guys that are depending on them to build on them, and yet they're not putting any money back into it. The top 10 companies in the world have roughly a trillion dollars of cash.
A trillion. That's basically not productive capital, except getting interest in these kind of rates. Now, imagine if you took like a single digit percentage and you created a seed ecosystem fund. We're talking about tens of billions of dollars. That's like a rounding error for those companies. Really, I mean, that's insane to think about it, but it's a rounding error, but it would do so much for those ecosystems. You know, when the judgment came against Apple because of the Epic case, where Epic basically had to force open the payment rails, which is great for crypto, by the way, because we launched a game on the Apple store, one of our existing games, and basically made it possible to use tower tokens, which is a crypto token for the game. It was an experiment and it was approved, which is great news, right?
