Library/People of IOG: Dan Friedman

People of IOG: Dan Friedman

Mar 16, 2021· 2:42:29· 42K views·indexed 5mo ago

THIS VIDEO

TranscriptAI-cleaned

⌕

lupo ah hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado and today&#39;s guest is daniel friedman my good friend whom i&#39;ve known for about half a decade now uh and uh he&#39;s one of the most remarkable men i&#39;ve met he speaks more languages than i think i&#39;ll ever even know and he&#39;s been all around the world and he has a hell of a life story so as many of you are aware and for the new fellow travelers the people of iowa iog series is all about the people that work with our company employees and contractors and the goal of this series is for us to get to know a little bit more about the people behind the scenes who deliver cardano or bring great stuff into our ecosystem and dan&#39;s done a little bit of everything throughout his history with us and before and so this is his show dan thank you so much for joining us it&#39;s really a pleasure to have you on thanks charles thanks for having me and uh yeah it&#39;s uh it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s an honor to be one of the first ones uh interviewed on this show and uh you know being interviewed by charles of all people which is which is great thank you very much well it&#39;s an honor to have you on too and so let&#39;s start from the very beginning so my if memory serves you were born in ukraine or as they used to call back in the day the ukraine the soviet union let&#39;s start there well actually that&#39;s one of the things that um i you know google it does it no favors um nobody can tell me why it&#39;s not it why it&#39;s the ukraine and not just ukraine because you say estonia you don&#39;t say the estonia you don&#39;t see the belarusia but you say the ukraine i i don&#39;t know well anyway yes i was uh born in the ukraine and kiev which is the capital city uh back during the um the era of the uh will the evil empire which was the soviet union um and yeah i just uh lived um i guess grew up in a what you would call a uh as as middle class as you could get in in those days in the soviet union and was this the 1970s 1980s when was this uh so i was born in the 70s but um the only memory i have of the 70s is apparently as it was explained to me by my parents is a big mural that was on the wall of our apartment building before we moved from that one to the one that we lived in basically the entire time until i moved to the us in the 80s but most of my memories were my childhood from the 80s so i&#39;m a child of the 80s okay so what was what were the 1980s like in kiev ukraine what did it look like what was the taste touch and feel i mean what was a day in the average life when you were walking around as a little kid well i&#39;ll tell you um apparently the the life that i that i led in the 80s were was really similar to the late 60s and uh in the us except for all the you know capitalism stuff um technologically um lifestyle wise fashion wise it was probably about 10 to 15 years behind uh the west but for example music that was popular in the 80s by a large part was actually disco um a lot of people still listen to disco mixed with some 80s kind of stuff uh european and germany was 1980s ukrainian disco like um you know what was really popular was um and some actually might know this group because some of their hits made it even all the way to japan which is where i live now um it&#39;s called uh jingis khan that was huge that was a big big hit in in the soviet union of that time and that&#39;s that&#39;s basically you know what i grew up listening to every other place i went to every single restaurant i went to every single house i went to everybody had that um was this on like the radio or television or or did you actually have like a phonograph or like a 8-track player i mean how did you actually consume media in 1980s ukraine well i&#39;ll tell you um everything was built on mostly mostly built on contraband in the soviet union because a lot of these things were actually i mean jinga&#39;s hand was allowed by the sensors but a lot of these things were not or sometimes for example with the beatles uh the beatles were allowed and then they&#39;re not allowed but then the music that was allowed before was then transferred to tapes so then people would uh copy each other&#39;s tapes um so you know it was it was a really weird system in fact um during soviet times there was um a list of forbidden western movies uh one of them included uh rambo it was rambo um there was a couple basically anything that was considered um propaganda against the soviet regime was considered contraband which was actually punishable by jail time if you if you came in and uh you had a copy of rambo true blood and who would catch you like the kgb or commissary like what would be the kind of person did somebody report you to the police or how did that work in practice um yeah it could get reported um you would get reported to to the local authorities and uh you know they um it was all about connections at that point you know who had what connections um some people that were connected up in the government could have this kind of stuff uh some people you know deliver the lower class which was pretty much you know most of the country um that wasn&#39;t in government um were you know exposed to this and especially during the uh the prohibition era which was the brezhnev times so i was actually born under leonid brezhnev and if some of you if maybe you know some of you are too young to remember him um this was and you know anybody who says anything and western politics yeah there&#39;s a lot of crazy okay with crazy [ __ ] going on in western politics there&#39;s always this but you cannot compare it with soviet politics um we had a guy run the country for 20 years 20 years so brezhnev came into power in the 60s and he died uh in 1982 i believe so this guy was in power for almost 20 years and during that time he instituted some contraband laws which were basically um you know built up on top of already existing contraband laws and just made things a lot more harshly punishable by jail times um like say for example contraband media um any kind of drug marijuana i mean marijuana would send you to prison for a long long time like something like 10 years any um any amount um things like that and um yeah and so i mean during those times um you just had to kind of walk a really you know tight rope with these things you really had to watch what you say um especially uh not even because of the the authorities it was actually for example when we were about to uh when we started thinking about uh immigrating from the soviet union to uh to to the us the middle late 80s um it took us several years to actually go through the process because he couldn&#39;t just leave um again something else you know um that we had to really live with us you could not actually leave the country freely uh you had to have papers to to uh to cross uh the the international border um and and then it was at the discretion of the uh the border patrol to actually let you through and a lot of times that&#39;s where the money was made which these border patrol agents would actually get you know kickbacks for letting people uh cross the border um so we actually have to go through a process that i believe took us about three years we started in late 86 early 87 and actually finally were able to leave the soviet union in uh in the summer of 89. wow um yeah it&#39;s it was a long process um and during that whole time i remember my parents were actually telling me that uh don&#39;t tell anybody about this and the reason was is not that it was illegal it was that the people that were around were known for once in a while you know part of my french but lynching jews happened a couple of times around that the the that part of the world especially jews that are trying to leave the country um so yeah they were basically uh you know my parents were basically afraid that you know somebody could you know set her house on fire or you know do something to me because i was still you know a kid and you know eight nine ten to eleven twelve years old at that point so right um it was an interesting time i&#39;d say wow and so what what what was your childhood like outside of the the contraband laws uh i imagine you&#39;re probably a little bit of a rebel but you&#39;re always trying to push the envelope a little bit and you know watch rambo and listen to the forbidden songs and so forth i mean how is it actually done in practice yeah i mean i always like but my father loves music so i always love music you know and i&#39;d always um i remember i still actually have um i pretty much created a well from what i remember in the same order a mixtape that he used to play uh on the weekends um yeah and i would listen to um remember i would listen to abba i would listen to uh well genghis khan um the beasts uh boniem i mean some of these names might mean something to people some of them might not you know i mean i know in europe they&#39;re actually still pretty big uh people know about these guys um actually if you ask any of most of our german uh german uh counterparts at iohk about uh genghis han because jingasan is actually a german group you know a lot of them just oh god you know they&#39;re not proud of those guys apparently i you know i kind of like them i like them still um so yeah you know like though did you did you have to go to ukrainian school or were you homeschooled or what uh how did you actually what was a day in the life of the of the soviet ukrainian education system for you just uh regular public schools um uh you know i i mean it probably was homeschooling there but uh you had them you know i always went to um went to public schools um i was actually at that point in my life and i still am was really into astronomy and so um i was into sciences i was into astronomy i was also sent to chemistry and so i actually made friends with you know science teachers who would then let me um you know come in after hours and then set up the telescope for me to look at the moon i remember one thing that i was actually really was growing copper sulfium crystals that was a big thing copper sulfide crystals um so copper sulphium is is for some people that don&#39;t know is this crystallized blue greenish right chemical um and you can grow crystals with it fairly easily i was actually really into growing crystals with different chemicals and so yeah you take copper sulfur and mix it in with a little bit of saline solution and you put strings in the cup and then when it would dry out actually the copper sulfur would accumulate on the strings it would form crystals and so i was really into that um also another part of the being in school was again the um is the exposure to soviet elements um we were all in uh inducted into the um i don&#39;t know if you want to equate this with the boy scouts because they weren&#39;t like the boy scouts were paramilitary but um all of this was spanning from you know teaching children children the ideas of the ideals of communism uh from early on and so uh when i was around i believe eight it was in the second grade uh i was inducted into uh a group called uh activity which was the children of the october um which was uh basically the children&#39;s it&#39;s like children of the corn or something that&#39;s got a very dystopian title pretty much pretty much it was you know everybody wore this like red star on their uniform with um engraving of of lennon when he was a boy um then after that uh we moved them and pretty much everybody moved on to being pioneers which are those i don&#39;t know if you&#39;ve probably seen uh uh tapes from that time uh where the um where the people wearing red scarves you know the kids wearing carves those are called pioneers and so those are kind of like boy scouts but everybody gets in there and it&#39;s sort of like the you know um preteen version of the communist party um yeah so there was a lot of that going on um you know behind the scenes there was um a lot of um well a lot of uh bigotry going on um i uh had to face a lot of um discrimination for for for being a jew uh because first of all i was i was in a minority uh i mean it was a really small minority at that point especially holocaust in the ukraine and uh you know i mean not everybody was like that but many people were many people were anti-semitic and uh they were really um you know that anti-semitism where it was just like you couldn&#39;t go certain places or you weren&#39;t allowed to be friends or was it overt where they they would like beat you up at school and uh you felt that that happened a lot oh yeah yeah um actually the whole getting lynch thing happened [Music] probably from around second grade when the kids started you know kind of to understand like what their parents were telling them about about you know hating jews so it started around second grade and i actually had to go to schools because of that um i would get lynched probably every day since from the second grade to the fifth grade until i switched uh schools to a more tolerant school um twice a day twice a day morning when you say lynch what do you mean what would they do i mean like you know imagine the minimum of eight and a maximum about 15 boys coming after you and basically taking you know taking turns and kicking you and punching you and beating you with their backpacks and calling you different colorful um anti-semitic uh things and yeah it&#39;s uh it was a yeah it was an experience i would say um and it&#39;s something that what was the status of judaism in the soviet union in ukraine were you allowed to go to synagogue or how did that actually work in practice because it&#39;s an atheist state right it is it is an atheist state um there were synagogues in fact um interestingly enough we lived uh close to a one of only two remaining synagogues in kiev uh where i lived it was the the reason it&#39;s called padol which was actually the the oldest part of kiev parts of padol were actually i think about 1500 years old that&#39;s where kiev started um and um yeah so they um they had synagogues and this is actually also where i had my first uh uh interaction with a rabbi which was later later setting me on my in a path you know of figuring out exactly what kind of a jew i am um and you could you could practice and then i actually remember one sabbath i walked by and there were actually a lot of people a lot of jews gathered for sabbath but again this was um this was also in a way dangerous because of um you know rampant anti-semitism uh in the ukraine and basically you know uh some people just don&#39;t want to know i didn&#39;t want other people to know they were jews uh because of that because of the you know of people you know anti-semites coming after them and trying to do whatever um they were actually um and it was it was kind of a bipolar type of thing so on one hand um they were thinking that oh jews are these you know outsiders trying to come in and take their things take their country and take their money and this other side was this conspiracy theory that all communism was conjured up by this um like evil uh jewish you know uh yeah kabal um they actually they actually had a name for it it was called judah kamuna and andrew this is a is a a you know a derogatory way of saying jew and russian it&#39;s actually the way you say jew in polish but in russian it&#39;s it&#39;s like a deregulatory way it&#39;s the the k word in in russian and so what it is is it&#39;s basically this conspiracy theory that starting from karl marx who actually was jewish um and going through all the big the soviets uh you know big soviet guys like trotsky and a few other ones um the whole coming of communism was actually the jews fault because the jews are the ones that brought communism to the soviet union and it&#39;s a conspiracy it&#39;s a grand conspiracy by the jews to you know you guys were getting it for both sides the ukrainians who hated communism blamed you for that then the communists were like oh this whole religion&#39;s silly we need to get rid of these guys they&#39;re they&#39;re outsiders that sucks exactly exactly and then the government was also um not very um i&#39;d say favorable uh to jews um a regular term of service and the soviet army and the soviet uh uh armed services was about i think maybe three years or four three or four it wasn&#39;t it was at least two but no more than four i believe for an average person uh my father was an officer in the in the uh in the uh ussr air force and um he was um you know after he graduated officers training he was going to go and be an engineer because that&#39;s what he was he was an engineer by trade um but actually he was lucky enough instead of you know doing his regular tour and then going to do his job and living his life to be stationed in afghanistan during the afghan war in the 70s which was in the border of afghanistan and as some might know the war between the uh the ussr and afghanistan or in afghanistan was not very pretty um you know um and some say a lot more brutal than the vietnam war um my father was actually on the front lines of that for 14 years he was stationed in turkmenistan and the city called mari because they wouldn&#39;t let him out you know and they would tell him different reasons but it was because he was a jew so you take the jew out officer you put him in the shittiest assignment wow and you just leave him there until he rots it&#39;s like eastern front duty with the uh with the nazis yeah exactly exactly that&#39;s crazy so so he was never home then during the 1980s when you were a kid in ukraine well uh he he actually um no he was actually right before i was born what he had to do was um he got injured and i think he he did something to his foot i believe he injured his foot and then when he was in the hospital he actually pretended like he he he had dementia so this injury actually you know gave him some sort of a mental uh issue and they had to discharge him because of that so they had to um uh you know that they had to let him leave because they thought that he had mental issues uh after this this injury so that is actually how he was able to finally leave the air force is you know discharged health issues which you know my father doesn&#39;t have mental issues thank god uh but yeah that was that was the uh the the the discharge and was mental health um in the eighties was yeah in the 80s he was around um but he did go to uh to an island to write his dissertation actually so back in the in the mid 80s so he wasn&#39;t around then he was around for one summer to uh write his dissertation on um artificial intelligence actually okay so your dad was an officer he was in the air force and then he started studying computer science and he became an ai guy um yes he was actually a cyberneticist by by trade he was an engineer and a cyber crisis by trade um he was an i.t uh in the soviet union he um he was actually the uh he managed an i.t center um and the of the soviet um uh athletic products whatever you want to call athletic we&#39;re an athletic product uh sector of the of the soviet manufacturing uh right you know machine uh because everything was state-owned so there weren&#39;t companies so it was like the the you know the soviet nike you know the state state the state nike um so instead of just do it it&#39;s must do it yeah you have no choice come right yeah yeah just do it it&#39;s like it&#39;s not you know not just just do it just do it so were you in ukraine i guess you were in ukraine during the chernobyl disaster oh yes i was and what fun that was yeah let&#39;s get that let&#39;s get into that and then then we&#39;ll then we&#39;ll figure out how you escape to america uh so so what happened during chernobyl what was what was that like how old were you i was eight so that was 1986 and i was born in 78 so i was eight years old um and i&#39;ll tell you um oh actually you gave me a good idea i&#39;m gonna drink for my my bambi cup right before i give you my chernobyl story yeah so um again as some might or might not know um chernobyl which was um the nuclear power plant that that brand mostly key of had a meltdown good times it was basically the three mile island um but a lot not as well managed i would say right um so um what happened was the the power plant melted down one of the reactors reactor number four melted down um and um they didn&#39;t tell us about it they um they did not tell us about it and they uh basically said uh you know it was nothing it was a small accident and and um you know in the power plant in fact i think it was something like a 30-second announcement on the news oh there was a small incident and that probably planned the government inquiry has been formed that was it um and so we knew nothing about it absolutely nothing uh meanwhile this thing was on fire for for for months actually i believe the reactor itself was on fire for months um they apparently they sent at first and you know because people are expandable in the soviet union the first they sent in the army and army was uh you know the army regiment was basically uh clearing out all this radioactive debris and with you know no protection or anything like that well they all died you don&#39;t you know don&#39;t handle radioactive burning radical radioactive material with your hands and at the time did your dad actually know this like were people whispering to like how did everyday people in ukraine know about this stuff because obviously the media wasn&#39;t telling you so i you know did you just not know it all or were there back channels that you guys had so what happened was um so the soviet union wasn&#39;t telling anybody and um what what ended up happening was um it drifted over finland so the the full out drifted over finland and finland started you know saying what the hell is this why is there a nuclear fallout over our country um and so then it started getting an international news and our friends from the west called us you know and you know i remember this phone call my mom&#39;s friends called us and and he said what are you still still home what are you doing at home you you know your your entire everything around you is radioactive what do you mean yeah your nuclear power plant melted down you shouldn&#39;t be at home why are you at home he was broke because the people from the west called people in the soviet union and let us know that our power plant melted down and we had to leave and so finally the the the government couldn&#39;t you know hold it back because everybody knew at that point and so they declared a state of emergency um and so yeah they said well yeah we&#39;re gonna manage it and blah blah blah and so they took you know again the worst possible the worst possible things to manage nuclear fallout like um i remember they used to come and wash the streets every day and so you&#39;re not supposed to do that because radiation you can&#39;t wash it away right you can only move it and accumulate so once you wash radiation it doesn&#39;t just magically evaporate it accumulates in radioactive water which then goes into the water supply and the ground is becomes more concentrated and so um yeah so after about a week of mismanaging this entire thing um my parents decided that uh you know we had to leave and so my father actually stayed behind uh to make sure that nobody you know burns her house it burns her house down and you know does anything uh to our possessions but uh myself and my mom we went to stay with my grandmother in moscow and the entire summer actually uh for i think three or four months uh starting in in early may because that&#39;s basically when we were able to leave and uh during those times uh you know it wasn&#39;t easy to hop on a flight um so we took trains um we usually took a train to see my grandmother in moscow and it would be an overnight uh train trip you know because moscow i think&#39;s about 800 kilometers from kiev 900 and so we get on the train at night and we get get to moscow in the morning you know if we took a direct train well kindly you know what the the government was so kind they actually um stopped direct trains to moscow just to make things a lot a little more fun for the people the all the train direct trains from from uh kiev to moscow were cancelled and so what we had we had to hop local trains to get to moscow and so you know this was about a day and a half of you know hanging off of trains and you know driving people to get on and uh waiting in lines and carrying suitcases around platforms and and you&#39;re like nine years old at the time right and this is with your mother only did you have do you have any brothers or sisters no i&#39;m an only child so yeah it was just me and my mom and yeah we were just running around like crazy trying to get to grandma&#39;s house in moscow that was cool and your gran was your grandfather still alive at this time or is it just your grandmother uh now actually my grandmother in moscow uh that&#39;s my my dad&#39;s mom uh i know my mom my gran my grandfather my paternal grandfather passed away uh when my dad was i believe uh 14 years old as i remember years ago you told me that uh i can&#39;t remember it&#39;s maternal or paternal that one of your grandfathers was a famous puppeteer uh yeah that that&#39;s my my my mom&#39;s dad okay that&#39;s my mom&#39;s dad um al-qaeda aaron which is actually now the name of my newborn son ah okay yeah so i named him uh well we named him my wife had a little bit to say about that as well um uh we named him aaron which is we&#39;ll get to the kids in a second so yeah yeah you got to moscow and that&#39;s that was your mother&#39;s grandfather grand mother so your maternal grandmother that you were staying with or or your father so that&#39;s my job okay yeah my dad&#39;s mom lived in moscow and so that&#39;s what stayed with because my my mom&#39;s parents lived in kiev which you know was radioactive um it still is in some places right so i&#39;ve actually been to ukraine several times and it&#39;s it&#39;s a wonderful place but there are some interesting places parts of that country what really astounded me was how different the west is from the east you know i was in lake levin this was totally different than odessa uh so it was uh incredible to see such radically different cultures in the same country okay so in the late 80s uh your your dad he&#39;s well educated uh he&#39;s he&#39;s had to already pull the i&#39;m crazy card to make sure that he doesn&#39;t die in afghanistan and get back there&#39;s been a major nuclear incident there&#39;s like rampant anti-semitism and and now you&#39;re in moscow with your dad&#39;s mom just kind of hanging out for a little bit in the meantime right there&#39;s an attempt to emigrate now was it to first like canada or germany or england or was it directly to the united states i mean how does that work when you go from a soviet country because you know a lot of them they go to a neutral country or a buffer country first and build up a little bit then get to the us did your dad try to directly go to the united states yeah so um of course you know america was you know the dream right um we wanted to go to america um it was difficult um so these were called waves right so uh waves were um waves of immigration from the soviet union by jews and so once in a while the government would you know try to show how lenient and proactive and uh you know uh forward-thinking they are and so they would let the jews leave and you know go back to their homeland which is israel and so they would open they would say they would open the gates and so they would open the gates they opened the gates once every decade uh so the the the way before us was from 1978 to 1980 when they once again closed uh immigration and they couldn&#39;t leave um we were in the uh late 80s wave so the wave of immigration from 87 to 89 which ended in late 89 which when they closed it off again and so what he actually had to do was um you couldn&#39;t i mean you could say that i want to move to america but that was defection and that was illegal and that would get you know you know don&#39;t pass go go directly to gulag uh don&#39;t collect 200 rubles um and so um what we had to do was actually uh we had to have a relative in israel petition the soviet government uh to let us uh go to israel and you know to basically go back to your homeland right and so what people would do is they would have a relative in israel do the petition so that you can actually leave the country right because that was the whole thing you had you had to have a way to leave uh to cross the international border out out of the country and actually leave the uh the eastern bloc so you have to be able to leave not only the soviet union but poland as well and to actually to get to the first country that was neutral as you said you know and for a lot of people it was it was austria and for us as well uh so we got this petition so it took us two years to get the permission to leave the country um and yeah we finally did i remember actually um when we were finally leaving you know i was i was 11 and a half and i remember we got on the train and it was very similar to the train that i would take to my grandma&#39;s in moscow but um something was different about the stream because i wasn&#39;t coming back it finally hit me and i remember actually my my uncle was with us because michael was still uh was still in the soviet union at that point he left after us he left about a half a year later and my grandparents and everybody were on the train with us and i remember actually crying my eyes out because it finally hit me that i&#39;m leaving i&#39;m not coming back i&#39;m never going to see anybody there again um you know because as a kid i mean that&#39;s all you know you know this life well as bad as it is or as good whatever you know whatever it is that&#39;s your life you know for as long as you&#39;ve been alive and um it finally hit me that i&#39;m leaving it you know and so i was crying my eyes out i couldn&#39;t stop crying even though you know was you know and then and retrospective was one of the best things that ever happened to me right and did you speak english at all or did you just speak ukrainian russian um mostly russian ukrainian as well because you know ukrainian obviously was the the language of the of the people the little local english but mainly russian because russian was the the lang the soviet language the language of the soviet union everybody had to speak russian iraq speaking russian so but what about your father did he speak english at all uh my he took some lessons um but mostly no none of us spoke english we wanted to speak english um some of us studied it actually you studied it in school but again you know just like with a lot of foreign language studies in public schools and actually around the world it&#39;s kind of useless unless you actually indulge and you know immerse yourself in it so you guys you guys are going all in then you know you&#39;ve left ukraine uh you&#39;re in austria i guess you have this israeli petition but you don&#39;t actually speak english fluent enough to survive in an economy and yet there&#39;s this dream of going to america that&#39;s that&#39;s pretty hardcore so what happened next yeah so yeah almost mostly no english i spoke no english i mean i literally spoke maybe five words of english um and um yeah so we we came to austria so there was an organization that helped jews to america it was called h-i-a-s it was uh i think it was that it was an it&#39;s an acronym and i believe the acronym stood for hebrew international american services his um well i have to actually look it up we just called it hyatt um yeah but it&#39;s an acronym and so it&#39;s a jewish organization in in america that would uh sponsor jews who wanted to come to america uh and you know it would pay our expenses which later we had to pay back of course uh back to the back to we&#39;re going to leave the organization um and so they would give us you know very very little money but they would give us some money to i want to buy food uh money for tickets uh money for you know processing and things like that um but also what we would what we did was at that point there was still um a um a pretty s significant um market for different goods to be brought from the soviet union because they they weren&#39;t supply to the west so some things were actually popular like uh pottery um uh you know pots and pans things like that um also um russian different you know russian ethnic paraphernalia you know uh like wooden spoons and wooden plates and you know these things with the the drawings on them so we actually bought out a bunch of those things we brought them with us we bought a suitcase of this stuff uh to sell and then we would have they would have dealers coming to the hotel where everybody stayed because everybody actually stayed in industry and everybody stayed in the same room so i think it was like 20 people uh all stayed in the in the same room and cox and cots in the same room so it&#39;s like a refugee camp basically and you guys are [ __ ] like russian nesting dolls and roaches oh wow that&#39;s hardcore yeah and so yeah we uh we had 20 people were you all were all jews in this group or were there some non-jews there okay okay so it&#39;s it&#39;s all jews all jews um and yeah so 20 people would be in it wasn&#39;t they were in that room in austria and uh uh italy as well in italy they did give us uh our own room we only stayed in uh so in italy we we stayed in italy a little bit longer so and we in austria it took us about two weeks to to get processed right so austria was the first point of processing so austria was where you would come you come there and you would say um i&#39;m actually i want to apply for refugee status to go to to the united states and um so so the government would say okay um here&#39;s the you know the paperwork and everything and so they would process the paperwork it would take about two and they would send us to everybody would go to italy and stayed in italy because italy apparently was the closest um uh the closest embassy or the closest counselor that would actually could con could actually conduct interviews for political refugees because this was a we were petitioning to political refugees from the soviet union-based uh you know upon being jews you know because because we&#39;re discriminated against the soviet union so and was this north of italy or southern italy were you in rome where where did you guys go i yeah so we were in rome for two weeks and then uh or maybe a week maybe a week yeah uh about a week and then a month and a half in uh a city or a town near rome was called it was anika which was a a small town it was a it was on the by the seaside of um adriatic i believe um so we we rented a room there and with other people so it was um it was one room uh four people to the room it was you know a small bedroom in in this guy&#39;s house and you know of course you go to italy and you rent a room from a guy and his name is mario and everything i mean you know just very uh you know as mario as you can get i remember when we were trying to use the we wanted to use the phone but actually we spoke no english we spoke no italian yeah and yeah yeah so we wanted to use the phone to call the the united states and our friends in the u.s and uh i think my dad asked him if we could use it but he wasn&#39;t home and then his wife told them you know like we communicated with gestures and um remember mario you know he was on the second floor and uh we asked him you know and then he says uh you know he said oh cool may call me call me he did this with his hammock pull him and corbin but we thought he wanted us to go away but in italian that&#39;s like that&#39;s the same as this you know what he did call me call me cool man like oh okay sorry he said no no hold on they call me call me my go home yes it was actually a really really nice guy um yeah and so we stayed there for about a month and a half uh until we were approved and not everybody was approved actually some people were denied refugee status and reapply and it actually had to stay in it sometimes for a year sometimes longer uh to uh to to to be able to get this refugee status how do you survive in the interim because are you allowed to work or was this everything a barter system or were relatives sending money or like how did that work in practice all of the above um you weren&#39;t allowed to work but you had to um some people were lucky enough to have relatives send them money um some people were lucky enough to be able to bring enough stuff to sell um you know we would we also brought like i said we brought these things that we sold with they had dealers coming to the hotel uh buying all these things out from people um you know actually i heard uh some p uh uh i heard this i don&#39;t know if it&#39;s an urban legend or not but some somebody brought two um dump trucks with them uh they&#39;re called kamas and the kamaz is uh one of those you know the the the big cat trucks you know they use the quarries so somebody actually drove two of those things to uh to austria from russia from the soviet union to to to to what it&#39;s immigrated on um that&#39;s the lord of warship right there that&#39;s great i love it okay so you spent how long in italy like a month two months and your dad at this time point was talking to the u.s embassy and applying for a status or like what were those interviews like yeah basically um yes so so we applied we had a couple of interviews um an initial interview and then the long interview uh mostly of my parents and it was uh basically it was you know was an honest interview it wasn&#39;t uh you know like are you spies you know are you here to pervert the the you know the young and virgin american minds you know um it wasn&#39;t like that they were really you know they&#39;re just trying to gauge if you&#39;re genuine um so they would ask you know why do you want to immigrate to the united states uh why you know what was you know how were you discriminated against um how did you feel about it how do you feel about you know communism how do you feel about capitalism things like that and uh yeah so my interview was actually pretty easy my parents were a little harder of course you know because they had to screen people you know at that point we still did have uh some of these uh you know this this cold war thing going on um and uh yeah you know it took us it took us a month and a half and i remember they were there was this place in um where we lived and actually i guess it was a everywhere you know uh jews in green to the united states lived that they would have these gathering places um and it was called which was basically just means little square you know little area gathering place and uh people would gather there because news from the from the embassy would come and they would be announced there and so this was basically where you you know you would know what your your your fate is you know so you it would be announcing you know you were you know you&#39;re given refugee status you&#39;re denied you&#39;re approved you&#39;re denied so we would come to this gathering place every day to hear the news because they would announce you know okay so this and this family has been approved this in this family&#39;s been denied and so yes one day what i mean you just stay in italy longer or deny i mean you actually have to go back to ukraine what was that like and also all these jews that aggregated in italy were they just from ukraine or were they from also other soviet bloc countries oh they they were everywhere actually um you know russia um moldova i mean all across soviet union they all have to go through the same through the same path and so this was probably the first time then in your your childhood that you were actually exposed to people from all over the soviet union or did you have some experience traveling throughout the union before i i not really but uh i mean we did have well i was actually exposed to a lot of these people uh through my grandfather because my grandfather was in the arts you know my grandfather was my mom&#39;s dad uh he was a puppeteer and uh so you know a lot of um you know a lot of the actors were from different parts of the soviet union from georgia from armenia from moldavia everywhere you know from from the um central asia um so yeah i was actually uh i was fairly well exposed to different people um except maybe uh you know uh like people from the from the asian republics because you know the two afghanistan and uzbekistan they were you know they were asian republic so um were uh you know those were people who didn&#39;t see as much off um in in the west parts of of the soviet union but yeah those were there as well um and um it was just a collective of all different people um that just you know we&#39;re gonna you know had enough of the soviet uh the soviet dream and they were looking for the american dream and so if they rejected you did you just stay there or did you have to actually go back what was that like the rejection um you you didn&#39;t have to go back so they wouldn&#39;t they would like deport you right okay um but you had to you had to reapply so basically you were stuck um you could go back if you want to um pretty much nobody did i don&#39;t think i&#39;ve ever heard anybody actually go back to soviet union and um yeah just reapplied you you know you you have to come to terms with with what happened um you know figure out how you&#39;re going to survive because it would take you know about six to eight months to um you know and like i said sometimes longer uh to uh get to uh be able to do the whole thing again and in fact uh my our friend my parents friend that we immigrated with um it was a you know a lady that was my mom&#39;s friend my mom&#39;s my dad anyway she&#39;s just a single you know single lady uh you know i i i guess she was you know early 40s late 30s she was denied um we were approved but she was denied and she actually actually had to stay there um and uh to uh to reapply for eight months and she had to get a job she uh yeah she was she was all by herself she didn&#39;t have any relatives or anything so she had to have a job she had to do all these different things to survive she actually finally actually ended up being able to come to the to the us a year later um yeah but people just you know people survived you just that&#39;s what you got to do and so was there like a strong sense of community where you guys were when you were inside that that compound trying to you know wait in purgatory did everybody kind of help each other out and work together or was it more like survival of the fittest and everybody for themselves i mean what were the social dynamics like there especially as being a kid i mean it was i i would say it was a bit of both um i mean there wasn&#39;t really uh or at least i don&#39;t remember there being any kind of you know rivalries or competitions or you know this and that i mean the the the what made you cool was being able to go to the us you know the day you were say you were told that you are okay to go you were the cool kid you know you were the lucky ones the ones that you know those guys i want to be these guys you know the guys that you know they told them that they can go they got their permission you&#39;re like willy wonka with the golden ticket basically exactly exactly exactly perfect analogy yeah so with the people that had the golden ticket to to finally go to the us those were the cool kids other than that i mean everybody was actually very you know very nice very civil um people communicated you know um some made friends some just kept to themselves um you know italy is a pretty big country uh considering oh you know it wasn&#39;t too packed with immigrants um yes it was just uh you know just i guess nothing nothing too you know to too drastic either way just people surviving okay so uh you go from ukraine get your papers go to austria then you go to italy you go through these long interviews you spend a few months there and it&#39;s not clear if you&#39;re gonna get there getting out there a lot of uncertainty and then finally the day comes you&#39;re going to the united states now at that point did your english improve at all or was it still like i just speak russian ukrainian now a little bit of italian probably you know from being a kid and uh yeah italian it was just you know call me coleman and the the the that was about it and i just had to call me call me cool so so where where in the united states did you guys first arrive did you have the traditional immigrant story and you landed in new york or what was what was the the the port of entry well actually we did land in new york everybody oh hallelujah new york all right and when was this what was do you remember the year uh yes it was um august 1489. wow i remember the date and everything very really vividly um august 14th 1989 is when we got to the us uh landed in new york at night and um yeah we didn&#39;t get to see the statue of liberty or anything you know it was just like a really you know we wanted to see it but and i remember somebody pointing at it in the window i remember this seeing this really faint green lit up thing in the distance but it was maybe it was just my imagination because i was still a kid you know um and uh yeah we were uh but you know we got we we but we got on a smaller plane from from new york philadelphia and we actually ended up uh in philadelphia uh because because that that&#39;s where uh my my mom and dad&#39;s uh friends were they they were actually came to philadelphia in the 70s during the last wave so they were you know uh soviet jews that immigrated just like us but in the last wave in the late 70s and they were already established already there for nine years at that point so they had a house that they were like the the you know what we wanted to be you know these established americans with the citizen american citizenship but ha in hand you know a car a house you know and they just bought a new house at that point and we were just in awe you know with this um get off so you&#39;re you flew in what was it jfk or what what airport was in new york and then you switched planes to philly was jeffy arrive at jfk what was that like for you just to be at the american airport i mean you heard all the propaganda and ukraine you know about what we are in america and for the first time in your life now you&#39;re walking around there&#39;s english show for the inner combo like what was that experience like august 14th 1989 well you know this is actually something that it was one of the first times that it&#39;s this happened to me um because it was the first time i was in a in a place um like that where a language was spoken that i&#39;ve never heard spoken before you know and and it was never immersed in and uh you know we i we tried to study uh english and uh you know i studied it at school but i never was actually in a place where people spoke and so my my my first impression of being in a jfk is was that wow everybody&#39;s speaking english everybody&#39;s speaking english it&#39;s english it&#39;s real like really english i&#39;m speaking it it was it was me thinking that and they had shops and other things in the airport right and so there&#39;s a lot of that capitalism that you guys keep hearing about i guess you got exposed to some of that in austria and italy as well yeah yeah i mean austria and italy was already when we were exposed to this and i remember actually some of my you know uh you know parole kid coming from the eastern blot that doesn&#39;t know things like you know automatic doors um i remember one one of the first things that fascinated the the hell out of me were automatic doors this was in italy uh actually right before we were about to leave for the united states we were actually in in uh i believe somewhere outside of rome and uh we were in front of the supermarket and the the you know the automatic doors of the sensor it was the first time i saw those and i remember it was just like right next to the doors on the opens like oh my god they are automatic they open by themselves and i remember is like was just walking up to the center watching doors open walking back or closed you know it&#39;s just it was really fascinating to me um jfk it was um kind of a blur for me because it was just you know you&#39;re in the state of complete euphoria that you finally made it you know you&#39;re there it&#39;s over it&#39;s the end of a journey um i actually remember um somehow and this is back you know this is uh during those um during uh you know pre-911 pre you know mass terrorism well it was actually there was still terrorism but you know uh more lenient times um we had knives with us that we brought from the soviet union to some that we didn&#39;t sell we just you know the the one of the items that we didn&#39;t sell and uh they were confiscated from us at jfk because when we arrived at jfk the jfk confiscated the knives not when we got on the plane when we arrived at jfk they confiscated these soviet knives from us that we just even totally forgot that we had um yeah and it was uh you know it was a lot of these little moments of of just you know i remember these things but it&#39;s it&#39;s funny what you remember uh what you remember so vividly you know it&#39;s not that these you know uh these big grand things that you would think you would you remember these little things um let&#39;s see if we&#39;re crossing the border to leave the soviet union into poland um i remember we were at the border and you know that we had the the the border guard checker check our luggage right and these guys knew what we were about you know they knew that we were jews leaving you know flee the soviet union um and so my dad at that point was really into into tennis right and so he took his tennis racquet with him he wanted to take it with him to to to america and um i took what she said to him to america as well at the you know toy train said that i loved and he took product with me my dad brought his tennis racket and so he took this tennis rack and put it in his luggage right and so when they when these border like patrol guys were checking our luggage you know they put it through the x-ray machine and they saw a metal ring in there and they were looking for anything to get us you know to to to basically screw with us on and so this metal ring on the x-ray like what is that what is that okay you know the comrade whatever vasiliev go through their luggage find what that is and so they start digging through our luggage and just go you know piling it up and finally they dig all the way to the bottom and they see this racket and my dad what he did was he he put a a a a metal ring on it so he could hang it on the wall so that was the metal ring that these guys saw on the x-ray but they thought they found something crazy and so with this great disappointment you know the the head guy goes to you know the the the the guy that did all the searching just comrade uh uh uh uh or like show the comrades to the exit you know that was that was we were shown out the soviet union you know see these see these comrades out of the soviet union please yeah yeah so it&#39;s yeah it was just an experience um and yeah i&#39;ll never forget it it was crazy right you arrive in philadelphia and you&#39;re like 12 years old it&#39;s the late 80s everything&#39;s crazy i was living in hawaii at that time i was a little younger than you but uh okay so now you&#39;re in america and you&#39;re living with friends who have already established themselves they speak english they have a house they have careers they&#39;re making money uh so what happened next did you go to like an american school uh you know what was that transition like you obviously had to acclimate to a radically different culture right um philadelphia public schools that&#39;s all i gotta say i got three words in philadelphia public schools um i went to a public school uh it was one of those public schools where they would have um you know they would they would bus kids in from all parts of the city and my school was probably about i&#39;d say about maybe 60 or more percent black and i that this was you know the first time i was i was you know i mean there were very few you know black people in the soviet union because i mean well they just aren&#39;t um and this was the first time i was actually in in in a place where there were so many black people and it was just really i remember that you know it wasn&#39;t you know it it it was a very i guess that was when i really started to get culture shocked because you know i i knew that they were they were you know that they were you know uh african americans and in in the us but i just never been around any you know and then i was immersed into the school where you know the majority of people are black so it was uh it was a very profound experience for me you know and uh i had to really adapt really fast uh because on that side you know then you know you come from this place where you&#39;re this outsider because you&#39;re you&#39;re you&#39;re joined in the soviet union to being a uh you know a soviet in an american school in the late 80s and again something that people weren&#39;t too fond of either in the united states they weren&#39;t too fond of the soviet union in the 80s in the united states about because of this cold war thing um yeah and um it was yeah again it was a very profound experience it was uh life-changing uh i&#39;m glad actually that that you know that was what i was immersed into right away because it kind of gave me a crash course in americana and uh you know having to speak english i had to learn english nobody spoke russian i mean well a couple of people did but the teachers right nobody was venus and russian i had to learn russian to be able to to go to school nobody was translating for me my parents didn&#39;t know enough english so how quickly how quickly did you pick up english was it just like a few months and you were fluent or did it take years or and also did you have to go to special classes uh because at the time 12 you were like junior high or something like that high school uh so i was still in middle school and so as for some reason regions of philadelphia was still middle school i was in middle school um and so you know they had i was called esl english english as second language right but again this wasn&#39;t the you know a class where you had a teacher that spoke russian it was just that you had an esl teacher an american teacher that would uh take you know extra time with us to uh you know to go through the materials and explain it to us or try to explain it to us you know there was a language barrier um um i believe um actually i remember that uh you know all the english that i studied that i could not put together really clicked on the third day so first day i was just completely like the hell is going on second day i was kind of okay it&#39;s not as bad as i thought that&#39;s what i was thinking and the third day i remember i started speaking english i mean it was broken english but i started speaking it because i had to and i was kind of really surprised about that i was thinking wow how am i doing this you know but i can communicate i could communicate i you know it was it was really you know it was really cumbersome and it was it was difficult but i was communicating with my teachers and with people around me um i would say probably took about six to eight months to get to where i was able to properly communicate uh with people um i was also um another thing that my parents did was they sent me to summer camp the next summer uh which really you know had impact on my english skills uh because every you know everybody spoke english around me nothing but english um but to really get good at it took a couple of years you know a couple of years where i was you know where i was actually spoke well enough and well enough to be able to read books and that that&#39;s really with any lingual studies if you really really want to be able to actually speak grasp the language you have to read you have to read the same with japanese the same with english same with russian with any language you have to read reading is what really kind of gives your your lingual skills a you know just a boost like nothing else does okay so you&#39;re doing the esl classes you&#39;re getting the ebonics version of uh philadelphia and you&#39;re becoming uh proper philly uh what did your mom and dad do like your dad has this cybernetics background and he&#39;s well-educated was he actually doing research or working there or was he just working a manual labor job or how how was the family surviving at that point well at that point actually my mom was the first one that found the job she was working at a russian restaurant of all places she was washing dishes at a russian restaurant uh it was called hunter which actually is not there anymore in philadelphia but it was hunter and actually this was a the place where we brought in 1990 um so my mom worked this restaurant washed dishes she also plays the piano she&#39;s actually a a concert pianist and theatrical historian by trade and so she was able to play the piano and uh you know entertain and so they you know that she got a job there minimum wage something like at that point i think it was something like two dollars an hour 1.95 an hour um and then after that my dad found the job uh at a school at an i.t school teaching uh and then also a small consulting job at that point uh you know i.t job programming and actually my dad at that point hasn&#39;t really programmed for a while because he was in research he was in cybernetics research in fact right before he was he hillary union he was actually offered a job to work at a lab an ai artificial intelligence uh cyber cybernetics lab um and yeah but he he went to work i believe he was making at that point something like 14 an hour which was actually serious money uh for us and yeah little by little you know we established ourselves um my father started working for campbell soup uh for the i.t center in camden and yeah those were the humble beginnings and um that we went through you know went from a one-bedroom apartment in northeast philadelphia to uh you know to uh to a house in the suburbs uh in about i&#39;d say less than five years five years we were you know we had that american dream going you know had two cars and also right you know um that&#39;s just refugees to the american dream in five years just uh work your way through it okay so you start going through school you&#39;re picking up the lingo you can speak english you get the high school you go beyond so then friedman the career what what did you want to do you mentioned while you were in ukraine you liked astronomy and chemistry and obviously your dad is doing computer science did you want to follow your father&#39;s footsteps or do you want to grow out your hair and become a rocker i mean you know what was the what was the the next stage the the post high school stage for you all of the above and in fact some of these things you know i still have the hair so some of you can see it a little of my uh of all these different phases yeah i did i did go to the when it could be a musician phase uh my you know late teens early 20s that was when i i got into that but actually um you know i know you know it sounds like a kid type of thing but um at first actually i wanted to be an astronaut i wanted to i wanted to go to space um and there was there was like if you if you ask eight nine ten-year-old dan what he wants to be well he would tell you that he wants to be an astronaut and i went for a long long time that&#39;s why i studied astronomy and the astrophysics and all these different things and actually um for a little while i was i i went to uh the college to with the intention of studying uh aerospace engineering uh was because it was really uh really i really wanted to get into that i really wanted to get into aerospace i really wanted to work in in the airspace field um i was thinking about becoming an astrophysicist uh something to do with you know with space um but uh yeah i i uh i ended up actually following my father&#39;s footsteps and uh getting into i.t um i&#39;m glad because it it you know it&#39;s it&#39;s something that kind of you know gels well with with myself and who i am and who i was you know how i was brought up and things that interest me and uh yeah but originally i i really wanted to be in sciences i really wanted to be a scientist um something like i said some so then you know i actually examined myself it&#39;s not that really i wanted to be a scientist as much as as i wanted to be an explorer i wanted to explore that&#39;s why i wanted to be an astronaut because that this was you know the final frontier as you know our good friends at star trek city i was going to say were you a star trek fan growing up uh actually funny quick funny uh uh word about that um i was in the soviet union later in the late 80s they started to allow some some private enterprise they were called cooperatives and so one of the things that the cooperatives did was they would rent out rooms in schools and you know different public halls you know just small rooms you know for 20 30 people and it would show american movies that were that at that point allowed in the soviet union and so late 80s you know 88 89 you would have these video salons spring up and what a video slide was basically a a room with 20 chairs middle chairs a tv and a vcr and they would play yeah yeah and they would play american movies do something like a ruble to to get into to watch this movie and i remember one of those cooperatives rented a room from our school where i you know where i went to school and they showed star wars wow and and and and they showed it backwards so the first they showed the empire strikes back and then they showed star wars so it was you know out of sync uh and i never actually saw return of the jedi until i came to the i didn&#39;t even know it existed until i came to the us like a year later you know i found that there was like another star wars there was another star wars movie really wow so i loved star wars and i still do and um when i came to the us i asked my parents friends the ones that we stayed with the ones that had you know the american dream uh oh i wanted to watch star uh but but i i knew how to say it in russian i don&#39;t know how to say it in english you know and russian star wars so it&#39;s literally it&#39;s just star wars but uh he he said oh star wars okay and instead he turned on star trek um and and so he says oh yeah you mean this and he turned on star trek the next generation uh was uh season two okay um yeah the the the the one uh actually no it was season one uh it was the uh uh uh encountered farpoint uh episode very okay the the second episode with q and all that other stuff okay yeah and that was season two but the episode that i watched was season one was actually was where they uh where they freeze jordy you know during the trial of humanity when hugh tries to puts humanity on trial and they freeze jordy i remember that was like one of the first things like wait a second this is not star wars star wars what is this you know and uh yeah but then i think you love star trek i&#39;m a big star trek fan um actually i mean you can&#39;t see it now but actually over there i have uh the entire cast of a next generation signed my uh you know a photograph of uh tng&#39;s cast patrick watched star wars you were star trek and it kind of inspired you you really started loving space you wanted to be an astronaut but you followed in your dad&#39;s footsteps and i guess this would be in the mid 90s to the late 90s that you&#39;re coming of age so you were coming out right when the dot-com boom started if if i&#39;m getting in english right exactly actually i i um i came to one of my first uh jobs in you know professional jobs was in the beginning of the dot com boom in the late 80s and late 90s i mean in 97 in 98 was when i started to get my first job you know building websites um the uh one of the things that was really big at that point were online malls so internet malls um yeah internet malls and so what it would be would just be a website uh and all these local shops they would have their own pages on this website right so it would be called internet mall and so what i would do is i would you know i was kind of an entrepreneur at that point as well and so i was still in college but i wanted to make the big bucks so what i would do is i would go to uh you know the um the the chamber of commerce meetings the local chamber of commerce meetings and it would offer my my my services of setting up uh uh an internet for the chamber of commerce and then all the members you know they would basically pay me you know a fee of couple hundred bucks a piece to set up their web pages on this on on this internet mall um yeah so that was the uh one of the first times i was it was exposed to this whole dot com thing uh we were still on uh this was actually right before mozilla came out mozilla mosaic uh the first browser i was using was was gopher um and we were still on gopher and on the comp compuserve who are are used to this you know and and this is your internet uh you know when i was growing up we had to dial up i just i love this concept of the internet mall it&#39;s just one of those like how do we take the physical ball and put it into this web experience and make it cool and navigateable so you go to the chamber of commerce you talk to these people and say hey guys i&#39;ll i&#39;ll build an internet mall for you but were there any e-commerce tools like how did you actually buy something without javascript and web certificates and crypto was it just like a card you would call them for them all and do the call order over the phone or how did that work and i mean it was um uh you know it was at that point it was just an advertisement right um you would you could potentially uh do some things with it um like for example i remember i put a um real estate company on on the uh on the internet mall back in 97 and at that point of the i forgot what the system is called but it&#39;s a it&#39;s a it&#39;s a i&#39;m sure they still use it it&#39;s a system where all these listings sit they live in this giant database and it was around back then as well and so i actually integrated the database with their website and so you can actually search for a house on their website on their page on the internet mall and send them a request so you could actually do simple things like you know ask you know make requests via email uh or you know get special coupons things like that right um and and that it was basically you know you go to this mall they give you special coupons they do announcements so it was for them was free advertising it was basically what it was it was just free advertising at that point you know because you just pay somebody 200 bucks they set up the site for you you know updates are really simple to do and they would just update coupons and you know i showed them how to do coupon updates so basically you know was the i would put it you know an image on the website and they would just i&#39;ll re-upload a new image and just call it the same you know so they wouldn&#39;t have to open the website um it was very simple did you have dreams of being like an entrepreneur and actually doing dot com startup and making the big bucks i mean what was well did you just want to do websites or what was the entrepreneurial side of this whole endeavor and i guess you know it&#39;s a lot of people are so young these days that they completely forget what the dot-com boom was like uh you know and so it kind of put us into that that feeling you know almost 30 years ago what was what was dot-com boom like well i&#39;ll tell you in some ways it is a lot like the the blockchain boom and in some ways it&#39;s not um and so you got to think about that at that point um not many people want i mean just not you know people are talking about mass adoption with blockchain and you know and then some people saying oh well it&#39;s not mainstream yet and this back then the internet was not mentoring and the internet was just this thing you know i remember doing one of the first big jobs i had was back in 99 i did a a report for mcgraw-hill who hired me to analyze their websites and their web traffic and explain to them why their websites were did not get any traffic and they had 12 different websites um and to basically to look at their meta tags and things like that to uh to give them to give them an idea of how to get traffic to them and so uh really it was about um it was one of the first times you know the i guess that the hacker kid was the one that all these old guys wanted you know these these establishment iet companies they had to leapfrog right and they didn&#39;t understand the technology just like with blockchain you know just these you know old final school financial institutions they don&#39;t understand the technology and you can&#39;t just buy this knowledge you have to either like the in demand probably for the first time in your life popular kid instead of the outsider like everybody wanted you and everybody everybody needed you uh to basically be there yeah yeah i mean basically at that point you know you already we already had uh you know java was coming around javascript was really in its infancy in fact you know when javascript started it started getting big uh you know in the past 10 years or whatnot i still had this you know old school uh version two two javascript and it&#39;s like javascript what do you mean javascript that&#39;s it&#39;s you&#39;re not supposed to do that stuff with javascript you&#39;re supposed to do it in a real language like java or something like that you know um yeah and uh at that point you know it was all about compilers and java and oracle oracle 7 was was the first big database to work with um it was just a lot of uh yeah um there was a lot of opportunity and i really yeah i really was to kind of go for broke make it big you know get get these things going i was actually part of a a really prominent company called two bridge uh which made uh content management software and and we&#39;re talking you know 20 years ago over 20 years ago this is before you know all these you know because now if you like so it was like wordpress before it was cool it was yeah it was way before wordpress and actually one of the pioneer ideas that uh bridge had was to actually have a seamless uh seamless integration between editor and website so uh instead of having to go through all these steps because before that you know the even the big uh the big names uh and content management made you go for about 40 steps to publish your web page uh these guys designed uh a system which would literally would put a uh a java server with it and a java widget into the into the page and you would actually use a portal to upload documents and it would format the document uh to to go into the website and so basically you get you got rid of a whole team of webmasters because you could now have the editor directly upload their word file or whatever you know word perfect file into the website and publish it within a couple of minutes and it would just point and click and so this company was about to go public and i remember you know and i was right in the middle of this whole com boom and in a company and i had a lot of stock options and you know we were we were actually we had a partnership with jp morgan and were projected to to split three times at a hundred dollars and i was going to be a millionaire uh you know but before i was you know before i was 25 and this and that and um you know um so it was big you know i was working in san francisco i had uh had an office with the view bay bridge the the clock on the bay bridge was my office clock because it was literally in front of it was the bay bridge and there&#39;s a big clock on it or at least there used to be probably still is uh and it would you know i would see what time it is um on that clock was just you know just the dream you know this this dream that you have if you&#39;re an entrepreneur and coming up you know in in in your teens and early 20s and i was in my early 20s at that point um and yeah it was it was a really great time it ended really abruptly um a year and a half after that that company was no more uh what was that like like the decline so was it just you wake up one day say hey we&#39;re out of business or did you just see it gradually happening like less and less people in the office every day the the often the coffee machine disappears the free stacks disappear i mean what was what was it like watching the dot com bubble burst uh for you it was it was full of rome i mean people under swords you know um it it was really like that you know i mean you just saw this thing you know you would have you know we built up this company um you know from not too many people to quite a few people you know offices and and and you know in several several parts of the us and all over the world in england and in germany um you know and then and you know in the east you know i mean this was a it was almost valued at a billion dollars this company and uh literally this company just burnt in about a year uh because they just didn&#39;t do you know they didn&#39;t do sales uh they they did not secure their their their income they uh they put a lot of it put a lot into going ipo which then they had to retract um they did not do enough sales um and in the end they just ended up you know just kind of imploding uh because of you know they cut more and more and more staff and i remember actually uh yeah it was like the fall of rome you know uh you know more and more people you know every week you know they would come around with the list of people you know who are going to get fired and uh you know was it like office space with the bobs where they brought in consultants to do are they just or was it just like you you read your name on the list on the wall the following people still have a job if you&#39;re not on the list you&#39;re gone i mean how were those layouts done it was it was actually a lot like office space in fact office space was it just ranked so close to to home because it came out right about the time when i was when i was when i was in the middle of that whole thing and uh it was yeah it was actually uh you know consumers or or you would have uh you know one you know an executive come you know anytime you had an executive come from out of town there was never good news at that point it means somebody&#39;s getting fired or actually not somebody a whole bunch of somebody&#39;s getting fired it&#39;s like yeah so guys well thanks for your service to the company but we&#39;re going to have to let you know yeah which one would love you this whole office is closed now yeah everybody back to the bread line for you so what was your last day like what happened um it was weird you know not to dredge up the the trauma of your 20s but i&#39;m sure enough time has passed that you&#39;ve probably gotten over it by now again you know all experiences you grow from when you get tough from and toughen you up and this was just like that i mean it was um you know some people were years actually some people put a lot into uh you know into being in that company and a lot uh you know including myself i wasn&#39;t in tears but i was kind of you know what it was it was almost like um you put your heart into something right and you really believe a vision you really believe it you know um you really uh you know you&#39;re not just making you&#39;re not just there for a paycheck you&#39;re really there because you believe in the company you believe in the vision you believe that the guy that&#39;s leading the company knows what he&#39;s doing and you know and and all these you know everything that they say is true you know not everything but you know all these great things you&#39;re gonna do as a company and it&#39;s gone then it&#39;s just like you know um it&#39;s and you gotta start to kind of as you pack your office you know as you pack your cubicle at that because we&#39;re cubicles um you start to reflect on that you&#39;re just thinking you&#39;re like wow you know i&#39;m gonna have to find something new to believe in you know something new to strive for because this was my my thing you know i was this was supposed to be the thing that took me to the next level but instead i have to go back now i have to go back to um you know to almost to square one and in fact i think actually that actually would uh build up a lot of resilience in myself anytime now that i have a problem um or where i feel like i&#39;m in a place where i&#39;m just like what the hell is going on why is this not working you know i feel stuck instead of coming to you know just being completely depressed and really feeling down you know and just feeling sorry for myself i tell to myself okay screw this this is not gonna happen okay i&#39;m gonna find a way i have i have a destiny my destiny is big i&#39;m gonna make it big i&#39;m gonna you know i&#39;m gonna do great things this is not gonna stop me what do i do to continue on to this path and um that experience actually also kind of gave me this you know because i was at that point you know just searching you know i was in search you know i had a a faith and a problem of faith you know i i lost my faith in what i was doing and like i said all these things to believe in were just not there anymore she had to find something new to strive on and yeah and so that was that you know that was basically the experience you know just packing things up and really reflecting on okay so what do i believe now what is the vision now uh where do i see myself in five years you know because a month ago i was going to be you know this great you know you know in five years i was gonna be this great you know like young millionaire looking you know uh you know going you know making some great you know company now what do i do and um yeah it just took some time for me to reflect on my own uh to what i was doing you went into filmmaking at some point in your life was this after the dot-com bust because you were in california at that point right yeah well yes so um i kind of hopped around at that point the two different it jobs you know six months six months take each job right and um i mean i was making you know okay money i was making pretty good money um but again at that point i was i still had a a a a a crisis of faith you know i just did not see i just at that point it started to feel like it just was a job you know i mean what was it gonna be that guy i mean it&#39;s not that bad of a place to be you know that guy that makes you know 75 to 80 a year and goes to retire in florida it&#39;s not bad you know i it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s a good lifestyle you know for those who are to consent with that i just wasn&#39;t you know something inside of me was just saying to myself look you know i mean it&#39;s comfortable but i i want my life to be bigger you know and so yeah at that point i was doing some business in california i came to california and actually um i came out for a star trek convention in pasadena it was the the next generation uh convention in pasadena um and um it was i think it was something like the uh like the 15-year anniversary of of tng um back in 2003 i believe or something like that um 2002. and uh yeah just things clicked and i decided to stay in in california i made made some friends who were in the business and uh so i decided i said hey you know this is the change that i need i feel something here um and so more and more at first of course i was doing the you know still still doing it stuff but more and more and more i wanted to really you know i started to kind of find my this other part of myself this the artist part of myself that my my mom&#39;s side of the family um and uh more and more and more i started making connection i started connections i started getting into uh you know filmmaking um at first you know i took i took the actor out which was you know which is a really good way to go uh went to acting school and called the beverly hills playhouse which is a pretty prominent school uh in in hollywood um and was taught by a great teacher the you know he unfortunately passed away a little a little bit ago uh alan williams um and uh it really it it it was a good place because it didn&#39;t just tell me teach me about acting and about directing you taught me about interaction with people and i believe that what i learned in that school actually made it actually makes me better at what i do now and it&#39;s not acting it&#39;s about being genuine it&#39;s about being able to communicate because really acting and and directing and filmmaking is about communication you know you&#39;re communicating with the audience um and so i went and yeah i did that at first and then i just kind of again i i had a bit of a time you know reflection point and said to myself you know i don&#39;t just want to be an actor because again actors even the big big names are still a lot of times just bought at the bottom of the barrel and hollywood right you&#39;re just holding to the directors yeah exactly the place you want to be is you want to be a filmmaker you want to be make your own content you want to create your own movies you want to you want you want to do your own stuff and so i got into um uh more into directing i get into filmmaking into writing i was i was a director of photography for a number of years i worked the camera had my own small studio as well i did editing i got into all of that actually um you know it didn&#39;t make anything huge but involved in a couple of really nice projects um and again it it all you know um at a certain point again i it wasn&#39;t i didn&#39;t uh really fully grasp the dream over there because um unfortunately that industry is is also it&#39;s it&#39;s very you know hollywood tries to pass itself off to be so progressive and so right you know for thinking and so you know like the the beacon of of change but it&#39;s actually really backwards and it&#39;s really it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s still very you know just conceited and and and and bigoted and uh just you know uh basically the opposite of what they trying to pass themselves pass themselves off to be as you know you know a place that talks about equality and this and that you know it&#39;s basically one of the last places where i saw you know true like in your face sexism and you know the jobs for sexual favors type of stuff happening all the time and this is like a business in the 2000s and you know harvey weinstein was still going around and you know these types of things yeah this is yeah this was the harvey weinstein era you know this was the era of the casting couch you know and and i saw you know dad i gotta ask did anybody try to cast and catch you well charles um well you&#39;d be you&#39;d be surprised how people got to where they&#39;ve got uh in hollywood because i&#39;ve seen it i&#39;ve seen um i&#39;ve seen it i&#39;ve seen the behind-the-scenes version of it and some some names actually that you might know on tv i i&#39;m not going to name them but a couple of those people actually i went to school with them i went to acting school with them and they&#39;re female and they have achieved a fairly serious level of success and i can tell you how they did but you know that would not be important right um unfortunately so you try to find yourself you know you you finally belong to the tech world you&#39;re the dot-com boom you&#39;re going to be a millionaire at 25 your dad&#39;s probably over the moon the families of the movie within a year the business goes out then you get you&#39;re kind of lost and you go to all these different i.t jobs and you have this epiphany you say i&#39;m going to be an actor then you go to beverly hills the mecca of acting you go with other people and you say oh well this acting thing is not for me you become a filmmaker you&#39;re trying to do the whole filmmaker thing and then you&#39;re like oh screw this hollywood thing so how in the world did you end up in japan how how did that happen like what was the transition there well wake up get on a plane and fly or like what was that what was the thing that got you there it was kind of like that actually um like i was saying before um the thing that i do is i instead of kind of sitting there and and moping i always kind of you know it pisses me off when i get into that place it doesn&#39;t make me sad it irritates me it infuriates me because this is not the place i have to i do not belong in this place in this place of despair and this hopelessness you know right and every time i&#39;m in that place you know of course you know there&#39;s a couple of days where i kind of feel sorry for myself but then something inside me clicks and said no this is not who you are this is not it okay you&#39;re me you&#39;re not meant to sit here and and cry for yourself okay and um that&#39;s what happened with me in japan as big and um so the thing in in california just wasn&#39;t doing what i wanted wanted it to do um that i spent you know a couple of years basically just you know in complete purgatory over there you know i was not really doing anything in the business um i lost my faith in the business you know i just really didn&#39;t think that it was something that i was wanted to be involved in just because it was just disgusted by so many parts of it and um i haven&#39;t found you know i was doing um i was back to i t but i wasn&#39;t really doing you know great things you know i was i was actually i was at that point i was working for honda um but again you know i was just doing regular i.t stuff for honda and um um i kind of said to myself you know what no this is not gonna work for me i need it needs to be big for me it needs to be big it needs to be it needs to be serious for me um and so what i did was i had a a dream i i went to bed one night in 2012 and uh i i had a dream i had an epiphany and a dream uh that i was somewhere in the east i was in the east i was i was in a brightly lit uh high-rise in an apartment with the sun shining through the window and i it wasn&#39;t some anything specific but i knew i was in the east you know and i woke up and i said to myself i need to flip this thing on its head um i can&#39;t go back to the east coast i don&#39;t want to go back to europe i had no interest at that point to go back to europe i said i have to go and i have to flip my life upside down i have to be in a place where i can start fresh and so i decided between i was uh started thinking and and my decision was between two places uh japan and sri lanka uh sri lanka was a little bit of there&#39;s a little bit of a difference between the two did you read did you read any arthur c clarke because you know he lived in sherlocker for 50 years exactly that is exactly why at sri lanka&#39;s because arthur c clarke is actually one of my all-time favorite writers uh you know the the odyssey series 2001 2061 which is actually i think is even more fascinating than the previous couple you know the 2010 and 2001 uh because it is a lot more into uh the uh you know the whole world of the future in the 3001 yeah it was because of marvel c clark and because he lived in sri lanka uh i was fascinated with that place and um i but ultimately i decided on japan uh because i just felt like oh um again i went to bed one more night and i woke up and i remember that i just had a vivid dream about being in a synagogue in japan don&#39;t ask me why the five synagogues of japan you&#39;re going to be in one of them but but why not south korea or china because you know the chinese japan&#39;s economy was kind of on the downtrend and china was booming so what what was the theme just a dream and that&#39;s it it was yeah it was basically just uh you know an epiphany in a dream and um then i just kind of got into it i started getting more and more fascinated with japan i mean i was always fascinated with japan but it was never really a japanophile you know i was really into japan i always thought it was a fascinating country always you know i always loved the history and the food and you know all these different things that people regularly love about japan i was never really like into it i didn&#39;t really study it didn&#39;t really research it and china i just you know i yeah i i already did the communist thing once i&#39;m cool with that you know okay there&#39;s a lot of cities to pick in japan so there&#39;s yokohama and hokkaido you have sapporo you have okinawa there&#39;s tokyo so why osaka did you first go to osaka or did you go to tokyo first no gradually work your way to osaka no i i went to osaka and i&#39;ll tell you why the second epiphany that i had and you know the the dream that i had i was in osaka i don&#39;t know why i was in osaka but it was in osaka and also one of my favorite movies is a movie by ridley scott called black rain came out in the late 80s with michael douglas and andy garcia and it&#39;s actually about these two cops that go you know following uh a yakuza gang member to osaka so that they witness him commit committing murder in in new york and then they have to you know uh they they catch him in new york and they have to take him back to osaka and then he escapes in osaka and so they have this whole you know this whole thing happened in osaka and the only reference point is a dream in a ridley scott movie from the 1980s but you&#39;re like no this whole yakuza osaka thing has totally sold me i i have to go there i don&#39;t know anybody i don&#39;t speak the language i have no friends i assume you had no social network when when you arrived no no i i i knew no one in japan um it was just you know it was just that that final frontier that i was looking for you know my whole life you know with being an astronaut with all these different things and yeah i knew no one i had no friends out here um all i had was just this dream of living in japan and you know a room at a guest house in osaka that i booked through rumorrama um rama uh which actually is is is uh the the uh they went out of business a few years ago um yeah and so i just sold what i could i sold my car sold a couple more things in in the us and bought a ticket and uh paid for my you know paid for my expenses for a couple of months in in japan i just came to japan and said look i am in japan i still had you know i still i was still making money at that point but i actually had to uh quit my job uh you know at honda and again it was a pretty good job you know it was it was a honda america in torrance california so it was like the head office of honda it was like the place where people would you know have careers and retire from you know this was the place to be but again you know it wasn&#39;t for me i mean the the the the freaking space shuttle flew over us you know that&#39;s it was between us and toyota um and yeah i just came to osaka and i did some soul searching out here and figured that it was for me final threat you know where i could grow and i could do what i wanted to do uh made some friends um at you know the first weekend i was in osaka what did i do well i went to the synagogue in kobe um and i i you know i found my fellow jews in japan and um you know made some friends uh i mean say what you will but you know i mean it&#39;s a good way to meet you to meet friends find somebody that&#39;s you know you had they have these you know ethnic and uh you know faith-based connections with and uh it&#39;s easy it&#39;s easier to have the same frame of reference you know being especially being in a place like japan made some friends and uh some of them you know helped me out greatly um i i think actually i mean you know one of them nico despopolis yeah one of my best friends nico helped me out tremendously when i just came to japan i mean he&#39;s my you know tweeter um and helped me you know help me get established introduce me to some some business contacts help me get into business out here help me start making you know start making yen i came out here you know one of my friends told me he said you know i know that this this the suit your suitcases that you&#39;re taking to japan are mostly business suits what&#39;s up with that i said no i&#39;m going out there too i&#39;m going out there to do business i&#39;m going out there to make a life you know and i do business in suits um and so i came out here you know one of my suitcases was suits um and uh you know good nice you know dress clothes and i wanted to make yen i wanted to do business i wanted to be a japan and the dream and that was what i followed out here and um i mean you know that&#39;s that&#39;s what i am i guess to a degree right now so in many ways you follow the footsteps of your mom and dad because you know you followed a religious connection to japan and you basically were like a refugee all over again you had to completely relive uh everything you had to learn a new language build out all the business contacts and so forth how long did it take you to learn japanese i i tried and that language is is labyrinthian for lack of a better term it&#39;s a very it&#39;s a very difficult language for an english speaker to pick up well i guess yeah actually it&#39;s a very good analogy about my parents uh very good in fact in many ways it felt like that you know i felt like i immigrated to japan just like my parents immigrated to the us because they were actually around the same age i mean a little older but about the same age you know early 40s when they immigrated to to the us i was in my mid 30s when i came to japan and yeah it was pretty much the same you know and i kind of felt i it was it was very interesting because i got to experience with my parents experience because you know they came to that they had to leave everything behind pretty much and in the soviet union and come to to the us and start their life again as adults you know you know in their early 40s and i did the same thing with japan in my late 30s and so i actually got this other perspective of what that is like that what it must have been like for my parents the language yeah it took me um i&#39;d say to get fluent uh took me a few years because it is different for all those of you who don&#39;t speak japanese uh japanese is um if you really translate it directly into english it sounds like yoda it really sounds like yeah give us an example of that like say a few things of japanese and kind of give us the english version okay let&#39;s say for example uh uh i&#39;ll give you something really really simple right uh the uh the cat ate the mouse you know the cat ate the mouse what you&#39;re saying is uh get mouse eight it literally is cat mouth eight so uh the verb always mostly comes in the end so it&#39;s something something did something mm-hmm and that is nan in japanese when it&#39;s a very nuanced language so um when you say when you say things uh you know uh [Music] like you say a it&#39;s it&#39;s almost like the the canadian a you know like you say oh thinking like today&#39;s you know the weather is really nice today huh like like you say now a lot and osaka actually no sakura die like you&#39;re saying no um but it&#39;s the same thing and the the the neo or the na is the yoda it&#39;s the same exact new one so uh when when i uh when i just started really getting japanese i was thinking like god it sounds like yoda like really that was the clicking moment so when you&#39;re in philadelphia you know in middle school day three it finally starts clicking english and you&#39;re in japan you&#39;re like ah your empire strikes back yoda that now i understand japanese everything makes sense now especially osaka exactly yeah it&#39;s just so much like yoda i&#39;m like wait a second did they design the way yoda speaks from japanese now like thinking i was thinking that yeah thing and learned lots of japanese from uh you know from anime and from manga and these things is that how you learn how to read and write or because that&#39;s what all the white guys in japan apparently do yeah i was actually never really into manga i never really went to manga i read some i wasn&#39;t really into manga i was not really into anime again a few anime but not too many you know um i was you know i was into inuyasha for a little while it&#39;s it&#39;s a popular animal japanese see so you managed to skip that entire culture of of yeah in japan yeah the whole world so you were more than bar room japan or what was what was the japanese business culture or you know uh leisure culture that you fit into well i guess um i was into a human connection you know um what i did was i went out and i made friends um i made japanese french japanese speaking first um one of the things we used to do would be uh so wherever i lived uh in japan uh little you know mom and pop coffee shops are really big thing you know so they&#39;re on every corner especially in the city um they&#39;re called kisaten you know or you know kisa you know uh are small mom-and-pop coffee shops uh now you have uh you could say like like uh like like which was which would be more you know just like a corporate looking one like a starbucks but if you are talking like traditional japanese you know like wood paneling kind of dark cloud of smoke you know because you can still spill out of places in japan um uh you know uh you know you get your toast and egg uh which was it&#39;s called morning morning which means morning service uh in japan it&#39;s a traditional thing where uh from from a certain time to a certain time in in the morning you actually for the price of a cup of coffee they also give you a small breakfast it&#39;s called morning service and so usually morning service has a slice of bread like thick thick uh asian bread and a hard-boiled egg and so i would actually what i would do is i would go around my neighborhood and i seek out these different uh kisaten and i would go there and i would have a cup of coffee and i would talk to the owner you know and i would talk to them and that&#39;s how i built up my my my speaking skills is is by you know really you know going around and just communicating with people and really talking to people and trying to really immerse myself in the language um reading as well um reading was yeah it was i i took a few lessons but mainly it was just about picking up a book uh i made great date of the first book that i read in japanese is is murakami&#39;s murakami&#39;s no mori which is uh the norwegian forest and it was just all about just sadness and death and fight just it&#39;s just the two volumes of just just just like swimming in depression [Laughter] you just you read this in japanese he&#39;s got a very uh very uh peculiar way of writing he he first of all uses kanji for wars they don&#39;t release kanji for you know so he writes like the old way right um and uh you know and he has these really really weird ways of kind of switching things you know you&#39;re reading and and somebody like reflecting on a memory and oh i remember this young girl that i used to spend time with you know we ate grapes and smoked cigarettes and in her kitchen while talking about current events and then you turn the page oh yeah and then she died from cancer [Laughter] you&#39;re like wait wait i&#39;m missing a b you went straight to c where wha wha what happened what&#39;s the point of the girl with the grapes and the cigarettes no no they were still eating grapes here in cancer how do we go from grapes to cancer in literally three pair that&#39;s the bill murray [ __ ] with lots of translation man that&#39;s great it was just like i was it was like what what wait a second wait a second hold on yeah and so that that was this is one of those things where you have like an existential problem after reading the norwegian forest and you go to the coffee shop and you&#39;re like eating your morning service and talking to the guy in japanese and say i don&#39;t understand why she died of cancer what is the what is the meaning of yeah yeah yeah you just well um like uh you know you go to a lot of these people and you tell them you know that they would see they would see you know you&#39;re reading this like oh can you read that like yeah like yeah but why is it so sad oh like means it can&#39;t be helped it&#39;s when i lived in japan uh it was what blew my mind were all the unspoken rules that you&#39;re just supposed to know like you know i think you stand on the left on the escalator and osaka and the right on the escalator in tokyo or did i get that backwards right osaka is on the right of the escalator and yeah and then the woman&#39;s car i could never for the life of me figure out when i was allowed in the woman&#39;s car on the mitasuji line versus not allowed because apparently you could be there you cannot be there but everybody knows but i i didn&#39;t know i just i just it all together i just don&#39;t wanna you know cause because actually i get on the i get into the women&#39;s car a couple of times by accident uh at the time and i got a lot of really you know evil stares in my way so i just avoid it all together um yeah actually you know the escalator that&#39;s how you spot people out from out of town because you know the tokyo people that come to visit osaka they stand on the left of the escalator and then everybody else stands on the right and you&#39;re like come on you&#39;re tokyo bastard get on the right this is insane tokyo getting in everybody&#39;s way because you know people like try to walk up the escalator on the left and they stand and wait on the right yeah but you know you can yell at them in the deep kansai dialect too you know they&#39;re all scared because our listeners might not know but a lot of the gangster movies in japan uh the dialect that they use for gangsters is osaka in kansai that area yeah yeah osaka the second dialect is like the de facto uh you know it it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s sort of like the the the new yorker the new yorker twang of japan you know but yo yo wha what are you doing i was like he&#39;s like what the hell are you doing you know that that&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s in in in in osaka dialect yeah yeah it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s yeah it&#39;s considered uh and we we wear this badge proudly it&#39;s considered the rudest city in japan well that&#39;s just perfect for me because i i&#39;m a very blunt direct rude person and so that&#39;s why osaka just made sense that namba you know the other thing i really love about osaka versus tokyo is like everything&#39;s on a grid and everything is in one area so if you want to eat you go to namba right if you want to shop you have the arcade you go down that way and you know we had an office in hamachi and i is that is that office still there the hamachi office i can&#39;t remember uh actually actually um uh the place is called honmachi hamachi is right well it&#39;s it&#39;s okay it&#39;s okay because you probably think you&#39;re thinking of all the fish uh like you always say you know goodbye japan thanks for all the fish well the you know yeah um yeah well the the physical office is still there but it&#39;s not ours anymore um yeah but the yeah we did have that office it&#39;s actually a really nice area you know that that office charles there was a a very um uh a very you know kind of it wasn&#39;t too busy but it was busy enough all right all right let&#39;s get to the sexy part of the interview let&#39;s talk about the early days of iohk this is this is like lore that is almost lost in history now we&#39;re this big company worth billions of dollars we have hundreds of employees and we&#39;re in 40 countries but that was not always the case and uh you were one of the very first employees of iohk so you were there in the very early days so let&#39;s talk about the early days of iohk how about that what what was your interview i i remember nico referred you to us and we interviewed you in that office i believe in a whole much yes yes you did um in fact um yeah so early days of iohk you know as you said we&#39;re this you know multi-billion dollar you know one of the biggest in the world you know blockchain ecosystem now and when i was interviewing i believe the first time you came to japan after after you know after i joined the company we all fit around that the the table in in in the common area in the the office at home watching because it was it was it&#39;s a share space and so we used the main room and remember actually all of us fit pretty much the entire company fit around the table like a table in in the share room and it wasn&#39;t that big of a table it&#39;s maybe what like 10 10 10 chairs or something like that right yeah uh yeah nico referred me uh the same guy nico despapolis um he referred me he he uh he uh he knew your uh your former partner and uh co-founder um jeremy and um he uh uh he referred me i had an interview over there i&#39;ll tell you i tell you how i met nico so uh jeremy had rented an airbnb for me and that was through nico and i i was in this little tower like in shinkanoka i forget i forget where it was it was uh like four or five stops away from the office on the mitasuji line and i stayed there for two or three months in this tiny airbnb and i had this very uncomfortable bed but niko gave me a really great rate on it and i said okay well you know it&#39;s okay i can find a way to to make it work and make it comfortable as i think i was only paying like 600 yen 700 yen 70 000 yen or like like sixty thousand yen per month and so that&#39;s a great price for you know monthly airbnb yeah actually yeah nico one of his businesses out here uh he lives in in italy now he he moved there with his wife because his wife is italian um but when he was living in japan um one of his main businesses was airbnb and he would you know rent these apartments out to uh people traveling and um yeah and so he he uh he that that&#39;s how he knew he knew jeremy and um uh yeah that you know you were looking to have a project manager uh actually manage the the project the pre-sale project because at that point we were still in uh trunks two of the pre-sale yeah and well i mean i&#39;m you know i&#39;m a project manager you know so uh you know one thing led to another yeah and we wrote we wrote for the audience&#39;s benefit we wrote all the compliance software so we were the first crowd sale to do kyc i i think ever in the space and and the problem was that there was no software that actually could do it the way that we needed to do it and so we tried to write it and we&#39;re like wow this is so much harder than we thought and i i was busy trying to build the science side of the organization so i i was going to ukraine and to america and to greece and other places and and i think was nico spentanitus in the company at that point remember bald nicos yeah yeah nico was was in the company uh yeah i think he actually just came aboard at that point yeah um yes it was just you uh jeremy nico&#39;s uh ari ari levy cohen yeah and then there was also ricky wakai uh who also came in good old good old ricky and uh and i don&#39;t know i don&#39;t remember if we had mario yet or uh if we had um christian linderin yet i were you hired before christian or after after actually christian i believe came you came on a couple of months for me uh and yeah and i came on a couple months later uh i think mario actually came on board around the same time as i did um yeah he&#39;s you know one of our researchers he&#39;s one of our head researchers in tokyo tokyo tech um yeah so that was we were all you know around the same era where the og crew of uh input output um yeah and actually i gotta tell you charles i i think i told you this in private but um um you know when you were interviewing me for the job um because yeah this all this compliance offer had to be written you had to be a properly managed project because you know it was just such a you know it was just it just grew really you know really a lot um in a short amount of time so yeah and that was i&#39;m i&#39;m very honored to say that was you know was my team that that uh uh developed this software for us and you know and and then we&#39;re we were able to do the the pre-sale with nycp software which was a a very involving job it was you know we did a lot a lot we wrote we wrote the whole application in meteor i remember that and it was we wrote over 300 pages of documentation just for the it was one of the largest meteor applications i ever it was a horrible choice of a framework for we have a history of that this company being like what is the worst possible choice for a framework to build something and i remember costa and his uh his wife were like you should just use it python and wufoo forms and do everything with like a centralized we&#39;re like no we&#39;re gonna write a bespoke meteor application and it&#39;s all just gonna work out amazing and be turnkey and they have this thing called galaxy it&#39;s gonna make it so great yeah yeah charles um thank you for that um it was it was uh fun yeah that that is the word fun um well we did it you know we did it yeah we we it&#39;s uh then that&#39;s what we do in this company you know we we make their we make our choices and we live with them and we you know we we we finish things we we start things we finish things um yeah so um i remember actually uh this is back when you know you still had the chance to interview everybody who was joining the company because you were still you know a couple of 15 people you interviewed me um uh over skype and um i remember uh i remember that conversation vividly because we should program an hour and um i remember that you were telling me these great things you know that we&#39;re gonna do and you said dan you know what this company is going to do big things you know we&#39;re going to create this really great ecosystem we&#39;re going to create one of the best blockchain in the world it&#39;s going to be you know science driven it&#39;s going to be an ecosystem it&#39;s going to be a company that&#39;s going to have hundreds of people in it you know um and and you know and this is this is me coming from you know the trauma of the dot-com crash and the years that followed you know the you know it was like it was like fallout you know the game you know just roaming the wasteland of the ice you know um and and here comes this guy um younger than me um you know telling me that we&#39;re gonna do these things these great things you know and and and i&#39;m a skeptic you know and i have a really really good [ __ ] of me you know it&#39;s i mean you can try and [ __ ] me but it&#39;s and it might seem like i&#39;m falling for it but i really don&#39;t and when charles when you told me these things i was thinking to myself you know my [ __ ] meter should go off because he&#39;s telling me these grand visions of just you know changing the world and but then i was thinking you know what but just something tells me it&#39;s not it&#39;s it&#39;s the real deal you know and yeah and that&#39;s that&#39;s really why i i you know decided to invest so much of my time and and faith and what and what we do you know um really i gotta tell you charles you know you you gave me that you know you gave me uh um that drive you know the the thing that i was looking for you know the the the division to follow to to to strive towards um and it started with that interview uh that started with that conversation we had and where i said to myself why isn&#39;t my [ __ ] meter going off because this guy is talking big big things you know i should be right away saying okay all right you know like give me ten percent of that would be cool and in the back of my mind i said okay just to be on the safe side let me not get my hopes high really really high up let&#39;s just say i&#39;ll be happy with 40 of what charles just told me well charles pretty much all of it came true so you know what the hell man like what can you do let&#39;s talk about the business development here so you did project management for that that whole thing and that that was incredibly difficult sketchy time because we we had to do things that had never been done before and we were doing them in japanese but then i was trying to also build a science and engineering company and who the hell you know we had no name no brand no reputation like iohk like hong kong is like you&#39;re a white guy like what&#39;s going on you&#39;re doing something in japan and it&#39;s in the cryptocurrency space and we&#39;re like no man it&#39;s legit i promise you and it&#39;s like okay hire your first wave of academics in ironically of all places ukraine so i went to pavel&#39;s conference there and we got roman olynykov and we also brought in mario langerra at the same time and through mario we got bernardo david and bernardo and mario and roman were just enough for us to convince aguilos to take it seriously and we had the greek connection with nicos bentanitus and so nicos nicos met actually aguilas through vasily zikas so nicos went to rpi that&#39;s where he got his phd and uh he went and talked to facilities and he&#39;s like oh we&#39;re gonna be so great you know this company is gonna be so big and if you still just like i&#39;m not the man you need to know the man you need is agados he&#39;s a big guy and if you can get agados everything will be great and so we spent a whole year trying to seduce aguilos and he&#39;s like fine i&#39;ll write a paper with you where&#39;s like it&#39;s going to be the best paper of all time and the problem was that uh roman was not really the right kind of cryptographer for that paper and mario had been working at a brazilian bank for a long time so he hadn&#39;t been doing research for a while so he was just getting back into the swing of things and his background was like hash functions and symmetric crypt he had no blockchain experience at all and bernardo was good but he was an alcoholic you know like even an alcoholic for brazilians so he partied man and he was a partying graduate student and you know sometimes he would be there sometimes you&#39;d not be there so this is like the worst team ever to read a paper with but we said to agolas like trust us this is going to work and we wrote the original our boris protocol with him so we were doing all that and then we were still trying to figure out how to be an engineering company and ours and we had brought in richard wilde had brought in um sarah kell right at that time and i i was i knew a lot about scala and python and i knew a little bit about haskell and i thought haskell would be a cool language and sarah kell we gave him a project i i&#39;ll never forget we gave them rs coin do that go do rs coin and uh that&#39;s your trial and if you guys are really good there uh we&#39;ll go ahead and you know give you the billy bill byron for cardano so sarah cal uh went and implemented rs coin we went to corfu greece did you did you come with us to corfu i can&#39;t remember actually um no and but uh corfu so i was being interviewed right before corfu and i was actually gonna company right but corfu is uh came right as my interview process was about to end so i actually had to wait for you guys to come back from corfu okay which ironically actually my my honeymoon destination that&#39;s that that&#39;s where i went on honeymoon with my wife right so core food yeah so corvo agrees and uh they showed off to george sinesies and sarah michael john the two authors of rs coin were there and they loved it they&#39;re all wow this is a great implementation so we said oh okay well they did that and shouldn&#39;t be too hard uh there was haskell bitcoin at the time and i said let&#39;s use that as a template and of course they came and [ __ ] everything up it was it was like it was like just put your hopes and dreams in a blender and then try to put them slowly back together after leaving it on puree for a while it was they were too young we were too young but i remember our city actually interviewed you and you tried tried to do an interview with haskell and i don&#39;t think you had ever written a single line of haskell in your entire life what was that interview like i i wasn&#39;t in it so i don&#39;t um so i um so the last time i i worked in a functional programming language was with lisp um and that&#39;s you know old people language you know if you&#39;re really old and and and middle aged like me and you&#39;ve been in i.t long enough you&#39;ve heard horror stories about lisp lisp was actually used for uh robotics and so the reason why i knew lisp was because back in my late teens i was brilliant to robotics as well and i bought a um a set of servo motors that were around by a terminal that was run on lisp right and so um that was the only interaction i had with a functional programming language i mostly worked on object oriented you know in java and cnc plus plus well java um and uh yeah and so what i did was we you know haskell this was about hassle uh what i did was i just took a really really long crash course in haskell um just just three days of nothing but just a cramming haskell and trying to get my my mind around uh you know lazy equations and and you know uh uh you know just why can&#39;t i get you know an output midway through come through the compiler what is that to you know why don&#39;t wait till the end to get an output why does the will not have anything in it midway through because you know in java you would set up you know set up checkpoints to check you know different stages of execution when you&#39;re writing a program right so like that&#39;s how we troubleshoot in java you know and set up checkpoints and i would say okay so here this thing that the variable is saying it&#39;s got this in it you know and now it&#39;s this now it&#39;s this you know you would read the readout you can&#39;t do that in haskell so in haskell you know doesn&#39;t have anything in it until the very end and uh yeah just it was really i mean i wrapped my mind around it but it felt wrong charles it felt so wrong you know well to be fair be fair at the type of haskell arcini and you know most of we were writing was actually wrong by the haskell standards as well uh i i tried to read that code so many times and i was like i i guess i&#39;m just not a haskell guy that&#39;s what it left then i talked to haskell guys like eric de castro this is like well i guess i&#39;m not a haskell guy either because where eric had to fix all the all the code those were crazy times though those were absolutely crazy times what was amazing about is we were working so hard like we brought all these engineers together every day was like a 16 hour 18 hour day and then you had guys like chico crypto and others coming out and saying we just went on vacation for two years and worked on ethereum classic oh yeah it just blew my [ __ ] mind i was like [ __ ] you no we were legitimately working hard and legitimately writing code and these things and actually trying to build cardano and deliver something to market and build an engineering and a science company it was horribly difficult uh all those things and etc was kind of a side thing and we actually outsourced it to a a a bonus addis team called atex a completely independent firm that worked on that while the core of the company uh was working on haskell and i tried to recruit galway they were my first firm i went to so we we had sarah kell to start with and then we went to galwa which was an american firm they do a lot of defense contracting and like drone software and formal methods and one of the founders of haskell um john launchberry created it and we went to galway we spent three months trying to convince them to work with us and they kept saying sure and then they said no and sure and now and it was so annoying so then we went to well typed ironically because we couldn&#39;t get the network stack to work properly and we said hey you guys did cloud haskell can you could you you know like do some consulting one or two months duncan and he said oh sure it&#39;ll only take a month that was like four years ago they were still here still working on things so yeah port duncan uh yeah but he had a lot of fun anyway yeah and i mean he i mean he&#39;s still with us he&#39;s a brilliant guy and i just remember that you know when he just joined us you know duncan is a really you know colorful guy you know he&#39;s a very fun guy you know and very like you know um really easy going you know like uh you know that&#39;s not your typical you know um i.t person you know uh kind of looks like you know he should be in lord of the rings or something you know right you know he was an actor he actually played the count and everything for the three musketeers and so he he did a lot of classical acting in scotland well he he&#39;s he&#39;s i mean he&#39;s very well spoken and you can actually tell when somebody&#39;s been uh you know trained by a voice coach you know actually took voice lessons as well um and it&#39;s you know it&#39;s a thing you know it&#39;s uh to be able to speak articulate properly to to pronunciate and things like that is it&#39;s not that easy it doesn&#39;t come naturally to some people and so i remember duncan when he just joined he was really you know this jolly duncan and joking around and you know and this and that we slowly crush his soul dad if we slowly crushed it i remember i remember a year later so this this this is you know this is malta this is our our uh meeting in malta you know he&#39;s just jolly duncan having fun going to clubs with us you know stealing pirate hats he stole a pirate hat in a uh in a club in malta um but he gave it back later but you know um and uh you know a year later we&#39;re in lisbon and you see this dunking you know clinching to it to to a pint and database like this what is this i know i know i know yeah it was like the requiem for a dream where you go from uh spring to summer and eventually eventually he&#39;s losing an arm in a prison somewhere exactly exactly it was it was it was kind of like that you know i mean he he found himself later you know he he went back up to to uh jolly old duncan yeah but that was you know a year later was just you know this jolly duncan was just really you know tearing his hair out clenching to his beard duncan um so yeah that was that was fun though okay so you went into the business development side and this is what you&#39;re doing now so you you&#39;re the guy we sent to georgia and my first time in my life going to the country of georgia i met the prime minister they took me on a wine tour i got to hang out at a castle and a vineyard how how did you pull that off i mean we&#39;re you&#39;re kind of like the special forces for our business development the eastern bloc we what we do is we parachute dan in and and within like a month i i can i can do whatever i want you know i got diplomatic immunity and it&#39;s lethal weapon too it&#39;s it&#39;s just crazy so let&#39;s talk georgia so what what happened there and and how did you open up the country of georgia first off how did you even know to open up the country of georgia like what was the what was the entry point for that well uh in the early days of of actual um you know um i guess targeted business development in in iohk where actually i was doing business development you know i wasn&#39;t doing also doing business development but i was actually on business development right um was back when we didn&#39;t really have a big you know big business development team at all in fact you were doing most of the business development you know uh you charles you know you were going to conferences and you had all these people give you cards and talk and you know trying to do this stuff and of course you know for you it&#39;s impossible to follow up on these things i mean yeah i just did all the gosh and then josh would have put him in the paper shredder and i&#39;m just kidding well actually no what what happened to me um you know i i came on to and and after you know after the pre-sale project was over um i did you know i did a few you know different things and at iohk i uh i then took it upon myself to bring the teams together because we still had kind of a siloed um layout at that point between the different teams and what i did was i i put together the weekly technical report which was actually the first an internal report that i created for you and and the rest of the stakeholders at the company and um i then created uh actually that point daily touch points i negotiated between all the different teams and i said look guys you know you guys need to talk and work together and at that point actually we had some team leaders that didn&#39;t even really speak to other team leaders before ever um you know the the i mean over email of course but not really like in a meeting a conversation where they spoke to each other you know and so i negotiated between uh sarah cal and those guy and a few other guys and uh you know darko was already in that was already with us at that point uh right phillip uh phillip kong was at at that point um you know i couldn&#39;t remember darko&#39;s name the first time he joined and i called him drogar we were in a meeting yeah and i was like what the [ __ ] is that guy&#39;s name and it&#39;s like drogart what do you think he&#39;s like it&#39;s taco and i always remember donnie darko and i never forgot at that point yeah darko&#39;s got an awesome name i mean it it it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s dark oh magic but it&#39;s actually you know when you look at it first it&#39;s it seems like it says dark darko magic right you know so it&#39;s dark magic um yeah but georgia georgia you put all you put all the reports together so i can&#39;t remember how do we meet yorgi and how did we get into that whole circle so um all these emails that you would get would get forwarded me all these hundreds of emails that you would get and i would have to go through these emails and i would have to figure out you know what makes sense what does it make sense um and this one came across your desk and then again made itself with made its way to my desk and then before that actually we had a few people uh you know contact me from georgia speaking about georgia through different contacts that i had i think that was um that was the bit fury guys right because they were uh this was um this was bitfury but even before bit fury uh some people that worked with emergo in london i was actually communicating with and they introduced me to some people in in um in georgia and i said by john um and so i spoke to them and we all you know we have this common ground because you know it was all like you know uh ptsd of being you know former soviet republics and former soviet you know so we have this you know uh uh um uh you know uh the same trauma that we that we&#39;re working past you know being you know being former soviets so we&#39;ll have some some connection point one of those connection points is mostly everybody&#39;s passion and so since i speak russian this is my native language um i was able to you know really communicate with them a lot faster and um he or he actually sent you an email and just basically saying that uh come to georgia ready to do business and something above that email um you know it was a very simple email you know and i looked and was like georgia there it is again you know it just came up a couple of times i heard a few things about you i&#39;m like there it is again let me see what this is about right and uh i scheduled a call with him i scheduled a call with york we spoke english at first and then i said hey you speak russian right it&#39;s like oh yeah yeah yeah yeah and so we just switched to russian you know it was like a homecoming he&#39;s like oh okay oh you speak russian oh great because you know now we can really talk um you know at that point you know we made a connection you know because all these other connections that i had it was like oh yeah but sounds cool okay oh you know some people there okay cool like you know with uh giorgi it was you know we made a connection and and one of the things that i do well is um and this is genuine you know this is not [ __ ] you know um i do make a human connection um the people that i do business with i connect with as people and not just as kind of business objects for me to make money from um and that&#39;s the best way to do business i believe uh because it really helps you understand who you&#39;re doing business with uh really be able to read the person and really understand if that person that you&#39;re doing business with is on the same level uh as you are both fiscally and and ethically because business ethics is a big thing for me and as a company um and so with george was like that um i believe that you know he had something there and so um i remember i came to you at that point after speaking to him a few times you know we just really brainstormed a few times saying okay well what can we do we did there&#39;s this there&#39;s that there&#39;s that and then you were in uh i believe we were in tokyo at that point and i sat down with you at the table and i said hey hey charles you know there is some interesting going on in georgia um i want to check it out the only thing i knew about georgia was stalin was from georgia i was like i think that&#39;s where wine came from and stalin came from so the one of the two ain&#39;t bad [Laughter] right right so so i i well but be growing up in the soviet union i knew about georgia i knew it was you know uh a very plentiful and rich country a lot of really good potential over there the people were great you know the georgians were always you know really highly regarded and in in her culture you know they&#39;re always very you know very friendly very hospitable people and so um i said you know i want to check it out i want to see what&#39;s going on over there because you know uh because i&#39;m being told a lot of really great things about it so um i made a trip over there after we spoke and you said you know yeah dan do do it that that&#39;s what you that&#39;s what you&#39;re supposed to do that&#39;s your job going going and i i think around the same time you also brought in the the new balance deal where we did the authentication dealership yeah that&#39;s right yeah that&#39;s right that&#39;s again that was a kind of uh you know by the way in the middle of the night received email if you have any interest give me a call and it gave them a call it&#39;s like two o&#39;clock in the morning and we were talking about you know stickers and second-hand markets and whatnot um yeah and george i just went down there uh with the help of giorgi uh he introduced me to a few people i really started really getting it uh we worked on it a little bit more you know just kind of brought it back in huddled you know and uh really thought about okay so what makes sense uh you know which sectors make sense and and we just uh you know built up a relationship over there you know we went over there like we do with everything else we uh we invented education i did um i did several uh speeches over there at the local colleges about what we&#39;re about uh we brought out um brought in a few of our people so we&#39;re there you know um uh esko came out with us peter k peter ghazi came out with me as well uh we did uh we did lectures on i believe it was orboros at the local universities and uh we also worked with the the local um innovation authority gita georgia innovation authority um and uh you know we invested in technology we really you know we kind of try to you know show that we&#39;re serious about the region and yeah it really kind of uh you know opened up a lot of doors for us you know the ministry of education uh really you know kind of made friends with us um other ministries uh the prime minister took notice and yeah we just cultivated this related these relationships and uh you know um did a lot of a lot of work in the background by the time he came down there which was about i think i was twenty yeah 2019 july july of 2019 i believe was when i came because i went to israel right after we&#39;re going to uh to georgia and i remember the prime minister and it&#39;s the first time i ever did a state visit where i met the prime minister in blue jeans and tennis shoes i wasn&#39;t trying to be a [ __ ] but i i was having a gout attack while i was there and i was like is this your first thing i i i you can&#39;t eat red meat and drink wine like the only thing georgia has to offer is red meat and wine and it&#39;s all amazing and good and and they say well you should probably you know lay off that while you&#39;re here so i i could barely walk and and i hear i&#39;m trying to meet the prime minister and i&#39;ve been i&#39;m at tennis shoes we&#39;re doing the state visit taking a picture and i felt like a jackass you know that that entire time but the hospitality was absolutely amazing yeah it was so much fun uh going around georgia yeah it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s a great place um you know i&#39;m really glad that we&#39;re there that we&#39;re doing what we&#39;re doing um um you know uh the project that or and but potentially you know future projects we&#39;re gonna be doing over there i believe that it&#39;s a a country that&#39;s striving to uh truly uh you know uh right it turned things on its head as well you know i mean they they were right after the soviet you know the soviet era ended uh georgia was actually uh it was a really difficult place to live in it was highly corrupt uh the uh the government there that was left over there was basically just remnants of the soviet government but a lot worse because now they had control over everything locally and so you know the local uh the back then it was the militia force which the police did which is you know which lease was actually the criminal element because they because they were you know controlling everything uh and so georgia and uh and one generation cleansed itself of pretty much all of the corruption all the intercorruption uh that was going on over there um this is this this is a country that is considered one of the least corrupt countries in the world now as far as governments and and enterprises they fired all their police officers in the entire country and trading again and parallel police force it was just extraordinary the anti-corruption there and what what was that financement what was his name uh that we had dinner with who was behind india yeah yeah yeah a guy i love that guy and he&#39;s the historian all rolled up into one and george is one of those countries that was like literally at war with with everybody at some point in their history they they didn&#39;t take crap from people and they actually had a very famous uh queen her name was queen tamar uh well tamara but they they masque they made it a masculine title and she doubled the size of uh georgia through conquest she&#39;d go out and battle and just kill people and was like the ultimate badass that&#39;s right yeah and everybody wanted to take a piece of georgia you know all their neighbors you know turkey was on their ass for centuries you know the ottomans um in fact you know there&#39;s still a lot of uh i mean a lot of turf influence over there as i know they have uh in the middle of felicia have still have the turkish baths they&#39;re these uh you know ottoman era bath houses uh you know because there&#39;s natural springs um in fact the name bilisi uh translates roughly translates into a war warm warm spring like as in you know body of water spring uh and from old georgian and yeah so it&#39;s it&#39;s a place to be uh great food great wine uh great scenery um a lot of different you know a lot of variety you can you can go skiing you can go to the beach because um uh patumi is another very large city in georgia it&#39;s on the black sea um so yeah it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s a beautiful country these beautiful black sands and batumi absolutely beautiful um there&#39;s a lot of really nice things here so we&#39;re doing a credential verification program in georgia and there&#39;s a good chance that that can grow to part of the national id system payments tourism tourism is the oil of georgia they only have a 3 million people but pre-covet they were getting about 10 to 12 million people visiting the country every year so and it&#39;s kind of here and here in my heart i grew up in hawaii and there&#39;s like a hundred thousand people in maui but three hundred thousand tourists and so the the population the will double or triple based upon the amount of tourists who are there so it&#39;s always fun to to see something the tourism business anyway dan we could talk forever but we&#39;ve been going for about two and a half hours well i figured this is a great place to kind of end it because you went full circle you started in ukraine you went on this great sojourn from austria to italy as a refugee to philly and kind of your parents got to live the american dream then you tried to live the american dream and decided to go and live the japanese dream that&#39;s right i really found great success in georgia of all places you know going basically back to the home right uh and uh that&#39;s all around the entire world uh the hard way so it&#39;s a hell of a story if you think about it yeah it&#39;s um it was quite a journey um i didn&#39;t really trade any of it for anything you know because it made me the person that i am today i know that you know kind of maybe sounds a bit cliche uh to say that but it is it is what it is um you know uh i would not be where i am if not for all these things and um i gotta say and i i keep saying this charles you know for me like you keep saying for myself uh being stuck not having uh uh you know one of the things i guess did uh inherit from growing up in the communist regime is the five-year plan mentality right what are you gonna do in five years right what is your five-year plan um and uh not to have a proper five-year plan just irritates me as a person you know i feel like i&#39;m disorganized to feel like i am don&#39;t have a grasp on my life and um you know really being able to grow this grow this ecosystem with you because yes you know but you have invested up just an enormous amount of your time and energy and health into the cardano ecosystem and it&#39;s growing this company um and i&#39;ve seen it and i&#39;ve seen you i&#39;ve seen you in all states you know i&#39;ve seen you i i&#39;ve seen a happy charles i&#39;ve seen an angry charles i&#39;ve seen the charles girls you know charles that&#39;s you know with you with your gout and everything like that and able to walk and pain and you know uh old states you know i mean god you the thing that i set up in israel right after georgia you came out and you did that after being bedridden for two days you literally crawled out of bed to do a meet-up um and george in in israel in tel aviv and that was i mean that that was the year you&#39;re you&#39;re a [ __ ] trooper man i mean you are um and and that really is it&#39;s it&#39;s it means the world to me it&#39;s the world to me to be able to say that i was with charles and we created this fantastic awesome great thing together you know this cardano ecosystem together and um it&#39;s not just a job for me i really believe in what we do you know that&#39;s what keeps me here you know i believe in what we do i believe that what we do will be around for for generations and it&#39;s inspiring and it gives me it gives me meaning and it gives me drive and i really really thank you for for giving me that opportunity to be a part of something like this well dan you&#39;re part of the family and forever part of the history of uh cardano and iog and we got a lot of great business to do in the future and things are getting fun smart contracts are coming soon to cardano and there&#39;s i think over 110 deals in the commercial pipeline so we&#39;ll see how many of those convert over and some of them you won yourself and georgia in particular it&#39;s just a great place to test products and we&#39;re real excited to see where that goes but it&#39;d also be really cool to do something finally in ukraine maybe you can completely go back home i yeah we uh we stayed out of that one for a while but boy it&#39;s uh it&#39;s a great country too thank you so much for coming on people of iog you know we just love having you here and it&#39;s great for our people to tell their own stories and where they came from thank you very much for having charles and uh yeah we&#39;re um you know for everybody watching out there um we do what we do because we love it and we&#39;re gonna keep doing it so you know all of you in the ecosystem that uh that are part of the ecosystem thank you and we&#39;re working hard for you to push this thing to new heights and as paul harvey would say that&#39;s the rest of the story thank you guys so much

MACHINE-GENERATEDSOURCE ↗

People of IOG: Dan Friedman

Related talks