Chris Mailander:

If you want to predict the outcome of a decision, understand how someone thinks, know where they came from, know what experiences shaped them, know what they value, know their aspirations, and then you know where they're going. This is Chris Mailander.

When I was a boy, I grew up on a small country farm in the middle of nowhere, Iowa. Our house was at the end of a white limestone lane that fell off of the white pole road, which crisscrossed the state for a period of time before Interstate 80 was built.

And yet still hundreds, if not thousands of people every day pass before the house.

And the greatest excitement for me is when somebody drove up that lane. They were coming to tell a story. They were telling about their lives and their beliefs and what they treasured and what they loved and what they feared. It was exciting.

And I came to sit beside dad and mom at a round table in the kitchen as we broke bread to hear their story. It could have been the friend of my father's who would drive up in a red Chevy pickup truck. He always had a six pack of cold beer in the back. It was always past blue ribbon and he always pulled the tab off and had a salt shaker on the dash and put a little salt on the lip of that beer, for some reason, that was his style.

And he'd tell stories like the ginger Irishman that he was in Iowa and I would laugh. It could have been the couple that had spent several years in Ghana with the Peace Corps coming back to tell their stories of adventure and how they saw a king and a queen in a procession while they were there. Me imagining that experience abroad and in a vastly different culture with different ideas and a history and a legacy and a future. It was the old broken down cowboy that would show up that most people would pass by, but he had a glint in his eye and he had a knack for getting thoroughbreds to run really well. These are the stories that enlivened me and enriched the experience. And I remember them all the way through to today. And that's what this is about.

This is about having those kinds of conversations with interesting people to understand where they've been, what they value, what they treasure, what they aspire to, what they fear. And when we understand that, we understand them and we understand where they're going.

Eliot Puplett:

Thank you, Chris. I thought I grew up in the countryside. You really grew up in the countryside,

Chris Mailander:

I certainly did. Elliot, it's great to have you here. I'm excited to hear about your journey from the seaside town in the UK and over to America and have very bold aspirations for what Medici AI is and what it can do in a transformative impact. But let's start where it all began. So take us back to Eastbourne.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, so I mean, as you say, Eastbourne is a very like sleepy seaside town. I had like, I think the most traditional middle class English upbringing anyone could have hoped for. You know, my my mom had like, she did do some work. She worked at a company called Farm Advertiser, which basically like sold farm equipment through a magazine at the place where she kept horses.

And then she also like, you know, used to look after me. My dad was a financial advisor.

So you know, very dull, not at all like their youth. I they have both of them had kind of interesting careers.

But yeah, I grew up in this small town and when I was about nine years old, my parents decided they wanted to move out into the countryside, which is nothing as dramatic as the Iowa countryside. I thought of it as moving to the middle of nowhere until I came to the US and realized there really is a middle of nowhere. was, I don't know, 20 minutes closer to London moving into the countryside.

But I grew up on an equine farm, which was really nice and very sort of bucolic English pretty when the weather was good, which was only occasionally. yeah, I think I sort of grew up with this very kind of just classical, I went to a lucky enough to go to a private school. My first private school was very traditional English. I mean, we're talking like very Captain Gown kind of thing, old school Victorian, Tom Brown school days kind of place.

And then I was moved to a really like, it was a private school, but it was a little bit more hippie ish called a battle Abbey. I don't think they would think of themselves as hippie ish, but in retrospect, it was a little bit more unusual.

Chris Mailander:

So, so let me get this straight. So you start out, I mean, it's, it's, it's very bucolic and my, dad was a horseman, as it were. And the dreams were always of a Kentucky farm and you model after that, or better yet, he was a... He loved Scotland and the Scottish way.

And we had the border collies and the horses. And he used to go to races in England. And that was the ideal.

So your journey kind of starts out with your mom running a stable and in the bucolic English countryside in a private school with the you proper dress and attire. I mean, it's a movie setting for kids. I mean, like school, you little tie and stripy blazer and everything. I mean, you had it all

But then something shifted, right? So so tell me about Battle Abbey.

So you're in a school that I believe is a you're probably, you know, solidly middle class English and on that pipeline that leads somewhere to Oxford or Cambridge or one of the prestigious universities and shifted.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, it's very true, especially from my first school. think had I gone the traditional track that a lot of my friends did from my primary school, I would have gone on to Eastbourne College and then Eastbourne College is a feeder school for Oxford and Cambridge and Durham. I didn't do well at East, I didn't do well at St. Andrews because at the time we didn't know but I had dyspraxia and a little dyslexia as well. I just other like ADHD, you know, the whole I had the whole Gambit was great.

But it wasn't till we moved to they moved my parents moved to Battle Abbey and then they realized that I, they kind of started testing for those things, realized I had them and I started getting kind of the education I needed rather than the education I was getting prior, which was like a very like rigid classical education. Right. How old are you at this time? think I was like nine, 10, something like that. So it was was early, early enough.

Chris Mailander:

Sure.

Eliot Puplett:

And then at was very good at allowing kids to kind of explore things that they wanted to do. You did a bit, you know, like most schooling at young ages, you do a bit of everything. But they had an amazing theater department, which I loved. And I do, I was very active in,

I loved the English department, the history department. It was a really cool place to go to school. And on top of that, I mean, it was in such a historic site too. Like if you just like Google battle Abbey, mean, it is the Abbey that was built on the site of the battle of Hastings. So the oldest part of the school is from 1066, like literally. And the younger, the younger parts of the school are from like the, you know, 12 through 1400s. really, really cool building.

Chris Mailander:

But it's a non-traditional in the, traditional UK system.

Eliot Puplett:

They still followed the same core structures and examine the problem with the UK educational system. Unfortunately, is that essentially it is mostly run by how the government deems education should be run.

So everyone has to follow these sort of standardized test situations, not dissimilar to New York state or somewhere like that. But it was very, they just took a bit more of a open minded approach. It was less about can we get you into university and which university can we get you into?

And it was more about like, Hey, like what's going to work for you? What kind of career are you interested in? I think if you look at my class group, that I would have had at somewhere like Eastbourne College, much more traditional versus the class group I had at Battle Abbey. I had like the kids of farmers in my school. I had people from the arts community and people from, you know... you had your traditional like, you know, lawyers, bankers, all that kind of stuff, kids as well.

But it was a much broader spectrum of people from a much more sort of unique set of backgrounds that were very, very differentiated from each other. I was very lucky to go to school with people who really came from very different backgrounds to me.

Chris Mailander:

That's interesting. So in a traditional environment, you're probably going to school with people that are in your same class, same ilk, families know each other. There's a certain amount of homogeneity to it. And then about Abby brings in different class backgrounds, beliefs…

Eliot Puplett:

Absolutely. I had a pretty strong scholarship program as well. So you had a lot of kids from more underprivileged backgrounds who were able to get schooling there.

And yeah, was, think also because it was that much deeper into the countryside. Again, I mean, the UK is tiny. We're talking about the distance of maybe a 15 to 20 minute drive, but for some reason, it seems to make a really substantial difference in a way that it just doesn't in the US. I think we don't really have suburban culture in the UK in the same way.

So I was really going to school with people who, you know, these were not urban families. You know, when I was in Eastbourne, a lot of people's parents had like day jobs in London in the city in the financial district, and they would then, you know, have their kids in like this, you know, very posh... private school in the Southeast at Battle Abbey. It really was like people who had set up shops in farms or did like, you at one of my friends parents was one of the leading stunt men in the UK. You know, really he lived in a barn basically like out in the, they had this beautiful big, big farm with loads of like woodlands and everything. We had people who were singing teachers, kids, just a really, really random selection of people.

Chris Mailander:

And how was that transition? You're nine, 10 years old or so..

Eliot Puplett:

I think I loved it. I obviously don't remember too much about the physical transition. My parents said that I went from being very closed off and being very unhappy to all of sudden just being in my element, having a great time. So clearly it worked for me. It was a school that really worked for.

Chris Mailander:

And Battle Abbey goes all the way through high school, upper school.

Eliot Puplett:

Yes, yes. All the way to year 12, is also known as upper sixth in old school British terminology, which is the year before university. Yeah, we'll have to translate from time to time.

Yeah, it's also called college, which is really confusing to Americans because we do college and then go to university, whereas and then also go to a college at university. It's all over the place.

Chris Mailander:

Yeah, fantastic. So tell me about the curriculum. You mentioned that you were particularly interested in theater and English and history.

Eliot Puplett:

I think it's helpful if I can explain also the UK examination system, because basically you've got this three layers of exams that you go through from your youth all the way up.

There's obviously there's ones when you're tiny as well, but those don't really matter. You've got at year nine, you have, I don't know if they still do them, they used to called SATs, which I think stood for Scholastic Appstitude Testing. It's basically the same as SAT stands for in the US. Those are kind of like a measure of how you're doing. They used to be way more important by the time I got into school. I'm not really sure why they still had them, to be honest. And then the next two years of your life, so years 10 and 11, are spent on GCSEs which are general certificate secondary education, you quite often will hear older people talk about them as O levels.

They used to be called O levels or ordinary levels. Right. So those are where you narrow yourself down to a set of subjects. There's core subjects like every school is a little different. Our school, we had to do the three sciences. We had to do math. We had to do English. We could choose literature or language or do both. You had to do at least one language, like one non-English language. I did French. I was crap at it.

Chris Mailander:

Sure.

Eliot Puplett:

And then you had like a bunch of occasional stuff. So in my case, I mostly focus in on like English, like the English subjects, I focused on music and theater because I just really loved those subjects.

And then also sports as well was part of your curriculum. I think much more strongly than it is in the US. The focus on sports, doesn't have the same weighting that American schools do where you have these like vast athletes go and do these amazing college programs. That's not a thing in the UK, but the focus on everybody doing sports and being something that like is the whole class just gets involved in sort of a camaraderie building exercise is definitely was very strong about Labby.

And so, yeah, so those are GCSEs.

And then after GCSEs, which you do two years on, you go into A levels or some people would then leave school and go into, you know, an apprenticeship or they'd go on to, you know, go run a family business or something like that.

So you're 16 years old when you make that decision. Some people would then leave and go on to a separate purpose-built college where you do your last two years of school. I chose to stay at battle. And then you do your last two years, which are your A levels. I spoke wrong earlier. It's actually years 12 and 13, your last two years, which is also known as sixth form. And those years, you have your first round of A levels in your first year. Most people do four subjects for that. And then you narrow that down to three subjects in your second year. And that's what you then go on and apply to university with once you're done.

So in classical European format, it's a very narrowing kind of thing. You've really picked what you're going to do by the time you go to university. And then you will apply to university for one course. So I had friends who applied for psychology at Oxford or to do English literature at Durham. And you're very narrowed. And you're going to study that one course at university for three years.

Chris Mailander:

So it's really a pipeline. And that pipeline gets narrower and narrower and narrower as you progress to those various levels.

And then when you make that transition from high school or college over to university, it gets tighter as well. And you make an election about what you'll study for the next three years. And that's it.

Eliot Puplett:

Yes. And that was the catalyst for me for coming to the States. Because by the time I'd gotten through the end of school, I'd focused in on theater and music. I loved that. I knew I wanted to go do something in that world. Originally, I was thinking maybe either writing

But I'd also sort of started thinking about maybe I wanted to go do some production work, like the business end of the theater. Because I was always kind of interested in sort of the business of theater.

And I wasn't, I didn't have the most artistic streak in me, you many more better artists out there.

So I started looking at universities in the UK. But I couldn't really find something I wanted because I was like, well, I want to study theater and music and you know, the business side of this.

And some of the drama schools did it, but it was really hard to find a course that would fit all of that because you're so narrowed into you have to do this one thing. So then I was thinking, okay, well, maybe I'll go work in the industry.

And I happened to have a family friend who was a producer.

And I went and did like a quick internship with him. I enjoyed the work, but it was I just didn't feel like I had enough knowledge at that point. I was like, I feel like I need to I'd like to go to university. want I wanted to go and study at a major level and it was at that point that my parents had just suggested, like, well, why don't you think about going abroad for university? Just like, you know, my dad was very big on this idea that university isn't important in terms of education. It's important in terms of like personal development. He was like, so why don't you, I just clarify, he didn't go to university. So he just, he was like, if it's something you want to do and it's something I'll support you either way, if you want to go to it or all on it, if you don't want to go.

Chris Mailander:

So tell me a little bit more about your dad. Cause he started out, on a lower economic strata and left at 16 and had a very interesting life and journey.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, he did. He was, so son of a baker grew up just outside of London. Big family. I think he was one of seven. Oh, I don't know. It's one of those classic, like, you know, early 20th century. He was born in 1947. But you don't know. think it was seven or eight. was something I haven't to this day. I don't think I've met all my aunts and uncles actually, because they're of separate ways. Yeah.

Yeah, I've definitely met a couple of them. Once a couple of them died before I was born. But yeah, so he grew up in a very large family. mean, like we're talking like serious two up two down kind of house meaning two rooms on the top floor two rooms on the bottom floor.

So it was basically like, I think some of the boys are based all the kids basically in one room and the parents from the other I think is basically how it functioned.

And when he was 16 years old, he decided to move to London and went to school called Westminster Technical College, which I don't think exists anymore, which at the time was a pretty solid chef school. He went and he learned the culinary arts.

And then by the time he'd graduated, I think that was probably a year later, two years, I don't know how long the course was, one to two years. He ended up working at the Cornhort Hotel in London, which today is still like one of the most prestigious hotels. And he was a pastry chef there.

Chris Mailander:

Okay.

Eliot Puplett:

Which I mean, it's it sounded amazing. I mean, this is back in an era where like, you know, I think they still had like coal fired ovens. They still were running some of the coal fired ovens up into the 60s.

So yeah, yeah, he was in London in the 60s, which was very cool. Because I think he had a my aunt Diana had gone into the music industry.

And so they used to go to all these parties. He met like the Beatles and like, you know, like Dusty Springfield and all of the Kate Bush and all these really interesting people within the milieu of like London society at that time, because of because his because my aunt's connections and he eventually went on with a friend of his to start a group of seafood restaurants in the southeast of England and moved into that. That went through until they decided to sell the business. I think after that he kind of was trying to figure out what he wanted to do. A friend of his had been like, hey, you have I have this opportunity to come and run this sports club called the Saffron's which at the time was doing really badly.

It's a big old Victorian sports club in Eastbourne. And so he'd moved down from London to that point to run these seafood restaurants. And then he had basically said, yeah, sure, I'll come and I'll, you know, I'll, CEO this, this business and direct it and see if we can turn it around. And at the same time, he'd also started doing a little bit of property investment. He bought an antique room of all things with some of the money he'd gotten from the business. To this day, some of the antiques my parents have.

Because he used to sometimes instead of taking rent, he just get cool antiques he liked. And yeah, then he he met my mom because she was his secretary. Total scandal of these days. know, be scandalous. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So she's a bit younger as well, right? Yeah, she was she was 13 years younger than him. So it was a scandal. Yeah, really. I mean, nowadays, I mean, that would be so not allowed. Having said that, they've been together over 40 years, so, know, clearly worked out. Yeah. Yeah. He went on and said he helped.

fix up this business. At the time, he also started a financial advisory firm with a friend of his at some point in there. I don't know when he got a psychology degree. No idea when that happened, but he did that. And then he left to go and do financial advising. And when I was born and through my childhood, that's what he was. He was a financial advisor. Also did because of his psychology background. He used to a little bit of marriage counseling as well with people. Got himself.

Chris Mailander:

I he had you coming in the door and going out with the marriage counseling and then..The financial advisory.

Eliot Puplett:

Basically, basically. think some of his clients were both actually, which is kind of funny.. But yeah, so it was, it was, was, he was a very like very entrepreneurial guy, generally speaking, he definitely set down the idea in my head as a kid that like, you know, if you really want freedom, you need to work for yourself and do your own things.

Chris Mailander:

He was quite entrepreneurial, quite frankly, he had several different careers and reinvented himself on several occasions.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, no, he really did. think he's to the degree that he could ever be a Renaissance man, he is a Renaissance man, he took interest in so many different things. Massive passion for education as well, I think, because he lacked a lot of formal education himself, right, he to fill in for that with his own reading and then doing additional courses and studying as he grows. So you know, he can talk about most topics and takes a general interest in most people and most stuff that goes on in the world. So

I think that was pretty formative for me as well.

Chris Mailander:

Awesome. Awesome. Tell me about your mom.

Eliot Puplett:

So she, my mom is incredibly strong character. I think she, when you meet her, seems, she comes across as like very delicate English woman. She's very sort of like, laughs at rude jokes and that kind of thing. She'll sort of like raise her eyebrows at certain situations. You're very classical in that respect. But she had an interesting childhood. I think her...

She had a family where she came from the wealth had all gone by the time she was born, but she came from a family that had been very wealthy. And my unfortunately, my grandfather, he'd inherited like a few hotels in Brighton, which is a town very close to Eastbourne. She grew up there. Unfortunately, he was an alcoholic. So he drank away most of the profits and the hotels ended up shutting down. And he died quite young. So she lost her father when she was in her, I think, in her like teens or 20s.

Chris Mailander:

Okay.

Eliot Puplett:

She didn't really talk about it much growing up. And then she also lost her mom as well, just before I was born. And she was only 30, like, you know, so she lost her parents within the space of like 10 years of each other at quite a young age for someone to lose their parents. And I think she, she always just worked hard. She knew that she wanted kids. She, I mean, my dad did not want kids and she like fought hard to get, to get me. So, you know, like that, that tells you the tenacity of the lady

Chris Mailander:

An only child, right? Only child, yes. One and done.

Eliot Puplett:

The agreement was at least one. That was the agreement. But no, was, she, mean, my entire, she was fiercely independent when I was growing up as a kid. I think she always, you when you look at, when you looked at my family, it looked very traditional. Dad's working as a financial advisor. Debbie's looking after Elliot. But realistically, I mean, she was working at the farm that she kept her horse at.

My dad got a scolding from the doctor when I was born, apparently, cause the, my mom had continued to ride horses right up till the last minute. I think that might be where the dyslexia and dyspraxia comes from to be quite honest with you. yeah...

Chris Mailander:

We're going to make medical news here that dyspraxia comes from horse riding?

Eliot Puplett:

No, I did not say, I don't, I don't say that. I don't profess to know, but, it's, I don't know. Maybe, maybe it is, maybe it is a reason. I'm sure there's some research somewhere, but, yeah, no, she was, she was always very independent. very like got on with stuff. Very little would put her down.

So I think I grew up with that force in me of being, you know, it's kind of funny. I'd like on one side, I have a parent who's very entrepreneurial, very positive outlook, just make it work, whatever you have to do, get it to work.

And on the other side, my mom acted in both as a very independent person, but as honestly, as an amazing support network for my dad as well. I mean, the amount of times that he would have business issues and she would be the one that helped him like figure it out and like would brainstorm with him ideas. Like I used to the partnership they had when I was growing I was very lucky to see that.

I know it's rare for a lot of people to have parents that are such good partners and they've really been amazing partners to each other.

Chris Mailander:

Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. So tell me a little bit about like your household. I mean, we've had some prior conversations where it was an interesting household. There was a lot of, you have a terminology, waifs and strays.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah. I think my parents always believed strongly in helping others. My dad used to have this thing he'd say, which is that like, you was, you fill in the gap, it could be the world, could be capitalism, society, the government only works if people look after each other and remember that they have a duty to each other as members in society. So he, both of them were very caring. I mean, my mom is like with, you know, I sometimes think, I don't know which one's higher, whether it's humans or animals, but like, she will literally help anybody or anything she sees. I mean, you know, we found a pigeon in the garden one time, it was hurting his foot and she brought it in and nursed it back.

I mean, that's the kind of woman she is. I think between the two of them, they used to always be out to help friends. And we had quite a few times in my childhood where friends that have fallen on hard times, family members that just needed help or going through something medical, or between apartments or something would come in and stay with them. They also did things, you know, they had quite a few investment properties. That was one of the main sources of their wealth that they developed over the years. And like,

My dad would have tenants for decades because he just wouldn't ever raise rent on anybody. know, he would like his real estate agent, like, oh, you need to raise the rent. He'd be like, well, so they're a great tenant. You know, maybe I'll put it up by like 50 bucks or I'll give them, know, but he's like, I don't want to do that until I've given them like a new stove or something like that. Right. Right

And then they would do the same with like family. Like they had fat. We've had family that would occupy their rentals and they just, you know, would give them ludicrously cheap rents. Right.

So it was any way they could help people.

And we'd always have friends staying, know, constant family dinner parties. I often say that like I didn't have a lot of family family like my parents weren't close to their siblings, right, particularly my mom's more close these days with her sisters than she was when I was when I was growing up. The closer on that side, my dad absolutely really know there's like one or two aunts and uncles that I grew up with the majority of them, they just kept themselves themselves.

But I think we we filled that void with just friends and friends, kids and like, you know, other people's always surrounded by human beings in the household. Yeah. Super interesting. Sounds similar to you actually, like people turning up at the door and sitting at the kitchen table. Yeah. I like that story you told at the beginning. That resonated with me a lot because there was always someone at the stable, especially when we moved to the countryside, someone would be around the stable. My mom would come in and be like, oh, you know, like XYZ is here. Let me put the kettle on and then we'd sit and have a cup of tea together.

Chris Mailander:

It really was the excitement growing up, you know, you're out of the country and you're in these environments and you interact with such interesting and diverse people. And I think one of the mistakes is that we look at places like that, like in Iowa and think it's monochromatic to home, homogeny, you know, is the same, the same ideologies, et cetera. Not at all. It was extraordinarily diverse when we look at how they thought about the world and, and, and, the engagement and their ups and downs and trials and tribulations. And it was fascinating.

Eliot Puplett:

I often think that in... like, because obviously, I live in New York City now. And I see a lot of... I see a mistake that people make is that they think like, the American hinterland is somehow homogenous, just because it's all, like, ethnically white people or something like that. And I'm like, sure, not. That's not the marker of homogeneity. Homogeneity is as much about thought as it is about, like how you look or your cultural background or whatever, or whatever the other monarchies are. And I think...

If I'm in a room filled with people, they could be the most diverse looking group of people in the world. But if they all think the same, there's no more diversity than there is in a country town hall in Iowa where people are arguing about their

Chris Mailander:

And I was just having a conversation yesterday with someone where by when I was growing up out there, each one of those little towns was a separate enclave in some ways because it was settled by European immigrants in different ways.

That town over there is a Danish town. There's a Dutch one. This one is literally called Norway Center. It was all the Norwegians, the Lutherans. They had different..., some were Catholics, some were Methodists, some were Lutherans. And they historically kind of kept to themselves. It was a bit clannish when they first settled because they were bringing people over. But then you have the interrelationships and intermarriage. But ideologically, was some really, there was a tremendous amount of diversity. It was subtle if you didn't know what you were looking at.

But it was profound if you did. And that was some of that that was going on. And so you these really interesting experiences. But again, like that story up front, if you knew what you were looking for, it was extraordinarily dynamic and diverse. And I think we've lost a lot of that. And it's changing, of course, with mass media and commonality. You give up that clannishness, and then I start to identify with different tribes.

Certainly some parallels to what you're talking about, is that what I'm hearing is a father who is terribly entrepreneurial and the master of reinvention and would figure out ways to make it work and a mother who is extremely caring and take care of everybody in that household that brought people in and a social ethos as well, which is, somebody's down on their luck. Let's help them out. Whether it's a conversation or a meal or a bed, we'll figure out a way to make their life a little bit better today.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah.

Chris Mailander:

Yeah, interesting. Totally agree. tell me a little bit more about like, so you go through a situation in which my, my assumption, you correct me if I'm wrong. My assumption is that you have a choice of a number of different universities in England and they represent something that you could do, but you were seen, you know, quite precocious in terms of what you wanted your experience to be and wanted to make sure that you very much charted out that experience from the time that you were 15, 16 and moving on. And there's some influences along that journey. Tell me about that journey and sorting it out and where you wanted to be.

Eliot Puplett:

I think it makes me sound far more organized than I actually was. OK, it could have been chaotic and it might have been luck, who knows, but I'm curious. No, it's, so I think what happened was by the time, to go back to what I was saying a couple of points ago.

By the time I'd finished school, it's very much you've gotten down to this one subject. And I think at that point, I was starting to feel like I'm not 100 % sure the direction. I knew I wanted to be in the theater business, at least at that point anyway. But I didn't know what end I wanted to be in. I didn't know where I wanted to go, the arts direction or the business direction. And I was like, I don't want to go and study one thing and then come out with no knowledge of the other thing, because that way I'm going to really pigeonhole myself.

So at that point, I was starting to think about what else can I do? And it was when that was when my parents said, well, have you considered going abroad for university?

And I think they had thought I was like going to go to France or, you know, Switzerland or something like that.

And I started looking at places around the world and I was sort of thinking, well, know, theater industry, where else is it huge? Oh, the United States, obviously.

And then at the time I had a math professor at school called Aaron Eckhoff was American.

And I kind of just casually said to him, I was like, Hey, like, do you think that's even possible? Could I go to the States University? And he was like, Yeah. He's like, you he's like, you know, there's thousands of universities in the US. And he started explaining this idea of like the liberal arts education to me where you can go and study multiple different subjects.

And right, you know, you might major in something, but you'll take courses from this department, this department, this department, I was like, that's what I want. I want that that choice is is what's going to work for me.

Chris Mailander:

And that's not available to you in the UK.

Eliot Puplett:

Not really. Yeah. I think having not gone through the university system in the UK, I don't know the extent to which you are able to take courses outside of your course load. don't get the feeling that it's normal, nor is it particularly easy. I think it depends. If you go to Oxbridge, Oxford, Cambridge, or Durham, or St. Andrews, one of the really historic universities, they're a little different because they have these like collegiate systems where you belong to a college and you, think you can start taking things from other topics within the college and you can also go to different lectures and stuff and you can sit in on lectures. I think you can do that, but it's not encouraged in the same way that like the American university system will literally force you to take a science class. know, it's like, Hey, you've got to your science requirement. You've got to get your, you know, English language requirement, which that's very, very different and much more like British under university education or secondary school education than it is anything else. So.

So yeah, at that point I started looking. I spoke to my parents about it. I think both of them were a little surprised, but true to form, they got right on board with the idea. They were like, OK, let's see how we can make this work. Serious props to my mom, because I think going through, I had to obviously take my A levels at the same time as also studying for my SATs and doing all the college applications, which American college applications are no joke. There's a lot of stuff that goes in. In the UK, you do one application through this thing called UCAS and you're done.

And in the US, it's like every college has their own forms and they want to write an essay. I think I ended up writing like 10 essays or something.

Chris Mailander:

it's a very different system than the European systems.

Eliot Puplett:

And I had no idea how to go through it either. Like I had never done anything like it. Professor Ekoff at my school was very helpful, but he also hadn't gone through the university system in 15 years at that point. So he was, know, his data was a little outdated of what they're doing at the moment. So yeah, so I was basically thrusted this environment where all of sudden we were trying to figure out these

Chris Mailander:

Have you experienced America up to that point? Have you traveled there or?

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, only a few times though. And I'd never gone to the Northeast. had only ever gone, we had a period of time where we used to go to Florida every couple of years. My parents just fell in love with Florida.

Chris Mailander:

The traditional European American experience that involves Orlando.

Eliot Puplett:

Not Orlando actually. We used to fly into Orlando sometimes, but I never went to Disney or anything. I don't think you could drag my parents there with a... with a chain, even if you wanted to. Not their thing, not their scene. So I'd gone to the US a few times. And I always had a good impression of it, I think. Coming from a European standpoint, America is a very friendly country. People are very kind, very open, and sort of welcoming. And I know that it sounds incredibly stereotypical, but this can-do attitude that the US had also appealed to me greatly. was like, people here.

Maybe it was a bit, you know, roast into spectacles. I'm like, America, can do anything. People just achieve anything.

Chris Mailander:

So how do you sense that? Where does that come from? Is it just the interactions with Americans or is it a cultural stereotype that you pick up from movies and television? Or did you actually experience that? And how is that different? And how is that different than what you had experienced growing up in England? What's the attitude there? What's the vibe?

Eliot Puplett:

It's a mix of all those things. think obviously, you know, we in the UK get a lot of American television, a lot of American movies. that Hollywood portrayal of the United States is very visceral. And then on top of that, every experience I'd had in the States or had ever had with an interaction with somebody American had usually been, had reinforced that to me. by the time that I, and you know, I'm young, I'm impressionable, 18 years old. So I'm thinking that's the United States, right? Because you have no nuance when you're 18 years old. Absolutely none.

I think the difference is America to me felt like it was going to be more freeing. Like the idea you can go to university, you can study whatever you want, you can go and live in different states that are the size of countries, all those sorts of things. Whereas in the UK, it's this tiny island, it's very much like you follow the rules here, you do what you're told kind of general overview attitude. And I can get a bit more into that later. in that like that some degree.

That was the rose-tinted spectacle view. I still to some degree to this day believe that, like having now gone back and experienced the UK as an adult and having lived here as long as I have. There is a difference in the attitude. And I think people try and pretend there isn't, but I think Britain is a very, is a nation of structure. To some degree, think Europe actually is a continent of structure. People do not, people question things, but it was never...

I never grew up in a society where authority was questioned in any way. And here, mean, the soup de jour is questioning authority. It doesn't matter whether you're on the left or the right of the political spectrum. Someone's always questioned authority protesting about something. I mean, the French are pretty good at that, but Northern Europeans less so. And I think Britain's firmly falls into that Northern European sort of Germanic mindset more than it does the French.

Chris Mailander:

So is that a product of culture? Is that a product of history? that a product of just America is also a younger nation than the European nations. And they've all had their epics of power and their expansionist and their entrepreneurial phases and perhaps some of that's been lost, particularly in England, they pulled back.

Eliot Puplett:

I think that's probably true. The historian in me... When I look at Britain, Britain is the home of liberalism. It's the birthplace of the individual and liberal ideas and the home of the Industrial Revolution, which is basically the birthplace of entrepreneurialism. People going around the world and exploring.

That culture... I think two world wars and a pretty bad 20th century knocked a lot of that out of Britain culturally. And you see it today, right? In the current political climate in Britain, Britain is a very demoralized nation generally. don't hear from my, and again, it's very anecdotal. is coming from just what I'm seeing and hearing, but I don't see... positivity coming out of my family over there. I don't see positivity coming out of my friends. see this sort of like they're just getting on with life. Life is just happening. There is no excitement for the future. There's nothing to like look forward to or build towards. That just seems to be the general feel of the nation.

And I think to some degree, the 20th century really knocked the wind out of the sails of the country. In many ways, I think lots of, there's no, I'm not going to blame either side of the political spectrum for that. I think it's been a whole host of things that have happened.

Chris Mailander:

Do you feel that in America now, that aspiration for the future and excitement and a drive or not? I'm interested in an outside perspective on that. If somebody who has experienced both environments, both cultural ethos.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, I've seen I've been very lucky since I've been here. I've been able to meet people from all sorts of backgrounds. And I think I've noticed that America... I think because of the wealth inequality in the United States, which is obviously one of the larger ones in the Western hemisphere, I think the economic top of the food chain is a little bit more positive about the future than the bottom part of the food chain.

However, there's more broad generalization. I think there is still pockets of individuals... You see this with Trump voters, right? One of the things that they're... I know that a lot of people don't want to sit down talk to these people. When you actually sit down and talk to people who are very strong behind the Make America Great Again, and you try and get to the bottom of what that actually means, there is a part that's about making America, keeping the borders closed, stopping people coming in, taking advantage of the country or whatever that part of it, the rhetoric is. But there's also this belief in wanting to get America back to this optimistic state of being where the future is bright.

And I think there's definitely a little bit of that has eroded over the same period of time, probably, and probably in a shorter period, like 20 years or so. I think since 9-11, you've seen that degrade. And I don't think that's pretty scandalous of me saying that. Like, it's pretty clear. Things have become more expensive. Opportunities have dried up for a lot of people. Or the feeling is that opportunities have dried up.

And I think that that might be playing into, depending on where you're coming from, if you're... either in an economic situation where you don't have as much opportunity or if you're in a situation where you've been told constantly you don't, even if you actually do have a lot of opportunity, you're going to look at the future as not particularly bright.

And you see that in a lot of things. Technology is actually a great one for that. Like if you look at the kinds of people in this country who are, you talk to people about technology, you get like two very distinct reactions. You get half the group who are like super excited, who are like, I want

I can't wait for the future. I'm so excited to see what happens. And then you get the others, which is like terrified of it, thinks that the future is awful. I heard someone the other day say something like the industrial revolution is the worst thing that ever happened to human history. And I'm like, I don't think you can quantify that statement, but that's a very interesting take. And I see that a lot with like fear of AI, obsession over old technologies versus new technologies.

Great example is like trains, you people are always on like, well, we need, we don't need cars, we need trains. And I'm sitting there going, hey, I don't like Autopia any more than anyone does... but like trains are 200 year old tech at this point. I'm sure there's another version of either some kind of mass transit or pod based mass transit that we could work towards that's better than both of those systems. And I think America in the 50s would have done that, whereas America today isn't quite as rearing to go and like just build the future. So

Yeah, sorry, I don't know if that I think that.

Chris Mailander:

Oh, it's super interesting. And one of the things I'd like to explore just a little bit with you is a concept that you introduced me to called Thatcherite liberalism. So tell me about that, because that's interesting to me. And it provides a little bit of context for some of the political debates that I see today of ways of understanding that that ideology that really was eminent or striking in the 1980s.

The UK and United States and your interpretation associated with that and how you grew up and how that influenced where you were and some of the seeds of what you're doing now, quite frankly, probably start from that.

Eliot Puplett:

Thatcher and Reagan are super interesting characters because they were both liberals, but they were conservative liberals.

On one side, had this very kind of get back to me. It's the whole neoliberal movement, right? This idea of get back to the individual. I mean...

Chris Mailander:

You've said something profound right there, which is that they were conservative liberals. They were both liberals, but conservative liberals.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah.

Chris Mailander:

Most of the American public can't understand what you just said. It's either or. Yes. I like it's conservative or liberal. It's never conservative liberal.

Eliot Puplett:

Let me substantiate that claim because so I am... There is... we often will say right and left. And it's a little misleading because politics are made up of varying spectrums. It's not just... And you see kind of cross patch spectrums and spectrums that are like star shaped and everything. I just tend to think of it as like a set of distinct spectrums where there's sort of a thesis and antithesis on either side. So for example, liberalism, the antithesis to liberalism is not conservatism, it is authoritarianism.

The antithesis to conservatism is progressivism. You know, progressives believe in creating a future that's better for everybody or that is, that ensues the old and tries new ideas. Conservatives believe that holding onto traditions is more important for stability of society. And you can find middle ground in all of these ideas, right? So when I say that Thatcher and Reagan were conservative liberals, what I mean is that they were, they were liberal, they were liberalists in some way, they believed in a type of liberalism, mostly focused around things like business and entrepreneurship and that kind of side of the world. And that respect, I like, you know,

Chris Mailander:

an anti authoritarian…

Eliot Puplett:

An anti authoritarian, very against the Soviet Union. But at the same time, they were also social conservatives, you know, they were both very openly homophobic. They were both very openly pro Christian. They were very openly like sort of pro these like very classical family values.

Reagan, you know, famously, basically just ignored the HIV AIDS pandemic, right? Like, you know, he's, that was one of his darker parts of his, of his tenure as president.

Chris Mailander:

Right.

Eliot Puplett:

So I think in that respect, they they were both liberals and also conservatives, just depending on which section of it you hear. And you see this today in discussions today, you'll, if you actually talk to like most Americans, I find really interesting is the amount of times I've heard from people across the political spectrum across the...

You know the demographics of, well doesn't matter whether it's race, religion, family income, they'll say, well I'm socially liberal but economically conservative. And I'm like, yes, that's a classical liberal, you're a classical liberal. believe in basically, I believe that everyone should be able to do what they want, including myself, don't touch my stuff. That's basically the classical liberalism. So I think, yeah, with Thatcher and Reagan, I grew up in a household where my parents had voted for Thatcher...

southeastern UK, lots of people voted for Thatcher there. But they, between the two of them, I think they strongly believed in the liberal side of her mandate. They don't really, they didn't really agree with her conservative side.

And they never have done. mean, my parents were both very, my dad's a, like, avowed atheist. My mom's very agnostic. They absolutely didn't care about anything to do with people. Like, literally, like, they couldn't care what people were doing in their private lives. They were very open and I kind of grew up with that mentality. Like my parents were very big on that as a kid, they were like, hey, right, you should respect everyone's decisions in life and what they want to do. like, you know, religion is the reason that we have all this hatred in the world. So don't don't go down that route. That was kind the thing. So in that respect, they were not that sure it's at all.

Chris Mailander:

So yeah, that's, yeah, very interesting. There seems to be also a sentiment which was, you know, being able for those at the top of the economic spectrum to be able to take a responsibility for helping some of those at the bottom. And that was part of the system, that there's a social fabric there.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, I think today someone skeptical would call it the noblesse oblige, right? The idea that those with resources are obligated to take care of those without. I think my parents had that inclination.

My mom, it makes more sense because of her background. My dad was an interesting one because obviously he comes from a background that you would classically align with like the sort of pro-labor movement, know, Baker's kids, union, family, that kind of thing. So I think he more just believed that like, you are blessed with whatever it is, skill, luck, tenacity to achieve in life, then don't just like pull the drawbridge up behind you, help people who don't have those privileges and sort of pay it forward a little bit. think that's kind of, do you understand what I mean?

Chris Mailander:

Yeah, I do. And I think that's an interesting concept as well. And I think that that's where sometimes we do a shorthand philosophically or politically speaking when you use the terminology noblesse oblige, it has a connotation and we immediately shortcut what it actually means, which is if you've done well, there is an obligation to help and support the social fabric.

And not simply to cut it off. And I think it has that sense of royalty or extraordinary nobility that most of us then disregard. It's not an American concept, to tell you the truth.

Eliot Puplett:

No, that's fair, actually.

Chris Mailander:

Yeah. Even though I think it is in certain, you know, can see iterations of it in various places. But that's interesting to me. Talk to me a little bit about the learning differences and you grew up in an interesting time and obviously were did the testing fairly young when you're nine or 10 years old, but it explains in an ordinary environment where there is a pattern that you're being tested and evaluated upon and that pipeline as you go through that pipeline rewards people who can actually get into the slipstream that it set forth in terms of standards.

When you have, and I have a son who is neurodivergent as well, when you have those differences, what is interesting to me is that you often see the world through a slightly different lens, that you see patterns in a different way. And some of the greatest creators and vendor, business entertainers come from that ilk, which is we see the patterns.

Society pushes us towards it, but if we are able to look at it through a different lens, we create something new. Thoughts on that as somebody with dyspraxia?

Eliot Puplett:

It's such an interesting idea. think I've been told that by people in my life.  I don't know if I 100 % buy it in the sense that I don't know how much evidence there is, like empirically. I know personally, there's things to me that feel very obvious that to other people maybe aren't. And I get picked up on it actually by my wife Tina all the time, because I'll state things like, to me, I'm just like, this is bleeding obvious. it'll sort of like...

I hit people a bit like, you know, the liberal versus conservative thing earlier, like to me, like the concept of having a liberal conservative, I'm like, well, obviously, I mean, you know, these are very different ideas. You can't just like put them on a spectrum. So maybe that's part of the neurodivergence that one, you get detractions in other ways. Like I can't spell for the save my life and I will frequently write things incorrectly, write numbers incorrectly, all sorts of things.

Chris Mailander:

Which seems to be less and less important every day, quite frankly.

Eliot Puplett:

Cause there's tools out there that take care it. My God. I that thing saves my life on a daily basis. Cause I can get it to spell check and grammar check everything I send. Um, but yeah, no, it's, I think it does. I I mean, maybe you, I mean, have you seen this with your son? Does, does he look in at the world in a slightly different way? Does he see things?

Chris Mailander:

Yeah, absolutely. Um, and wicked smart sees things in a creative way. Came to me the other day. We were watching American football and he sees the patterns and the relationships between quarterbacks and receivers and how they're moving and these trades and they're putting new combinations together. And he sees it so fast. He sees those patterns in ways that took me 20 years, quite frankly, to see in the same way that he gets right now. And I attributed it to the fact that it just works in a different way. But yet there's other dimensions that people are like, well, not as quick on that. It doesn't matter.

I think a piece of this is being able to find where your contributions really elevate the game, where you're able to leverage that unique insight. What is that? How is that? Lean into your uniqueness is the idea. Don't try to always be part. We have such a tremendous cultural predisposition to falling into whatever the norm is and to be very close to where the herd is, when in fact what we're looking for is exceptionalism, uniqueness, new ideas, new contributions. And telling a teenage kid, lean into that, be different, go for it, is hard sometimes. And as a dad, sometimes it feels like they're not listening to you, but I know that this is where great contributions come from.

Eliot Puplett:

And props to you for pushing that. I was very lucky. My parents did the same thing. They said to me, you know, my dad was like, hang everybody else's opinion.

You know what you're good at, focus on that. But I feel so bad for kids who don't have that in their childhood because there are so many people whose parents either just don't have the resources or maybe they don't have the parents there in whatever capacity. And I think, unfortunately, society, we say, we love individuality and we celebrate individuality, at the same time, we also crush it in every possible way we can in our education system. Yeah, that really does that. That really.

It hits home, like what you're saying. I I was, I will say in the American versus the British education system, because I think that was the original question, right? Was the differences. I think it's, I would say that because of the examination system, the UK can feel a bit more constricting. And I think that's actually a common complaint of European education systems. I mean, you famously, the traditional education systems based on the Prussian model, right, which is a German style of education. And that model is historically what the US has also had, but I think American, the American education system has tried to push back a little bit more. And that's why you have this much more sort of localized education here. Downside of that being that it's very dependent on where you grew up as supposed to where you're going have a good schooling or a bad schooling in a way that other places in Europe don't have that quite the same issue.

But I think, I think the creation of all these standards in European education that seem to go all the way through the university level just don't allow for the amount of flexibility. I mean, to me, the concept of the GPA was brilliant. I was like, you can finally have a scoring that is professor to student relationship based, where again, problem with that, you know, the professor now, it depends on what the relationship with the professor is, and you know, not professors are humans, so they are fallible people. But I still think given the potential for professors that are like working with the kids, if you have that relationship established,

Professor can really address each student individually, whereas like I could just fail one exam as a kid and that's it. My grades shot as a British school kid. mean, looking back on it now, my, my, my friends discussion of their high school education, they could basically flunk a test and they would still pass with a solid grade because they'd done really well on the course the entire way through. the British system. I mean, if you failed an exam, that could be it. That could be a whole grade right there, like one exam and you're done. It was just insane.

Chris Mailander:

I mean, like, you know, we, you know, quite familiar with the German educational system, because we have family members that are there. And then also with the Spanish system, because we've posted three exchange students from Spain. And that notion of basically, it comes down to almost a singular test can determine your entire future is brutalistic to us.

Yeah, it's like, wow, mean, that is really high stakes. And yet they look at the system in the United States and how we do application processes. And there's a combination of essays and tests and relationships and nominations and peer reviews and things of that nature as being burdensome and complex, cetera. And I think that's true. I also think the virtue of it is that there's 36, 3700 colleges and universities in the United States.

There is one out there that's going to fit with you, that's going to allow you to blossom in a really magical way if you can navigate through a fairly cumbersome process.

Eliot Puplett:

I think it comes down to, to some degree, not to get political, but it's sort of, it's a belief in decentralization versus centralization. I think the American political system is a constant tug of war between these ideas of centralization and decentralization. You see it at the state versus federal level, local versus state

Whether you should have locals. I mean, I remember when I used to live in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, and there was this huge debate going on about whether we should have centralized funding for high schools or whether it should be localized with the concern on the conservative side being, well, if we now centralize it, maybe schools won't get the funding they could get. like, they should be getting potentially more funding to support some of their programs.

 But the progressive argument was, well, you know, we're hitting a situation where like one town over can have terrible education because they just don't have any resources because it's based on local funding. Yeah, these are complicated. People love to simplify them like, oh, we should just do this. I'm like, these are not easy. I think in Europe, they've in the 20th century, they moved to a very centralized model of education. Everything is sort of very top down from the state for the most part. I think that's great at setting a standard like it's a really good thing to have a baseline standard. We need everyone to be able to read, write,

et cetera, up to a certain level and be able to measure that in some conceivable way. I think where it falls down though is that when you create a standard, tend not to, you don't just raise people up to that standard, you also drive people down to it as well. And I think the benefit of the American decentralized model of education is that, unfortunately, it does leave some people by the wayside, but at the same time, it also allows for a level of excellence that you just are never going to see in Europe because universities, schools can just go off and do their own thing. And they can they can test out new ideas, try things out, and see what works and what doesn't work. And I think there's a lot of I think America at the moment is doing a lot of soul searching as a country as to that, that whether that's a good thing or bad thing, I would say having seen it in action.

I think it's amazing that this country is able to go and experiment as much as it is. And you have a university over here that's trying out these ideas and a high school over here is trying out these ideas. And they're not trying to fit into some kind of central narrative. They don't need to. They just have to. Yeah, sure, you might have some state exams, but that's so unimportant for most high schools, like where they see themselves in the scheme of getting kids into college.

Chris Mailander:

So one of the things that in the conversation is understanding where the seeds of these ideas in your journey come from and how you think about them and then where it takes you on your journey going forward as an entrepreneur and I want to spend a little bit of time talking about what you're building and where you're going with it. But one of the things that really stands out to me here is as a systems thinker, a systemic thinker, always thinking about how this is constructed. it centralized, decentralized? What allows us to have creativity and innovation? What the virtues are of those different platforms? It seems to me that that's baked into. How you're thinking about this journey that you're on. Is that fair?

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, I think that's very true, actually. I've always thought in terms of processes, systems, and patterns. Kind of like your son, actually. Pattern recognition is a big one. I think that is something you get from neurodivergence, whatever kind of neurodivergence he and I share. think you start to see things in terms of patterns, blocks. I find things like first principles thinking to be quite easy for me personally. It's easy to boil things down into their component parts.

And then deconstruct things and rebuild them as these sort of systems that you can then change and shape. I have a great example, know, in what Medici is doing, you know, we started off in what we're building and thinking about like, well, why are there private markets versus public markets? You know, that was the core question. And most people, when you talk to them about this, they're like, because there are like, for obvious reasons. And you're like, well, what are those obvious reasons? You start bringing down, you're like, actually, there's no structural reason they should be separated. They are, you know, one and the same. There's no

Like all markets are just markets. And I think it's important in building anything to be able to boil things down. Now then having to be able, one thing I suck at, which a lot of other founders are much better at than I am, is then explaining it in a really succinct way back to people. That's something I've got to work on, but you have to start by breaking it down to simple things.

Chris Mailander:

So tell me about Medici. Tell me what the vision is here and what you're building. You talked a little bit about it in terms of private markets and public markets, but. Tell me what that is.

Eliot Puplett:

So, I mean, our long term goal, I hate to use the term we see a world in, but basically we see a world where there is an international ability for individuals to buy and sell and trade and build companies and sell that equity, create funds, issue shares of those funds, invest in things overseas. We want to create a financial system built on blockchain that is open and accessible to all people. That's essentially the holy grail that we're aiming for, which I think is true of all people in the blockchain space. At the minutiae level of what we're actually building, we're essentially making a system by which private markets, so things like private funds, private companies, if it's a small startup or something, can essentially list an account on chain, meaning that it becomes hyper-transparent. They can easily access capital overseas, distribute capital overseas if needed.

They can also access liquidity that they wouldn't have today, which is the ability to trade away shares. And these are all structural issues in private markets today that make them very slow. But we don't really have that problem to the same degree in public markets because they've been historically built in such a way that they have their well-oiled machine. But we're using this new technology, blockchain, to essentially create a much freer and more open market system.

I'm almost starting in private markets.

Chris Mailander:

So it's really about opening up the doors to private capital and providing a measure of liquidity so that money can move around the private capital markets amongst private companies and investors much more easily. And then also being able to do it transparently.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, yeah. Basically that in a nutshell, I think it comes from to some degree my basis of...

We talked about my parents writing this idea that they they were like, you you have to know blessedly is you have to help people if you're in a better position than they are. To me, I look at the current state of the world of finance and I see a government sanctioned club and I don't love that. That's how it is because it keeps a lot of people down, keeps it keeps options away from a lot of people. And that's not just a problem in the US as a problem globally. And I think a lot of people who believe in blockchain technology are all under the same idea that this is in the same way that the internet democratized information, blockchain will democratize finance in a way that like fintech never could.

Because now a young entrepreneur who wants to issue shares of their company doesn't have to go beg at a VC fund. In theory, they can now do an issuance to a much larger group of people and individuals can make their own economic decisions if they want to. If it's somebody

In India, who wants to invest in the American market, they now have the ability that if I want to invest in the South African market, I can now more easily do that without going through all these huge centralized intermediaries. A big thing that we worked on for our initial product was this liquidity pool system, or taking advantage of the liquidity pool systems, which a liquidity pool is just a place where people lend their money out directly to traders to trade against when they then receive, the lender receive 100 % of the benefit. If I wanted to do that today, I have to go through a bank, the bank's then gonna give me like this teeny tiny yield on a CD, and then they're gonna take the money and do all of that with it and take all the benefit. And I think that's the beauty of the blockchain system is it takes these bloated systems out of it and replaces a lot of what they do with technology contracts. And it's by no means perfect. mean, it's got a, this technology has a...

a long way to go to get to the point where it has the substance that our current financial markets have. But I think the runway is there. I think that for me, I see it as a way that we can really build an internationalized financial system where not just a few wealthy people can take advantage of it, where everyone has the access and the opportunity to make small investments, get small loans, do all these sort of microtransactions they need to to build wealth for them and their families.

Chris Mailander:

So let's talk about in the context of an ecosystem, meaning you mentioned a couple of the groups that would be beneficiaries of this, which could be small private companies, private companies writ large, other kinds of investors, small investors or retail investors that might have an opportunity to invest or somehow facilitate the development of a company. And I get where some of the benefits would come from and the feeling of potentially being excluded from traditional finance and the traditional systems. Who's opposed to this? Who do you fight against? What are the barriers and the walls that you got to fix or overcome?

Eliot Puplett:

I think there's two major ones. The less imposing barrier is the industry writ large. So you're seeing a lot of pushback from large scale private fund managers, large scale institutional companies.

And I get it, a lot of that just comes from a standpoint that it doesn't affect them. These aren't issues that they get affected by. I had a conversation with a very large fund manager who's got several billion under management.

And when we told them about what we were building, they kind of laughed at us. They said, oh, well, my investors don't have an issue with transparency. They trust me.

And I was like, I mean, that's good for you. I was like, but what if like you're a small company with no track record? You know, you don't that's not an option. You need you need that level of transparency or What if you're an investor with less money who doesn't have like a million to potentially lose on your one fund? know, like you need you need more more surefire. You need need a more sure thing and you need something where you can you can liquidate your your your your stake if you need to.

So there's there's a general sense of sort of just poo pooing the industry as it is right now. It's changing slightly. I think the financial industry is taking this technology more seriously. Some are embracing it and being like, how can we

take the systems, very first principles, like how can we take the systems we do as like a bank or we do as a fund management company today, the things that are value adds like risk analysis, all that kind of stuff and apply it to this world. That's a smaller group, but you are seeing that. And then on the other side, you have a much larger group who are like, how can we stop this thing? And they'll use everything in there, every lobbying power they have to make sure that things don't go forward.

Chris Mailander:

In those large financial institutions or asset managers?

Eliot Puplett:

I mean, I think it's kind of a joke in the industry. But anytime you see a bank talking about blockchain, they're always talking about it in terms of like central bank digital currencies. I'm like, oh, okay, so you just want to just make the technology used so that you can keep all the central power you have, just make it more digital and make it cheaper for you to run. But none of us get any of the benefits out of that as society. So that's one group. And then that leads into the second group, which unfortunately is the government.

And I don't think it's, I'm not like some big conspiracy theorist. I don't think the government's out to get everybody. I think they are doing the wrong things for the right reasons. You see this a lot with the SEC right now where they've been very vehemently anti-crypto. I think they've had a lot of reason to be anti-crypto when I look at things like, I mean, the disaster that was FTX. mean, the tragedy is in the industry. So many people saw it for what it was before it happened. any of those centralized exchanges that

didn't show you their books or weren't fully decentralized on chain. Like most true believers in the technology were like, that's a massive red flag. And then when it collapsed, none of us were surprised. But, you know, the government just looks at it all as crypto. And it's like, well, we need to regulate the, regulate the everything to do with this. And I think what you're seeing in Europe and you're seeing in the US is this knee-jerk reaction from regulators where they're like, well, we have to maintain control in every way we possibly can, because if we don't have control, it's anarchy.

And I think what they're missing is that there is going to be little bit of anarchy by moving into a more blockchain-based financial system. But the benefit to the population overall is going to be huge by comparison, because now we're really taking walls down between nations. And I think this comes into a larger philosophical debate that needs to happen around this idea of national versus international. That's another one of those spectrums, right? Nationalism versus internationalism.

You know when you when you look at blockchain in the same way of the internet one of the things these technologies have in common is that they really target the heartstrings of this idea of the nation state which is I know we all think of it as like this thing that's existed, you know forever It's it's not I mean the nation state as a concept is basically 1600s onwards before that you had this idea of like kingdoms and tried more tribalism that that we've that we've known prior, but When you can circumvent national law with the internet or you can circumvent terror restrictions with blockchain that scares governments. Understandably, because that's the world that they know, right?

Like the world they know is this structure where they have control things like anti money laundering where they block. I have a friend of mine who is he has a large crypto, this fully decentralized crypto company that he's part of and they had a whole interaction with the government because it was discovered that a foreign bad actor was using their system.

And government ended up dropping the case because they were like, you know, this is a truly decentralized system, but that shows the point, right? Like North Korea or, you know, the Taliban or whoever it was, they can trade on those systems too, because they're open and decentralized. And I think we as a society just need to start realizing that this technology, like the internet, decentralized, you know, crypto technology, these are, these are here to stay and they're going to, we're going to have to rethink how we control systems. And we're to have to, some degree, give up some of the control in order to be, in order for it to function and serve everybody and just find other ways that we can stop those bad actors from doing some from doing, you know, from trading the drugs or whatever it is that we want to stop them from doing.

Chris Mailander:

Right. Right. So the whole it strikes me that the decision model is quite different. So you have a legacy decision model around the regulation of finance, the protection of security interests, the regulation of bad actors, whether domestic or international. And now you're fairly in a dramatic way proposing a system, a way of doing finance that is significantly different and therefore the decision apparatus has to adjust and look at it through a different lens. Is that a fair assumption? And do they have the ability to do that? Because you have embedded interest within regulators want to protect what they're doing. They have mandates and you have political agendas associated with it. Do they have the ability to adjust the debate to the realities of a world that will look very different over the next 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years.

Eliot Puplett:

In the short term, I think the answer is no. We are still a very tribal species. I think of things. You see it now with the rhetoric around American. What does it mean to be American? In my future worldview that I see happening, I think those barriers will slowly start to collapse over time. I think the European Union actually was one of the first groups to really try that in a meaningful way.

know, really try and say, what does it mean to be not just French or German? What does it mean to be European and be part of this broader community? And I think we're gonna, we're gonna have to get there as a society. I think it's gonna, it's gonna mean that we're gonna need to start focusing on common goals that we have as a planet, that aren't just dictated by one group that are like, you know, really, like, if that's economic prosperity, or whatever it is, like, we need to set our minds on those goals as a group.

But this technology will grow slowly until we can get to a point where all of a sudden we understand the benefits and we start thinking of things and start regulating things on an international level, not on a national level, or we start. And we can do that as humans. I mean, we've done it with other things, right? Like maritime law is mostly internationally agreed upon. There are certain things that we...

You we have a, we have a common call sign service system for air travel. We have interbank financial systems already in place like Swift that exist. So we can do this. We set up the United Nations, for hate's sake. know, I mean, like, you know, we are, we are capable of creating international bodies, but I think until such time that we start thinking about these technologies in their, in their international scale that they're at, we're not going to have, we're not going to see the benefits of them that we could.

Chris Mailander:

And it strikes me that in the debate, you have to be able to delineate who's taking what positions based on their self-interest, which is retention of power and the money that moves across their platforms relative to actually protecting the public or national security or things of that nature, which are a different kind of risk. And we're trying to manage that.

Eliot Puplett:

That's so true. I just totally agree with you. I think the difficulty... especially in the United States, because of all of the external powers that get involved in the political landscape here, it is so hard to see what is the intention behind the speech or the intention behind the action. And that's true for everything. my industry, that's true for every industry. You know, when I think my industry is quite idealistic, it wants to see this world develop where it's international cooperation and individuals are able to help their families and build little businesses and whatever it is they want to provide value to the world around them, their communities and such. That's a very idealistic thing to aim for. And I think we're going to have to get really smart as a group to navigate these big entrenched systems that have very, not only do they have a desire to survive, but they also have people with their own interests, right? There's people who have the cushy job that they don't want it to go.

You see this with AI quite a lot, right? Like, I mean, a lot of people pushing back against AI right now, I mean, it's, I understand it, but it's like writers and artists, because they see the writing on the wall, they see their jobs disappear much the same way. I you could take this right back to the 19th century, right? With the Luddites in the north of England that smashed all the mill machinery because it was taking away their local crafts jobs. there's always a, whenever you have a new technology, it's always going to upset somebody.. and I think we, as a society have to get really switched on to what are the benefits to society and then pick a little bit who we listen to. Because when we have a, when you have a banker telling you how much of a disaster this is going to be, you have to ask, well, what, what, what's their, what's their reason for, for not liking this or a central government that wants to, doesn't like something. You have to kind of look, look beyond the surface level of what they're saying and understand the, the, what's pushing it.

Chris Mailander:

Right. Right. Yeah. And as I hear you talking about this, another one of the ingredients of how you think about this issue that we should add into the mix is that you have a degree in financial history from Bucknell, which as you go back to the Luddites and the action, again, we have a framework for what Luddite means and nobody knows in America where it actually traces back to Northern England and smashing mills. They simply know it as somebody who's regressive and hasn't opened up to new ideas. It's simply the short hand shortcut and not the original history.

But I think that's super interesting in terms of how you think about the progression of finance from a tribalistic nations and feudal nations through periods of time.

And now we are bumping up against it yet again, in terms of nationalistic finance, the embedded powers, how they retain that control and power and access to capital relative to a… in the emergence of a new type of competitor, new ways that money flows. And quite frankly, most people don't really understand how money flows through the capitalistic system and who the embedded actors are. They just know there's big banks and central banks and there's not a detailed understanding of that, A, and even less of how could it be different? How could it be different and better? And what's the virtue of that?

Eliot Puplett:

I think that's absolutely spot on. In many points, and yeah, I should probably clarify, yes, I, even though I went to college, assuming I was going to do theater, I ended up falling down this business and history track, which was unexpected. I still am a little surprised even all these years on. This is the virtue of the liberal arts system. You explored a bunch of different classes and this is where it went. Quite literally what happened. But I think these, we...

In the political spectrum, think most average people, and I'm just, I'm not talking about average in the terms of like most people working in nine to five. I'm talking about like even the average business people, even to some degree, the average elite, like some of these, some of these, know, because there's the super elite and then there's like the slightly less super elite. And even some of the super elite sometimes I think have their heads in the right place. There's a set of common goals that we want to try and achieve, right? It's things like ensuring that society functions well.

ensuring that there is as much sort of health and prosperity and wealth as possible generated for everybody. Because, know, happy, well looked after individuals don't revolt. So that's always good. There's sort of common goals across the board that people are trying to get to. And I think what gets in the way is these small individual disagreements between groups about how the best system is to do it.

I think one of the things that led me down the track here that I wanted to the track that I've gone down is I try and use evidence as much as possible to support whatever it is that I'm working on. And to me, when I see countries around the world and what's made them successful, it's usually some form of liberalism that's helped. China is probably the most famous recent example where China went from being a very centrally planned economy.

And then under Deng Xiaoping liberalized and that liberalization led to the China we have today. Now China is far from liberal. It's not a liberal society by any stretch of the imagination. I think that culture is very, has historically been very hierarchical because of, know, Confucianist philosophy and a lot of other, you know, unique features of that society. But the, the thing that has helped them has been the, this like little kernel of, of, of liberal sort of capital ideology.

And you see this in many examples throughout history. know, that's one of the major reasons, I mean, Europe became incredibly wealthy because of liberalism to some degree. I mean, it also became wealthy because we then had more money than everybody else and were able to basically stampede our way through anywhere we wanted the world and steal the resources. know, let's not forget that bit. But the thing that got us to the point where we had the bigger guns...

It was liberalism. It was the Industrial Revolution, which is to its core a liberal idea and this idea that we can free people with free enterprise to some degree. At the moment, I see a lot of people pushing back on that. I have friends who are socialists and communists and stuff, and we tussle on this quite a bit. I think one of the things that they miss is that what they're seeing is this system, which they call capitalism.

It's really not capitalism, it's cronyism. A lot of the systems and structures we have today are not true capitalism. A prime example is the banks in 2008. A truly liberal capital system would have just let all the banks collapse at the end of 2008. Once the banks screwed up enough, would have, like JPMorgan, Goldman, none of them would exist anymore. They would have all fallen apart and they would have been broken up and they would have been bought up by other entrepreneurs who would have scraped little bits and started their own little mortgage lending firms and everything.

Our system said, no, we can't let that happen because we must maintain stability and control. And there's some benefits to that. But I think that the detraction of that is that you end up then keeping a lot of the population out, all those opportunities that could have been all those small financial firms that could have developed out of the financial crisis as a result of the collapse of the banking system. We're never going to know what those were because we decided to like rein back in central control, government pump money into it to keep it propped up. And we now have, you know,

two or three fewer banks than we had back then. See, think sometimes, I think a lot of people, need to remember that we're on the same side of the argument. We're not just because I'm like, you know, I lean a little more libertarian, probably because I'm in the crypto space. That my socialist friends, we are more alike than we are different. We need to…

Instead of looking at philosophy for our goals, we need to actually look at the evidence of what's been working and try those things instead and not get too tied into, well, I'm a Marxist or I'm an Adam Smith, I'm a Smithsonian or whatever.

Chris Mailander:

Sure. Let me go back to one thing also associated with your upbringing and folks, cetera. The 2008 financial crisis was difficult.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, that was a big, big one. I'm kind of glad that it happened the way that it did. I think what you're referencing is like my family circumstances.

Chris Mailander:

Yeah. At a formative age for you as well, which is life changed, the art changed, the journey changed, and it was economically dependent on what was going on. And so these decisions around, you know, the safety net that helped out the financial system so that there would not be a systemic crisis stepped in. But a lot of people got hurt during that period of time, too.

Eliot Puplett:

No, I mean, my family circumstances financially changed drastically in that period. There was a few different reasons. Some of it was just timing. My parents made a few successive financial changes. And then the financial crisis hit right at the wrong moment and just wellied them in the stomach. yeah, mean, we went from a family where money was never not talked about, not thought about, but we definitely had enough. We were very comfortable… to a family that was very much counting pennies and really, we weren't by any stretch of the imagination destitute or anything like that, but we definitely went to a situation where money was incredibly tight. And I remember my parents sitting me down and said, hey, look, if you want things for yourself, you want new stuff and you're gonna have to go get a job. And it happened right at the right time, because I was mid teens at that point.

So I'm sort of glad it happened because I think it made me, I learned very quickly like the value of money. I learned very quickly the value of work and also what good and bad employment looked like. So I had experiences from all over the shop. But yeah, I it was very much a formative moment in my life was that change.

Chris Mailander:

Right. So take me back. So here's where I'd like to go is you spend a lot of time talking to different kinds of players in that ecosystem that is around you or you're trying to build around Medici.

And they range from large asset managers to bankers to venture capitalists to potential users of the platform. Give me a sense of the different perspectives and how people come into that conversation and what you see and experience as an entrepreneur that's trying to build something. Where do the walls go up? What conversations are productive and which ones aren't and why?

Eliot Puplett:

That's such a good question and a very hard one to answer, actually.

Chris Mailander:

Too many dimensions to it, of course, so we'll have to pull it apart.

Eliot Puplett:

I can start, can kind of break it up bit by bit. So I think to start, there's definitely, I would categorize people into three buckets. There's the already sold group. They are the smallest people who understand the technology. They understand the trajectory of the technology. sometimes they have a vested interest in the technology. So when we explain what we're doing to them, they're like, brilliant… totally understand that they're on board from the second they hear it.

Chris Mailander:

Is that... so in your three camps, so people who get it and are already there or an easy, easy win.. Is that individually derived or do they come from entities that would benefit by it or they can get there?

Eliot Puplett:

I would say it's a mix of if you are an individual, it's usually because you've experimented with the technology already. Maybe you are a crypto trader yourself. You've done some research into the technology. We also find actually like our biggest, not detractors, but our biggest positive critics come from that side. People who are not criticizing us in a negative way, but are coming up with their own interpretation of how the technology should be used and whether they agree or disagree with how we're doing it. we've had some very productive conversations with that side as well. That's your first major camp. then there's people-

Chris Mailander:

...if I were to put that into a model, they're coming to the table with some preparation. They are coming with a level of experimentation, understanding, research, analysis. So when we look at them on the learning curve, they're already up there a little bit. Some degree of being up on the learning curve, meaning that they're coming not just as a blank slate. They know what they're looking at and at least can tell if this is a horse or a cow.

Eliot Puplett:

And they also will have like a very strong philosophical idea of how the technology should be used. mean, we've had some very, not heated necessarily discussions, but like a very active discussions with people where, you know, they're a true, like thoroughbred decentralization person where they, the idea, you know, a lot of our system is it's built on blockchain technology, but because we live in a world with KYC rules, like no client rules and

This idea where centralized management or centralized executive management is normalized, we can't just go to a decentralized model initially. We just wouldn't be able to do what we're doing. It would physically be impossible to use a completely decentralized model. We're still 100 % transparent. Everything's built on chain, but we still have to KYC our clients. The people who run the funds are still a human being. It's managed transparently, but you're still signing away the right to your capital to an individual to go manage it, which most normal people are fine with. there are like, in the, the decentralized community, there's, there's groups who think that's fine. And they think that's a great model because they agree with that, that idea. And then there's groups who are like, no, absolutely not. It should all be voted. I shouldn't have any, I shouldn't have any centralized management of any kind. and that's like in your first group, which is all the knowledgeable and understands and is bought into this technology. I don't think we're ever going to sell that, that site that group, if you're like a true decentralized believer, mean, more hats off to you. My personal take is I don't, I don't think democracy works for everything all the time. I think it was Aristotle who said it right, like you'd a ship in the storm is you need a captain, not the crew, not the passengers to tell you what's happening. And I think a lot of people who are the hard over decentralized group, are right. They don't, they don't see any central power as good power. But you know, maybe over time, our minds will change on that. I'm not sure.

So then you have your second group. Your second group is the not initiated yet, but when you explain it to them, they understand it they see the benefit. They might ask much more searching questions and they're usually the more rudimentary questions. To go back to that first group, like the first group of critics that are the hardcore decentralized, I don't really have a good answer for them other than I just disagree with you, which you'll see again happen in group number three.

But then you're in this middle group, it's usually people who we can pretty much preempt most of the questions they're going to ask and we can explain it very easily. That group is most concerned with risk more than anything else because they're like, well, I know what blockchain is. I've probably heard of it. They're commonly open minded individuals who when you explain to them the systemic benefits of this system, they get it. And they're like, I see that I can see the benefit or I can understand. I understand this problem.

Those people usually are a mix of technology and finance people who just don't know anything about crypto and the blockchain space. So I've had that conversation with people who are individual investors themselves. I've had those kind of conversations with bankers. I've had those kind of conversations with people who are asset managers. Those are people usually they're just a little more liberal minded. They're like a little more open to new ideas.

We can usually talk to them in such a way where for them it's not a game of whether this is going to work or not. It's just a game of what's the risk exposure they're willing to take as a new company with new technology. are they, you know, if I might talk to someone who's like a fund manager for a pension fund, they might be the most open person on earth. They might be like, yeah, I totally get this. I think this is the way the world's going. But they manage a pension fund. They're like, I can't just... jump into this system and use this technology because I have like this very severe financial obligation that I have to uphold. And if I did that, I would be taking that back and shot.

So they're like, give me, give us a few years. I've actually had that conversation with financial advisors quite often where like almost all of them we've spoken to have said, we totally understand what you guys are doing. We're totally on board with it. We'd love you to come back when you have like 25 million AUM because then I can reasonably sell that to my clients. But with you guys where you're at right now, it's a really hard…

It would be like a hard sell from an ethical standpoint more than a hard sell from a social standpoint.

Chris Mailander:

Let's put a marker right here and then we'll talk about the third group that you've got on your categories. But right there, you've talked about something that I think is extremely fascinating. And part of the reason I wanted to talk with you, Elliot, is that you are an entrepreneur who is in the midst of the journey as opposed to an entrepreneur who's had that wild exit already or is a you created the unicorn, et cetera, which is the one that we typically hear about.

That's part of that mythology that I talked about before, which is the entrepreneur who has this wild success and creates immense value. And then how did they get there and where are they going with that for better or for worse? You are in the midst of the journey. So you're going into a conversation. I think this is super interesting to understand how you're wired about it, but also the risk associated with it, which is that you are advocating.

An idea, a concept, a platform that would have a significant impact on the financial system, which is bold, which is renegade oriented. But you're talking with people who say. I can't have this conversation with you until you are successful, successful. So you are on the one side of the void, which is building this thing out, but they want to wait. They can't take the risk until you have 25 million assets under management.

How do you approach that? How do you know as an entrepreneur, you're bucking up against that wall. How frequently does that happen? How do you overcome it? How do you endure that? Which is that that is a my opinion, a huge... It's a limitation on, you know, it's an energy drain. It's a suck.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, you're absolutely right. It really is. I think it comes down to two things. It's partially just you're in tactical mode where our team is. We know, we hit up against these problems, we fix the problem, we move on to the next problem, fix the problem, move on to the next problem, knowing that there's going to be like 600 problems we have to solve.

With each problem solved, you get a little close to that next goalpost. And those potential clients are all along that route, right? mean, know, a financial advisor who said to me, I love what you're doing. Come back to me when you have 25 mil. I'm like, okay, cool. I can put a button in, I can put a pin in that and I can wait until we hit 25 mil and I can go back to that advisor and restart that conversation. And then they don't have any other, they have nothing else they can say to me. We already fixed the thing that they didn't like.

So I think that's really what it is at this point. It's we know the overall strategy that's been set down. We understand what we're doing. We know our long-term goals. We have our mission like firmly implanted in our mind. I think every single person on the team at this point, granted very small team, but still every single person is like hell bent on making this thing happen by any means necessary.

We spend our day just focused on fixing the issues to get us to that next stage, whatever that is, whether that's a question we had from a potential client. mean, right now we're dealing with a blocker where all the technology is there for us to do the investment. We have our initial fund launched, all that kind of stuff's there. On-ramping and off-ramping within the US is really hard. So that's converting dollars, USD, into like a crypto equivalent of dollars like USDT or USDC that can then be ingested by our system for the accounting and for the investing.

Right now, there are two companies that do on-ramping and off-ramping at the scale that we need to. Neither of are good options for us. One of them, they both have a similar issue, which is that their models are built on volume-based fees, whereas we're built on AUM-based fees. So they want to charge X number per month, or they want to see Y amount of volume before they'll take us on as clients. Whereas we're like, well, we don't want to see volume moving. We want to see people invest and stay invested. That's how we judge success is how much people keep invested with us. And that's just part of the fact that the industry is young and there's just not enough providers who are providing these things. So we're finding ourselves hitting up against these problems being like, well, now we have to come up with very out of the box solutions. I can't just magic a bridge system into existence like an on-ramp off-ramp system. So I have two options. I go partner with somebody and figure one out or I go buy one, I build one myself.

And that we find that happens a lot. Like we had to build like our entire fund accounting system. I think it, haven't seen anyone else do this. I think it's the first on-chain fund accounting system that's ever been built. I can't say that for sure, because there might be some other random company out there that we just haven't found. to my knowledge and my colleagues and people I know who are accounting individuals, like people in the accounting space, they don't know of any other one either. So we had to build an entire on-chain fund accounting system because originally our thought was, we'll just go hire one or buy one.

And then we found that that didn't exist and we were like, well, I guess we're building it ourselves. And the exciting thing is that that's opened up whole another layers of business that we didn't think about. We have whole sections of clients that we wouldn't have thought that we could have gone to to sell that kind of service to purely because we had to build it to fix a problem we had internally. So that's kind of the exciting bit about being where we are right now is that we because we keep just solving problems. We're actually solving problems like these are real problems that not just us, but everyone else in the industry who's coming up alongside us and behind us is going to have to. So it feels like every step we take is like a meaningful step, not just for us, but for the industry, which is a cool place to be in. It's exciting.

Chris Mailander:

And again, the mindset of the entrepreneur is an interesting one in the sense that you jump off the ledge, it seems to me. You kind of know the problem that you want to go solve, but then you have to solve 600 problems right immediately thereafter and don't have a game plan for it. A lot of people aren't wired to do that. They want to know what the answer to the test is before they jump off the cliff. But to be an entrepreneur, you got to take that step and then solve it, right? I mean, that's part of what the journey's about.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, no, absolutely. I actually just had this discussion this morning with a young gentleman who is looking to potentially go into the startup space. And he'd been connected with me through mutual friends. And I said to him, was like, look, it really comes down to risk tolerance. was like, I would go work for a really early stage startup and see if it's a lifestyle that you enjoy.

Because if you try and start a company, like that's a lot of risk to take on. And you have to be ready for everything. It's got to, you've got to have a support network in place. You've got to able to financially support yourself. And you've got to be ready for just a lot of pain and suffering. And that's not just in your business life, that's in your personal life too. mean, I'm incredibly lucky that I married to a very strong woman who has a very, very good job, who keeps our roof over our heads while I'm working on this project. But you know, it is a cause of constant not necessarily like disagreement in our marriage, but it's friction, right? It creates that there's discussion around, you know, what's going to happen and how we're to do this and what have we sacrificed to achieve this? And what like, how are we then measuring what successes for this thing that we're doing? And it creates like, whole different situations with our financials, you know, our financial advisor and us have discussions around how we have to rethink financials from like the normal orthodoxy that you hear that works for the 90 % of people for that smaller group… that's doing things a little differently, like it doesn't work. So your whole life really get revolves. It becomes like a, I hate to because like a personality, but you become like a founder. It's sort of bizarre really, cause it's just everything changes for you.

Chris Mailander:

And there's a couple of dimensions there. One of which i... you have to, and I use this concept of the trophy, the trophy that's out there on the horizon. And then you identify what that is. You sketch it in your mind, you drive towards that, but you've had to change the trophy a couple of times, right? You push it out a little bit further or I think the platform itself has evolved as you start solving problems. And as you mentioned, ooh, we uncovered a new problem. We therefore have to build something, but which is a labor, which is a cost, which burns time. However, it opened us up to a much larger market, a new set of customers, et cetera. Walk through that journey as well.

Eliot Puplett:

I'm going to disagree with you only slightly purely because I think I wouldn't say that the trophies changed. I think the mission and the goal and like why I'm doing this, gets me out of bed and gets, know, what keeps me going and gives me hope is that I have this, I think everyone on our team does, we have this like kind of mission we're aimed for where we want to build something that is genuinely going to help just everybody in a really tangible way. It's going to bring people across the globe close together. It's going to give people economic opportunities they wouldn't have had otherwise. It's going to make it easier for people to get started on things and build and innovate in whatever capacity they're doing.

When you're starting a company or you're starting a small fund, whatever it is that you want to do, the capital piece of that should not be the limiting factor for you. And today it is for almost everybody internationally. It doesn't matter whether you're trying to set up a farm stall… or you're trying to set up like a new technology company and it doesn't really matter where you come from in the world. you are, all nations are to some degree have the same problem, which is the access to capital is usually tightly controlled by a small group of people.

And as much as they might try and democratize it themselves, they're just not gonna do it as well as technology like this can. Because all the reasons we've talked about, right, government and the philosophies behind it all of those things. I think what keeps us going is that North Star. What's definitely changed, what's had to change is the strategy to get there. know, when we first, the first concept that I had developed with my original co-founder for Medici was this idea that we were going to help people by getting their finances in order. And we then realized that like that there was a lot of stuff out there already trying to do that and it wasn't really working.

So we were like, okay, so that's probably not the thing that's actually going to help people in the way that we thought it would do because the empirical evidence is just showing it doesn't work. So we decided to wrap that up and stop that project. And the Medici that I'm doing now, because I kept the company name going because people came in and out of trying to figure out what our direction was, where we ended up going with this was a much more sort of brass tax approach where it was like, how can we actually just make... things more economically accessible to people. You where we've started is a very small group. It's just making private markets more accessible, which I know obviously doesn't help everybody. only helps people with it. It's funny in the grand scheme, people say, well, you're just helping rich people. I'm like, that's true. And like when you're looking at, you know, the 8 billion people in the world population size, but that's still like millions of people that were potentially helping globally.

And then we can keep expanding that out to more and more and more people as we go. And that's like our game plan is basically like, we can help a small group in this much the same way, right? That like cars started off as the playthings of the rich. And it took a few iterations to get them to be something that now even somebody in a, you know, in a small rural village somewhere in the world can like get a moped and can have some sort of motor vehicle transportation. we're now in a world where that's possible a hundred years later.

That's kind how we see our journey too. So it's a very long game. And we've just had to adjust the strategy as we've gone and take advantage of the opportunities and also like get around the issues that we've had. Cause sometimes we've just walked into a wall where we're like, you know, one of the walls we walked into early on, was like, idealistically, I really wanted to build something where we could do this kind of investing for everybody at a retail level. Unfortunately in the United States right now, the regulation just bars it. Like it's, it's legally impossible to do what we're doing at a retail level. So I had to.

not to do retail, had to do high net worth and above. It socially kills me to do that. I hate that that's what we had to do. It angers me that we had to do that. But I can't take the SEC on today as an early stage startup. I can take them on when we have $6 billion in AUM. Then I can take the SEC on and I can lobby to have the laws changed and become more egalitarian.

Chris Mailander:

Yeah. And just to explain for those who don't understand it, you are limited to accredited investors, which have a certain net worth or certain standard of sophistication, could use your platform in order to move money, invest, hold it transparently, but an average retail consumer could not, correct?

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, just to kind of, and just to fill in, because I want your listeners to get as angry as I am about this. I think so the US government in all of its great glory and knowledge decided back in the 80s that... if you wanted to invest in a private product, so think like a venture capital fund or a private equity fund or even just a private business like our company as a startup, like the equity of Medici, you had to meet certain wealth threshold. They call them accreditation. I just call them what they are. They're wealth barriers. That's exactly what they are. So you either had to have a million dollars in assets under management or you had to be making 200,000 plus for two years. And then they added another layer of qualification, which is if the thing that you're doing, like if it was a fund, was charging a performance fee, meaning that it was basically you were saying, hey, you're going to pay me a management fee. And then if I do really well, you're going to pay me an extra 10 % or I'm going to take 10 % of our winnings and give you the 90%. That then raised the bar to something like 2.5 million wealth base, I think. Might be more than that now. But as a result of that, we're talking about like less than 1 % of population here who have access to these amazing products.

Chris Mailander:

And this is the divide that you're talking about. leads to centralization. leads to a, quite frankly, a divide on a class or a wealth or economic basis where tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people are not able to access the significant financial products that are out there or investment opportunities because they don't meet the standard that was put in in the 1980s.

Eliot Puplett:

Well, and also caps people because like if you they have some there are some small things that they've put in place to try and allow like up to 35 investors who aren't accredited and stuff like that. it means also if you come from a family where you need to let's say you don't have like individuals around you.

who are wealthy, it now becomes even harder for you to go, because you can't just go out and solicit anybody. You have to go and only solicit accredited investors. You probably don't know any accredited investors. So now you have to go through the traditional VC model. And there's a reason we see that founders in this country tend to come from wealthy backgrounds. It's because they're the ones that have access to the capital to begin with. And I'm like, this is the problem. These are the issues we're trying to solve. I don't want it to be just a bunch of Harvard kids who startups. I want it to be like if a kid from, you…

If a kid from like, I don't know, Philadelphia from like not a wealthy family once like comes up with a good idea and it has a couple of friends get together and they build it in school. want them to be able to go out and get access to that capital. And I want to be, I want them to be able to have the ability. And if that means that they have to get access to capital, not within the U S or maybe they're trying to solve something that's overseas and they want to get access to capital over there right now be physically impossible for them to do that with using blockchain. makes it much more accessible.

Chris Mailander:

And the reason is because you can move the money much more easily through a blockchain fabric A and transparency, right? I mean, that's the big issue is transparency. I don't understand what's happening and where it's going and where there's been abuses is because it was done in a dark room quietly and people didn't know it until too

Eliot Puplett:

Absolutely. And just to sort of cover what you're saying for listeners benefit as well. it's, we know whenever you do an investment anywhere in the world, there's always like a set of risks that you have to go through, right? So if you,

You have the amount you need to put down, what the percent of that is of your net worth. So if I'm a millionaire, like one with 1 million, investing 100, like 1000 is very different from investing like 500,000 for me. Whereas if I'm a 30 million millionaire, investing those two numbers doesn't mean a lot in my life. Then there's also how long is that money going to be tied up? Like if I give money to something, can I afford to lose it for one year? five years, 10 years, how often, how will I ever need that money back? And then the third thing is also geographic. Like if I, and that kind of comes back to transparency is like how much risk can I take on knowing that I'm giving this person this capital? Am I ever going to see it again?

And what's the chance that that's not?

And how much research can I do before investing?

And I think when you look at investments in the private market today, it doesn't really matter what they are. Those three things are really bad.

And the further out you go from that, either whether it's economically or you have less capital to work with or whether you just literally go further afield and you're now dealing with international law, those become harder and harder and harder to make investments, even for people with means. what we're really trying to do is make it so that by taking those barriers down, by giving people the ability to trade away private investments if they need to, their circumstances change, by making the infrastructure cheaper to run because blockchain is so inexpensive to run.

We can reduce the buy-ins necessary to do this. can, instead of having like me, you know, me going through a legal process as a founder to issue shares, the traditional way is very expensive. So I need people to invest large amounts each time because those legal documents cost a lot of money. If I do it through blockchains, pennies. And the same thing again with transparency. If I have end-to-end transparency in what's happening, that now somebody in, you know, India could invest in a company in America with smart contracts running that investment. So they still have like a protection there in place if something were to go right. And they still have the ability to then trade away those shares to somebody else who potentially could be in Australia. And those systems aren't possible today.

Chris Mailander:

It's probably worthwhile for you just to take a minute and describe the blockchain fabric and how that you're able to do for pennies on the dollar compared to traditional finance, which is legally intensive, expensive to do, inefficient and clubby in terms of who has access to it does this work? How does blockchain work? How does that enable access to be able to use it with a demographic which is lower economically speaking, A, B, extremely geographically diverse, and then you create liquidity in the system also, which simply means that the money is able to move around so that somebody who has a smart contract in India is able to trade it with somebody in Costa Rica, who's able to trade it with somebody in Saudi Arabia.

Eliot Puplett:

So I think to answer the question, blockchain is sort of cheaper and more accessible for two main reasons. The first one is that the technology is immutable, meaning that you can't change it once it's happened. today there's a lot of verification. I need to verify what's happening in other countries. That means I have to get involved with the legal system over there. I probably need to have a presence there to be able to deal with something legally over there. I need to be to validate contracts, argue contracts. Still some of that exists on blockchain, but it's much more clear cut because the contract that's happening is a smart contract. It's a set of code that can be audited by all people before they look at it. And because it's open, anyone can look at it and audit it. So you can see a new product that comes out. And you're going to have a ton of engineers get in there and be like, hey, we see this problem here, or this thing looks good, whatever it is. So that's one of the major reasons. And then the second one is lack of intermediaries. when you take, let's take a process today.

I am in France and I'm going to invest in Mailander fund in the US. I need to, first of all, get capital within, in France, in euros. I then have to set up an account in America so I can invest into your fund. That means I now have to take my euros. I have to send them to the US, have to convert it to dollars where they then land in, they land in the United States. That account I've set up has probably been set up with some kind of KYC system. You know, they've needed to know what I am. I now have to maintain an account there.

Depending on the state time in, probably need legal representation over in the US as well to be act on my behalf, sign contracts, that sort of stuff on my behalf there. And then your fund is going to take that capital in. If I now have a legal dispute with you, like that's the whole nother ball game. I now have to like sue you in the United States. Maybe I can sue you at home, depending on how big the fund is and if you're doing business in France. But it just creates a lot of like friction and every single step of the way that.

every single thing I said there, there is someone with a hand in the pot every single time. There is either a financial institution getting involved, there is a broker dealer getting involved, there is a lawyer getting involved somewhere down the line. Blockchain, because it's so transparent and everything that happens on it is sort of like an irreversible clean transaction that can be again audited by anybody at any time, it creates this system where you need far less intermediaries to take anything.

Like if I'm the same person in France, I'm investing your fund. All I have to do at this point is just find the fund investment pool online and then buy into that fund. And I receive the fund shares back into my wallet, my crypto wallet. And now I am a legal owner of that fund. And pretty much like most Western courts at this point have held up like smart contracts, our contracts legally. So like now I own those shares of that fund. No one can take them from me. And I get the distributions that come back from your fund,

because I have those legal shares. So that whole process only took basically one peer-to-peer transaction between you and I. I didn't have to go through all this structure where I had to deal with multiple governments, where I had to deal with multiple financial systems, legal systems. We had one clear set of rules and guidelines that we've agreed to through those contracts. We've done it between you, your fund, and myself. it just simplifies things, I think, to an extent that... we've never seen in finance or technology.

Chris Mailander:

Yeah, I mean, it's unbelievable, quite frankly, how elegant that could be of what you're describing in terms of that transaction between Maylender Fund in France and being able to quickly execute it and do it efficiently. And then I think about, you know, to come back to the audiences or the ecosystem, who fights this, who's against it? All the lawyers, all the investment funds, the asset managers, the central banks that are clearing it, the regulators all have a vested interest. in the existing system.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, if you look at what an investment bank does today, for a company, right, let's say you want to take a traditional company public in that process. Now, there are some things the investment banks are doing, which I mean, that is never going away. There's a salesmanship aspect there that, you know, they're going to go around, shop around, get those initial investors. But then there's also underwriting that they have to do. There's a risk underwriting that they do as a company. There's all the lawyers that get involved in all of the regulatory filings and have to create all of the contracts. Then you've also got the stock exchange that has to get involved and they've got to make sure that you can be listed correctly. Then you've got the Depository Trust Clearing Corp that comes in the DTC and they have to make sure that when buyers and sellers match that they actually have the capital they say that they do and the shares that they say that they do.

And all of these systems are there and they're not horrendously expensive to run by in the grand scheme of things, but it's still chipping away.

And what it means is that you have to be of a certain size in order to take advantage of those systems with blockchain. As we've already seen, I mean, you look at the crypto industry today, there's been token issues, issuances for projects that are brand new. I mean, these are like two kids in a basement kind of projects that have had a good idea that have put a token issuance out there. People have bought into it. It's funded their projects with millions of dollars in capital out the gate and they've gone on. They've built something, whether it's a project to it's usually like a technology product to this point, because again, the industry is young and it's building itself out slowly.

But you can take that same theory, could be literally anything you want to do. I mean, it could be a project to go and build a, I don't know, a new type of teapot, whatever it is, your heart desires. If people believe in it, and they read your prospectus, and they see the thing, they go, yeah, I'll buy one of those tokens. It sounds great.

Chris Mailander:

And so how do you navigate this path, Elliot, which is that... You're a startup, you have a strong team, but a young team, a lean team with a strong vision and what would be considered probably a radical vision if you're the incumbent powers, meaning, wow, this could really gut the ship over a period of time. How do you get it started? What's the you know, the first domino to fall in the sequence here, as opposed to being able to attack directly. You don't have the horsepower to do so. So how do you create a strategy which allows you to out think, out maneuver and get that first domino to fall.

Eliot Puplett:

Well, the first thing you have to do, at least what I believe anyway, and what I've seen the industry fail at, maybe the industry, I the crypto industry fail at is know thine enemy. So learn the rules. is one thing to know the problem and to see it for what it is and hate it. That's one step. Most people stop there.

And then they go and build a project and then they get shut down by the SEC or they get thrown in jail or something happens. Then for me, the next and most important step is, now learn how you can work within that framework because you've got to be in the club to change the club. That's my, that's just my, I mean, some people would have disagree with me on that, but I think you to some degree have to be in the club to change the club. so in much the same way, like Uber, right? Like Uber broke the taxi licensing system. Uber also had to get licensed as high.

like they didn't, you they could have just tried not to, they wouldn't shut down. The reason they were successful is because they followed the rules just enough while really playing fast and loose with them. So there's lots of things we have to do. So like we go back to the retail versus accredited thing. I hate the fact that I can only take on accredited investors. I think it's morally corrupt. But if I don't, the SEC shuts me down. I am forced to

There's certain custodial rules that don't work for the blockchain space that I'm forced to follow. I find ways to follow those custodial rules. Right now, I could do anything, would start like if there was no rules and no banking or anything, I would start my own bank tomorrow. I would just start taking deposits. I build my own bridge on ramp off rem system in five seconds because technically it's very easy to do. Obviously, I would brush up against every banking regulation in not just the country, but each state, it would be an absolute disaster and I'd go to jail for a long time. So it's about doing things like find partners that you can work with who get what you're trying to do, who are already set up in that space. So I think that's for us, that's how we're doing it. It's a lot slower. it really, this is gonna take a while. Like this project is not a, I wish it was like, got a $5 million to $50 million valuation next two year kind of thing. And maybe that'll happen, but.

I think we're all in this with a long-term view and we just know that it's about meeting each of those requirements as carefully as we can while sticking as close as we can to the mission. a great example of this is KYC. There's a rule around KYC within the United States, depending on the institution, but for like advisory firms is you must do KYC.

There's really no clear guidance around whether that's you do it yourself or you outsource it to a technology provider. The way that we've done it is we outsource that piece to technology provider and we are going to be eventually working with that technology provider to do decentralized KYC where you will receive a token, KYC token back to your wallet and you'll hopefully be able to go and use that at other partnering firms like companies or other systems that need to KYC you.

That is not... technically legal or illegal. It's undefined within the law. So our goal there is using that gap to go in and create a new standard that's a good standard and then allow them to do that. We've done something similar with custody. There's really no clear guidance for private funds around custody. So what we did was we took the audit exemption that private equity has and we said, okay, well, if private equity can do this and they just get audited once a year, then like, well, we can use the same model and we'll just come up with a system that works for a decentralized model.

So we've created an on-chain custody model that is an operation that can work and it could be replicated to other funds that's a little bit unique and a little bit strange. But all of the meaning of the law is there. All the things that the SEC are trying to get achieved through custody is there. Just the SEC's language doesn't really allow for the way that we've done it in the most strict sense of the term. So nothing we're doing is like wrong. It's just like, have these huge open gaps and we have to just like, you know, we either pretend we ignore the rules, which is stupid. And that's how we get in. That's how you get in trouble. Or you go, okay, well, what's the ethos they're trying to get to? Let's build something as close to that as possible. Because even though there's no true law that says we should do it one way or the other, we know what they're aiming for. So we can build into that model, knowing that like, event. It's a good system. It's following the right direction. There's a reason some of these laws got set up anyway, and they're not necessarily the worst thing. And that's kind how we think about building it. It's like just following the rules, following the rules as a guideline, and then keeping that in touch with the technology and what's possible in the technology, and then also with the ethos of the company.

Chris Mailander:

Yeah. Talk to me about VCs and your conversations with VCs.

Eliot Puplett:

My favorite people. It's been interesting. I think the...

The biggest, so VCs and the FinTech space are a strange animal. think a lot of VCs want to treat FinTech like social media when it functions a little bit more like MedTech because of the regulatory concerns. It seems to me a VC will hand money over to a medical tech company with no problem. But if you come, they're like, well, let's talk about traction and clients. like, I don't think you understand the cost of the regulatory hurdles we have to cross to even take clients on.

And then on top of that as well, there's like a lot of VCs that we talk to, they don't want to touch the blockchain space because they're terrified of it. Understandably. mean, it's a very wild west space to be in. There's no regulatory guidance at all. And the guidance that is there is crap, to be quite frank. So we've had conversations with VCs where they've been bullish up until like the 11th hour and then they've pulled out because of regulatory concerns. And it's not even like they haven't even studied our regulatory.

They just look at the regulation that a butts up against the wall that we've created. And they're like, I don't know. We don't know enough about it to make an informed decision on investing in you. So we can't take that risk. And we know the regulation, but no amount of us explaining to them the analysis we've done and how every decision we've made has been done with a compliance mindset.

No amount of us explaining to that to them is going to allay that fear because if they don't understand the regulation, they can't understand where we're in line or where we might be falling out of line and they then can't take that risk on themselves. I understand it. find it of interesting because it's the point of venture capital is the venture bit in my mind.

Chris Mailander:

Yeah. I mean, you've identified that this is a source of risk capital, your risk is their primary motivation is to get the risk as low as possible and the highest returns. Yeah. As opposed to funding into it.

Yeah, so think about non-traditional sources of capital that might be out there. One of the things that you mentioned is that oftentimes your most successful entrepreneurs also come from a wealthy background, and their initial tranches of money come from family who are investing because they're putting money into the pocket of a son or a daughter who has an idea of something non-traditional, and they're willing to bank that bet, and it turns out extraordinarily well. And the risk parameters are different in those contexts.

We've talked about that conversation as well, which is looking at other sources of capital of people who might get that vision, understand what you're bumping up against, and also the potential opportunity.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, and we do. actually, we've seen that ourselves. know, initial investors that we had, we've been very lucky because we've been introduced to people just through the, mostly the power of networking, to be quite honest with you. None of our group and our founder pool really come from any money to be quite my money. My money's long gone. My any money my family had and you know, mean, one of our one of our co founders is a comes from a really like, quite hard up family from Queens. You know, so he's we none of us have like what I call great ties to any capital, but we've been able to raise little bits as we've needed from like true angel investors, people who have like really believed in us.

Um, and I think that's the other way too, is like, VC's not the only route to go. Uh, I think, I think we have this. Slight, uh, bias to things that have happened in the last like 10 years, right? So like in the beginning, if I was doing this 10 years ago, then I probably would have gone to VC and it would have been very different conversation. The tune of VC has changed dramatically in the last five years. And you see founders talk about that quite openly. VCs used to, you used to, you used to have to come in with nothing, like a wing and a prayer back in the good old days. And now like.

VCs want to see significant amounts of traction. want to see, they want basically no risk before they make an investment, which is kind of ironic given the fact the venture is in their name. So that means you have to get creative with where you find capital sourcing. So like what we're pursuing right now is instead of going down the capital route, is go down the strategic partnership route. You know, we've got, we have stuff that we bring to the table. We have other needs that we have that will, you know, with a partner would grow both of our businesses equally. So for us, why not go down that route and meet with them?

Talk about strategic investments and partnerships with them because they have a vested interest in us being successful. So I think there's always creative ways you can get around financing. Obviously, it would be easier if my parents were just multimillionaires, that would make my day much happier. But I think you can always find creative solutions. I mean, honestly, to go back to what we said earlier, you kind of just have to.

When you're founding a company at this stage, mean, my options are make it work and give up. Those are the only two options I have. It's very binary.

Chris Mailander:

It strikes me the tremendous amount of resiliency to work through those problem sets, to bump up against those conversations time and time again, to find new ones, to rethink it. It takes a tremendous amount of resiliency.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, I think it's, I don't know if it's it's resiliency or stupidity. I haven't decided. I think I think it just comes from

You know, I tell you what, was a, I think it was Forbes article, this is years ago now, talking about like, you know, I always say like, I try and keep things as empirical as possible. Like look at the evidence. It was Forbes or somebody like that. They did a look at people who were successful in their field. And it was everybody from like doctors to entrepreneurs, politicians, whole gambit of people who were like top producers in their field. They basically did character studies on them and looked at their backgrounds, their education… to try and see is there a trend thing? Was it like everyone was born on a Wednesday or was it like they all came from backgrounds where both parents worked, whatever it was that made them successful? What they found was that the only two things they could find in all of the groupings, one of which was a constant feeling of self-doubt, which is the feeling that you...

Well, if osteo syndrome, that's it, like where you don't feel like you should be in the room that that was common across everybody that they looked at. And the other major one was, it was just tenacity. Like every single person had just not given up and had just figured it out as they went. So I kind of, think I took that to heart and I was like, okay, well, we can keep finding ways. Like we're doing good work at the moment. whether or not the strategy that I have in my mind as the, as the CEO is the right strategy...

something within that strategy is going to click in some way. I'm already seeing that. Like I mentioned, we've discovered a whole B2B side of the business that we didn't even know existed when we got into this. We started thinking retail, we then figured we couldn't and we then found a better market elsewhere. There are lots of little things that you discover along the way that you can then pivot into. And think nothing sums it up more for me than like Slack as a company.

I don't if you know the background of Slack, but they started as a group of friends who were building a video game together. And I think it was a video game. And they needed a way to communicate and share files and code with each other. So they built this little program and then they ended up that became the business and they sold the little program. The little program grew into what is now Slack and Instagram had much the same thing. They started off as a company called Bourbon where they

It was like you take photos of the bourbon you were having and you'd rate it and share it with friends and they like it and stuff like that. And friends of theirs were like, hey, have you considered just doing this photo thing, sharing things is actually really cool. Why just do it for bourbon? So I think you see that a lot in, we only hear the success bit of that story. We don't hear the failed apps beforehand and all the other ideas like the video game that never was that created Slack. know, there's all this like failed projects along the way. And I think the only difference is, you know, lot of people would have gotten through that, like, you know,

lot of people would have done like with bourbon that became Instagram, they would have just gotten to the end of the bourbon journey and been like, well, no one's using it. No one likes it. I guess we'll just give up. But they didn't pivoted into something else and it became wildly successful and they sold it to Facebook.

Chris Mailander:

Tell me about your support network. That's a big piece of this. Huge.

Eliot Puplett:

It's, cannot overstate the importance of a support network. Cause you are going to, especially if you go down this route, you are going to feel like garbage all the time. I think it was Elon Musk that said like being a founder is 99 % awful and 1 % great. And that's absolutely true. I think it's, I'm incredibly lucky. have both my parents still alive.

They're great if I need, you know, like just to chat about literally anything I can. I've got, know, in my personal life, obviously, I've got a very supportive spouse and I've got good network of friends around me who will have their own, bring their own stuff to the table. And then within the company, two very, very strong co-founders who both are really different to me in many ways. We agree on some things and we did not disagree on anything, but like we all have very different ways of looking at the world and different skill sets. I find that we all

We all hit moments where we're all feeling down and we keep each other going. And then I've got an amazing advisory board as well of people who have enormous amounts of industry expertise, people who have built their own companies. They've done this before. And I'm lucky enough to be able to chat to them and I can vent to them. And I really do vent to some of them in a very just like, you can just lie on the floor and cry kind of way.

You know, they're there to pick me back up with the floor and say, no, you're doing okay. And they remind me of the things that we're doing and why we're doing it. I think, so I think whenever you're going down a journey like this, it's really important to set yourself up with. Whatever your support network needs to be for you personally. I'm very good at like, find human connections to be the thing that helps me being reminded by people who have more experience than me. like people who are friends in industries that I like, who have different perspectives to me or advisors who have more experience than me, co-founders with different opinions. Those things to me are the things that like really give me strength. But you know, it might be for someone else, it could be.

like reading that gives them strength, finding like information on stuff and like learning that helps them. There's all sorts of ways that you can create a support network, whether it's human-based or systems-based. Some people are like more systems-based support network is good for them. like discipline, things like that, getting up at the same time every day helps them. So I think it's just finding the things in your, finding the things for you as an individual on this journey that like work for you and really get you to like keep going and chill. I know for me, like one of big things is I try and I get super down when things feel like they're not going anywhere. We have this like, there's like a hill and then like a dip when you hit this bottom of the dip and these like micro ones happen constantly. And I find when I hit the bottom of a dip, if I'm not careful, I can get super de-energized and I can just be like do this, I like, why am I doing this? Why do I, why did I ever do this? So what I do is I make sure that I either call somebody who I know is going to like, help get me mentally back on track, just have a quick conversation with them about like, or like spitball the idea of the problem with them. I'll somebody if I like, there's someone who I follow on like YouTube or something who I like, take like follow for guidance, like I'll watch a video from them about just to remind myself like, either why I'm doing this or what the longer journey looks like. it's keeping, think the most important thing is just keeping an eye on the, make sure you just remember the road's long and just don't worry about the road being long too much.

Chris Mailander:

Right. What do your parents think? Your dad, the entrepreneur and master of reinvention and your mom who supports and helps take care...

Eliot Puplett:

I actually don't know Chris. I actually don't know exactly what they, I know what they say to me, but I don't know that's what they think.

I think they, I think they... respect the process. They challenge me on it a lot. That's a big one. They always challenge me on making sure that I'm still heading the game, that I'm still making progress, I'm not wasting time. So when I talk to them, they always ask, and there's always a little bit of a challenge, challenge my narrative a little bit. When I say something's going well or whatever, they'll be like, can you quantify that? But basically, can you quantify that statement?

I think that I've answered those questions in a way that they're comfortable with so they don't poke too much. But yeah, I think they, when I told them that I was gonna do this, my parents are both like, they're not risk averse, they weren't when I was growing up. I think so they got it, like they understood why I was doing it. I think had I quit and I didn't have like a support network around me, they probably would have had a few more questions, but because I already had a very established, I came to them with a very clear argument of what I was doing and why... and I think that was that with that, said, okay, that's, that's cool. I would have done it with or without their approval, but it was nice to have the blessing. You know, it's always good to have a, have your family behind you. if they can be...

Chris Mailander:

So, tell me where this goes. What is the trophy?

Eliot Puplett:

It's really good question. I would love... really want to see in the future, thousands of people using what we're building and people who have started companies and started funds and have made their family investments, built wealth for themselves. I would love people to see me and be like, my God, I love Medici. Really, it's so cool. Or not even just use it as the point, kind of like how we think of Google today, where it's just so ubiquitous in our financial lives that we're just not thinking about it and it's there… helping everybody every single day in some capacity, helping people just transact and get through the world that they need to. If I can help bring people together and bring, I think, for me, international cooperation of business is the best way to not have war. So if I can help that as a side gig where we reduce conflict by some quantifiable measure because people are now doing more business internationally because it's now easier.

That's also would be awesome. That would be a little side benefit if I could have that. Yeah, I just wanna leave having made some impact, right? Leave the place a better state than I found it, I guess.

Chris Mailander:

Awesome. That's great. Anything else that you want to share?

Eliot Puplett:

That's a really good question. I have a question for you actually. So your Iowa upbringing, your farm upbringing, because you obviously had quite an interesting trajectory. been, you you've been differently entrepreneurial to me, but you've also done quite a few entrepreneurial things in your tenure. What do you think the key thing for you was that kind of pushed you down that track? Do you think it was similar to me? Was it parenting or do you think it was something? something else.

Chris Mailander:

Yeah, I don't know. I think it's this interesting mixture, this cauldron, this bubbling goo that we all have in a unique story and our situational context and how we grow up. And it just creates interesting journeys. think that there are dimensions of where I came from. I I grew up on the seventh generation that was on the same piece of ground in Iowa.

And they had all been farmers. They all are farmers or lawyers. And dad said, you're not going to be a farmer because this was during the 1980s. And it was extraordinarily difficult period of time in agriculture and many farms were, know, farmers were going bankrupt and leaving and selling. And it was a very difficult time. it was thin. We grew up without a lot of resources. So, so A is start looking outside. You know, you're going somewhere else.

I'm not necessarily guidance on where that is and what was right or wrong, but rather it's not here. Okay. So we know that you're not coming back here. Second of all, I probably was wired in a way that was anytime somebody told me that you couldn't do something was absolutely the perfect motivation that I was going to go do that. So there was a dimension of that. There's a dimension of, you know, where I grew up.

Again, you know, think I always carry a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about what it is and what people on the coast think it was, which they don't have any idea. So I don't know why they have an opinion on it. However, with that said, I grew up on a little farm town that was extraordinarily supportive of its community. We took care of each other, whether it was just, you know, that beer in the driveway or a quick dinner when they needed it or somebody, you know, mom making a pie to somebody who just lost someone.

And… doing what you can to help somebody out, having their kids come over for a couple of hours just cause they needed a break and it was tough. to, you know, I had really supportive coaches who, know, they, they gave me everything they, they said, do it. You get to, you get a chance to be a star. We're behind it. Let's go. I also had the wild, privilege through randomness, which is that I had one of the foremost, speech and debate coaches in the country.

We had in a little small farm town, we competed at the highest level at the state and national level in speech and debate, extraordinarily influential. This is a guy, John Burke, would take us to, we'd go to the University of Iowa and do our research in the libraries. He's taking us all over the Midwest to debate schools that were five times larger than us and were the premier prestigious schools that were the pipeline for education out there. We were not on the pipeline and we were playing at a very high level.

That's a little bit of random fate and why I also probably ended up like I told you, mainlanders either are farmers or lawyers. So I ended up going to law school and went through that process. There's a little bit of the ingenuity that comes with growing up poor in the country, which is that we did not have the good equipment. We bought broken down cattle, broken down sheep, broken down machinery, and you make something out of it.

So there's this innovation ingenuity that's associated with it. You better be able to fix something to get more life and more value out of it. And there's a tremendous amount of pride about it all. I think what you talked about is quite interesting in terms of having, you know, I come from an area which is extraordinarily progressive when it's measured in agricultural production. It is one of the most productive per capita.

regions in the absolute world in terms of what an individual contributor out there produces in terms of net value. And it's because they are up to date on the latest science and technology. There's another side to that as well, which is that that science and technology has allowed those farms to continue to exist, grow, be extraordinarily powerful. But it doesn't take as many people. And it changes the cultural fabric of the place where you're from. And so there's far fewer people.

there and it started with, know, fence row to fence row with corn and a couple of windmills stuck in the middle of it. So it's changed. It's changed dramatically. I find it infinitely interesting to look at all these different variables, which is understanding what's going on economically, culturally, ideologically, emotionally, with how people then make decisions. Because I think that how you make the decision determines the outcome.

Which is part of the exploration I wanted to go through with you, which is understanding your journey as someone from the UK who has a spirit of adventure, a bit of a renegade, came from a home that had enough wealth to allow you some opportunities and experiences and education and meeting super interesting people, but went through adversity. So you had to go get a job when you're 16 and start working in kitchens and make all that work.

And now, and then becoming a bit of a systemic thinker who's got a major in financial history, who is interested in issues around decentralization versus centralization, authoritarianism versus liberalism, what it means to be conservative or progressive, and then putting that into a mix of a venture, which has the potential to dramatically change the centralization and finance dramatically change how you help people at a lower socioeconomic level. Opens up money and opportunity so that people can better themselves as opposed to being on the social roles of the concept of noblesse oblige, which I think is super interesting and nobody here really understands what that means in a beneficial way. It's probably a little bit of a pejorative term actually, as opposed to if you've had a bit of success, help somebody else out, help them come along. Otherwise, the system that is necessary to take care of people and help people systemically is worse. So I think that sense of responsibility is interesting in your story as well. I don't know if that answers your question, but.

Eliot Puplett:

No, it kind of does. I think I look at the era of the world that you came from. I think what you said about the changing economics there in the last, you know... 50 years really as mechanizations increased. That fascinates me because I think it's changed. You think 100 years ago, I forget exactly how many people it was worked in farming, but it's significantly higher than it is now. And it's basically been a downward trajectory since the industrial revolution started all the way through. And I do wonder if that's going to have an impact on how we as a society in the United States think kind of going way, back to our earlier conversation around the culture of the country and how it's changing. know, a lot of that kind of independence, that independence mindset where your small communities help each other out, in the, but you know, as a tiny, you know, village, essentially in the middle of Iowa, that no one's going to come save you when things get bad. So that, that, that's going to change, think, dramatically as more and more people leave those communities behind to go to cities or bigger communities, whatever it is, they're, you know, chasing different opportunities. So it's interesting to just see your upbringing kind of is sort of a microcosm of something that's

We all live in environments where our upbringings never exist again. We are the only generation that grew up in either of our upbringings. Your generation had a very specific experience that your kids didn't have. I had a very specific experience. My father's two up, two down cottage. That's basically gone. Those don't really exist anymore. It's just interesting to me how it shapes how we think and then how each subsequent generation's struggle is different or like what they view as successful also changes pretty dramatically as well.

Chris Mailander:

And I think the way that you see opportunity, what's interesting about the entrepreneur's journey that you're on is you're bumping up against some really large institutional players with capital that would like things just to be the way they are. And then you start pushing against that. And then being able to find throughout history is that single little shift… where something moves and you use the case of, for example, of Uber, which went against a very institutionalized way of moving people through the taxi licensing system. And relatively quickly, they figured out a way to completely transform an inefficient industry into something which is much more liquid, accessible, with ups and downs associated with it. But huge shift. Google, 30 years ago. What was Google 30 years ago?

You know, and now they're ubiquitous, Microsoft, et cetera. they these these... going through that primordial goo in your case, which is the larger financial system, and then finding that window, that opportunity and being able to target it and then grow from there. That's what you're looking for.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, I think you're right, actually. I think that's true. Across the board for every generation that comes through, right, they find their their niches of little things they need to work on them. But I think comes back... to what we were talking about earlier, where it's about the, we're all on the same, we're all mostly part of the same grouping in terms of what we want for the world. We want general improvement across the board. We want less poverty. We want more opportunity. We want to see those things progress. How we think we should get this changes depending on, you know, where you came from and like what your background is. it's good to see that people from your and my background, which are very disparate to each other and like how we grew up, there's still similarities in like what we both wanted to try and go out and do something. And I see that a lot in people around me. Like it doesn't matter right roughly where they come from. There's always, there's something they want to work towards and push for. And I think, I think if in the moral of this, the moral of this entire episode, if it could be anything, it's just keep on going basically, you know. Keep fighting.

Just keep fighting, keep pushing through.

Chris Mailander:

And I think it's interesting. think your philosophy is interesting around being able to, it's too hard for you to fight the club. So you have to become a member of the club and then change it from within. I think it's an interesting concept and I'll be interested to see how that plays out. But finding that little chink in the armor, being able to go in and change the host organism as it were will be interesting.

Eliot Puplett:

I think we all do it in our own way though. It's if you think about your background, I mean, you you in the world that you entered where you became a lawyer and then, you know, went on to do quite a lot of consulting work with firms and not just firms, but people from very different cultural backgrounds, as far as long as you know, the Middle East and such.

Chris Mailander:

I always wanted experiences. So if it was an exciting experience, yeah, I'll go.

Eliot Puplett:

But you've you've shaped yourself as an individual. I mean, I don't you know, you don't.

If someone had to guess your background, an Iowa farm boy is probably not the first thing that would come to their mind. And it's not that you're like being like untrue to yourself in any way. It's like you've just, you've learned the, you learned the club and the vernacular that you needed to in order to go do the things you wanted to do in life. you know, make the changes that you've made, build the life for you and your family that you want to do. So I think in a funny sort of way, it's, it's all, we all do something like that. We all figure out what club we need to belong to. I've definitely Americanized while I've been here.

And some of that's been on purpose just to be able to fit in, know, as words, terms and stuff that I actively use instead of others to make sure that I can communicate effectively with people who grew up in a different language structure and different social structures, the one I grew up in. So I think it's, it's an, it's an, it is interesting that like we don't often as a group, we're not aware that we do it, but as society, we actually do like change to be part of whatever club it is we need to join to achieve the goal that we need to achieve at any point.

Doesn't matter...

Chris Mailander:

Well, and I think one of the interesting things that we should touch on also is you're part of the immigrant story of what is dynamic. So many times, particularly on the entrepreneurial side, are immigrants or first generation because they come in and they see the American system and they understand how it works and they are necessarily part of it. And then all of a sudden, because they come in through this unique lens… are like, this doesn't make sense. We can fix this. We can change it. And it blossoms from there. And so I think that's a really, you know, something that I'm quite proud of, which is the American experience invites people in with really interesting perspectives, diversity of ideas, see things differently. Here's new patterns. Why don't we go here? And it blossoms. And that vigor and energy is essential in our cultural experience.

Eliot Puplett:

It's actually interesting. get frustrated sometimes with some of my uncle immigrant brethren, I guess I'll call them because I've noticed that there's really distinctly two types of immigrant in the U S I belong to the first group, which you just mentioned, which is the, I am. To for better or for worse, a hundred percent bought into the, to the idea. Like I get the, it's a nation built of immigrants. It's a nation built of people coming to the table with different ideas. I think it's one of the things that makes it the most exciting dynamic country in the world.

still to this day. We are the only country in the world where you can find sushi in rural Ohio. You don't see that anywhere else. I can tell you that for you. don't see that in rural Australia. it's a nation where you have this like, there's so much opportunity if you just go out and figure it out and find it. I meet a lot of immigrants though who also are

I call them like the whiny brigade. it's, like, you know, people who they, all they want to do is just complain about why America is not like where they came from. And I find it fascinating. tell Europeans are really bad at that. Actually. That's a, it's I'll give a break to a lot of other countries because, um, a lot of the continental areas, uh, my friends who are immigrants from places like Latin America, um, from like central Africa, uh, don't complain as much. They're much more like switched onto what the benefits are here.

I find a lot of Europeans, they're like, I don't like it because XYZ or I think it's stupid because XYZ. And they don't realize that like the philosophical framework of the United States, founding, its entire business system is built in a methodology that like continental Europe isn't. And the reason it's worked so well is because of that framework and to come in and then the immediate thing is I want to change it. I'm like, well, why it works really like mostly works really well. You know, there's definitely we have some very, very

significant issues in this country, but every country has significant issues. And the benefits that we've been able to give the world as a country, which I can say now because I'm a citizen, but the benefits that we've given the world as a country, I think far outweigh the detractions. And still to this day, I mean, we still put out more innovation than anyone else. It's been very impressive. mean, despite the fact our medical system is a disaster left to right, we still put out more medical innovation than any other country. We're the ones, I mean, look at you look at what's like SpaceX has done like getting the program on by putting tons of rockets up into space, you know, will probably be the country that hits Mars faster than anybody else. We're the first country to implant chips in people's brains. mean, that's crazy enough as it is. Just I just always I'm always it's an all being a part of this country. And I always find it interesting that so many people come in and don't see it. It always really surprises me.

Chris Mailander:

All right. So, Elliot, you've given us a lot to think about. And the issues are big and profound and daunting, and you're navigating them one by one. What is it that you do when you're not thinking about Medici and about creating this private capital market and a way of doing finance on an international basis, quite frankly? What is it that you do that takes you completely out of this?

Eliot Puplett:

That's a really good question. love philosophy and ideas.

And I don't just study them in my own time, but I also, so Tina, my wife and I recently set up a like philosophy kind of debate club thing that we put together with a group of friends. It's gotten quite big now actually, but it's basically we meet together for dinner once every now and then, and we'll just have like these long discussions on topics. think whenever I'm not doing this work, I'm just trying to keep a beat on what

You know, what ideas are out there, what's going on that can be within the range of like politics or more just general broad philosophy history, that kind of stuff, just to sort of understand. The overarching things that make humans tick and like why I'm fascinated by people and what what makes us work and why and like where people get their ideas from and it just all of that fascinates me no end.

Chris Mailander:

What about the theater? You live in New York.

Eliot Puplett:

I know, I know. It's funny. I don't see as much these days. I used to, I find a lot of theater. I think.

Chris Mailander:

I mean, you're literally in Hell's Kitchen, right? It's just a walk up.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, it's, I don't know. I've, I've, there's some really great theater. There's a lot of fine theater out there. I try and keep a tab. What's going on. I just went like a couple of weeks ago. I just went to the Sorcaborate. So I am, I am still, I'm still going. I don't go anywhere near as much as I want to.

I do still go and see a lot of music and stuff though. I will try and go and see jazz at jazz clubs. I love pretty much everything, even traditional Irish music in an Irish bar, that kind of stuff, literally anything and everything. So I try to keep in touch with my artistic side. I listen to a ton of music.

Chris Mailander:

So do you find that you have to recharge batteries after dealing with all the issues that you're dealing with and then changing strategies and have a... good conversation and a bad conversation. And sometimes those can suck a lot of energy out.

Eliot Puplett:

Yeah, I think there's different types of battery recharge too. There's like mental and then there's like mental ways to deal with it and physical ways to deal with it. And I think depending on the issue or what's happened is depending on what I do. Like if I'm, if I'm stuck on a problem, I'll usually go for a really long walk. Like I can do like two hour walks easily without skipping a beat. And that helps me think through everything.

It also helps me sleep better because then I don't get stuck thinking about it trying to go to bed and then not sleep. Sure. And then I think when I when I hit a point where I need like an actual break, where I'm not trying to solve something, I'm just like, I'm exhausted. I need to stop for a bit. That's when I go do something fun like the sort of philosophy reading stuff or that kind of stuff is like a good vent for me to like do something completely different. Nothing to do with my work. It's nothing to do with anything finance related. It's just something I'm super interested in.

And then I think the music and arts thing is something I do more like that's something I do. That's developed to something I do with Tina, like my wife, like I love doing that with her. So we go and do that because she also has an arts background as well. She's an engineer by training, but she was a dancer all the way up and through college. And so she, she and I love going and then like critically evaluating what we see, you know, we'll go, usually will go see a show or some music or something, and then we'll go grab like a slice of cheesecake or something in a diner afterwards and we'll sit and like really get into the weeds of like, what was good, what was bad, what we liked, what we didn't like. So that's like become a thing that we just do as a couple now. So that's awesome.

Chris Mailander:

Elliot, this has been fantastic. I've really enjoyed spending time with you taking us behind the scenes and into your mind and how you think about this, because it is one of the great journeys in the American experience, the American mythology of the entrepreneur, the risk taker, the visionary, the idealist.

And I'm glad that we've got to see this on your journey. And I want you to come back as that journey progresses so that we can see how it's unfolding and where it leads to and how you knock down each one of these individual problem sets over and over and over.

Eliot Puplett:

I would love to. But I'll probably have a lot more gray hairs by the time I come back. But was really good fun. Really good fun, Chris. I'm excited we're doing this, honestly. I think this is I'm excited to see what all the other other episodes look like and who you're bringing on, who you're talking to, because it's a great format.

Chris Mailander:

Very good. Thanks, Elliot. What a great conversation with Elliot. What an interesting journey of working through life in terms of falling out of the traditional pipeline that otherwise would have led him to Oxford or Cambridge in a fairly constrained, constricted system, but because of a learning difference, going to Battle Abbey for school being introduced to the liberal arts that is the foundation of of US colleges by virtue of having a an American math teacher while he was in high school and then coming over to America, emigrating and building something which is altruistic, which is using true capitalism to help people at all strata of society and not crony capitalism of being able to do the entrepreneurs journey of having a really strong vision and idea of the future and then day in and day out working to serve that vision. It's inspiring. It's part of that American ethos that we respect.

And quite frankly, sometimes I'm in awe of it's the same sort of people that I came from and many of you came from, which are entrepreneurial. They do what they need to do out of necessity, out of creativity, out of a sense of helping themselves and taking care of their families, but also doing well by others. So I wanna thank Elliot for spending some time with us and the best of wishes and good luck on Medici.

That's all for now. I'll talk to you soon.