.jpg)
THE FRONTIER LINE
Hosts Wayne Aston and David Murray explore the critical global pillars of infrastructure development and energy production, from traditional methods to future-forward advancements. The Frontier Line covers the latest industry news, energy innovations, and sustainability trends that are shaping the future. Through expert interviews with industry leaders in renewable energy, utility-scale battery storage, and waste-to-energy technologies, the podcast provides insights into the evolving landscape of energy efficiency and sustainable infrastructure. By focusing on the intersection of innovation and the politics of energy, The Frontier Line highlights transformative ideas and technologies poised to deliver cost-efficient, resilient, and sustainable solutions for global industries.
THE FRONTIER LINE
Ken Tapp- Complete Financial Solutions, Spacebilt, & Decentral Life; Blockchain Revolution: Tokenizing the Future
Welcome back to the show. Friends of the Frontier Line. We're very excited to welcome another special guest into the studio. Dave, how are you today?
Speaker 2:Doing great. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while now, so looking forward to getting a good chance to talk to Ken.
Speaker 1:Yes. So listeners out there today we've got special guest Ken Tapp in the studio with us. He's dialed in, I think. He's traveling on business today and we're grateful that he's able to join us because he's got quite the schedule. Ken Tapp is the if I get it correct. Correct me if I'm wrong. Ken, I believe you are the secretary of Complete Financial Solutions. That means you get the paperwork done. You make sure things are I's are dotted and T's are crossed, and that's just one of your roles, because you wear many coats actually, and we're going to dive into that for the listeners today. But, ken, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Well, gentlemen, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Gentlemen, Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. So, in standard form for the Frontier Line, we typically won't read a biography about you for the listeners. We'd prefer to let that be our first kind of guiding question, ken. So can you just give our listeners some background of who is Ken Tapp and, over the years, what are some of the big accomplishments that you're proud of and what led you, you know, into complete financial solutions?
Speaker 3:the middle 90s where I got my start in the tech industry, which is really what my focus is all about in my career identifying technologies and companies that are trying to use technology to solve problems today's problems, tomorrow's problems.
Speaker 3:It's led my career into some pretty big problems, especially as it relates to things like defense and security and even aerospace and that sort of thing, and so it's been a fun journey for me.
Speaker 3:I started out in a little startup company that we went public back at the oh, August 1999, come to think of it right about now called Realtorcom, so I'm getting a start in the real estate space. That followed on to some additional real estate startup companies, including names like Zillow and Trulia, and then that pivoted into some other sectors, is really more focused on e-commerce and social media and blockchain over the last 15 years or so and, like I said, it's led me into finding solutions using those type of technologies for some pretty major industries, and that's really what Complete Financial Solutions is trying to accomplish. It's a fantastic team of generals and colonels and executives and super, super smart people that I get to, like you said, dot the I's and cross the T's and make sure all the paperwork gets done correctly. But being around that team, it's a privilege and it's a joy to learn as much as I can from people who are much smarter than I am, and I'm excited about where that company is planning to go.
Speaker 1:Thanks for that, ken. You know, I think a lot of our listeners have some background in real estate and I thought it was cute that you teed it up. These small companies, small company, realtorcom All the startup. As a startup it obviously is small, but I mean Trulia and Zillow and Realtorcom. I mean these are probably the most influential real estate-focused online businesses of our maybe of our era. These are household names. I imagine that that was not only a wild ride for you, but you probably saw some nice exits with those businesses.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, so I just want to you'll you'll learn that I always want to give credit to everybody else because that's really where it's deserved. I call them small businesses because I was involved with them at those early stages. Because I was involved with them at those early stages and I think that's my expertise is really trying to help companies get off the ground and take it to the next level. I don't try to confuse anybody or myself that I belong in a company long-term and when I got involved with those companies they were small, so it's always a joy to see a company like that take off. Those companies take off and become as useful to the public as they have been.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. What's your, ken, what's your you know in doing that? I mean, that takes a special kind of someone to be able to have that foresight, to be able to understand, I guess, enough of technology, enough of the market space where things are going, but then also to jump in and be able to start to connect those dots Is that kind of your you know. What you found has been your superpower in all of this is being able to come in and be that person to take what is an idea or a really good idea, but maybe being able to guide them along the path of making it into something substantial and removing those barriers and obstacles along the way of so many startups.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's a really good point. With startups, you have to play three-dimensional chess, and what I mean by that is that you have to understand who you're going to be later not right now necessarily so that you can back in to right now. The thing that you're constantly dealing with is a consumer that is fickle and changing their mind frequently. Their mind frequently, every time a new device comes out, a new application, a new trend, your potential client goes a different direction, and if you're not already heading that direction before they get there, you're out of business, and so at those early stages in those companies, I find a lot of joy in trying to figure out where the consumer behavior is headed.
Speaker 3:If you ask me, where do I think we're going to be 10 years from now, the first thing I'll tell you is that access to energy will be entirely different 10 years from now and, with some luck, we'll be able to be at the early stages of fusion, and that will change everything.
Speaker 3:And as a result of fusion changing everything, businesses will have to change to match up to that. Well, that's probably not the first thing you're going to think of if you decide to sit down today and start a new business. Ten years from now, the energy sector may entirely change the sector I'm going to go into, whatever that might be. So I like to look out as far as I can and understand how those different sectors are about to change and then look back and try to understand how consumers are behaving and see if I can't find a place where they're going to meet somewhere in the future and and then try to build a business help people, I should say build businesses around that concept, and it's not always accurate, but it's also a lot of fun because you're trying to look into the future.
Speaker 2:What, what's your? What have you run into? Is, I mean, and I and I, I want to and I want to get into blockchain, I know have to convince a lot of decision makers, a lot of groups, to adopt something that, frankly, they don't understand and even today don't understand and a lot of people still don't understand and the adoption and everything else. How do you navigate that on the business side of things, Telling them or teaching them, how do you do that? How do you enlist these? You know these groups you know to work with. Or even going back to the realtorcom days, how do you make the case or help them say well, this is where things are going with the internet and you're going to want to be here. You know what are some of the things you employ in doing that and solving that.
Speaker 3:That's a great question and I think I learned that skill at Realtorcom before, even before we decided to go online and have a com we were a software system early on that. You really have to start and look backwards at that industry that you're trying to solve problems for and understand why those problems exist in that industry and most of the time that's related to regulation or a group of people in associations or big associations. You know, back then it was focusing on how is the National Association of Realtors and even the National Association of Home Builders stuck in a certain way that has created a problem, and how is our technology going to come in and potentially solve that problem? And then from there it's a layer cake. You begin to look at okay, they deal with consumers, so how do we need to educate consumers that they can go a different direction to avoid this problem? And you start to play. You know you're drawing a map of the future and trying to fit your product or your service, your business model, into that map and then navigate through the map and it's the I would say the hardest part of that isn't as much knowing how to convince the consumer base on how to adopt it. That typically will just take place on its own if you're picking the right industry and the right solutions. The hardest part of that is to convince investors or to convince other powers that be that have some role in your success.
Speaker 3:National Association of Realtors had a huge role in the success of Realtorcom. Had they not got behind the company, it would have been probably a failure, despite the fact that we had a good name. And so you really have to figure out how do we educate the people who are going to ultimately pull the financial strings or the regulatory strings or way, and make sure that those investors along the way continue to see the potential? Frankly, because not to jump into aerospace, I know we'll talk about it here eventually, but the fact of the matter is that he started out with an idea which flopped, you know, going and buying an old rocket from Russia or Ukraine and whatnot, and then trying to repurpose it and whatnot, and then trying to repurpose it and then decided, wow, we better build our own.
Speaker 3:And then running out of money and having to go and convince investors that this wasn't just a pipe train, that it really needed to happen, and I think a lot of investors and founders when they can marry together like he's been able to do with his investors. That's when some real magical things happen. It is different now than it was 25 years ago. We went public in August of 99. And so, gosh, back then you just had to have a good idea and there was a ton of money that would go into it and you didn't really have to educate those investors along the way at that early stage. You cannot go and start something new today without going through all of that trouble to make sure that those investors really understand the potential. Really understand the potential, because the fact of the matter is that you may, like I started out in the conversation, you may need to pivot three or four times, but you probably will need to pivot three or four times to hit that growth curve.
Speaker 1:Ken I-.
Speaker 3:Agreed.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, that was a great answer.
Speaker 1:It was a great answer and you're jogging so many new questions as we go and there's a great segue. I want to make you have a superpower of prescience, and Dave touched on this. No one has a crystal ball, and you said it, ken, there's no guarantees that you're going to be right about everything. But to have a level of prescience that you can kind of really see the future with some level of clarity and then articulate it accurately and I heard a podcast from the Sean Ryan show recently.
Speaker 1:Sean Ryan interviewed General Stephen Quast and General Stephen Quast gave a phenomenal interview, riveting technology that he talked about. You're touching on this, ken, you know, as alluding to the. You know the energy sector is not looking the same a decade from now and Stephen Quast certainly discussed that with Sean Ryan. Coincidentally, you work directly with General Stephen Quast and a startup that that he, I believe, is one of the co-founders of, space built. And, uh, I would love to hear more about you know what's going on with you and general Quast and space built, because that that seems like it has a direct correlation on the on the energy sector looking different 10 years from now, if we're, if we're reading the tea leaves on how the interview with Sean Ryan went.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have to always be careful about what I, what I'm, what I can share and what's and what's already out there. That was a fantastic interview because it was the first time that I think a lot of people got to hear some things that he said that probably were, you know, in the past, behind some closed doors, wise, with things that maybe started in a small project in a, in a, in a dark room somewhere, you know, decades ago, finally make this way to to the consumer's eye. And some technologies, by the way, that I know of never will and some won't, not because they shouldn't, but because they'll probably just never get funded, and some other technology will end up replacing it along the way anyway. But the joy of working and I don't, by the way, for clarity's sake, I don't work side by side with Stephen. In fact, you know, it's really the brains behind that company is Dennis Wingo and Stephen Quast. Behind that company is Dennis Wingo and Stephen Quast and of course, they've got some other amazing, extremely intelligent engineers that just being in the same room as them, you feel like the dunce. But they are working on some things that our national security requires, some things that global corporations really need.
Speaker 3:I'll just give you a couple of bullet points. The fact of the matter is is that there's I don't know 11, 12,000 satellites in orbit right now. By 2030, their expectation is somewhere in the 60,000 range. That's a lot of space at space clutter, if you will. And the truth is you know right now the technology for satellites and I don't want to sound like I know everything about satellites. I know just enough. They don't have a very good shelf life. A big part of that is because of their power and how long that power will last. Power, of course, gets taken from the sun through solar panels. We all see satellites with solar panels and the amount of radiation that's coming off of the sun is so harmful for computer parts, is so harmful for computer parts you know chips and all the other mechanisms that are inside of a satellite that there's a lot of space junk and will continue to be more space junk.
Speaker 3:If you just base it off of the number I just said. So let's fast forward to 2040. How much junk is going to be up there at that point? Right, so they have a solution for that, an amazing solution for that. They have some other very fantastic solutions for everything from, you know LEO, which is low Earth orbit all the way to the moon and doing things on the surface of the moon. So if you don't know, if you're listening and you don't know Space Built and you don't know who General Cost is, certainly go look both the company up and himself and go watch that Sean Ryan show. It's very fascinating.
Speaker 1:So, ken, with regards, is this a collaboration where Complete Financial Solutions is providing some services to Space Built, or can you give some definition to what that relationship actually is?
Speaker 3:I'll try to give you some definition, although it's early stage, so it's forming still, with the team at SpaceBuild, including Rick Sanford, who's their operations officer. Is that okay? Great, you're going to create this fantastic solution and get up in space and solve these problems, and here's what your financial projections look like. This is all great. How about the supply chain? What does that look like? How about the supply chain? What does that look like?
Speaker 3:So I try to dive deep into the parts of business models that people skip over, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, and as we got further through a conversation which then also led into some conversations with some of their amazing engineers. What I extrapolated from those conversations is that the supply chain in the aerospace industry right now is monopolized by your big contractors like Lockheed and Boeing, et cetera. And gosh, if they go out and get some big contracts, well, they're going to use the supplies for themselves first before they leak out any of those supplies to any of these other smaller startup companies. And that's a problem, because if either of you want to go and start a satellite company today, if you don't have access to let's just make it simple the adhesive that puts on solar cells, on a solar panel or you know any of the composites or or any of the materials that are necessary to build your satellite business.
Speaker 3:You might have a really great idea with some really great architecture, but you don't have the supplies. Some really great architecture, but you don't have the supplies. You're not going very far. So I suggested that what Spacebuilt is going to need is whether it's internal or external, which is kind of this early conversation with. Complete Financial Solutions is a company that can help these earlier stage companies in the supply chain side of the business to make sure that that supply chain can continue to provide them and other companies that they would be working with or partnered with.
Speaker 1:That's a great answer defining how this is coming together. What an exciting opportunity. Dave and I will probably end up having to consider doing a company spotlight on space built, knowing what we know about their impact on the energy sector, as Stephen Quast you know talked about in the Sean Ryan show, because the front line is really focused on energy and infrastructure. But let's switch gears for just a minute, ken, to, I think, maybe one of your favorite talking points, and that is tokenization. You also are working with or own a company called Decentralife and it's got some very exciting things happening in the market today. Would you mind giving us kind of the primer for that and then we'll dive into this tokenization kind of the primer for that and then we'll dive into this tokenization.
Speaker 3:Yeah for sure this will make sense now. I started that company back in early 2013 because I had been exposed to so many early startups that just didn't have what it took. I'll just say it that way. They didn't have what it took to really get started with the right management, and that's hard. I mean, I'm sure both of you have started businesses where sometimes you go through a couple other executives on the team or you find just the right partner and then one day you want to keep on working as hard as you have been and they don't want to work as hard, and so you have to part ways and replace them with somebody else that that sent. Um, that management is really difficult, and it's been my experience in these early stage companies that, uh, that's besides having access to capital, that's usually a weak link in their ability to finally get off the ground and get somewhere, and so we wanted to provide that to a technology business incubator type model. Also, we wanted to be able to be in the public markets as quickly as possible, so we got that company public in mid 2016 so that we could help those companies also get exposed to other public companies, also institutional investors and institutional investment, and the way all that worked. And learn the structure of what it's like to be a public company or be acquired by a public company. Everything from you know the necessities of audits on a quarterly basis to really understanding cash flow and where's where you know you got a great idea. How are you going to be able to get that financially off of the ground? And will the public markets accept that? And or the parent company that owns you will, and will the public markets accept that, or the parent company that owns you, will they support you and all of that? So all of the nuances that I had learned.
Speaker 3:Going all the way back to that early stage was Realtorcom, when we had gone public. We went public as Homestorecom, with HomeBuildercom under our umbrella back in August of 99. And so that first few years was grad school for me basically as it relates to taking companies public, and so we wanted to be able to pass that information along to these early founders. So we've been doing that now for 12 years. Right, it's about the summer of 25 now, so time flies. It's a lot of fun. We've had a couple of successes. We've had some companies not as successful.
Speaker 3:But all of the things that I talked about earlier have come into play on these type of companies, which is you really have to plan for your next pivot and the pivot after that and the pivot after that If regulation doesn't go your way or the markets aren't cooperating and providing you with the type of liquidity and investment into your company to get to the next stage, and all of those sort of things. What we are really focused on right now for the last few years in fact, we probably got a little bit of a jumpstart on this back in summer of 21, is blockchain and the tokenization of real world assets and digital securities and everything from tax credits to carbon credits and all of that sort of thing. The last, the last group of leaders at the FTC, which you you absolutely have to follow the direction the FCC is going. If you're in the public markets, if you don't know what direction the wind is blowing at the FCC, then you for one, you don't know new rules and regulations that might be coming your way, that you know once upon a time you were doing everything right and the next day you're not. So it's important from that perspective, but the last group of leaders did not believe the same way. This new group of leaders that the tokenization of everything from real world assets to currency security in a company, etc. Et cetera, um was a priority. I'll just leave it at that. This new group of has made it a huge priority, with Paul Adkins and Hester Pierce Um, you know, really being the tip of the spear for the last six months and and driving new policy and regulations.
Speaker 3:So they companies and real estate developers and mining, you know, companies of gold or lithium or any other kind of thing can go and tokenize their assets or tokenize their securities. I'll give you an example, and I think you guys may be familiar with a company called Ion Digital which has tokenized gold that is still in the ground, and so there's some huge efficiency to leaving the gold in the ground. Right, you're not creating an environmental mess, trying to get it out of the ground over many, many, many, many decades, but the value is still there. And so if you tokenize that value and then bring that out to market and find a very compelling and interesting way for that tokenized gold to be used as an asset back or something else, which is what they've done with the banking industry and Carlos Montoya at the helm, who is just a genius when it comes to the banking industry, then you've got a way to come up with a whole new business, a whole new model, something that solves a lot of problems in the future without having major environmental impact. That's just one example of how you can tokenize something. But it's uh, it's something we focus on at decentral life. Uh, we've got some really exciting things that we're always focused on, but some things that are coming coming our way here pretty soon, and that's that's just about all I can say about the future there at the company without having some material information become public here pretty soon. But it's an exciting space to be in. It's changing. This administration has really, you know, embraced the future of tokenization and decentralization.
Speaker 3:I'll finish with this because I think it goes over the head of most people. So I'll try with this, because I think it goes over the head of most people. So I'll try to simplify it. And Howard Lutnick has said it really well lately that you know we, this country, consumes a lot and we are not very good at managing budgets on either side of the aisle. On either side of the aisle, historically, we run up our deficit and then we try to sell that debt as T-bills to other countries, sovereign wealth funds, that sort of thing. But there has to be a supply and demand for that and if the demand isn't there, if we have way too much debt, nobody wants to buy it and you know we run into problems, et cetera.
Speaker 3:By what the Genius Act laid out is that we can then take the US dollar again and back our own US digital currency, which then puts the owners back on our banks to put put dollars on their balance sheet so that it's backing that currency. That's genius, because then we don't become as dependent on countries like China or anywhere else to continue to buy up our debt, whether that's good debt or bad debt. So I think that the future as it relates to tokenization and decentralization and digital currency is really under explained that the fact is and I'm just going to throw a couple numbers out there that people much smarter than I am have come up with, but we have. I'll just give you a quick example. We have, you know, call it $100, $110 trillion worth of global liquidity in the market. Trillion worth of global liquidity in the market and this is a whole new way to bring more liquidity in the market by tokenizing real world assets or the real estate that you're standing on right now, or whatever it might be, and bringing it public where before you couldn't easily do that. And so there are some that say an extra know, an extra $30 to $60 trillion worth of liquidity will enter the markets here in the next few years. Imagine the amount of businesses that will benefit from that, the employment of people that will be created.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I continue to hear people talk about how AI is potentially going to take jobs away from people, and I think that that's a little bit of a silly notion. Let's go back in time 25 years If I said hey, the new devices are going to come out in about five years from now, called smartphones, and those smartphones are going to eliminate the need for people to do certain things because they will have mobile applications on them and people will become more efficient, and blah, blah, blah. You would probably laugh at me and be concerned that you know someone that you know may lose their job or not have a career in some industry that they had already set out to be an expert at, because some application is going to replace them. And that same conversation is taking place right now with artificial intelligence, and what I say to that is that when you have, on one side of the equation, an enormous amount of new wealth and capital to infuse into a country or, or or a business or a sector or what have you, and on the other side, efficiencies on how to get those companies up and running and through all those problems that I was talking about earlier that we try to help companies solve, you know, ai can replace many of those people. I gave you an example earlier.
Speaker 3:If you had a business partner that you lost because they just fizzled out, truth of the matter is is you could go and build that same business partner, in essence, and all the things that they were responsible for doing on a daily basis, with, you know, a dozen or a couple of dozen AI agents using different applications, and that person would show up to work every day and they would never get tired Not person, but you know what I mean and they would not cost you nearly as much money and they would work 24-7.
Speaker 3:And so the idea there is that you could start a company and almost ensure a better level of success with those companies using AI, and then those people get freed up to go and learn what the next big big idea or company is that they should start. So I think what we'll see here with AI in every sector but if we're just talking about small business and people maybe losing jobs, is it's true acceleration of ingenuity and the ability to grow the global economy, and we won't be all sitting around, you know, with nothing to do and no money to be made, while a bunch of robots are doing our jobs for us. I think that's silly.
Speaker 2:I'm going to agree with most of that. So I wanted to ask you thank you, that was a great explanation of a lot of things, a lot of different things going on in this world. I'm curious, as somebody who's been you know had had his toe and and maybe foot in in this space, uh, for a while, do you what? Do you? Regulatory hurdles, do you think, still have to be jumped, uh, or do you think that we finally are seeing some? I mean, we've seen, obviously, some big movement in the last six months. There's a lot of. There are a lot of people a lot of my friends in the industry applauding the moves, because they've been beating their heads against the wall for over a decade At least that's what it's felt like and now we're finally getting support because, as you know, early in the days there were a lot of ideas, lots of things coming to market and immediately it was well, can we do it here?
Speaker 2:Can we not do it here? And people are going to Portugal, they're going all over the world because they just couldn't do the projects here, but we're finally getting a hold of that. Do you feel like that's that's? We're finally past most of that stuff? And now the big challenge with blockchain might be more adoption, you know, more general adoption in the mass market, or do you think that's even an issue right now? Do you think it still has to be adopted in more of the if you will quote unquote corporate America and it's got to take root there and we're going to find all kinds of use cases and then it'll be morally more embraced by the general population.
Speaker 3:Well, that's a good question. I have a vision, and I'll just share my vision, because it includes some real timelines, and part of that timeline requires the original question there about regulation and that sort of thing, and these are major factors that we have no control over, but if you know that they're there, then you can sort of plan for them, them, we. We know that two of the um more powerful people on wall street, which is the, you know, major economic market in the world, right, um, two of those people, larry fink and ken griffin from larry's, with obviously black rock your listeners know that ken griffin is citadel they have come together. They came together and made an announcement, though, 13, 14 months ago, about launching this new securities exchange in Texas, and I don't think that that was either of them. In fact, I would be flabbergasted to hear that either of them were thumbing their nose at Wall Street and saying, well, we don't like new york, we want to be in texas. That wasn't it at all.
Speaker 3:I think what they saw was that the winds of change were here and that the future of tokenizing everything from, you know, etf to real world assets, especially real estate, tax credits on natural gas, whatever it might be you name it that this whole new market is about to explode, and why would they want to sit on the sidelines and do the same thing that they've been doing for years in the stock market? When they see the future, they have the resources to do this, and they know that they needed each other to get it done, along with many, many, many, many other people who have both the finances and the know-how and the businesses and the access for the businesses and the assets to launch this new Texas exchange. And I can tell you this those two gentlemen and their companies are winners. They're not about to explode, and I think you can read some tea leaves here too Larry, paul Atkins, who, of course, is now the head of the SEC, gosh, even Jamie Dimon and some of these folks. They were all on the Economic Advisory Committee for for Trump in his first administration, and so they know each other.
Speaker 3:They talk, I'm sure, probably golf together, whatever it might be, and so they understand, whether whether they're working in rowing together or they just know, because they're in each other's circles, that this is the future and that they should be supporting it in their own lane, and so I really, really believe that we're going to see fast adoption, really fast adoption. Those companies right now that are listening to your podcast going what the heck is he talking about? Tokenizing my stock security? That makes no sense. In a year or two from now, they will understand this like the back of their hand, and I think that the problem that gets created there just to kind of put an explanation point on it is that the stock market is going to have to figure this stuff out, maybe not in the next couple of years, but certainly in the next couple of decades, maybe even sooner, right, because they're not going to be the only game in town and they might not even be, you know, the best-looking one at the dance.
Speaker 2:One of the things that always occurred to me and you know, and my friends again, again, who were, you know, had some some significant wins in the space early on and did some some stuff we talked about it is that, um, the language that got used in this, in this, you know, in this arena it gets really heady and it it just people glaze over, they don't understand it. That's not accessible, and that was always what we talked about is you have to make it to where, instead of talking about the technology of it, you're talking more about the solutions and what it can do for you. For example, you know, on email, I think you know, when somebody I'll say, you know, parents or whatever, can they? They can send a thing to their son or daughter. They don't care how it works, they just know they can do it Right. And and that's when I, you know, looking historically, you see adoption start to take place, when they just start using things and becomes easy, and it always seemed to me that I think blockchain was close to that.
Speaker 2:As soon as stuff gets integrated and we're just using it, we might not even know we're using it. That's when it starts. People start to actually take interest and hold and the you know, the broader population goes oh I, we get it. Now we understand what this is, but before it's it's a bunch of you know, like my friends who were talking you know, above almost everybody's heads, and well, no one's, no one understands what you're saying, do you? Do you think that's still the case? Is the case? What are your thoughts on that? Is that an issue at all?
Speaker 3:perspective, because I think that we've already got a pretty good track record here with the adoption of, you know, atm cards instead of having cash in your pocket, you know, leading all the way up to what we do now, which I just have my phone against, you know, whatever and I pay that way the buying, the selling, the you know trading, whatever, um, the investing and holding onto a digital assets, which is a word we'll just use for all tokenization of all things, um, that's, it's going to become like you mentioned, you know, using email. Uh, it's not a scary thing and people just do it because it's already built into whatever applications that they're accustomed to using. I think and I've had conversations with some folks that you know, and also Carlos Montoya, who again is a genius in the banking industry I think that what will happen is that you'll log into your bank account where you see your money, usually maybe pay your car payment and your mortgage from there, or transfer or do a wire, and you'll see your digital securities in there as well, and that might be some of your gold that you have own, uh, that's tokenized. That might be some of the stocks digital stocks that you have in different companies, certainly things like Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. You know all of your digital assets will be accessible from at least your bank, but there will also be plenty of applications out there that you can, you know, tie all of your bank accounts and all of your different you know, robin Hoods and everything else together into one. I mean, we already have that for bank accounts and that sort of thing.
Speaker 3:So I see that the decentralization of all of this stuff will actually, in an ironic way, become pretty centralized in the way it gets used by the end user and then the flip side of that, which are those that are out there making the assets.
Speaker 3:You know, if you have a big, huge piece of land, you want to tokenize that and take that land public and go and raise some money from the general public for it, versus having to go down to your super regional bank and take out a loan to do the development that those people who wants to go and do that will have to go through an education or a learning curve as to how to do it, because if you're going to take your company public, you've got to hire a law firm and an accounting firm, and those are professionals that help you through that process too. So I think that it's going to be more of a trend just using real estate as the example. One developer hears from another developer that they play golf with, that they've just tokenized a building that they own, or a shopping mall or, or a farm or a ranch or something he's going to, or she's going to say, well, how did you do that? And they'll get them in touch with the people who helped them out, and then, before you know it, it's, it's kind of you know, status quo.
Speaker 1:So those are my thoughts. That's an awesome, awesome explanation. Ken, we're coming up on the top of the hour here. We want to be mindful and respectful of your time, but I'd like to maybe spend the last few minutes here with a shameless focus on Valley Forge, because you know quite a bit about what we're doing here in central Utah with Valley Forge Massive development. There's a couple key pillars that we envision could be ideal candidates for tokenization. I just wanted to get you to weigh in.
Speaker 1:So at Valley Forge we've got land which could be improved, industrial pad sites for lease or sale. It could be homes that would be sold in the open market. We've got water and we're setting up special service districts for water and that could be a vertical. We've got Reg D-506C private offerings, so we're raising a ton of capital on an ongoing basis over the next 20 years. And we've got power sales. You know generating an inordinate amount of power in the Sentinel-1 power complex and selling a lot of that behind the meter. So of all of those verticals, does any of those feel like they couldn't be tokenized and what are your thoughts about you know, what might be the best way to back into tokenizing the first vertical.
Speaker 3:Did you say couldn't be tokenized? Because I do believe all of those should be tokenized.
Speaker 1:Awesome, that's what I was hoping to hear you say.
Speaker 3:Yes, and let me say this too. I mean, I say that with a level of confidence because I just know that it's going to happen. But you are talking specifically about your own project and the truth of the matter is other projects that might be adjacent to you, or things just taking place in that state or other state they're going to. They're going to go and tokenize everything. They're going to go and tokenize everything and, at the end of the day, you do need to get access to that end user that finds value in what you're doing and wants to buy or hold or trade even the tokenization of whatever that might be. And so the faster, the sooner you get that done, certainly do it right, but the quicker you can get that done at this stage of the game, you know, the I think that the better your your chances are and being really successful there. So, but having said that, which one would you do first? Well, I think that we have to go back to what's being understood and adopted the quickest. It's my experience right now, and that could change in a month or two from now, because, keep in mind, you know, the SEC is coming up on a lot of new rules and regulations that are going to be provided. They need to have to because they've got this Texas Securities Exchange that plans to go live in 2026. So they certainly need to pave the way for that. Go live in 2026. So they certainly need to pave the way for that.
Speaker 3:And so real estate, probably the tokenization of tax credits, even municipal bonds and things like that.
Speaker 3:I already see the appetite for that and it's only going to grow. It's probably a little bit safer than say if I came to you and said, hey, I've got this startup concept, it's going to take me 10 years to go and put a building over here where I'm pointing and I need a bunch of capital between now and 10 years from now to get it done. That's just like me going to you and saying I want to start a new company and it might not be five or 10 years before you'll get your money back out of it. That that might be a tough thing for investors to to swallow. But if you have something that can be pretty liquid pretty soon and that's the tokenization of real estate and tax credits and you know, et cetera, then that's what you'd want to do first, because you need to be able to head towards that liquidity and I think that that liquidity it's already started and it's just going to pick up some major momentum here pretty soon, that's an exciting answer, very insightful.
Speaker 2:I hope our listeners are really paying attention to this, because that was some golden nuggets, replay, take notes, put it into AI, do a summary for you, because you're going to want to reread all this information.
Speaker 1:Ken, we're so looking forward to working more closely with you as Valley Forge evolves through these phases. We definitely have the intent and commitment to start tokenizing where we can, and this early liquidity notion you just shared really motivates me to really grab the bull by the horns and get that going. So thank you for the insight. Really, you know, grab the bull by the horns and get that going. So thank you for the insight and with that we'll wrap things up. We hope listeners out there have gotten as much out of this as we did. This is a phenomenal, phenomenal opportunity to share with you, ken.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you for sharing so much, so much information about not only your history, but just the world as it is right now and as you think it's going to be. It's incredibly insightful. Thank you for taking the time, Ken.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm honored to be on your show and I appreciate your time.
Speaker 2:Thank you Well, next time on the. Well, until next time, right, wayne? Yeah, on the Frontier Line, we'll see you next time.
