Transcript of PARLER IS BACK: GAME CHANGING APPROACH TO PROTECT YOUR INFORMATION || JON WILLIS || EPISODE 065

The code to winning insights you need today to seize the world tomorrow. Today, we have a very special guest. If you are curious and learning a bit more about social media platform, about branding, about understanding movements of algorithms and all that. We have the CSO, Chief Strategy Officer, and also co-founder of Pulse in the studio today. If you are well familiar with Parla, a social media app as well, one of the cofounders in the studio today. We're going to talk a bit about the journey, founding it, the relationships with the current 45th and 47th President of the United States. It's going to be a very fun, enlightening, exciting interview. Different perspective. This is the episode for you as well. Without further ado, our amazing guest right here in Arizona. We're going to welcome John Willis. How are you doing, brother?

Good. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Exciting to be here.

Awesome. Thank you very much for your time. Yeah. I want to just dive into it real quickly. Parler. I remember hearing about Parler 2020 after the President was removed out of X or Twitter at that time as well. Can you just walk us through the journey of Parler, how it began and everything else regarding that, too?

Yeah. Parler was originally founded by John Mates and Rebecca Mercer in 2018. It was really started as a counteract or a counterbalance to Twitter, which was starting to ban Conservatives left and right, because if you didn't fit a certain narrative on what you were posting on Twitter at the time, you were either shadow banned or completely deplatformed. Some of the original ones that were kicked out of Twitter were like the Laura Loomers, the Milo Yianopolis, those types, because they were considered fringe or extreme.

Rush and Bar and all those guys.

Yeah. Well, I don't know if Rush got completely banned. He probably got shadow banned a few times. But really, Laura and Milo were the first two ones. And so as Parler started to grow, they really started to see their momentum hit in 2020 during the election, when banning was happening left and right. And in October of 2020 is when the Hunter Biden story was being heavily suppressed by Twitter and by Facebook. And we learned later with the Twitter files that it was because of government collusion, where government insiders were telling Twitter to shut down certain influencers that were posting the Hunter Biden story, including the New York Post. They even shut down the New York Post account for a short time because they didn't want the Hunter Biden story to get out. So Parler became that counterbalance, in a sense, and it shot up to be the number one social media platform in the app store-Literally. Right before the election. And then when Trump lost, it continued to skyrocket. And then January sixth happened, and the media needed a scapegoat. And so they decided to say that Parler was the main culprit behind President Trump on planning and coordinating the January sixth attack on the Capitol, and there was no truth to it.

I mean, Parler didn't have the DM type of capabilities or any of the things that you need to coordinate. And in reality, if there was any coordination going on, it was done on Facebook. That actually had Messenger and all that stuff. But be that as it may, they found their villain. And through a coordinated effort between Apple, Google, and AWS, Parlor was shut down. January ninth, I think, is when that happened, of 2021. And then Trump was shut down pretty much the same day or the day after. And so you had 20 million Americans, and even some foreign people that were on the platform, completely silenced. And AWS even took it a step further where they deleted the database. So it wasn't just something where it was just a slap on the hand. They couldn't bring it back and restore all the old posts or anything like that because AWS just pushed the delete button. And that was a real problem. And so you had part Parlor that had a billion dollar valuation at the time. A billion dollar valuation went to zero immediately. And it was all because of collusion between big tech and the government.

And it wasn't until later, in fact, February of this year, where we found out that Doge discovered a study between... Or a payment was made to Stanford University to do a study on Parlor in 2020 to basically monitor and spy on Parlor users, and they use that information to give to Apple and Google as the justification to shut down Parlor. It was all government-funded. They paid about $750,000 to the Stanford University in order to do that. Parlor was shut down. John Mates was removed as CEO. The investors were scrambling, trying to figure out how they could save their investment. The platform was then sold to George Farmer, who is Candice Owens' husband, and he tried to bring it back, but they weren't a tech company. Parlor never was a true tech company. They had a front-end that they designed with pretty decent, I'd say subpar user interface and user experience, but they were still relying on AWS. They came back for a short period of time, but the damage was done, and they just could not survive. So they shut it down. George then sold the platform to a marketing agency who wanted the database email list.

We had the opportunity, my partner and I, had the opportunity to pick that up. December of '23, we bought Parler and the brand, the IP, and the database, and we relaunched it back into the App Store, spring of 2024. And so it's been back for over a year now, and we're growing. People are excited that it's back. We put a completely new interface in place. And when I talk about Parlor's journey, there was actually another journey that was happening parallel at that time. So you had Parlor's journey, and then you had the journey with my partners and I. Because at that time, we had another company where we were building white label social media platforms for affinity groups, churches, you name it. We witnessed firsthand what was happening there, and we made a very strong and bold decision. Hey, Parlor's down. Let's launch an alternative immediately because we had the capability to launch a social media platform like that. And so we did. And within three weeks of us launching, now, mind you, this was a month after Parlor was shut down. We had our app in App Store, literally a month. And then three weeks after that, we get a call from Trump's team to come down to Mar-a-Lago and to meet with him to start discussing the initial steps of building Truth Social, what is now Truth Social.

And And so for about a period of six months, we helped with the architecture of the UI, the UX, as well as the cloud infrastructure. But also during this time, one of my partners and I, who's actually the CEO of Parler now, or Pulse, which is our parent company, we were looking at the whole ecosystem, or not the ecosystem, but the whole playing field of what was really going on. And you look at Twitter, even though it wasn't owned by Elon yet. Twitter was still reliant on third-party cloud. Same thing with Instagram and Facebook had their own, YouTube had their own. But all these other platforms that were popping up, like Getter, like CloudHub, and Gab, they all had reliance on third-party big tech clouds. And so we looked at Parler saying, Okay, well, one of the main weaknesses that Parler had is that it was so reliant on AWS. And so we were like, Okay, well, in order to prevent that from happening, you have to control your ecosystem. Exactly. So you have to have your own cloud. So we made some acquisitions and some smart moves, and we created our own cloud. It's called Triton Data centers.

When you talk about cloud, most people equate cloud with a data center, and that's not it. A cloud is the software and the hardware. That's really what you need. And so we worked out a deal with the manufacturer that manufactures Facebook's servers, and we became a hyperscaler for what we call the Open Compute Project. So if you go to opencomput. Org, which was created by Google and Meta as a way to create hardware that is very energy-efficient, we decided to go ahead and partner with them, partner with that company, the manufacturer. And all of our data centers are now using the same servers that Facebook uses, and they're super energy-efficient. But what's amazing about that is we control our cloud, so we cannot be shut down when it comes to our database or our cloud because of the redundancies that we have in place in the 24 data centers in eight countries around the world that we have. And so that was a very important thing that we had to build. But then we looked at this and said, okay, well, wait a minute. We have the cloud. And basically, when you have the cloud, it's like a foundation of a building.

When you have your own cloud, you can pretty much do whatever you want. And so we decided, hey, parlor is cool and all, but it's in a crowded field because you have X now, which is now taking the flag of being the conservative free speech app under Elon. You have Tru Social, you have Threads, you have Blue Sky, and you still have Gab and Getterd, but they're not even worth mentioning because they're so low on the totem pole. And so we're like, okay, that's great. But where's the trend? The trend is going towards video content, the instant dopamine hits with the reels. And so we decided to launch because we had our own cloud, we launched Play TV, which is our TikTok YouTube competitor. And so that's what led us to where we are now. And then since then, we have grown our network, our ecosystem to include Fintech, Fintech and blockchain. And then we also have e-commerce with our marketplace. And then we also made a very strategic acquisition acquisition earlier this year, and we bought one of the world's largest content delivery networks called Edgecast, which was originally developed by Yahoo in 2006.

They sold it to Verizon for 300 million. Verizon created a partnership with Limelight, and they ended up creating a new company called Edgeo, which ended up filing for bankruptcy. And we bought the assets out of bankruptcy and relaunched it on our cloud. So it puts us in a very strong position because when you really look at what we've built in the last five years, we've built a true replacement to big tech. We don't have a single piece of anything in our tech stack that's big tech. It's all ours.

My question, though, is that even though you do have your cloud, where does it come in regarding using the App Store or even Apple and Android? They've got their Play Store and App Store as well. You say you can't get shut, but can you get removed from the App Store? Sure. Okay.

Yeah. And so the problem with the parlor is that their website was shut down. And their website was on AWS. So was their apps. But the main... It's supposed to be autonomous is your website because the rules are completely different for websites than they are if you're in the app store. When you're in Apple and Google, you still have to play by their rules. Exactly. And their rules have lightened up quite a bit with several lawsuits that have happened against them over the last five years or so. But I mean, their rules are not That crazy. It's like, don't post pornography on your sites. Don't have anything illegal. I mean, it's just basic, like no, blah type of rules. So we still have to adhere to that. But we also have everything that's on the web, too. So we have our apps, and then we have Web. And so if we were ever shut down on Apple and Google, which I highly doubt we would be now, we still have the Web as the backup. And if you brought up the web browser on your phone, it looks exactly like the app. Okay.

Makes perfect sense. And then, obviously, we know before the takeover of Elon in the X platform, it was at that time, a lot of Conservatives were getting removed. They were getting silenced. They were violating the rules at that time of what X said before you took over X as well, which I feel was a major shift from what I've seen, because I think at that time, Parla was, and it's probably still a household name, But it was mainly for Conservatives. Majority of Conservatives felt like they could go there and express their opinion, get their voices heard as well. Then my question is, what's the new strategy moving forward, considering there's competitors like X and Truth Social? Because whenever the President does something, I don't even look at his X on my just type in, @realdonaldtruthsocial, just see what the latest thing is regarding that. What's the strategy moving forward for Parler?

Sure. You're 100% right. Parler is It's known as a conservative app. It's got a 40% name recognition, according to Pew Research Center, and it's all about Conservatives. The issue with that, originally, was that Parlor only focused on Conservatives. We are doing a little bit different approach where we don't care who you vote for. We don't care who you pray to. We don't care what color skin you have, where you come from. Parlor is for everybody. Let me ask you this. You You mentioned X, you mentioned true social. Let's even throw Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok in there. As a user, how much do you earn from those platforms by using those platforms? Not as a content creator, but as a user. The answer is zero. Zero. But how much do they make off of your data? Billions. When you click I accept, when you join their platforms, you're accepting the fact that they are going to take all your metadata, they're going to mine it, they're going to listen to your conversations, which they do for advertising purposes. They're going to track you, and they're going to see who you associate with. Like right now, if you have a Facebook account, I have a Facebook account, the producer has a Facebook account, Metta knows that we're all in the same room.

And so when we start seeing friend suggestions, it's going to be based off of your database, my database, her database. Crazy. And that's how they work. Whereas with Parler, we don't want you to be the product because With big tech platforms, you're their product because they are selling you to the highest bidder. That's crazy. We are flipping the model saying, Keep your data. We're not going to spy on you. We don't give a dang about your data, your metadata. We want you to be able to express yourself freely within reason. No pornography. We have a zero tolerance on pornography. But we want you to share your opinions, share your beliefs, and you're to earn rewards by doing so. And so we are the first social media platform that has fully integrated blockchain rewards into our platform. So anybody in the 177 76 countries that Parlor is currently in can earn daily cryptocurrency rewards. The crypto project that we launched was called Optio, which is Latin for choice, because in order to help people be free, the first thing that they have to have is the freedom of choice. And in reality, most people don't have freedom because they're broke or impoverished.

They have no ability to make money. And it's funny as you look at some of These third-world countries, you've lived in West Africa before, and there's parts of South Africa where you're from that are very third-world. And yet a lot of people have smartphones. As impoverished as they are, they still have a smartphone or they have access to the Internet. As they go on to parlor or play TV, they can earn these rewards on a daily basis. So think about it this way. A single mom, she has two jobs to take care of her two kids. The stress that she has every single day is so heavy. It's unbelievably heavy. But every single night, what is she doing as she lays into bed? She lays in bed and she starts scrolling on her phone through social media. We call it doomscrolling, right? Well, as she's doomscrolling, just watching content, interacting, liking, sharing, commenting, posting, whatever it is, what if she woke up the next morning and in her wallet, we call it our Kyvo wallet, which is our DeFi crypto wallet, she wakes up and there's rewards in there for what she did the night before.

And what if we are able to get the value of those rewards to a point where those rewards that she earned the night before can go buy groceries for her. Interesting. Or if she could go and help pay her rent. Also, let's look at West Africa. You mentioned Ghana before the interview. The average individual in Ghana makes $300 a month. It's actually a stat that I know. $300 a month. What if they made that in a week? What if they made that in three days? What is that going to do to not only that individual, but to that community, to that economy, to that country? And so what we are trying to do is make the users of something they already do every single day, the beneficiaries, not the product. Interesting. And so when you ask what Parler's plan is, we are planning on trying to make the world a better place by giving people choice. And the way to do that is to take what they're already doing, behaviors that they already do, and to monetize their behavior for the user, not for us. We will make money no matter what because we have an ad platform, all this stuff.

We have plenty of verticals to make revenue, but none of them involve the data of that user.

But what are the stuff that people are going to be doing? Because you said they're going to be gaining rewards. Are there any specific things or multiple stuff people can do to try and gain those rewards? Sure. Yeah.

Interact. Engage. If you follow your best friend from high high school, you're liking their posts, you're commenting, making jokes, you're posting, posting videos, posting thoughts, posting articles, you're joining groups, just using the platform. And we have point values attached to every single action within the platform. And then at the end of the day, you're distributed points. And those points then can either be redeemed in our marketplace, which I'll talk about here in a second, or you can take it to an open exchange convert them into crypto and take it to cash.

And you guys have had a lot of big names end up using Parla over time. I think there was a time even the first lady ended up having an account as well. Did they end up losing that account when everything was shut down? Yeah. Okay.

So we were able to restore all the accounts. So if Melania ever wanted to come back, her account is still there. Her following is still there. The original content is gone because AWS wiped it out. But we've been able to bring back personalities like Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, Sean Hannity. We have even more of the friends like Alex Jones. We have James O'Keefe, Newsmax, Real America's Voice. We have quite a few Laura Lumers back on there. We've got quite a few that are on there. Then we even have celebrities like Kevin Sorbo. They're just starting We're going to come back on because we haven't really done a hardcore push yet for marketing because we've been building this. We've been building everything in stealth mode for the last 18 months. But now we've got a lot of things cooking where Parlor is going to be a household name again here very shortly.

I love that so much. I know you and I spoke yesterday. We're talking about play TV, and I know you briefly touched on that. What is Play TV going to do to what we currently have right now with YouTube, apart from the fact that it will become a bit more independent because of pulse and what you guys would not have in your own cloud? What is it going to do differently for people to try and go there and actually get the proper and full benefits and enjoyment from it?

Well, just like with Parler, you earn rewards for using Play TV. But as a content creator, you have a channel on there. How often have you been flagged?

I've been, right now, about About three times on one of my FBI episodes because of the song I ended up using over there, Copyright. But then one other guy that scaled his business in terms of e-commerce, they're flagged. They'll be like, giving us leading information. I'm like, No, he gave these things. So I've been flagged about three times in the last three weeks or so. Yeah.

And most of the time it doesn't make any sense because they change the rules. It's like the moving the goalpost when it comes to the The community guidelines that you see on YouTube, on TikTok. I've been flagged. I used to be an influencer on Facebook back in the day, making really good money, but I would be demonetized every other month, and they would never tell me Why? And so with Play TV, we're not doing any of that. Now, do we have moderation? Of course. We want to make sure there's nothing illegal being posted. Same thing with the copyright issues. That's a real issue. But we don't want any pornography or trafficking type stuff. We don't want any of that stuff on there. We have zero tolerance for that. But we've learned over the last 10 years or so the amount of voices that were censored just because of ideologies, ideological differences. That's not what we do. Tiktok still does it. And I know TikTok has a new buyer lined up right now. We've actually spoken to them. We know who they are.

Do you want to share that? I cannot. I'm curious. Can I give your name? Can you tell me yes or no?

Go ahead.

Mr. Beast? No.

But the amount that they're paying is crazy stupid. Yeah, crazy, crazy stupid. But I mean, there's value there. But the problem is, with this new buyer, are they going to continue this suppression of free speech and freedom of expression like they already do right now under ByteDance? And so with Play TV, we wanted to give a virtually identical experience that you have on YouTube with long form videos as well as short form reels, we call them bursts, to the users, but then monetize the users by allowing them to be rewarded. And then content creators, how we monetize content creators with a mixture of fiat or cash and crypto makes it a lot more appealing for them to move their audience over. Or at least, we don't expect them to move their audience over, but at least start a channel there and have it be another avenue of monetisation outside of just YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and such.

Okay. I'm glad you guys are taking the role of understanding right now people's attention span relies on video and graphics and stuff like that. Even though an attention span is going to be eight seconds, I've had my media guy tell me, Hey, let's shorten up the reel. Let's do all these stuff. Because when people are scrolling, they're trying to get as much satisfaction from the content they're getting. But also attention span is so little.

Three seconds. You got them for three seconds. If you have a hook on your caption that gets them to stop, or you have a hook line, the first thing you say is, Hey, are you interested in a side hustle? Watch this. That's a hook that will get someone to stop for more than three seconds before they scroll to the next one. So it's really that 2-3 second window that you have to capture someone's attention. It's one of the reasons why we launch Burst, because we know people have the attention span of Nats.

No, I love that so much. I want to go back again into the truth social, the creation of it. So you're invited in Marilago, right? I know there's only so much you can end up revealing as well, and I don't want to respect that. But what role did you play in the creation of truth social?

So all we did originally was we helped them with the initial wireframing of the app. And the way it works when you do app design is each little window, each little button, there's logic that has to go to it. And so we helped with the initial user interface and user experience wireframing of truth. And then we helped them with the cloud infrastructure. Even though they ended up not using the cloud infrastructure, they're on AWS right now.

But isn't that a conflict of interest, or you had an acquired Parler at that time?

We didn't have Parler yet. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Now, that's fascinating.

Yeah, this was in 2021. We acquired Parler at the end of '23.

Okay. All right. I do like the fact that you guys end up the new focus of what's going to be happening. And currently, right now, are you in... How many countries are you guys?

176.

Okay. And obviously, US being the most. What's the second most higher user base?

I think it's pretty close between either Saudi Arabia or Brazil. We're starting to pick up quite a bit in the Philippines right now, believe it or not.

And then you guys haven't done any marketing or anything, obviously, right?

Just little, yeah. We're on Fox quite a bit right now in Newsmax. From a talking head, subject matter expert standpoint, one of our senior advisors is Eric Finman, who is the youngest Bitcoin millionaire. He became a Bitcoin millionaire at the age of 12. He's in his 20s now. But we just did a thing that went viral last week where the Iranian rebels that were rebelling against the Iranian regime were actually using Parler to communicate back and forth because the Iranian regime couldn't shut down our platform. And so that was really the first test is Facebook, WhatsApp, they all shut down in Iran. But through Eric, were able to send... They had Starlink connections, and then they were able to use Parler to communicate. We actually have pictures of Iranian rebels holding up a piece of paper that says Parler has given us a free speech here in Iran or something like that. And so that was on Fox Business last week or the week before. And yeah.

Awesome. Now, I'm glad. I'm excited that you actually touched on that as well. And I also think the incorporation of crypto, I think you guys are just catching ahead of what the trends are right now, what people are, and also with your experience on blockchain, considering that you have that experience, too. Where do you see Paul in the next five years?

Well, let's talk about the blockchain, and that leads right into your question. So last year, we knew that one of the biggest pieces that was missing in social media was blockchain technology. Now, Facebook or Meta tried launching a token a few years ago that bombed miserably, mainly because their token was really to benefit Meta. It wasn't really to benefit the users. And it was just like a meme token. It had no real utility or value to it. So we launched Optio under the auspices of having it be a true utility token. And if you know anything about blockchain, you have stable coins like USDT, you have altcoins, which are like Ethereum and Solana that are strong coins. An altcoin is anything that's not Bitcoin. You have asset-backed tokens, and then you have meme tokens like the Trump or Melania token, the Fart coin, Pepe coin, all these. Dogecoin. Yeah, the Dogecoin or Shiba Inu. There's no real tangible value to the meme tokens because there's nothing backing them. I call them firework tokens, where they look pretty, they shoot up really high in value, they explode, and then they disappear. Then they're done. Rug pool.

Rug pool, 100 %. But with utility tokens, there hasn't really been, besides Bitcoin, a really strong utility token introduced that can be integrated into multifacets of everyday life. And because we have a very wide ecosystem, we decided to build a layer one blockchain, Optio, with the intent that it can be plugged in to multiple different type of platforms, including like an X or a TruSocial or whatever, not just be specific to the Pulse products. And so what we did with this is we built it in a way as a layer one, you can launch meme tokens on Optio, you can launch asset-back tokens, which we've already done one already, or any other token. And you can really start to make that layer one a really good foundational blockchain for a bunch of different projects. But for us, we wanted to make sure that utility was used in the real world. We launched a program called Optio Accepted Here, which is similar to what American Express and Discover Card did when they first launched, where they would go out and build relationships with different retailers and say, Hey, we want you to accept our credit card.

If people will come in and they're going to buy your products, they're going to be using a Discover Card or an Amex card. Same thing goes with Optio. We're working deals with retailers all around the country, starting in the US, where they can accept Optio as a form of payment. And so we have some pretty big deals that we're going to be announcing here very shortly. Very big deals, where that real-world utility will be used in grocery stores, department stores that you use every single day. Interesting. The other thing is, is we launched a marketplace called Cartix. C-a-r-t-i-x. Cartix. We partnered with Kevin Harrington, who's one of the original sharks from Shark Tank. And on there, we're currently onboarding over 100,000 merchants that have Shopify stores, WU commerce stores, Wix stores. We have 250 different type of online e-commerce stores that can be tied into Cardix, and they can sell their products similar to what you would see on a TikTok shop or Amazon or Etsy or Pinterest, all in one location. But the difference is you could take payments in fiat and optio. So it's a mixture of the two. So let's say that you wanted to say, okay, yeah, this T-shirt costs 20 bucks, 18 in fiat, $2 in optio.

Now, how does that benefit the vendor? Well, that $2 in optio could be worth $4 soon because it's on an exchange. So it has a value that can usually go up or down. But over time, it's going up as we add more utility to it. It's not just a one for one dollar anymore. It could be a one for five dollars or one for ten dollars, depending on the growth, the long term growth of that token. And so vendors are really excited about that because typically they offer discounts anyways in order to move product. Well, if we are helping them with advertising through our platforms, they're more in tune to list with us or to put their products on Cardix. We help them market on Parlor and Play TV, our email list, and so forth. And then they take a portion of that in Optio. That creates utility. So a user earns Optio on Parlor, they go to Cardix, and they see a T-shirt that they want, or a candle, or a hunting gear, whatever it is, and they pay the fiat amount for it, and then they throw Optio from their Kyvo wallet into it as well, and that increases the utility.

The more utility you have with that token, historically, the higher the value. Wow. That's crazy.

I was just thinking about it the other time, just obviously with the transformation of how we end up using money to buy certain stuff. It went from actual cash to getting a swiping. Now, I just use my phone, Apple Pay with and everything as well. Do you have any plans to try and collaborate with other international bigger money transfer systems, like a Western Union stuff? The reason I'm asking that for myself with The content I'm releasing every day because we have a project, we have Project 100K subs because we're releasing every single day in July and so forth as well. My editors in the US are getting a little overwhelmed. They've been outsourcing some in the Philippines, and then I have another one I recently hired in Pakistan as well. But one in Pakistan does a PayPal, the other one does, I can't remember what it was. It was like something with a W. I don't even know what it is. But my point is, is that your plan moving forward to try and make it accessible when people can just send transfers easily? Correct. Rather than the whole process that...

So one of the other apps that we have in the app store is called Kyvo, K-Y-Y-V-O. Yes. Don't ask me what it stands for because I don't know. I didn't come up with the name. But Kyvo is a DeFi wallet, and within the next few weeks, it will be a full Venmo competitor with fiat. Kyvo is basically becoming a bank. And so we'll have all the banking features where you can do peer-to-peer transactions just like you can with Venmo, PayPal, Cash App. And then also, as you use that wallet and the Kyvo debit card that we're going to be releasing here shortly, guess what? You earn rewards.

Quick question. I got to intervene. Will it be an international thing? Because my hardest thing ever, if people can get a thing where you can do an-I know it's harder with the Swift, the rates, like a Rant or the Looney in Canada, whatever it may be. If it could be a straight Venmo from here to South Africa, it takes such a stress away. You know what I'm saying? We got you. Really? That is interesting. That's always been my dream. I do so much of transactions everywhere, but it's like Venmo is so accessible, Cash App and all this stuff. It's easy to do stuff here. But my dream is to do a Venmo internationally. I just want to do something so quick.

We got it.

Interesting. I had this interview. Sorry, you can continue there.

Just wanted to make your day.

No, that's good. How would exchange rates affect that, though?

I mean, typically what you would do with any type of currency exchange, depending on what it is. But yeah, it's all automatically built into the transfer system. So when you're wiring, doing a peer-to-peer transaction, let's say you're going from USD to pesos in Mexico or something, it'll do the exchange calculation and all that. And also on the crypto side, we're currently build in a DEX right now, which will have a swap in it. And so the same thing goes. If I want to take Optio and swap it to, BTC or Ethereum or XRP, it'll make the automatic adjustments on the currency difference or the exchange difference.

Wow. I know we don't have much time, but I have to go into this entrepreneurial field that you're currently in. I think one of the best things about being here is the fact that the US is the capital of capitalism. There's an opportunity for just not only improving lives, but also getting the rewards and benefits of reaching a certain level of income. That's why even the richest man in the world is from my country, because he took on the opportunity to be able to and exercise that. My question with that is, what has been probably the most rewarding thing personally for you as an entrepreneur?

Well, being an entrepreneur is one of the hardest things you could do. The journey that it takes, the stress, the faith, the trust. It sounds stupid, but in The Last Jedi movie, which is the least popular of all the Star Wars movies, Yoda says to Luke, failure is the greatest teacher. If you haven't failed, you're not an entrepreneur. The journey that we've been talking about for the last several minutes All sounds great. But for all the great stuff, there's been a ton of not-so-great stuff. A lot of betrayals, snakes, just evil people that we've come in contact with, and that where we've able to overcome that. In order to be an entrepreneur, you have to be able, and this is something I'm still learning to this day, to truly discern good from bad. That comes not only in opportunities, but also with people. To learn how to be a politician, in a sense, to be in that gray area. Now, my personality, I'm very black and white. It's like I'm a justice type of guy, so if something goes wrong, I demand justice. I've learned that that It doesn't necessarily work in business because it actually burns more bridges than anything.

But I'm not saying that you have to be gray in order to be a snake or anything. That's not what I'm saying. You have to learn how to go with the ebbs and flows of business. Being an entrepreneur, you have to be able to take risk. I can tell by meeting somebody whether they have the ability to take a risk or not. The same thing goes with investors. If I'm going to do a capital raise or something, I know who I'm going to talk to and who I'm not going to talk to. If I have someone that's working a 9: 00 to 5: 00 job that is so focused on their 401k and their IRA, I know that they are completely adverse to risk. Why? Because they like the security of their job, and they like the security of their retirement plan, and they don't want to muddy those waters at all. Whereas someone that has started their own business or has who has had successes or who has had failures, those are those who are willing to take a risk and to take a leap of faith to do something crazy. I've done a lot of crazy things in my professional career of 26 years, 27 years.

Some of them have been incredible. Some of them have been absolute horrifying nightmares. But would I change it all to go for a 9: 00 to 5: 00 job? Absolutely not. I'd go crazy. Because my brain is always looking at, how do I make things better? How do I scale it? How can I take this problem and solve it? And how do I take everyone that I know with me for the ride so they can benefit with it, too? And I think that's what's really interesting with what we have with Parlor is all my partners, a lot of them have been with me and my other partner through this five-year journey where we have dealt with a lot of these snakes together, and we are family. In fact, our tech thread is called The Family. So when I get a text from it says, Oh, I got a text from The Family. So it's our group thread. Because everyone in there, I consider my brother or sister. And you only get to that level in business When you've gone through hell with each other. But yeah, I mean, an entrepreneur, you can go to all the seminars and listen to all the Gary Vee talks and Tony Robbins and all that.

But at the end of the day, if you don't have the drive to take a leap of faith and be willing to deal with the consequences of that leap, you can't be an entrepreneur.

That's powerful. Yeah. And I think there's also moments where it's lonely. There's moments that are just dark. There are moments that, like you said, you experience. I haven't been in the snake park where you've experienced that, but I've done almost all the states doing so many different interviews. And sometimes I ask myself, What am I doing this for? Then I just realize, oh, my God, it's always been my dream to connect with the most high-profile people, that I can be able to get content out there, that I can reach many people's lives. To see the progress happening on a day-to-day basis, it's an exciting thing, but I feel like it can be done here in the US. There's something that's very unique. When I first came in in 2017, my old Mission companion, we lived in Utah, and I just came to visit for a month. I called my dad, my state president at the time. I'm like, I'm going to transfer you. I need to come to school here because I've never seen people, 21 years old, going for four months, doing sales, coming back, and then investing in a home. Just that opportunity, it's that capitalist mindset, which I've appreciated most.

I feel like sometimes people that are born yet sometimes don't really appreciate the essence of just that privilege that you might have.

Yeah, and that's 100% accurate. I mean, we're spoiled here, especially The entitlement mentality that people have nowadays where they just automatically expect things to be handed to them for free. I mean, you have people come into this country now having that expectation. You come to the United States and you're going to get everything for free. That doesn't work anymore because number one, We can't afford it as a country. And you, as a person, can't afford it either, because if you have everything handed to you on a silver platter, you're good for nothing because you don't know how to work. It's like the old adage of when you put a lion in the zoo, all of its natural instincts to survive disappear. So if that lion were ever released into the wild, it'd be killed because it doesn't know how to hunt. It doesn't know how to work for its food. And in reality, that is the problem with communism, with socialism, democratic socialism, wherever you want to take it. It's all legalized slavery, is what I call it, because you become not only a slave to the government, but you become enslaved to an ideology that is meant to suppress your natural instinct to be free.

And so when our founding fathers, when they duke it out with the Continental Congress coming up with the Declaration of Independence, they took the risk of death by treason to say, We demand to be free. We don't need you, King George. We don't need your outrageous taxes of 3%. I give anything to pay 3% tax. But we don't need that anymore. We demand to be free. And now you see a complete wing of the United States, namely in New York, that is saying, We demand to be slaves. We want the government to take care of us. And if you've learned anything about the government, they don't know how to do anything efficiently. They know how to spend. That's about it. But from my standpoint, when you look at being an entrepreneur, taking a leap of faith, you have to look at yourself in the mirror, and number one, you have to trust that person that you see. That's the first step. If you trust the person that you see in the mirror every single day, that means someone else is going to trust that person as well. If you can grow that circle of trust where You can grow a business out of that trust with the integrity and honesty and doing everything that you should be doing the right way, you're going to find success.

It may not be with that particular venture, but if you keep trying and trying and trying. I look at my grandpa, for instance, who passed away a few years ago. He didn't become successful until his 50s. He was always an entrepreneur, and he's one of the wealthiest guys I knew, but he didn't make it until his 50s. He had a candy business of all things. But it wasn't until he discovered foam insulation and started a foam insulation company here in the Phoenix area, becoming one of the top foam insulation contractors here in the state. It was all because he saw it. I can't remember if it was in California or whatever. He saw it being installed. He didn't know what it was. He said, Hey, maybe we should do that in Arizona because it's so hot here. And he started that business. And it's still alive to this day. My cousin's running it now. But it was an opportunity that he saw and a risk that he was willing to take. After years of failures, years of being screwed over by partners, he took that risk, and it paid off.

Powerful. Now, I love that so much. John, thank you so much for coming in the studio. I always ask this question to guess just towards the end because it's the code to winning insights you need today to see the world tomorrow. In your personal definition, the last and final question, what does it mean to be winning?

When you can be proud of yourself, when you can look in the mirror and know that your kids are taken care of, your wife is taken care of, and that you know that at the end of the day, you still trust that person that you see that's winning. It's powerful. And even if you feel like quitting and you still wake up the next day and you're out there fighting again, that's winning. And winning is always ongoing. There's never a definitive win when it comes to entrepreneur or comes to life. It It's basically the whole adage of enduring to the end. I look at it this way. If you ever go to Universal Studios in Hollywood, they have those escalators that go up the side of a mountain. When I was a little kid, my brother and I would race running up the down escalator. The escalator didn't have any people on it. We would try to run up it. You get tired because it's going upside of a mountain. If you stop, what happens? That down escalator takes you all the way back to where you started. I think throughout life, we're constantly climbing down escalator.

And though our legs may be burning, we may be out of breath, we feel like we're going to have a heart attack because the climb is so hard. If we stop our climb, we'll end up right where we started. We have to continue to be I mean. And for me, every step that we take that's upwards in a world that's constantly trying to bring us down is winning.

Powerful. Thank you so much. We're going to add at the bottom there, the Parlor app, every other app, and Pulse, and all that stuff as well in the description section. If you could let our viewers know where they could get a hold of any of the other projects you guys are working for, your companies, and so forth as well, please.

Yeah, just go to buypulse. Com, by-B-Y-Pulse, P-U-L-S-E. Com, com. You can also check out parlor@parlor. Com, playTV@playTV. Parlor. Com, and everything else. But on buypulse. Com, you'll see a link to all of our site. Make sure you follow us on our socials at GetParlor app on X, as well as optio-blockchain on X.

The co-twinning insights you need today to seize the world tomorrow. John Willis, great on us.

Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.