Parallel Entrepreneur with Mark Cleveland

Matthew Joynes (00:00)
Everyone thinks Bitcoin has been adopted. I've never seen one person buy one thing with a Bitcoin. So what is it? It's just a commodity.

The dollar is going down now, as we all know. Now, you would have thought its purchasing power would be less. It's actually gone up.

Matthew Joynes (00:17)
That's the truth. For the first time in history, knowledge isn't a barrier of entry. You know, knowledge is the cheapest commodity out there.

Matthew Joynes (00:25)
The money that you're going to put into patents, put into marketing, put it into branding, put it into innovation and creativity.

Mark Cleveland (00:32)
Welcome back to the Parallel Entrepreneur, part two of the conversation with Matthew Joynes, British American parallel entrepreneur, lawyer, film producer, AI technology leader, thought leader, and inventor. Let's pick up where we left off.

Matthew Joynes (00:48)
It's so crazy!

Mark Cleveland (00:49)
So we're talking about FinTech and you have a background that is astonishing where you began a trading platform, a currency, international currency business. I'm curious in this world, starting with that as a background, describe what you did there and then fast forward it to you and I spent a bunch of time in crypto and your your analysis and your perspective on currency today. How is what was it like? What is it now? And what's it going to be?

Matthew Joynes (01:20)
Oh gosh, that is such a deep question because it goes to what an economy is. So I started in, had a, I bought a company. I was a lawyer, I progressed to working at a large investment bank and it was very dull and very boring. But one day an accountant there came up to me and says that there's this bus business that's going to be all over the press tomorrow. The accountants are going crazy. Barclays Bank is going to get a punch in the face in the press because the owners have stolen all the money. In those days you didn't have segregated bank accounts so all the money came in for all the clients to trade currencies in one account and of course, the guys that were running the company realized they could just steal it and bugger off to Dubai, which is exactly what they did. This would have been catastrophic so they said look you've got a bit of a background in TMT but you don't know too much about trading would you like to take over this this currency business so I bought it for I paid the trustee in bankruptcy $50 grand for his fees. He gave me this company in Bromley in Kent. There's a Mary Celeste bunch of computers. Everyone had abandoned it and three backroom staff, two of which were cleaners. I turned that within 18 months to 120 traders in Canary Wharf in a state of the art business. I had a big advantage is that I had a trading, an entity, a dealer brokerage fee of zero.

So of course I was the cheapest money in town and that's how we turned it around. It was a bit of a fix, but the fix was in. That company is still going today, some 25 years later, still a billion spot a year going over. I sold it just before the crash of 2008. Worldwide Currencies, you can go and you can pull off its statements of account because it's in Britain, which is a good tip by the way, if you're starting a business, you cannot see any of your competitors returns, know, their tax returns or the cost of doing business. In Britain, by the way, it's all public. So you can go to CompaniesHouse.gov, you can put in, let's say, Cafe, whatever it is, and you can literally pull off all their accounts to see how profitable they are. So before you start any business, I suggest you go to Companies House in the UK and see if that business is at all profitable and benchmark it against the cost you've got.

So you can go, well, it's rent was this, my rent would be that. It's employees with this, my employees would be that. It is the cheapest tip you're ever gonna get. Britain is insane. I mean, literally we're bonkers. Bonkers. So you can literally pull off any of your competitors' bank statements, because everything's audited. The British are very honest about everything. They don't puff anything. Everyone pays corporation tax. I pay more corporation tax through my two British companies than Facebook did in the UK.

How nuts is that over 20 years? So all the English are completely the worst entrepreneurs on the planet. ⁓ But they're relatively decent people. But if you want to get the company's accounts, go to companycounsel.com.

Mark Cleveland (04:26)
Decent people and I just lost all my subscribers in Britain.

Matthew Joynes (04:29)
Yeah, yeah, no, no, well, they'll be back. They form a company in America because nobody gets to see what you do. Nobody knows anything and you can do whatever you like with them and you can even have no fiduciary duty. So this currency business went off and grew very big. So I learned a lot about trading and how that market is manipulated. I suppose the biggest takeaway I have from my days as being a figure in London trading, was knowing that you could corner markets. So if you don't think gold's manipulated, you're wrong. If you don't think silver's manipulated, you're wrong. Because they could even manipulate the currency market. This is the largest market in the world. It's a trillion dollar a day market. And I know four guys that managed to manipulate it. Three of them did end up in jail. It's a matter of public record. But one of them got away with it.

So yeah, if you can manipulate a trillion dollar a day market, how easy is it to manipulate the price of stock in Nvidia or whatever it is? And if you don't think the Blackstones and the world are not doing it, and even the President of United States is doing it, you you can make a political statement and your share price will go up or down like the knickers of a whore in a whorehouse. You know, I believe that they're doing that.

And that's where you get into this wider conspiracy theories which tend to be actually quite accurate. In terms of how currency is developed, will tell you Bitcoin is the big question everyone asks me about. Everyone thinks Bitcoin has been adopted. I've never seen one person buy one thing with a Bitcoin. So what is it? It's just a commodity.

It's a scarce commodity like gold or something. It's not digital gold because gold actually has other uses. There's actually a use case. A stock of Nvidia can give you a dividend, has a use case. Bitcoin, no use case, nothing. It's just one giant scheme that's managed by a small bunch of whales that control a few exchanges. And all these young people have got themselves into this, it's going to be a million dollar coin out there. It's just not. It's never going to happen. You know, each one of these coins eats so much energy, it makes no sense. Nobody uses them. It requires other people to believe in something, you know, that's got no underlying linkage to anything.

And at the end of the day, it's relative to the dollar. So if the dollar goes down, Bitcoin goes down. It's not de-correlated from inflation. If inflation is going up, well, fact, Bitcoin is not going up as fast as inflation. If inflation is going down, does it go down with inflation? No, it's an uncorrelated asset driven by sentiment. Very few market participants, even fewer exchanges, are people taking advantage of people's naivety or lack of access to investment products, which I think is more of the truth. I think it was easier to access these products, but now Robin Hoods have come along and other things have come along and people can now access investment-grade products more rapidly. I think Bitcoin has been used mostly by criminals, drug dealers, all across the Middle East. Terrorism is funded.

I think anyone who's really supporting it doesn't realise they're supporting I would advocate everyone to sell now. I I can see it going all the way back down the ladder. Will it go to zero? No.

So there'll be always people that will disbelieve their eyes and believe in the hope. But that hope is held by a lot of people around the world because this is their only chance to even transfer money in the middle of Africa. But there are better technical fintech products on the way and out there. You know, just so much better than Bitcoin. I think the underlying knowledge structure is great. I think you know, cryptography of Bitcoin is going to be smashed in a second with these quantum computers. You know, but there are some really great products coming out for Africa and countries that are challenged. So, this idea of what a currency is, it's really fundamentally important. Is Bitcoin a currency? Not in my view. Is it a commodity? Yes. Should it be taxed like a commodity? Yes. Should it have capital gains tax? Yeah.

But it's not a medium of exchange, nor is it a store of value, possibly. If you want to store value, go buy gold, because gold has outperformed the S&P statistically every year for the last... forever years. Gold's your best asset if you're looking to store wealth.

There's no single doubt about it. If you want your wealth to have compound relationship with your investment, go buy Nvidia stock or Apple stock or Amazon stock. You know, on a compound basis, they'll outperform gold. But on a straight S&P price of gold per ounce to the S&P's performance, yeah, the gold will win. So if you can stock pick pretty decent stock, you'll outperform gold. But everyone will outperform Bitcoin because it's been down to three grand.

It's been up to nearly a hundred. All those people that just put in at Christmas at hundred. What a loss in three months! I mean, come on. Yeah, no, this isn't something anyone, unless you're very wealthy, should be playing in. And I remember the SEC asking me, as you know, I speak to them quite a bit about various, I've talked to the WTO and I've talked to the Chinese finance ministry about currency.

Mark Cleveland (09:34)
Mm-hmm.

Matthew Joynes (09:58)
And one of things I said, they said, what do you think about Bitcoin and all these cryptocurrencies? I said, the problem is you're asking me this question like three years too late. I said, the horse has bolted. If you regulate this at all in any fashion right now and close it down through backroom regulation, you will put a generation into poverty. And that generation needs to buy the baby boomers businesses, the car washes, the simple stuff.

You know, they got, got, you know, these guys are getting old. They've hung on to these business. I have to hand it to them. Not one of the baby boomer businesses has come my way at 55, but it's going to have to come to someone younger at some point and they need capital. Bitcoin was a great way for them to grow that capital at the expense of other people. Someone is a zero sum game. That's for sure. Somebody's losing for you to win.

You know and if the banks want to be stupid and put the liquidity in then let them do that in the banks can lose in the end and then we all lose I suppose. Not that they mark to market anything anymore because you can just print money out thin air and I think you know going back to this currency question you posed the the truth of how money is created You know, I remember the word fiat, nobody would have known that, now everyone knows what fiat money is. It's like, oh, okay, so the conspiracy theories, you know, they tend to be a little bit true. And there's no better, truer conspiracy theory about the creation of how money is created. And if you really go back to our conversation about share value, you literally create money with your share price. can literally, because banks will lend you against your share price,

Mark Cleveland (11:15)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Matthew Joynes (11:37)
if you have a strategic fund come in at that price to give it a mark to market valuation. And that's a way of injecting capital into this system. And not many people are fully aware that if everyone repaid all the debts, be no dollars in circulation. The whole fucking thing would collapse. America needs to print and lend the interest payments it makes on its bond debt every year into the world economy, otherwise the world economy will contract because it's the reserve currency. So how does it do that and not debase its own currency or debase the living standards of America? And that is incredibly difficult to do and should not be underestimated. So going back to the crypto stuff, it's bonkers. The amount of shiratoshis, the minimum thing is like quadrillions. Yet there's only 21 million of which 4 million are missing. I mean for this to be some sort of currency is just idiotic. It's just not. It's a, I consider like a collectible. You know people collect it's something to talk about. I've got some Bitcoin. I've got a beanie baby. I mean if you ask anyone who's real in this business I'm telling you they just chuckle. They go fine, it's another beanie baby. They're very enthusiastic. Childlike enthusiasm

Mark Cleveland (12:37)
Hmm.

Matthew Joynes (12:55)
promoting the cult of Bitcoin because they're just in the church. So, you know, sorry, guys, if you're out there Bitcoin holders going, no, no, no, you're wrong. It's just a matter of time. I'm right. Just just take your cash. Go and go and buy a car wash. Then go buy some gold and then go buy some real stocks and shares and learn how to do all of that better with AI. But Bitcoin never going to be a

Mark Cleveland (13:14)
No, never going to be a million.

Matthew Joynes (13:16)
15 years old, 15 years old. Are we using it every day? Nope. It hasn't overtaken any currency anywhere in the world. And it's 15 years old and hasn't innovated. And it can only do a minimum number of transactions. And you've got to pray that your transaction goes through. And when you go to an exchange, you just get crushed on the fees in and out.

It didn't get to a million bucks in 15 years. Truth is, the dollar went down a lot. That's the truth of it.

Mark Cleveland (13:42)
Yeah perhaps because we printed so many of

Matthew Joynes (13:47)
Here's an interesting thing.

Purchasing power and the price of the dollar. Very different things. You know, it's kind of a little insight from a guy who's been in currency for a long time. The dollar is going down now, as we all know. Now, you would have thought its purchasing power would be less. It's actually gone up. So if you go abroad right now, you can purchase more with your rest dollar than you could before and go to Europe you'll see what I mean even though the currencies you get less euros but you can buy more with those less euros than you could a year ago so currency pricing not really what you should be looking at should be looking at comparative purchasing power and the dollar you know I'm all I'm American I'm a huge dollar fan. It's a reserve currency of the world.

Mark Cleveland (14:23)
Hmm.

Matthew Joynes (14:36)
I'll never talk it down or talk it up. I'm Bitcoining my own currency here, the dollar. But it has some unique properties that nobody else does. You know, people hoard dollars, physical dollars, they hold them in their bank accounts. They don't spend them. And America has to print a lot of dollars to pay the interest. So there's always any moment it pulls back on printing dollars, there's going to be a liquidity problem.

And already in just in this quarter, we're starting to see some liquidity problems for foreign countries. And you people go on and it will be about tariffs and I suppose that's where we're probably going to go here with currency. Tariffs are intimately linked with currency because it's a one-off event. A tariff isn't inflationary, it's a one-off event and it tends to be managed by the currency. It's not tend to be managed by consumers or producers, it gets managed at the currency level.

It's a resetting of the currencies relative one to another. So people asked, will we see inflation? I go, absolutely not. You'll probably see deflation or stagnation before you see inflation. So most of the propaganda you're getting right now, particularly from the left, is absolutely wrong at a mathematical level. Because here's what happens. You've got factories in China, and you don't ship, you just store all those goods on the dock. Well, they keep storing on the dock because you keep paying or producing people wages to keep making product. So what happens is product chases marginal return. Anything is better than nothing. So you set it for cheaper. You have to. You chase that marginal currency rather than let it sit on the dock. So you actually keep supplying more into the marketplace, which makes, because, you know, if goods become oversupplied, they go down in price, causes deflation. So China's caught in an incredibly bad trap, notwithstanding the rhetoric that you're going to hear out of them, that they can't stop supplying goods and services into the West.

Because they're prepared to chase anything to get that extra barrel of oil because they need it because they don't produce enough oil. So they've got to chase the marginal revenue of the dollar wherever it is even to pay back their debts unless they decide to collapse their own system. And, you know, I've sat at WTO with the head of the finance, the minister of China, and he's talked about taking his currency to gold. I said, please do that. That is a fantastic idea.

Mark Cleveland (17:01)
You

Matthew Joynes (17:02)
And by the way, I'm going to send you all the barrels of oil you need to fill up all your trucks to transport all your gold to me because that's what would happen. And China doesn't understand that America can monetize its debt. Yeah, he can just print more money, but by not printing more money, it causes a massive liquidity crunch, which means it's got to produce more goods to cover that liquidity crunch. And that is deflationary. So you know, that is why we're seeing, you know, the surprise for the economists this week was, well, inflation was down. go, yep, guaranteed that one. And so forth. So currency is super important to what it is. Cryptocurrencies, yeah, super play going on. I don't dismiss it as a potential replacement. Digital central bank currency, it's coming. We probably won't see paper or coins in the future.

I mean, there's a lot of libertarian issues about that, I think. For all my optimism, I think governments are going to get more control. So there's, you know, the flip side to AI is a very dark AI. You know, it's going to have control over your money, it's going to have control over your price, it's going to know where you are, what you're doing, what you're saying, where you're going. It's a perfect tool for the surveillance state. Let's hope to God we don't become communists and because the little freedoms we do have will become even less.

Mark Cleveland (18:19)
Let's extrapolate that though. I've heard it said that capitalism is the worst system out there, except for it's the best we've got, you know, those kinds of comments or democracy being the worst system, except it's the best we got. And I think democracy didn't work out very well for Socrates, know, pure democracy. So I'm fascinated by how we are represented, what our interests are as individuals, what our interests are as countries. Yet what I think we're talking about is this wide open global trading, global platform for value creation. And we're not sure what value is if AI is, and robots are doing all the physical work and AI is doing all the calculating work. Is value now a relationship?

Is value now the time we buy for ourselves and share with each other? Is value now something back to our fundamental close friendships and tribe family? What is value?

Matthew Joynes (19:21)
Well, I think we really had a real life example of what value is to certain people. You know, freedom is something that people are going to purchase. You know, people want to come to America because it's a freer country than others. If this was such a bad shithole, they wouldn't be climbing over the wall to get in. Nobody's climbing over the wall to get into Venezuela. Nobody's climbing the wall to get into Spain or Mexico or, you know, all around the world you can say that. They're climbing over the wall to get into a place that has freedom and we need to value that and I mean Elon Musk just put a price on it. He said I have to buy Twitter and I put X amount to keep my freedom. We are too glib with not knowing the value of our choice, the ability to make a choice and we are too easy to give it up to other people to make choices for us and we've framed that, sadly in terms of having and having not.

And the have-nots have a lot if they have freedom. Without freedom, the have-nots have even less. And then trying to get the haves to have less, for them to have even less, is an absurd proposition. America has, we have this incredible natural resources that we can all access. There's a lot of haves there.

Cars are relatively cheap, and oil and gas is relatively cheap. Land is relatively cheap compared to the rest of the world.

Our value is our natural resources, it's our time it's really valuing your neighbor as yourself, as trite as that sounds.

So I think the value of freedom is really the currency of America, and that's what drives the dollar's adoption, that's what drives its living standard.

It's what drives its imagination, its creativity. AI is an expression of that level of freedom. No other country invented it. It came from here. Well, it came from a British guy from Canada, actually. But AI is a libertarian option for people. The truth shall set you free from a previous truth.

Mark Cleveland (21:13)
Hahaha

Matthew Joynes (21:22)
And you know, I think we're going to unearth some fantastic physics in the future. We're going to know stuff that we can only dream of, like an 18th century pioneer could not understand you and me having this conversation over a telephone in real time, go out ⁓ to millions of people. I mean, it just couldn't conceive what that would look like indistinguishable from magic. Therefore, it is magic.

Mark Cleveland (21:37)
Right, across the country, online, yeah.

Matthew Joynes (21:46)
But I think that is why I look at us as being erased. You know, all those challenges, all those thoughts, all those problems everyone had in the last two century are not the future's problems. Those problems have gone away forever. They're just going to have a new set of problems. And I think one of set of problems they're going to have is what is value? What is currency? All the things you're talking about. Mark, how do I self-improve? How do I grow? How do I use my time?

And these are really fundamental questions, funny enough. So we've gone through this whole loop to go back to this, to now, what kind of society do we want? Do we want a democracy? Do we want a dictatorship? Do we want a quasi-democratic Trumpian dictatorship? Do you want to give them three terms? You know, all these things are up for grabs now. Where they weren't, you know, after 1945. Now America has ended the Marshall Plan, with emphatic style. You know, why? I don't know. Could it kept printing dollars? Absolutely, yeah. Because it can always monetize them. Yeah, but it doesn't want to have a Marshall Plan. It wants to reorganize itself under the Trump doctrine, whatever that is. And if anyone can decipher what he's doing with the tariffs, which is, I'm supportive, but confusing. I don't think I would approach this in draconian terms.

Mark Cleveland (22:58)
Hahaha

Matthew Joynes (23:00)
If you'd given me the chance to be Mr. Nutnick, I would have said, calm down. You know, there are some tariffs imbalances that you definitely need to look at and are palpably unfair to American industry. Why don't we focus on those rather than do this broad brush stroke approach where it's 145% to China, which doesn't help China, doesn't help us. You know, it's like, I'm going to poke you in the eye because you poke me in the eye. I mean, we'll all end up blind like that.

But nevertheless, there is some, some approach to it. And, know, Trump's a parallel entrepreneur himself. You know, he's not only is he running businesses, he's also the president and he's looking at running the presidency as a business. Well, I can safely say the Middle East, you know, from back at the beginning, I was just there. They look at their states as businesses for sure. So Trump, you know, why wouldn't he want to look at America as a business?

You know, apply something, his parallel entrepreneurship is he's bringing his business acumen. If it's not working, renegotiate it. And there's plenty of times I think Mr. Trump has gone to the banks where he's got a loan that's going to default and he's renegotiated it so that it didn't default. And I think he's doing the same thing with the currency of America. He's saying to all the counterparts that we really need to negotiate

Mark Cleveland (23:53)
Yeah.

Matthew Joynes (24:16)
the velocity at which the dollar comes back home and how to keep it in our own economy going because you're extracting too many dollars and we can't pump the internal consumption economy any further than we have. You know, we're lending, you know, 3% down to buy a house, crying out loud, from the FHA. That is pumping a lot of debt into the economy. You house prices is the way that the Federal Reserve pumps money into the American economy. It needs to pump every interest payment on every credit card every month somehow into the economy and I think it's finding it harder and harder to find counterparts. I mean you can get an SBA loan right now just by signing on the dotted line for $250 grand. You know the loosening of credit, you know notwithstanding your credit report you know.

The irony is the people that need the credit are the ones between 550 and 700 and they're the people that are not going to get it at all. Because they're the ones that they want to work. They don't want them to invest. That's the coffee worker. That's somebody, the barista, that's the person at the check-in desk at your Marriott hotel. That's your answer phone to your American Express card.

Mark Cleveland (25:15)
Mm-hmm.

Matthew Joynes (25:30)
They don't want give them any capital, but for the rest, there's unlimited capital almost.

Mark Cleveland (25:34)
Well, so I suppose that if the dollars aren't coming back into the United States in the form of buying our debt, then they need to come back into the United States in the form of our export products being successfully purchased in any other country with a dollar denominated transaction.

If the dollars are staying in other countries, which I see when I travel as well, I see dollars in South America. I see dollars in lots of different places. If they're not coming back, then we just have to print more of them in order to maintain liquidity. That's your argument.

Matthew Joynes (26:06)
Yeah, look at Argentina being a case in point. It's dutched its own currency and chosen the dollar. They're not the only ones, but they've also, they've got to make shit to get their dollars. So over capacity is overseas trying to chase these dollars that we can print. And the bond market is essentially has to be very, very healthy. I mean, the only reason Trump stopped this tariff war as quickly as he did, he could see that the bond market

Mark Cleveland (26:07)
or part of it.

Matthew Joynes (26:32)
might not have accepted all the dollars that they needed to print. Fortunately, it was ironically oversubscribed. he might have, I think instinctively, he's a good economist. And I think that, I think he got bluffed into it to pull back to see if the bonds market, they thought there was going to be a default on the sale of bonds just last week.

Well in fact turns out completely oversubscribed three to one and I think he got told that there was going to be a catastrophe and that there wasn't. His instinct was there wasn't going to be a catastrophe and had he held his nerve there wouldn't have been one. Yeah so you're right to point that you either buy the debt through the bond market or we have to sell much more goods and services. If we can't sell goods and services competitively how can we sell goods and services?

So we just have to keep relying on the bond market to keep buying our debt. And that's unsustainable at certain points. And it's unfair actually on people abroad who literally get nothing for the dollar. I mean, they send us a car, we give them paper. You know, it's great for America. I mean, we've created a tribute system. You know, I've written recently to a group I'm a part of about, you know, I think the overtribute economy is appearing. America consumes more than it makes, clearly. That consumption is really tribute from other countries to America not to bomb them or not to destabilize their currency or not to upset the apple cart. And if America starts moving around -

Mark Cleveland (28:05)
Tariffs could be another form of tribute.

Matthew Joynes (28:07)
Well, they are. I think it's tribute. Tariff is tribute. There's no doubt about it. I mean, nobody's talking about this point or not giving it its name. And it is de facto tribute to America being the strongest reserve currency in the world. And it's over. It's in your face. And China and Europe don't want to pay tribute. Well, why would they? But here's why they should. You get lots of dollars. Your economies grow.

Mark Cleveland (28:09)
Tariffs. Yeah.

Matthew Joynes (28:32)
Your people are stable, their pensions are paid for, there's more products and goods and services shoved into the global economy, everyone gets wealthier. So for 40 million Americans, their life is sublime while everyone else has to work. And that's kind of what's happening. The lawyers get money for nothing, the accountants get money for nothing. And it literally is nothing because AI can do it. So as long as this sort of super middle class can keep getting the money coming to it somehow, which that is the tricky bit, they realize the best way is through stocks and shares. So pile in everyone, because that is the way that you're going to get and keep your wealth in the future. The stock market is gonna go through the roof. Maybe not next month, maybe not the month after, but it's a runaway train. And if you're not on it, it costs you so much to catch up to the runaway train that you're separated again and you're caught in that little group gap. Yeah, and this is all a matter of monetary policy and what currency is, what wealth creation is, what wealth transfer is. And all these big, big questions are really to the fore at the moment,

Mark Cleveland (29:14)
gonna grow.

Matthew Joynes (29:36)
which is an exciting time. And that's the four at the very time that AI is also making its first impacts, I might add. know, algorithmic training driven by AI is out there already. Arbitrage has always existed, but now there's a certainty on your trading. You you can arbitrage to win with the press of a button. You know, so you don't know how these tools can help you. You can't help yourself.

So think Americans dropping into what I call a pure speculative.

Mark Cleveland (30:03)
So there's a quote that is on your website that I love and it says, "success isn't about avoiding failure. It's about learning when to adapt, adopt, change, and keep moving forward." Tell me how that download came to you and what does it really mean when you're trying to get people to understand what is failure? What does it mean when you're avoiding failure?

What's your attitude toward the word failure?

Matthew Joynes (30:33)
Well, I think an absolute failure is a business doesn't make enough money to cover its costs from an entrepreneur's point of view. And I've had a business that's done that and there was nothing I seemed to do. I kept putting money in. I thought I was clever. I wasn't. I couldn't adapt to the market changes. I had some old thinking that I thought I could sell, I could buy customers by giving a good service.

But customers behavior had changed. hadn't realized it. And I kept putting in money and it was a failure. Not at a product level or an infrastructure. It was licensed or compliant, everything else. So it was a success at how to build an efficient little business, but it failed because it couldn't find enough customers wanting that efficient little business because they had a lot of choice. And I didn't know how to reach them to change their choice. So the cost of reaching them to change that choice was too much. So yeah, it was a successful business in the sense it set out and did everything it said it was going to do. But it failed because it didn't realize that acquiring a customer fundamentally changed. The age group of the customer wasn't my age group.

I projected myself into that business too easily, I think. So, you know, then I adapted it to do other things. Carbon trading. So, you know, so you have to change your mindset and then continue. But I think all of them of, you know, what I set out to do wasn't quite what I wanted. Let's take Wikipad and Gamevice, you know, Wikipad.

I'm suing Nintendo for over a billion dollars still for 10 been suing them. It's a matter of public record. You can read it, know, GameVice versus Nintendo because we had the original switch in Wikipad and they infringed our patents, but they dragged it out to death. That company's never really made a profit because all of its money has gone to the bloody lawyers. And it still exists today and all the money comes in just flows to the lawyers to continue this epic battle against Nintendo. I wish I never started You know say a success and a failure all in the second. Yes, we did. Yes, we did, our lawyers persuaded us ten million dollars in later it got worse. They actually managed to invalidate some of our patterns, but look we don't want to go there. That's just my story.

Mark Cleveland (32:39)
You started the battle?

Matthew Joynes (32:55)
I should have listened to Brendan again. He said don't file for any patents. You're just going to give away your secret sauce. And once you file for patents, you want to defend yourself because you think, oh, righteously, I've spent all this money on patents. There's a reason for it. So we sued Nintendo. And of course, they're deep-pocketed adversary. And they can delay and delay and delay. And it's still trundling through the court system since, what was it? was probably 11th or 12th year. I don't think it's ever going to settle. They've never offered to settle and we've never offered to stop so it just trundles along. I think perhaps an email and a letter goes across costing us ten grand every couple of months. the cows being milked I think.

Mark Cleveland (33:33)
Oh man, you know, I've actually, used to, I think I hold a part or the title to for patents, filed one with Hytch, thought that we'd done some really, really innovative stuff. And I thought, well, that needs to be protected, spent, you know, 40 grand on patents and research and delayed the release of products so that we could have absolute clarity and absolute novelty standard in Europe.

So we delayed our own U.S. domestic technology launch so that we could perfect this and then file in Europe and that it never been released. All these things that I got great advice from, I suppose. But I'm now of the opinion like you that a patent is just giving away your secrets. You're publishing your secrets. You're publishing your prior art references and you're teaching everybody what it is that you do uniquely. And then you got to go get patent insurance or some other form of self-insurance for the lawsuits that are going to follow. I think a patent is just a ridiculous waste of time anymore. I'm saying that. think I just heard you say that.

Matthew Joynes (34:39)
Oh no, I totally agree with you because it's so easy to create an innovative step to get a new patent based on your old patent. You know, move button A to another position. I mean, yeah, no, it's costly. would tell every entrepreneur, bother. You know, you're not going to force it against China. They're going to rip you off. It's going to be a cheaper product. The money that you're going to put into patents, put into marketing, put it into branding, put it into innovation and creativity.

Just don't give it to the lawyers. You know, any time you're spending money that doesn't have a creative output, I think you need to question whether you're spending the money in the right way. You know, even if you're thinking of marketing your product, what's a creatively unique way of marketing it? Rather than say, well, I'm going to supply a bunch of television ads or adverts in magazines. I just don't think that works. I think you're told that's the way to do it because people make money out of you.

Be creative, know, do a playground event or something, you know, a local school. You'll probably pick up more customers in less dramatic ways. know, and the same goes for patents, don't waste your money.

Mark Cleveland (35:42)
Yeah, we, when I, when I was building Swiftwick in the very, very early years, we, we, we looked for patents because we thought we had some great innovation in our socks and the wicking technology. We didn't wind up doing it, but we did lean into creative marketing. And then the final answer was we just went to a super long distance athletic events, people running 50 miles on a trail. And I talked directly, my team would talk directly to the athlete, athlete, and we would give them a pair of socks and challenge them to that. It would make them 5% faster and have fun with it. And the product did perform better than anything that they had experience with. And by giving away the sock, that was our marketing budget. Now we got years later, the company was up for the best in business award and we won that. And then a little bit later, we were we were a candidate for the Governor's Award for Trade Excellence for having started with no export business and then having been one of the fastest examples of made in Tennessee product getting exported. And so we won in the small business category.

Mark Cleveland (36:47)
We have had this wide ranging conversation now about currencies and value, corporate structure, how AI is reshaping our understanding of what value is. And I want to pivot for a second and talk about what I think we're going to focus on in season two and what is happening right now in the Parallel Entrepreneur Network. We're attracting people who just believe they can unleash potential everywhere. And coming into these conversations and I'm seeing a younger generation of entrepreneur that seems to start coming out of maybe they went to business school, maybe they didn't, wherever they are, they are starting with the perspective that they've got multiple swim lanes going and they're experimenting constantly.

Two to five businesses each on average, if you want to call it a business, they're definitely generating revenue and experimenting aggressively. They're paralleling. What do you think is happening in this moment in time with the next generation of entrepreneurship?

Matthew Joynes (37:53)
I think infrastructure to start up costs historically were very very expensive, you know, just forming a company when I formed a company back in the early 90s you had to spend a lot of money just to form a company, then put money in a bank account, building a website all of those costs are now sunk. So I think, you know, you can get your identities going cheaper, set up that shop much, much faster. And you can see that the cross-pollination of different smaller focuses, it's like everyone's building little bulks, which is great. You know, somebody can have an AI, let's say scheduling Greyhound buses.

I haven't seen one yet, but I'm pretty sure that somebody will come up and go, hey, I've got the Greyhound bus timetable and I'm going to tell you what's a good time to leave your house if you allow me to track you to catch the Greyhound bus. And it can track the Greyhound bus. And then at the same time, you're thinking, well, okay, so I have my Greyhound buses, but these people know I have much money. So I said, I have another line and I go, okay, why don't I have the best value motels on the Greyhound bus?

So you get another one. Then you think okay you've got your best value for money Greyhound bus route hotels and then you set up another one saying hey specials in that area for breakfast dinner here's a coupon where are you now? So you know you can you can have push notifications you can cross pollinate and all those three apps I'm telling you you can make right now within 24 hours.

That is why everyone can do 10 or 20 or 30. And then it's going to be which app catches light the fastest, which one provides the best service, which one has the best rewards for using it. And that takes a little bit more time to build up that kind of reward infrastructure, which I think, you know, credit cards have been doing for years. I think that you know, what makes a customer sticky to Marriott or Hilton, those kind of, you know, add-ons are going to be what separates, you know, one AI from winning in another. So, yeah, I can see that, you know, young people will know once they've done it once, they can do it three or four times. It's just their imagination that stops them. And then it's just going to be a furious rush to market share. And then it's pick up your friend and say, OK, I'll give you my market share for some of your shares, literally.

And then there's a consolidation and then they'll become one winner. So yeah, all power to them, that's exactly what they should be doing.

Mark Cleveland (40:27)
One accounting system hooked up to seven or eight different apps, generating invoicing and ⁓ tracking that is sort of universal. You've set that challenge aside. Tracking customer acquisition, the AI can actually do that. You might not need standalone SaaS platforms for those kinds of things. It's really a mass address of one pinpoint solution after another.

Matthew Joynes (40:55)
Yeah, that's it. It's exactly pinpoint solutions. There was an uber driver saying to me, you know, what could they do to make money? I said, well, listen, just go and pick up washing from people's front doors and take it to a laundry mat and charge them a percentage of the washing. And, you know, if you get a hundred customers all within an area of each other paying you, you know, $10 a load.

You you're starting to build up some money four times a month and it probably takes you half a morning to pick up the washing. And I think the AI apps are a bit like that. They're just going to give you time back and then we go back into the time how do you use your time loop. So, yeah, these apps are all, it'll all be free in the end because that's what capitalism drives you to. Marginal cost equals marginal revenue, which is an axiom, which means you'll always chase the last cent.

And the last cent may be giving it away for free.

Mark Cleveland (41:55)
So many companies give away services for free that the user is you and me and the data is our behaviors that they're monetizing in lots of creative ways.

Matthew Joynes (42:05)
They're all bar. Anything, if anyone's listening to this that has access to any form of big data, that's what they should latch onto. Attach your AI to data sets, or you've got to capture audience to create data set. And, you know, you happen to know somebody's got a massive data set and stuff that you think is garbage, it probably isn't.

Mark Cleveland (42:28)
Probably not garbage.

Matthew Joynes (42:29)
That garbage is somebody else's treasure. Look at Peter Thiel. Or Joe Lonsdale. They're all about data acquisition and management. That's their entire value proposition.

Mark Cleveland (42:42)
So if you were to look back on your, let's just way back, wind back to talking to yourself as a little kid, what would you say to your younger self?

Matthew Joynes (42:42)
Thank you.

I would say start earlier. I started way too late. didn't really start. I haven't worked for anyone since I was 31. But I shouldn't, I don't think, I think I was at my peak at 25, 26, at my creativity, innovative. And I got told, you know, stay in the job, learn from others. There's nothing to learn from others. Don't stay in the job. Your time at that time is free. What are your expenses, you know?

Share a room with a mate, your computer can go to the coffee shop, you know, that's it, that's it. Don't wait till you've got a couple of kids, that's bonkers. Or in my case, just before I had my first children. But you know, just go now. There's nothing they can teach you at university that you can't learn off your phone. There's no courses. That degree is just for your own self

Mark Cleveland (43:41)
So that's.

Matthew Joynes (43:47)
feeling good to say I got a degree because there's no knowledge they're going to give you that isn't changed within the next 24 months. Nothing. Physics, biology, medicine, economics, it's all going to be transformed as people can crunch big data for the first time in humanity's history. What are the other six, seven billion, four hundred million, nine hundred ninety nine thousand people thinking and doing?

If you get that data, you're going to be making very big decisions. ⁓

Mark Cleveland (44:17)
Your access to data, your access to knowledge is now no more barrier, no matter who you are, no matter where you are, provided you got access to the internet, I suppose, and some handheld computing power. So, or I suppose you could even go to an internet cafe and get started when you don't have those resources.

Matthew Joynes (44:35)
Yeah, I think if you're the right entrepreneur, how to see data and see what it's throwing up as an opportunity, you can move on it. You know, here's another idea, you know, I'm just thinking off the top of my head. Everyone's renting equipment. Let's say you're in the construction industry and you rent a tractor and a thing and all of you do, there's competitors, there's 20 competitors within 10 miles. You all have inventory you're not using. Okay.

Well, why don't you all get together, create another competitor that only uses unused inventory of each other. Do you see what I mean? And the AI can find it in than 10 seconds to create a fake one that uses unused inventory of that day and sell it off cheaply. And they just deliver it from each of them. So they actually can work together. So you can, you can compete and work together. And I think that's what AI gives you the advantage to do. You can compete against yourself. And this is what your other friend said

Mark Cleveland (45:12)
Yeah. ⁓

Matthew Joynes (45:32)
who was on the show, you know, may the best dog win effectively and you can compete against and work with your competitors for excess inventory, excess warehouse inventory.

Nobody does it. Why don't they do it? They can't get that data quick enough and number crunch it and do it in real time. But AI can just ping you every morning and say, hey, how much unused square footage have you got today? And you can rent it by the hour, by the day, by the week, by the month. So it's breaking things down and it can be dynamic in real time.

Mark Cleveland (46:05)
You talked about the various different businesses that are going to get disintermediated, right, or made irrelevant. The consulting business, how do you see that?

Matthew Joynes (46:16)
Well, Knowledge has become cheap. That's the truth. For the first time in history, knowledge isn't a barrier of entry. You know, knowledge is the cheapest commodity out there. Data is an expensive commodity and utilization will still have value. You know, as we're already moving way, way from ownership to rental models on just about everything. You know, I don't think that any state in America where can actually own your own house.

You're going to go, well, that's not true. And I say, yeah, well, you're always going to pay property tax. So there's always a tax that stops real ownership. You can never stop working. You have to have an investment to pay for that. So everyone's caught in a rental model. You never own anything, but you can rent out stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla completely transforms its business into you never buy a car, you just rent them from us on a per day basis. And when you're finished, the car drives itself home.

I think that's more or less where he's going to go and that's why he hasn't come out with this 25 grand Tesla like everyone was expecting him to. I think he's just going to go to a day use rental model. We'll send you a nice clean car every morning. If you want it, it'll be at the front of your drive, charged up, ready to go where you want. Why not?

Mark Cleveland (47:34)
It'll drive itself to you and that's on our liability. So it's not an autonomous vehicle that you're in, you've got to worry about. And then when you're done with it, it takes you home and then it drives itself home. ⁓ Great idea.

Matthew Joynes (47:44)
And you might, yeah, and you may never see another car. And the reason for that is that AI can figure out all the congestion points, take you on different deliveries, tell you start time, end time, and even book your, you know, where you're going for your haircut. I mean, it's going to get bonkers. There is no reason that the AI knows you're going to need your teeth cleaned every two months, your hair cut once, it knows where you want to go. It can time it. So you've gone and done a massage, had your teeth cleaned, got your hair cut, done your business phones, your calls from the car, got you home to your wife, bought her flowers for her birthday and called your kids up for you and leaving a message with its fake voice. I mean it's gonna be awesome or terrible.

Mark Cleveland (48:31)
Awesome or terrible.

Matthew Joynes (48:33)
Yeah. Well if you come through that data then you'll find the RRS waiting for you when you get in your haircut.

Mark Cleveland (48:41)
I set alarms to make sure that I don't forget my daughter's birthday, right? But AI would just flat never let me forget the birthday. As a matter of fact, it probably would lean into two or three weeks before that. Don't forget this is what she likes the most and send it to her.

Matthew Joynes (48:58)
Yeah, these phones are going to change complete format. I think we're going to see mobile phones be very, very different in the future.

Mark Cleveland (49:07)
Yeah, they don't need a user interface. You just need to talk to it.

Matthew Joynes (49:11)
Correct, yeah, that's it. And if you need to face to face, you know, your TV in your car will come on and you can do a face to face or your television or, you know, your fridge, whatever. But yeah, I think it's going to turn into a little cube or something. Maybe you have glasses in your pocket when you want to see someone, I don't know.

Mark Cleveland (49:31)
So people are watching this revolution happen around them. They're participating in it. It's kind of one or the other, right? The distance gap. Is that accelerating?

Matthew Joynes (49:43)
Yeah, we'll get big.

Yeah, I'd like spend the 20 bucks. I mean, really spend the 20 bucks or, you know, join up to use GROK and participate. I mean I think everyone's like that. This is this is the beginning days of the Internet. And now who would have thought you could stream all these movies on the touch of a button? Yeah, AI is just going to do everything for you. And then you'll have a robot cutting your grass and making dinner.

Question is what do humans do then? You know, as their work mode becomes obsolete, which we've all wanted to do, we might be paying for our own jobs.

Mark Cleveland (50:21)
Hmm.

Matthew Joynes (50:21)
You might turn around and say, no, want to wash dishes and work in the hospital.

Mark Cleveland (50:28)
So I've got some experience with songwriting, music production and AI. Recently, my wife did a new song leveraging the lyrics that are a poem DeepSeek responded to a prompt and wrote a poem about what it's like to be AI. And it got some attention and Jenny took that and decided that it was really the baby AI, the angst of humanity, a mirror reflected back to us. And the AI needs a lullaby, sort of a hush little baby approach to speaking back, speaking with and to AI and maybe even calming humanity a little bit about that moment in time where it's creating. And one of the things that AI is doing is it's creating, it's enabling as a tool, an extremely rapid development of music, extremely rapid development of video. You've even said on our previous conversations, you've said that one of your companies is actually at risk from being made irrelevant by AI in the video space. How are you leaning into it, knowing what you know?

Is your team leaning into it with you or how is that? How are you experiencing that?

Matthew Joynes (51:43)
Yeah, that's my animation business. Yeah, we distributed and produced, I think about as many animations as a single studio for an independent studio. I think done about 17 from Garfield, Marmaduke through to Dragon Keeper just recently. You know, budget range four to twenty two million dollars. used to be able to sell those for more than they cost. There's big government subsidies of 50 percent in these sorts of things.

You know, now we can see AI gonna eat our lunch. I think what's gonna be important is IP brand recognition to drive consumers. So like, Marmaduke people know about, Garfield they know about, of course. And people can locate us.

Because I think there could be a hundred Marmadukes made, you know, within minutes by the AI. You know, it's read, Save the Cat. It's read thousands and thousands of scripts that have been fed into it. It knows how to do out the beats. You know, it can do voices. It's got millions of samples of people's voices. It can experiment fast.

I think we're definitely going to see the first fully animated animation film within 24 months and it will be good. What can I do about it? I don't think we're going to go down that line. I'm going to leave that for some other people. We had a bit of fun making the animations. I think that's for another generation. I can't save it. And, you know, all will happen is the cost of the animation will drop, obviously, but then they can't sell it, they can't sell it to make any money. So, you know, we might have a lot of free shit out there. But the person that can, you know, turn that into a business by making good free shit. Well, that person, you know, is going to make a nice little living, you know, maybe cut it up on TikTok or maybe cut it up on YouTube or whatever it is, or, you know, find some marginal revenue to pay for their time. But their time was very limited in making it.

So yeah, it's a real challenge, we're not going to be in that battle. We're going to leave that for people 20 years younger to kick out. I did my bit in my time.

Mark Cleveland (53:47)
Well, thank you for doing your bit in your time, Matthew. It's just great to see you out there championing parallel entrepreneurship, recognizing it as a thing, providing us with an example of how to do it, how to be nimble. And I greatly appreciate you joining us today on the Parallel Entrepreneur.

Matthew Joynes (54:05)
You're too kind Mark, thank you for inviting me.