Omid Malekan (Columbia Business School) on Private Money, Financial Systems, and Crypto in Geopolitics

**Wyatt** (0:00)
This is Wyatt, and on today's episode, I sat down with Omid Malekan. Omid is an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, having previously spent more than a decade in the asset management and finance industry. In 2017, he started to take a deep interest in blockchain technology, and since then, he has become a leading thinker on blockchains, stablecoins, and their relevance to global money and power systems. In our discussion, we touch on the requirements of digital money in today's digital era, the current scale of private money across our economic system, the banking industry's stronghold over payments and consumer deposits, and far more.
Without further ado, I hope you enjoy our conversation.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:42)
Matt Walsh and Nic Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and hosts may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:03)
Brought down by Bad Mortgage Investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:08)
The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, 85 billion dollars. This is a different kind of market and the Fed is asleep.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:16)
The federal government is stepping in to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:22)
The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:28)
We print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin.

**Wyatt** (1:36)
Omid, thank you for joining. Excited and we're recording this in person, which is fun to sit down with you. My favorite title I think you've garnered among many others is the explainer in chief of blockchains. So I'd love to hear about how you got into the world of blockchain finance and stable coins generally.

**Omid Malekan** (1:54)
Sure. First, thank you having me. Long time listener, first time caller as well.
Big fan of the podcast, so really excited to be on here. And yes, my self-given title is explainer in chief. But that came from the fact that when I stumbled into crypto early on, like the 2013-2014 period, I was very interested in it. I was very curious. I wanted to learn a lot. And as the years went by and I became a bigger believer of the transformative potential, there was this question of, well, what value do I have to add to this overall idea or movement? And almost by accident, I realized that explaining, educating, writing, teaching, this is my primary value add of trying to stay on the frontier of the newest ideas, digest them, have some kind of a mental model and rubric that I process them through, and then explain to other people what I think is happening here and what's going to work and what's not.

**Wyatt** (2:55)
So you've been doing this for quite a number of years now, and I'd say if you look at the generation of people who took an interest in blockchains and Bitcoin from an early stage, you had people like Nick, he was a philosophy meets political science background type, who really had an interest in geopolitics and money.
You had cypherpunks, you had people who maybe spent time on niche corners of the Internet. What were your interest areas previously that drew you into taking an interest in this?

**Omid Malekan** (3:23)
The cypherpunk ethos definitely appealed to me. Long before crypto, I had another accidental career, which is a critic of central banks and the Fed. One of my claims to fame is that in his memoir, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke refers to a YouTube video that I made as hilarious, but misinformed.
But for me, because I had a TradFi background, in another life, I was a trader, worked various roles in financial services. I had a pretty good idea of how the plumbing of finance and money works. And when I first learned about Bitcoin, I was very intrigued by how fundamentally different it was. Because the one thing you know, if you spend enough time on Wall Street, is that you never actually own anything. It doesn't matter who you are. You could be a retail individual. You could be a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. At the end of the day, there are multiple layers of intermediaries between you, your money and your assets. I was very intrigued by this idea that what we call now self-custody, but not so much from the actual practice of it. I think actually, especially now, everybody has to be very careful when you're practicing self-custody. And I have no problem with there being new intermediaries, like custody providers, whether they do it technologically or legally.