People of IOG: Dan Friedman

lupo hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado and today's guest is daniel friedman my good friend whom i've known for about half a decade now and he's one of the most remarkable men i've met he speaks more languages than i think i'll ever even know and he's been all around the world and he has a hell of a life story so as many of you are aware and for the new fellow travelers the people of iowa iog series is all about the people that work with our company employees and contractors and the goal of this series is for us to get to know a little bit more about the people behind the scenes who deliver cardano or bring great stuff into our ecosystem and dan's done a little bit of everything throughout his history with us and before and so this is his show dan thank you so much for joining us it's really a pleasure to have you on thanks charles thanks for having me and yeah it's it's it's it's it's an honor to be one of the first ones interviewed on this show and being interviewed by charles of all people which is which is great thank you very much well it's an honor to have you on too and so let's start from the very beginning so my if memory serves you were born in ukraine or as they used to call back in the day the ukraine the soviet union let's start there well actually that's one of the things that i google it does it no favors nobody can tell me why it's not it why it's the ukraine and not just ukraine because you say estonia you don't say the estonia you don't see the belarusia but you say the ukraine i i don't know well anyway yes i was born in the ukraine and kiev which is the capital city back during the the era of the will the evil empire which was the soviet union and yeah i just lived i guess grew up in a what you would call a as as middle class as you could get in in those days in the soviet union and was this the 1970s 1980s when was this so i was born in the 70s but the only memory i have of the 70s is apparently as it was explained to me by my parents is a big mural that was on the wall of our apartment building before we moved from that one to the one that we lived in basically the entire time until i moved to the us in the 80s but most of my memories were my childhood from the 80s so i'm a child of the 80s okay so what was what were the 1980s like in kiev ukraine what did it look like what was the taste touch and feel i mean what was a day in the average life when you were walking around as a little kid well i'll tell you apparently the the life that i that i led in the 80s were was really similar to the late 60s and in the us except for all the capitalism stuff technologically lifestyle wise fashion wise it was probably about 10 to 15 years behind the west but for example music that was popular in the 80s by a large part was actually disco a lot of people still listen to disco mixed with some 80s kind of stuff european and germany was 1980s ukrainian disco like what was really popular was and some actually might know this group because some of their hits made it even all the way to japan which is where i live now it's called jingis khan that was huge that was a big big hit in in the soviet union of that time and that's that's basically what i grew up listening to every other place i went to every single restaurant i went to every single house i went to everybody had that was this on the radio or television or or did you actually have a phonograph or a 8-track player i mean how did you actually consume media in 1980s ukraine well i'll tell you everything was built on mostly mostly built on contraband in the soviet union because a lot of these things were actually i mean jinga's hand was allowed by the sensors but a lot of these things were not or sometimes for example with the beatles the beatles were allowed and then they're not allowed but then the music that was allowed before was then transferred to tapes so then people would copy each other's tapes so it was it was a really weird system in fact during soviet times there was a list of forbidden western movies one of them included rambo it was rambo there was a couple basically anything that was considered propaganda against the soviet regime was considered contraband which was actually punishable by jail time if you if you came in and you had a copy of rambo true blood and who would catch you the kgb or commissary like what would be the kind of person did somebody report you to the police or how did that work in practice yeah it could get reported you would get reported to to the local authorities and they it was all about connections at that point who had what connections some people that were connected up in the government could have this kind of stuff some people deliver the lower class which was pretty much most of the country that wasn't in government were exposed to this and especially during the the prohibition era which was the brezhnev times so i was actually born under leonid brezhnev and if some of you if maybe some of you are too young to remember him this was and anybody who says anything and western politics yeah there's a lot of crazy okay with crazy [ __ ] going on in western politics there's always this but you cannot compare it with soviet politics we had a guy run the country for 20 years 20 years so brezhnev came into power in the 60s and he died in 1982 i believe so this guy was in power for almost 20 years and during that time he instituted some contraband laws which were basically built up on top of already existing contraband laws and just made things a lot more harshly punishable by jail times like say for example contraband media any kind of drug marijuana i mean marijuana would send you to prison for a long long time like something like 10 years any any amount things like that and yeah and so i mean during those times you just had to kind of walk a really tight rope with these things you really had to watch what you say especially not even because of the the authorities it was actually for example when we were about to when we started thinking about immigrating from the soviet union to to to the us the middle late 80s it took us several years to actually go through the process because he couldn't just leave again something else that we had to really live with us you could not actually leave the country freely you had to have papers to to to cross the the international border and and then it was at the discretion of the the border patrol to actually let you through and a lot of times that's where the money was made which these border patrol agents would actually get kickbacks for letting people cross the border so we actually have to go through a process that i believe took us about three years we started in late 86 early 87 and actually finally were able to leave the soviet union in in the summer of 89. wow yeah it's it was a long process and during that whole time i remember my parents were actually telling me that don't tell anybody about this and the reason was is not that it was illegal it was that the people that were around were known for once in a while part of my french but lynching jews happened a couple of times around that the the that part of the world especially jews that are trying to leave the country so yeah they were basically my parents were basically afraid that somebody could set her house on fire or do something to me because i was still a kid and eight nine ten to eleven twelve years old at that point so right it was an interesting time i'd say wow and so what what what was your childhood like outside of the the contraband laws i imagine you're probably a little bit of a rebel but you're always trying to push the envelope a little bit and watch rambo and listen to the forbidden songs and so forth i mean how is it actually done in practice yeah i mean i always but my father loves music so i always love music and i'd always i remember i still actually have i pretty much created a well from what i remember in the same order a mixtape that he used to play on the weekends yeah and i would listen to remember i would listen to abba i would listen to well genghis khan the beasts boniem i mean some of these names might mean something to people some of them might not i mean i know in europe they're actually still pretty big people know about these guys actually if you ask any of most of our german german counterparts at iohk about genghis han because jingasan is actually a german group a lot of them just oh god they're not proud of those guys apparently i i kind of like them i like them still so yeah like though did you did you have to go to ukrainian school or were you homeschooled or what how did you actually what was a day in the life of the of the soviet ukrainian education system for you just regular public schools i i mean it probably was homeschooling there but you had them i always went to went to public schools i was actually at that point in my life and i still am was really into astronomy and so i was into sciences i was into astronomy i was also sent to chemistry and so i actually made friends with science teachers who would then let me come in after hours and then set up the telescope for me to look at the moon i remember one thing that i was actually really was growing copper sulfium crystals that was a big thing copper sulfide crystals so copper sulphium is is for some people that don't know is this crystallized blue greenish right chemical and you can grow crystals with it fairly easily i was actually really into growing crystals with different chemicals and so yeah you take copper sulfur and mix it in with a little bit of saline solution and you put strings in the cup and then when it would dry out actually the copper sulfur would accumulate on the strings it would form crystals and so i was really into that also another part of the being in school was again the is the exposure to soviet elements we were all in inducted into the i don't know if you want to equate this with the boy scouts because they weren't the boy scouts were paramilitary but all of this was spanning from teaching children children the ideas of the ideals of communism from early on and so when i was around i believe eight it was in the second grade i was inducted into a group called activity which was the children of the october which was basically the children's it's like children of the corn or something that's got a very dystopian title pretty much pretty much it was everybody wore this like red star on their uniform with engraving of of lennon when he was a boy then after that we moved them and pretty much everybody moved on to being pioneers which are those i don't know if you've probably seen tapes from that time where the where the people wearing red scarves the kids wearing carves those are called pioneers and so those are kind of like boy scouts but everybody gets in there and it's sort of the preteen version of the communist party yeah so there was a lot of that going on behind the scenes there was a lot of well a lot of bigotry going on i had to face a lot of discrimination for for for being a jew because first of all i was i was in a minority i mean it was a really small minority at that point especially holocaust in the ukraine and i mean not everybody was like that but many people were many people were anti-semitic and they were really that anti-semitism where it was just you couldn't go certain places or you weren't allowed to be friends or was it overt where they they would like beat you up at school and you felt that that happened a lot oh yeah yeah actually the whole getting lynch thing happened [Music] probably from around second grade when the kids started kind of to understand like what their parents were telling them about about hating jews so it started around second grade and i actually had to go to schools because of that i would get lynched probably every day since from the second grade to the fifth grade until i switched schools to a more tolerant school twice a day twice a day morning when you say lynch what do you mean what would they do i mean like imagine the minimum of eight and a maximum about 15 boys coming after you and basically taking taking turns and kicking you and punching you and beating you with their backpacks and calling you different colorful anti-semitic things and yeah it's it was a yeah it was an experience i would say and it's something that what was the status of judaism in the soviet union in ukraine were you allowed to go to synagogue or how did that actually work in practice because it's an atheist state right it is it is an atheist state there were synagogues in fact interestingly enough we lived close to a one of only two remaining synagogues in kiev where i lived it was the the reason it's called padol which was actually the the oldest part of kiev parts of padol were actually i think about 1500 years old that's where kiev started and yeah so they they had synagogues and this is actually also where i had my first interaction with a rabbi which was later later setting me on my in a path of figuring out exactly what kind of a jew i am and you could you could practice and then i actually remember one sabbath i walked by and there were actually a lot of people a lot of jews gathered for sabbath but again this was this was also in a way dangerous because of rampant anti-semitism in the ukraine and basically some people just don't want to know i didn't want other people to know they were jews because of that because of the of people anti-semites coming after them and trying to do whatever they were actually and it was it was kind of a bipolar type of thing so on one hand they were thinking that oh jews are these outsiders trying to come in and take their things take their country and take their money and this other side was this conspiracy theory that all communism was conjured up by this like evil jewish yeah kabal they actually they actually had a name for it it was called judah kamuna and andrew this is a is a a a derogatory way of saying jew and russian it's actually the way you say jew in polish but in russian it's it's a deregulatory way it's the the k word in in russian and so what it is is it's basically this conspiracy theory that starting from karl marx who actually was jewish and going through all the big the soviets big soviet guys like trotsky and a few other ones the whole coming of communism was actually the jews fault because the jews are the ones that brought communism to the soviet union and it's a conspiracy it's a grand conspiracy by the jews to you guys were getting it for both sides the ukrainians who hated communism blamed you for that then the communists were like oh this whole religion's silly we need to get rid of these guys they're they're outsiders that sucks exactly exactly and then the government was also not very i'd say favorable to jews a regular term of service and the soviet army and the soviet armed services was about i think maybe three years or four three or four it wasn't it was at least two but no more than four i believe for an average person my father was an officer in the in the in the ussr air force and he was after he graduated officers training he was going to go and be an engineer because that's what he was he was an engineer by trade but actually he was lucky enough instead of doing his regular tour and then going to do his job and living his life to be stationed in afghanistan during the afghan war in the 70s which was in the border of afghanistan and as some might know the war between the the ussr and afghanistan or in afghanistan was not very pretty and some say a lot more brutal than the vietnam war my father was actually on the front lines of that for 14 years he was stationed in turkmenistan and the city called mari because they wouldn't let him out and they would tell him different reasons but it was because he was a jew so you take the jew out officer you put him in the shittiest assignment wow and you just leave him there until he rots it's like eastern front duty with the with the nazis yeah exactly exactly that's crazy so so he was never home then during the 1980s when you were a kid in ukraine well he he actually no he was actually right before i was born what he had to do was he got injured and i think he he did something to his foot i believe he injured his foot and then when he was in the hospital he actually pretended he he he had dementia so this injury actually gave him some sort of a mental issue and they had to discharge him because of that so they had to that they had to let him leave because they thought that he had mental issues after this this injury so that is actually how he was able to finally leave the air force is discharged health issues which my father doesn't have mental issues thank god but yeah that was that was the the the the discharge and was mental health in the eighties was yeah in the 80s he was around but he did go to to an island to write his dissertation actually so back in the in the mid 80s so he wasn't around then he was around for one summer to write his dissertation on artificial intelligence actually okay so your dad was an officer he was in the air force and then he started studying computer science and he became an ai guy yes he was actually a cyberneticist by by trade he was an engineer and a cyber crisis by trade he was an i.t in the soviet union he he was actually the he managed an i.t center and the of the soviet athletic products whatever you want to call athletic we're an athletic product sector of the of the soviet manufacturing right machine because everything was state-owned so there weren't companies so it was the the the soviet nike the state state the state nike so instead of just do it it's must do it yeah you have no choice come right yeah yeah just do it it's it's not not just just do it just do it so were you in ukraine i guess you were in ukraine during the chernobyl disaster oh yes i was and what fun that was yeah let's get that let's get into that and then then we'll then we'll figure out how you escape to america so so what happened during chernobyl what was what was that like how old were you i was eight so that was 1986 and i was born in 78 so i was eight years old and i'll tell you oh actually you gave me a good idea i'm gonna drink for my my bambi cup right before i give you my chernobyl story yeah so again as some might or might not know chernobyl which was the nuclear power plant that that brand mostly key of had a meltdown good times it was basically the three mile island but a lot not as well managed i would say right so what happened was the the power plant melted down one of the reactors reactor number four melted down and they didn't tell us about it they they did not tell us about it and they basically said it was nothing it was a small accident and and in the power plant in fact i think it was something a 30-second announcement on the news oh there was a small incident and that probably planned the government inquiry has been formed that was it and so we knew nothing about it absolutely nothing meanwhile this thing was on fire for for for months actually i believe the reactor itself was on fire for months they apparently they sent at first and because people are expandable in the soviet union the first they sent in the army and army was the army regiment was basically clearing out all this radioactive debris and with no protection or anything like that well they all died you don't don't handle radioactive burning radical radioactive material with your hands and at the time did your dad actually know this like were people whispering to like how did everyday people in ukraine know about this stuff because obviously the media wasn't telling you so i did you just not know it all or were there back channels that you guys had so what happened was so the soviet union wasn't telling anybody and what what ended up happening was it drifted over finland so the the full out drifted over finland and finland started saying what the hell is this why is there a nuclear fallout over our country and so then it started getting an international news and our friends from the west called us and i remember this phone call my mom's friends called us and and he said what are you still still home what are you doing at home you your your entire everything around you is radioactive what do you mean yeah your nuclear power plant melted down you shouldn't be at home why are you at home he was broke because the people from the west called people in the soviet union and let us know that our power plant melted down and we had to leave and so finally the the the government couldn't hold it back because everybody knew at that point and so they declared a state of emergency and so yeah they said well yeah we're gonna manage it and blah blah blah and so they took again the worst possible the worst possible things to manage nuclear fallout i remember they used to come and wash the streets every day and so you're not supposed to do that because radiation you can't wash it away right you can only move it and accumulate so once you wash radiation it doesn't just magically evaporate it accumulates in radioactive water which then goes into the water supply and the ground is becomes more concentrated and so yeah so after about a week of mismanaging this entire thing my parents decided that we had to leave and so my father actually stayed behind to make sure that nobody burns her house it burns her house down and does anything to our possessions but myself and my mom we went to stay with my grandmother in moscow and the entire summer actually for i think three or four months starting in in early may because that's basically when we were able to leave and during those times it wasn't easy to hop on a flight so we took trains we usually took a train to see my grandmother in moscow and it would be an overnight train trip because moscow i think's about 800 kilometers from kiev 900 and so we get on the train at night and we get get to moscow in the morning if we took a direct train well kindly what the the government was so kind they actually stopped direct trains to moscow just to make things a lot a little more fun for the people the all the train direct trains from from kiev to moscow were cancelled and so what we had we had to hop local trains to get to moscow and so this was about a day and a half of hanging off of trains and driving people to get on and waiting in lines and carrying suitcases around platforms and and you're like nine years old at the time right and this is with your mother only did you have do you have any brothers or sisters no i'm an only child so yeah it was just me and my mom and yeah we were just running around like crazy trying to get to grandma's house in moscow that was cool and your gran was your grandfather still alive at this time or is it just your grandmother now actually my grandmother in moscow that's my my dad's mom i know my mom my gran my grandfather my paternal grandfather passed away when my dad was i believe 14 years old as i remember years ago you told me that i can't remember it's maternal or paternal that one of your grandfathers was a famous puppeteer yeah that that's my my my mom's dad okay that's my mom's dad al-qaeda aaron which is actually now the name of my newborn son okay yeah so i named him well we named him my wife had a little bit to say about that as well we named him aaron which is we'll get to the kids in a second so yeah yeah you got to moscow and that's that was your mother's grandfather grand mother so your maternal grandmother that you were staying with or or your father so that's my job okay yeah my dad's mom lived in moscow and so that's what stayed with because my my mom's parents lived in kiev which was radioactive it still is in some places right so i've actually been to ukraine several times and it's it's a wonderful place but there are some interesting places parts of that country what really astounded me was how different the west is from the east i was in lake levin this was totally different than odessa so it was incredible to see such radically different cultures in the same country okay so in the late 80s your your dad he's well educated he's he's had to already pull the i'm crazy card to make sure that he doesn't die in afghanistan and get back there's been a major nuclear incident there's like rampant anti-semitism and and now you're in moscow with your dad's mom just kind of hanging out for a little bit in the meantime right there's an attempt to emigrate now was it to first like canada or germany or england or was it directly to the united states i mean how does that work when you go from a soviet country because a lot of them they go to a neutral country or a buffer country first and build up a little bit then get to the us did your dad try to directly go to the united states yeah so of course america was the dream right we wanted to go to america it was difficult so these were called waves right so waves were waves of immigration from the soviet union by jews and so once in a while the government would try to show how lenient and proactive and forward-thinking they are and so they would let the jews leave and go back to their homeland which is israel and so they would open they would say they would open the gates and so they would open the gates they opened the gates once every decade so the the the way before us was from 1978 to 1980 when they once again closed immigration and they couldn't leave we were in the late 80s wave so the wave of immigration from 87 to 89 which ended in late 89 which when they closed it off again and so what he actually had to do was you couldn't i mean you could say that i want to move to america but that was defection and that was illegal and that would get don't pass go go directly to gulag don't collect 200 rubles and so what we had to do was actually we had to have a relative in israel petition the soviet government to let us go to israel and to basically go back to your homeland right and so what people would do is they would have a relative in israel do the petition so that you can actually leave the country right because that was the whole thing you had you had to have a way to leave to cross the international border out out of the country and actually leave the the eastern bloc so you have to be able to leave not only the soviet union but poland as well and to actually to get to the first country that was neutral as you said and for a lot of people it was it was austria and for us as well so we got this petition so it took us two years to get the permission to leave the country and yeah we finally did i remember actually when we were finally leaving i was i was 11 and a half and i remember we got on the train and it was very similar to the train that i would take to my grandma's in moscow but something was different about the stream because i wasn't coming back it finally hit me and i remember actually my my uncle was with us because michael was still was still in the soviet union at that point he left after us he left about a half a year later and my grandparents and everybody were on the train with us and i remember actually crying my eyes out because it finally hit me that i'm leaving i'm not coming back i'm never going to see anybody there again because as a kid i mean that's all this life well as bad as it is or as good whatever whatever it is that's your life for as long as you've been alive and it finally hit me that i'm leaving it and so i was crying my eyes out i couldn't stop crying even though was and then and retrospective was one of the best things that ever happened to me right and did you speak english at all or did you just speak ukrainian russian mostly russian ukrainian as well because ukrainian obviously was the the language of the of the people the little local english but mainly russian because russian was the the lang the soviet language the language of the soviet union everybody had to speak russian iraq speaking russian so but what about your father did he speak english at all my he took some lessons but mostly no none of us spoke english we wanted to speak english some of us studied it actually you studied it in school but again just like with a lot of foreign language studies in public schools and actually around the world it's kind of useless unless you actually indulge and immerse yourself in it so you guys you guys are going all in then you've left ukraine you're in austria i guess you have this israeli petition but you don't actually speak english fluent enough to survive in an economy and yet there's this dream of going to america that's that's pretty hardcore so what happened next yeah so yeah almost mostly no english i spoke no english i mean i literally spoke maybe five words of english and yeah so we we came to austria so there was an organization that helped jews to america it was called h-i-a-s it was i think it was that it was an it's an acronym and i believe the acronym stood for hebrew international american services his well i have to actually look it up we just called it hyatt yeah but it's an acronym and so it's a jewish organization in in america that would sponsor jews who wanted to come to america and it would pay our expenses which later we had to pay back of course back to the back to we're going to leave the organization and so they would give us very very little money but they would give us some money to i want to buy food money for tickets money for processing and things like that but also what we would what we did was at that point there was still a a pretty s significant market for different goods to be brought from the soviet union because they they weren't supply to the west so some things were actually popular like pottery pots and pans things like that also russian different russian ethnic paraphernalia like wooden spoons and wooden plates and these things with the the drawings on them so we actually bought out a bunch of those things we brought them with us we bought a suitcase of this stuff to sell and then we would have they would have dealers coming to the hotel where everybody stayed because everybody actually stayed in industry and everybody stayed in the same room so i think it was like 20 people all stayed in the in the same room and cox and cots in the same room so it's a refugee camp basically and you guys are [ __ ] like russian nesting dolls and roaches oh wow that's hardcore yeah and so yeah we we had 20 people were you all were all jews in this group or were there some non-jews there okay okay so it's it's all jews all jews and yeah so 20 people would be in it wasn't they were in that room in austria and italy as well in italy they did give us our own room we only stayed in so in italy we we stayed in italy a little bit longer so and we in austria it took us about two weeks to to get processed right so austria was the first point of processing so austria was where you would come you come there and you would say i'm actually i want to apply for refugee status to go to to the united states and so so the government would say okay here's the the paperwork and everything and so they would process the paperwork it would take about two and they would send us to everybody would go to italy and stayed in italy because italy apparently was the closest the closest embassy or the closest counselor that would actually could con could actually conduct interviews for political refugees because this was a we were petitioning to political refugees from the soviet union-based upon being jews because because we're discriminated against the soviet union so and was this north of italy or southern italy were you in rome where where did you guys go i yeah so we were in rome for two weeks and then or maybe a week maybe a week yeah about a week and then a month and a half in a city or a town near rome was called it was anika which was a a small town it was a it was on the by the seaside of adriatic i believe so we we rented a room there and with other people so it was it was one room four people to the room it was a small bedroom in in this guy's house and of course you go to italy and you rent a room from a guy and his name is mario and everything i mean just very as mario as you can get i remember when we were trying to use the we wanted to use the phone but actually we spoke no english we spoke no italian yeah and yeah yeah so we wanted to use the phone to call the the united states and our friends in the u.s and i think my dad asked him if we could use it but he wasn't home and then his wife told them we communicated with gestures and remember mario he was on the second floor and we asked him and then he says he said oh cool may call me call me he did this with his hammock pull him and corbin but we thought he wanted us to go away but in italian that's like that's the same as this what he did call me call me cool man like oh okay sorry he said no no hold on they call me call me my go home yes it was actually a really really nice guy yeah and so we stayed there for about a month and a half until we were approved and not everybody was approved actually some people were denied refugee status and reapply and it actually had to stay in it sometimes for a year sometimes longer to to to to be able to get this refugee status how do you survive in the interim because are you allowed to work or was this everything a barter system or were relatives sending money or like how did that work in practice all of the above you weren't allowed to work but you had to some people were lucky enough to have relatives send them money some people were lucky enough to be able to bring enough stuff to sell we would we also brought i said we brought these things that we sold with they had dealers coming to the hotel buying all these things out from people actually i heard some p i heard this i don't know if it's an urban legend or not but some somebody brought two dump trucks with them they're called kamas and the kamaz is one of those the the the big cat trucks they use the quarries so somebody actually drove two of those things to to austria from russia from the soviet union to to to to what it's immigrated on that's the lord of warship right there that's great i love it okay so you spent how long in italy a month two months and your dad at this time point was talking to the u.

s embassy and applying for a status or like what were those interviews like yeah basically yes so so we applied we had a couple of interviews an initial interview and then the long interview mostly of my parents and it was basically it was was an honest interview it wasn't like are you spies are you here to pervert the the the young and virgin american minds it wasn't like that they were really they're just trying to gauge if you're genuine so they would ask why do you want to immigrate to the united states why what was how were you discriminated against how did you feel about it how do you feel about communism how do you feel about capitalism things like that and yeah so my interview was actually pretty easy my parents were a little harder of course because they had to screen people at that point we still did have some of these this this cold war thing going on and yeah it took us it took us a month and a half and i remember they were there was this place in where we lived and actually i guess it was a everywhere jews in green to the united states lived that they would have these gathering places and it was called which was basically just means little square little area gathering place and people would gather there because news from the from the embassy would come and they would be announced there and so this was basically where you you would know what your your your fate is so you it would be announcing you were you're given refugee status you're denied you're approved you're denied so we would come to this gathering place every day to hear the news because they would announce okay so this and this family has been approved this in this family's been denied and so yes one day what i mean you just stay in italy longer or deny i mean you actually have to go back to ukraine what was that and also all these jews that aggregated in italy were they just from ukraine or were they from also other soviet bloc countries oh they they were everywhere actually russia moldova i mean all across soviet union they all have to go through the same through the same path and so this was probably the first time then in your your childhood that you were actually exposed to people from all over the soviet union or did you have some experience traveling throughout the union before i i not really but i mean we did have well i was actually exposed to a lot of these people through my grandfather because my grandfather was in the arts my grandfather was my mom's dad he was a puppeteer and so a lot of a lot of the actors were from different parts of the soviet union from georgia from armenia from moldavia everywhere from from the central asia so yeah i was actually i was fairly well exposed to different people except maybe like people from the from the asian republics because the two afghanistan and uzbekistan they were they were asian republic so were those were people who didn't see as much off in in the west parts of of the soviet union but yeah those were there as well and it was just a collective of all different people that just we're gonna had enough of the soviet the soviet dream and they were looking for the american dream and so if they rejected you did you just stay there or did you have to actually go back what was that the rejection you you didn't have to go back so they wouldn't they would like deport you right okay but you had to you had to reapply so basically you were stuck you could go back if you want to pretty much nobody did i don't think i've ever heard anybody actually go back to soviet union and yeah just reapplied you you you have to come to terms with with what happened figure out how you're going to survive because it would take about six to eight months to and i said sometimes longer to get to be able to do the whole thing again and in fact my our friend my parents friend that we immigrated with it was a a lady that was my mom's friend my mom's my dad anyway she's just a single single lady i i i guess she was early 40s late 30s she was denied we were approved but she was denied and she actually actually had to stay there and to to reapply for eight months and she had to get a job she yeah she was she was all by herself she didn't have any relatives or anything so she had to have a job she had to do all these different things to survive she actually finally actually ended up being able to come to the to the us a year later yeah but people just people survived you just that's what you got to do and so was there a strong sense of community where you guys were when you were inside that that compound trying to wait in purgatory did everybody kind of help each other out and work together or was it more like survival of the fittest and everybody for themselves i mean what were the social dynamics like there especially as being a kid i mean it was i i would say it was a bit of both i mean there wasn't really or at least i don't remember there being any kind of rivalries or competitions or this and that i mean the the the what made you cool was being able to go to the us the day you were say you were told that you are okay to go you were the cool kid you were the lucky ones the ones that those guys i want to be these guys the guys that they told them that they can go they got their permission you're like willy wonka with the golden ticket basically exactly exactly exactly perfect analogy yeah so with the people that had the golden ticket to to finally go to the us those were the cool kids other than that i mean everybody was actually very very nice very civil people communicated some made friends some just kept to themselves italy is a pretty big country considering oh it wasn't too packed with immigrants yes it was just just i guess nothing nothing too to too drastic either way just people surviving okay so you go from ukraine get your papers go to austria then you go to italy you go through these long interviews you spend a few months there and it's not clear if you're gonna get there getting out there a lot of uncertainty and then finally the day comes you're going to the united states now at that point did your english improve at all or was it still i just speak russian ukrainian now a little bit of italian probably from being a kid and yeah italian it was just call me coleman and the the the that was about it and i just had to call me call me cool so so where where in the united states did you guys first arrive did you have the traditional immigrant story and you landed in new york or what was what was the the the port of entry well actually we did land in new york everybody oh hallelujah new york all right and when was this what was do you remember the year yes it was august 1489. wow i remember the date and everything very really vividly august 14th 1989 is when we got to the us landed in new york at night and yeah we didn't get to see the statue of liberty or anything it was just a really we wanted to see it but and i remember somebody pointing at it in the window i remember this seeing this really faint green lit up thing in the distance but it was maybe it was just my imagination because i was still a kid and yeah we were but we got we we but we got on a smaller plane from from new york philadelphia and we actually ended up in philadelphia because because that that's where my my mom and dad's friends were they they were actually came to philadelphia in the 70s during the last wave so they were soviet jews that immigrated just like us but in the last wave in the late 70s and they were already established already there for nine years at that point so they had a house that they were the the what we wanted to be these established americans with the citizen american citizenship but ha in hand a car a house and they just bought a new house at that point and we were just in awe with this get off so you're you flew in what was it jfk or what what airport was in new york and then you switched planes to philly was jeffy arrive at jfk what was that like for you just to be at the american airport i mean you heard all the propaganda and ukraine about what we are in america and for the first time in your life now you're walking around there's english show for the inner combo like what was that experience like august 14th 1989 well this is actually something that it was one of the first times that it's this happened to me because it was the first time i was in a in a place like that where a language was spoken that i've never heard spoken before and and it was never immersed in and we i we tried to study english and i studied it at school but i never was actually in a place where people spoke and so my my my first impression of being in a jfk is was that wow everybody's speaking english everybody's speaking english it's english it's real like really english i'm speaking it it was it was me thinking that and they had shops and other things in the airport right and so there's a lot of that capitalism that you guys keep hearing about i guess you got exposed to some of that in austria and italy as well yeah yeah i mean austria and italy was already when we were exposed to this and i remember actually some of my parole kid coming from the eastern blot that doesn't know things like automatic doors i remember one one of the first things that fascinated the the hell out of me were automatic doors this was in italy actually right before we were about to leave for the united states we were actually in in i believe somewhere outside of rome and we were in front of the supermarket and the the the automatic doors of the sensor it was the first time i saw those and i remember it was just like right next to the doors on the opens like oh my god they are automatic they open by themselves and i remember is like was just walking up to the center watching doors open walking back or closed it's just it was really fascinating to me jfk it was kind of a blur for me because it was just you're in the state of complete euphoria that you finally made it you're there it's over it's the end of a journey i actually remember somehow and this is back this is during those during pre-911 pre mass terrorism well it was actually there was still terrorism but more lenient times we had knives with us that we brought from the soviet union to some that we didn't sell we just the the one of the items that we didn't sell and they were confiscated from us at jfk because when we arrived at jfk the jfk confiscated the knives not when we got on the plane when we arrived at jfk they confiscated these soviet knives from us that we just even totally forgot that we had yeah and it was it was a lot of these little moments of of just i remember these things but it's it's funny what you remember what you remember so vividly it's not that these these big grand things that you would think you would you remember these little things let's see if we're crossing the border to leave the soviet union into poland i remember we were at the border and that we had the the the border guard checker check our luggage right and these guys knew what we were about they knew that we were jews leaving flee the soviet union and so my dad at that point was really into into tennis right and so he took his tennis racquet with him he wanted to take it with him to to to america and i took what she said to him to america as well at the toy train said that i loved and he took product with me my dad brought his tennis racket and so he took this tennis rack and put it in his luggage right and so when they when these border like patrol guys were checking our luggage they put it through the x-ray machine and they saw a metal ring in there and they were looking for anything to get us to to to basically screw with us on and so this metal ring on the x-ray like what is that what is that okay the comrade whatever vasiliev go through their luggage find what that is and so they start digging through our luggage and just go piling it up and finally they dig all the way to the bottom and they see this racket and my dad what he did was he he put a a a a metal ring on it so he could hang it on the wall so that was the metal ring that these guys saw on the x-ray but they thought they found something crazy and so with this great disappointment the the head guy goes to the the the the guy that did all the searching just comrade or like show the comrades to the exit that was that was we were shown out the soviet union see these see these comrades out of the soviet union please yeah yeah so it's yeah it was just an experience and yeah i'll never forget it it was crazy right you arrive in philadelphia and you're like 12 years old it's the late 80s everything's crazy i was living in hawaii at that time i was a little younger than you but okay so now you're in america and you're living with friends who have already established themselves they speak english they have a house they have careers they're making money so what happened next did you go to an american school what was that transition you obviously had to acclimate to a radically different culture right philadelphia public schools that's all i gotta say i got three words in philadelphia public schools i went to a public school it was one of those public schools where they would have they would they would bus kids in from all parts of the city and my school was probably about i'd say about maybe 60 or more percent black and i that this was the first time i was i was i mean there were very few black people in the soviet union because i mean well they just aren't and this was the first time i was actually in in in a place where there were so many black people and it was just really i remember that it wasn't it it it was a very i guess that was when i really started to get culture shocked because i i knew that they were they were that they were african americans and in in the us but i just never been around any and then i was immersed into the school where the majority of people are black so it was it was a very profound experience for me and i had to really adapt really fast because on that side then you come from this place where you're this outsider because you're you're you're joined in the soviet union to being a a soviet in an american school in the late 80s and again something that people weren't too fond of either in the united states they weren't too fond of the soviet union in the 80s in the united states about because of this cold war thing yeah and it was yeah again it was a very profound experience it was life-changing i'm glad actually that that that was what i was immersed into right away because it kind of gave me a crash course in americana and having to speak english i had to learn english nobody spoke russian i mean well a couple of people did but the teachers right nobody was venus and russian i had to learn russian to be able to to go to school nobody was translating for me my parents didn't know enough english so how quickly how quickly did you pick up english was it just a few months and you were fluent or did it take years or and also did you have to go to special classes because at the time 12 you were like junior high or something like that high school so i was still in middle school and so as for some reason regions of philadelphia was still middle school i was in middle school and so they had i was called esl english english as second language right but again this wasn't the a class where you had a teacher that spoke russian it was just that you had an esl teacher an american teacher that would take extra time with us to to go through the materials and explain it to us or try to explain it to us there was a language barrier i believe actually i remember that all the english that i studied that i could not put together really clicked on the third day so first day i was just completely the hell is going on second day i was kind of okay it's not as bad as i thought that's what i was thinking and the third day i remember i started speaking english i mean it was broken english but i started speaking it because i had to and i was kind of really surprised about that i was thinking wow how am i doing this but i can communicate i could communicate i it was it was really it was really cumbersome and it was it was difficult but i was communicating with my teachers and with people around me i would say probably took about six to eight months to get to where i was able to properly communicate with people i was also another thing that my parents did was they sent me to summer camp the next summer which really had impact on my english skills because every everybody spoke english around me nothing but english but to really get good at it took a couple of years a couple of years where i was where i was actually spoke well enough and well enough to be able to read books and that that's really with any lingual studies if you really really want to be able to actually speak grasp the language you have to read you have to read the same with japanese the same with english same with russian with any language you have to read reading is what really kind of gives your your lingual skills a just a boost like nothing else does okay so you're doing the esl classes you're getting the ebonics version of philadelphia and you're becoming proper philly what did your mom and dad do like your dad has this cybernetics background and he's well-educated was he actually doing research or working there or was he just working a manual labor job or how how was the family surviving at that point well at that point actually my mom was the first one that found the job she was working at a russian restaurant of all places she was washing dishes at a russian restaurant it was called hunter which actually is not there anymore in philadelphia but it was hunter and actually this was a the place where we brought in 1990 so my mom worked this restaurant washed dishes she also plays the piano she's actually a a concert pianist and theatrical historian by trade and so she was able to play the piano and entertain and so they that she got a job there minimum wage something like at that point i think it was something like two dollars an hour 1.95 an hour and then after that my dad found the job at a school at an i.t school teaching and then also a small consulting job at that point i.t job programming and actually my dad at that point hasn't really programmed for a while because he was in research he was in cybernetics research in fact right before he was he hillary union he was actually offered a job to work at a lab an ai artificial intelligence cyber cybernetics lab and yeah but he he went to work i believe he was making at that point something like 14 an hour which was actually serious money for us and yeah little by little we established ourselves my father started working for campbell soup for the i.

t center in camden and yeah those were the humble beginnings and that we went through went from a one-bedroom apartment in northeast philadelphia to to to a house in the suburbs in about i'd say less than five years five years we were we had that american dream going had two cars and also right that's just refugees to the american dream in five years just work your way through it okay so you start going through school you're picking up the lingo you can speak english you get the high school you go beyond so then friedman the career what what did you want to do you mentioned while you were in ukraine you liked astronomy and chemistry and obviously your dad is doing computer science did you want to follow your father's footsteps or do you want to grow out your hair and become a rocker i mean what was the what was the the next stage the the post high school stage for you all of the above and in fact some of these things i still have the hair so some of you can see it a little of my of all these different phases yeah i did i did go to the when it could be a musician phase my late teens early 20s that was when i i got into that but actually i know it sounds a kid type of thing but at first actually i wanted to be an astronaut i wanted to i wanted to go to space and there was there was like if you if you ask eight nine ten-year-old dan what he wants to be well he would tell you that he wants to be an astronaut and i went for a long long time that's why i studied astronomy and the astrophysics and all these different things and actually for a little while i was i i went to the college to with the intention of studying aerospace engineering was because it was really really i really wanted to get into that i really wanted to get into aerospace i really wanted to work in in the airspace field i was thinking about becoming an astrophysicist something to do with with space but yeah i i i ended up actually following my father's footsteps and getting into i.t i'm glad because it it it's it's something that kind of gels well with with myself and who i am and who i was how i was brought up and things that interest me and yeah but originally i i really wanted to be in sciences i really wanted to be a scientist something i said some so then i actually examined myself it's not that really i wanted to be a scientist as much as as i wanted to be an explorer i wanted to explore that's why i wanted to be an astronaut because that this was the final frontier as our good friends at star trek city i was going to say were you a star trek fan growing up actually funny quick funny word about that i was in the soviet union later in the late 80s they started to allow some some private enterprise they were called cooperatives and so one of the things that the cooperatives did was they would rent out rooms in schools and different public halls just small rooms for 20 30 people and it would show american movies that were that at that point allowed in the soviet union and so late 80s 88 89 you would have these video salons spring up and what a video slide was basically a a room with 20 chairs middle chairs a tv and a vcr and they would play yeah yeah and they would play american movies do something a ruble to to get into to watch this movie and i remember one of those cooperatives rented a room from our school where i where i went to school and they showed star wars wow and and and and they showed it backwards so the first they showed the empire strikes back and then they showed star wars so it was out of sync and i never actually saw return of the jedi until i came to the i didn't even know it existed until i came to the us a year later i found that there was like another star wars there was another star wars movie really wow so i loved star wars and i still do and when i came to the us i asked my parents friends the ones that we stayed with the ones that had the american dream oh i wanted to watch star but but i i knew how to say it in russian i don't know how to say it in english and russian star wars so it's literally it's just star wars but he he said oh star wars okay and instead he turned on star trek and and so he says oh yeah you mean this and he turned on star trek the next generation was season two okay yeah the the the the one actually no it was season one it was the encountered farpoint episode very okay the the second episode with q and all that other stuff okay yeah and that was season two but the episode that i watched was season one was actually was where they where they freeze jordy during the trial of humanity when hugh tries to puts humanity on trial and they freeze jordy i remember that was like one of the first things like wait a second this is not star wars star wars what is this and yeah but then i think you love star trek i'm a big star trek fan actually i mean you can't see it now but actually over there i have the entire cast of a next generation signed my a photograph of tng's cast patrick watched star wars you were star trek and it kind of inspired you you really started loving space you wanted to be an astronaut but you followed in your dad's footsteps and i guess this would be in the mid 90s to the late 90s that you're coming of age so you were coming out right when the dot-com boom started if if i'm getting in english right exactly actually i i i came to one of my first jobs in professional jobs was in the beginning of the dot com boom in the late 80s and late 90s i mean in 97 in 98 was when i started to get my first job building websites the one of the things that was really big at that point were online malls so internet malls yeah internet malls and so what it would be would just be a website and all these local shops they would have their own pages on this website right so it would be called internet mall and so what i would do is i would i was kind of an entrepreneur at that point as well and so i was still in college but i wanted to make the big bucks so what i would do is i would go to the the the chamber of commerce meetings the local chamber of commerce meetings and it would offer my my my services of setting up an internet for the chamber of commerce and then all the members they would basically pay me a fee of couple hundred bucks a piece to set up their web pages on this on on this internet mall yeah so that was the one of the first times i was it was exposed to this whole dot com thing we were still on this was actually right before mozilla came out mozilla mosaic the first browser i was using was was gopher and we were still on gopher and on the comp compuserve who are are used to this and and this is your internet when i was growing up we had to dial up i just i love this concept of the internet mall it's just one of those like how do we take the physical ball and put it into this web experience and make it cool and navigateable so you go to the chamber of commerce you talk to these people and say hey guys i'll i'll build an internet mall for you but were there any e-commerce tools like how did you actually buy something without javascript and web certificates and crypto was it just a card you would call them for them all and do the call order over the phone or how did that work and i mean it was it was at that point it was just an advertisement right you would you could potentially do some things with it like for example i remember i put a real estate company on on the on the internet mall back in 97 and at that point of the i forgot what the system is called but it's a it's a it's a i'm sure they still use it it's a system where all these listings sit they live in this giant database and it was around back then as well and so i actually integrated the database with their website and so you can actually search for a house on their website on their page on the internet mall and send them a request so you could actually do simple things like ask make requests via email or get special coupons things like that right and and that it was basically you go to this mall they give you special coupons they do announcements so it was for them was free advertising it was basically what it was it was just free advertising at that point because you just pay somebody 200 bucks they set up the site for you updates are really simple to do and they would just update coupons and i showed them how to do coupon updates so basically was the i would put it an image on the website and they would just i'll re-upload a new image and just call it the same so they wouldn't have to open the website it was very simple did you have dreams of being an entrepreneur and actually doing dot com startup and making the big bucks i mean what was well did you just want to do websites or what was the entrepreneurial side of this whole endeavor and i guess it's a lot of people are so young these days that they completely forget what the dot-com boom was and so it kind of put us into that that feeling almost 30 years ago what was what was dot-com boom like well i'll tell you in some ways it is a lot the the blockchain boom and in some ways it's not and so you got to think about that at that point not many people want i mean just not people are talking about mass adoption with blockchain and and then some people saying oh well it's not mainstream yet and this back then the internet was not mentoring and the internet was just this thing i remember doing one of the first big jobs i had was back in 99 i did a a report for mcgraw-hill who hired me to analyze their websites and their web traffic and explain to them why their websites were did not get any traffic and they had 12 different websites and to basically to look at their meta tags and things like that to to give them to give them an idea of how to get traffic to them and so really it was about it was one of the first times the i guess that the hacker kid was the one that all these old guys wanted these these establishment iet companies they had to leapfrog right and they didn't understand the technology just like with blockchain just these old final school financial institutions they don't understand the technology and you can't just buy this knowledge you have to either the in demand probably for the first time in your life popular kid instead of the outsider like everybody wanted you and everybody everybody needed you to basically be there yeah yeah i mean basically at that point you already we already had java was coming around javascript was really in its infancy in fact when javascript started it started getting big in the past 10 years or whatnot i still had this old school version two two javascript and it's like javascript what do you mean javascript that's it's you're not supposed to do that stuff with javascript you're supposed to do it in a real language like java or something like that yeah and at that point it was all about compilers and java and oracle oracle 7 was was the first big database to work with it was just a lot of yeah there was a lot of opportunity and i really yeah i really was to kind of go for broke make it big get get these things going i was actually part of a a really prominent company called two bridge which made content management software and and we're talking 20 years ago over 20 years ago this is before all these because now if you so it was like wordpress before it was cool it was yeah it was way before wordpress and actually one of the pioneer ideas that bridge had was to actually have a seamless seamless integration between editor and website so instead of having to go through all these steps because before that the even the big the big names and content management made you go for about 40 steps to publish your web page these guys designed a system which would literally would put a a java server with it and a java widget into the into the page and you would actually use a portal to upload documents and it would format the document to to go into the website and so basically you get you got rid of a whole team of webmasters because you could now have the editor directly upload their word file or whatever word perfect file into the website and publish it within a couple of minutes and it would just point and click and so this company was about to go public and i remember and i was right in the middle of this whole com boom and in a company and i had a lot of stock options and we were we were actually we had a partnership with jp morgan and were projected to to split three times at a hundred dollars and i was going to be a millionaire but before i was before i was 25 and this and that and so it was big i was working in san francisco i had had an office with the view bay bridge the the clock on the bay bridge was my office clock because it was literally in front of it was the bay bridge and there's a big clock on it or at least there used to be probably still is and it would i would see what time it is on that clock was just just the dream this this dream that you have if you're an entrepreneur and coming up in in in your teens and early 20s and i was in my early 20s at that point and yeah it was it was a really great time it ended really abruptly a year and a half after that that company was no more what was that like the decline so was it just you wake up one day say hey we're out of business or did you just see it gradually happening like less and less people in the office every day the the often the coffee machine disappears the free stacks disappear i mean what was what was it like watching the dot com bubble burst for you it was it was full of rome i mean people under swords it it was really like that i mean you just saw this thing you would have we built up this company from not too many people to quite a few people offices and and and in several several parts of the us and all over the world in england and in germany and then and in the east i mean this was a it was almost valued at a billion dollars this company and literally this company just burnt in about a year because they just didn't do they didn't do sales they they did not secure their their their income they they put a lot of it put a lot into going ipo which then they had to retract they did not do enough sales and in the end they just ended up just kind of imploding because of they cut more and more and more staff and i remember actually yeah it was the fall of rome more and more people every week they would come around with the list of people who are going to get fired and was it like office space with the bobs where they brought in consultants to do are they just or was it just you you read your name on the list on the wall the following people still have a job if you're not on the list you're gone i mean how were those layouts done it was it was actually a lot like office space in fact office space was it just ranked so close to to home because it came out right about the time when i was when i was when i was in the middle of that whole thing and it was yeah it was actually consumers or or you would have one an executive come anytime you had an executive come from out of town there was never good news at that point it means somebody's getting fired or actually not somebody a whole bunch of somebody's getting fired it's like yeah so guys well thanks for your service to the company but we're going to have to let yeah which one would love you this whole office is closed now yeah everybody back to the bread line for you so what was your last day like what happened it was weird not to dredge up the the trauma of your 20s but i'm sure enough time has passed that you've probably gotten over it by now again all experiences you grow from when you get tough from and toughen you up and this was just like that i mean it was some people were years actually some people put a lot into into being in that company and a lot including myself i wasn't in tears but i was kind of what it was it was almost you put your heart into something right and you really believe a vision you really believe it you really you're not just making you're not just there for a paycheck you're really there because you believe in the company you believe in the vision you believe that the guy that's leading the company knows what he's doing and and and all these everything that they say is true not everything but all these great things you're gonna do as a company and it's gone then it's just it's and you gotta start to kind of as you pack your office as you pack your cubicle at that because we're cubicles you start to reflect on that you're just thinking you're like wow i'm gonna have to find something new to believe in something new to strive for because this was my my thing i was this was supposed to be the thing that took me to the next level but instead i have to go back now i have to go back to to almost to square one and in fact i think actually that actually would build up a lot of resilience in myself anytime now that i have a problem or where i feel i'm in a place where i'm just like what the hell is going on why is this not working i feel stuck instead of coming to just being completely depressed and really feeling down and just feeling sorry for myself i tell to myself okay screw this this is not gonna happen okay i'm gonna find a way i have i have a destiny my destiny is big i'm gonna make it big i'm gonna i'm gonna do great things this is not gonna stop me what do i do to continue on to this path and that experience actually also kind of gave me this because i was at that point just searching i was in search i had a a faith and a problem of faith i i lost my faith in what i was doing and i said all these things to believe in were just not there anymore she had to find something new to strive on and yeah and so that was that that was basically the experience just packing things up and really reflecting on okay so what do i believe now what is the vision now where do i see myself in five years because a month ago i was going to be this great in five years i was gonna be this great like young millionaire looking going making some great company now what do i do and yeah it just took some time for me to reflect on my own to what i was doing you went into filmmaking at some point in your life was this after the dot-com bust because you were in california at that point right yeah well yes so i kind of hopped around at that point the two different it jobs six months six months take each job right and i mean i was making okay money i was making pretty good money but again at that point i was i still had a a a a a crisis of faith i just did not see i just at that point it started to feel it just was a job i mean what was it gonna be that guy i mean it's not that bad of a place to be that guy that makes 75 to 80 a year and goes to retire in florida it's not bad i it's it's it's a good lifestyle for those who are to consent with that i just wasn't something inside of me was just saying to myself look i mean it's comfortable but i i want my life to be bigger and so yeah at that point i was doing some business in california i came to california and actually i came out for a star trek convention in pasadena it was the the next generation convention in pasadena and it was i think it was something the the 15-year anniversary of of tng back in 2003 i believe or something like that 2002. and yeah just things clicked and i decided to stay in in california i made made some friends who were in the business and so i decided i said hey this is the change that i need i feel something here and so more and more at first of course i was doing the still still doing it stuff but more and more and more i wanted to really i started to kind of find my this other part of myself this the artist part of myself that my my mom's side of the family and more and more and more i started making connection i started connections i started getting into filmmaking at first i took i took the actor out which was which is a really good way to go went to acting school and called the beverly hills playhouse which is a pretty prominent school in in hollywood and was taught by a great teacher the he unfortunately passed away a little a little bit ago alan williams and it really it it it was a good place because it didn't just tell me teach me about acting and about directing you taught me about interaction with people and i believe that what i learned in that school actually made it actually makes me better at what i do now and it's not acting it's about being genuine it's about being able to communicate because really acting and and directing and filmmaking is about communication you're communicating with the audience and so i went and yeah i did that at first and then i just kind of again i i had a bit of a time reflection point and said to myself i don't just want to be an actor because again actors even the big big names are still a lot of times just bought at the bottom of the barrel and hollywood right you're just holding to the directors yeah exactly the place you want to be is you want to be a filmmaker you want to be make your own content you want to create your own movies you want to you want you want to do your own stuff and so i got into more into directing i get into filmmaking into writing i was i was a director of photography for a number of years i worked the camera had my own small studio as well i did editing i got into all of that actually it didn't make anything huge but involved in a couple of really nice projects and again it it all at a certain point again i it wasn't i didn't really fully grasp the dream over there because unfortunately that industry is is also it's it's very hollywood tries to pass itself off to be so progressive and so right for thinking and so the the beacon of of change but it's actually really backwards and it's really it's it's it's still very just conceited and and and and bigoted and just basically the opposite of what they trying to pass themselves pass themselves off to be as a place that talks about equality and this and that it's basically one of the last places where i saw true like in your face sexism and the jobs for sexual favors type of stuff happening all the time and this is a business in the 2000s and harvey weinstein was still going around and these types of things yeah this is yeah this was the harvey weinstein era this was the era of the casting couch and and i saw dad i gotta ask did anybody try to cast and catch you well charles well you'd be you'd be surprised how people got to where they've got in hollywood because i've seen it i've seen i've seen it i've seen the behind-the-scenes version of it and some some names actually that you might know on tv i i'm not going to name them but a couple of those people actually i went to school with them i went to acting school with them and they're female and they have achieved a fairly serious level of success and i can tell you how they did but that would not be important right unfortunately so you try to find yourself you you finally belong to the tech world you're the dot-com boom you're going to be a millionaire at 25 your dad's probably over the moon the families of the movie within a year the business goes out then you get you're kind of lost and you go to all these different i.t jobs and you have this epiphany you say i'm going to be an actor then you go to beverly hills the mecca of acting you go with other people and you say oh well this acting thing is not for me you become a filmmaker you're trying to do the whole filmmaker thing and then you're like oh screw this hollywood thing so how in the world did you end up in japan how how did that happen like what was the transition there well wake up get on a plane and fly or like what was that what was the thing that got you there it was kind of like that actually i was saying before the thing that i do is i instead of kind of sitting there and and moping i always kind of it pisses me off when i get into that place it doesn't make me sad it irritates me it infuriates me because this is not the place i have to i do not belong in this place in this place of despair and this hopelessness right and every time i'm in that place of course there's a couple of days where i kind of feel sorry for myself but then something inside me clicks and said no this is not who you are this is not it okay you're me you're not meant to sit here and and cry for yourself okay and that's what happened with me in japan as big and so the thing in in california just wasn't doing what i wanted wanted it to do that i spent a couple of years basically just in complete purgatory over there i was not really doing anything in the business i lost my faith in the business i just really didn't think that it was something that i was wanted to be involved in just because it was just disgusted by so many parts of it and i haven't found i was doing i was back to i t but i wasn't really doing great things i was i was actually i was at that point i was working for honda but again i was just doing regular i.t stuff for honda and i kind of said to myself what no this is not gonna work for me i need it needs to be big for me it needs to be big it needs to be it needs to be serious for me and so what i did was i had a a dream i i went to bed one night in 2012 and i i had a dream i had an epiphany and a dream that i was somewhere in the east i was in the east i was i was in a brightly lit high-rise in an apartment with the sun shining through the window and i it wasn't some anything specific but i knew i was in the east and i woke up and i said to myself i need to flip this thing on its head i can't go back to the east coast i don't want to go back to europe i had no interest at that point to go back to europe i said i have to go and i have to flip my life upside down i have to be in a place where i can start fresh and so i decided between i was started thinking and and my decision was between two places japan and sri lanka sri lanka was a little bit of there's a little bit of a difference between the two did you read did you read any arthur c clarke because he lived in sherlocker for 50 years exactly that is exactly why at sri lanka's because arthur c clarke is actually one of my all-time favorite writers the the odyssey series 2001 2061 which is actually i think is even more fascinating than the previous couple the 2010 and 2001 because it is a lot more into the the whole world of the future in the 3001 yeah it was because of marvel c clark and because he lived in sri lanka i was fascinated with that place and i but ultimately i decided on japan because i just felt like oh again i went to bed one more night and i woke up and i remember that i just had a vivid dream about being in a synagogue in japan don't ask me why the five synagogues of japan you're going to be in one of them but but why not south korea or china because the chinese japan's economy was kind of on the downtrend and china was booming so what what was the theme just a dream and that's it it was yeah it was basically just an epiphany in a dream and then i just kind of got into it i started getting more and more fascinated with japan i mean i was always fascinated with japan but it was never really a japanophile i was really into japan i always thought it was a fascinating country always i always loved the history and the food and all these different things that people regularly love about japan i was never really like into it i didn't really study it didn't really research it and china i just i yeah i i already did the communist thing once i'm cool with that okay there's a lot of cities to pick in japan so there's yokohama and hokkaido you have sapporo you have okinawa there's tokyo so why osaka did you first go to osaka or did you go to tokyo first no gradually work your way to osaka no i i went to osaka and i'll tell you why the second epiphany that i had and the the dream that i had i was in osaka i don't know why i was in osaka but it was in osaka and also one of my favorite movies is a movie by ridley scott called black rain came out in the late 80s with michael douglas and andy garcia and it's actually about these two cops that go following a yakuza gang member to osaka so that they witness him commit committing murder in in new york and then they have to they they catch him in new york and they have to take him back to osaka and then he escapes in osaka and so they have this whole this whole thing happened in osaka and the only reference point is a dream in a ridley scott movie from the 1980s but you're like no this whole yakuza osaka thing has totally sold me i i have to go there i don't know anybody i don't speak the language i have no friends i assume you had no social network when when you arrived no no i i i knew no one in japan it was just it was just that that final frontier that i was looking for my whole life with being an astronaut with all these different things and yeah i knew no one i had no friends out here all i had was just this dream of living in japan and a room at a guest house in osaka that i booked through rumorrama rama which actually is is is the the they went out of business a few years ago yeah and so i just sold what i could i sold my car sold a couple more things in in the us and bought a ticket and paid for my paid for my expenses for a couple of months in in japan i just came to japan and said look i am in japan i still had i still i was still making money at that point but i actually had to quit my job at honda and again it was a pretty good job it was it was a honda america in torrance california so it was the head office of honda it was the place where people would have careers and retire from this was the place to be but again it wasn't for me i mean the the the the freaking space shuttle flew over us that's it was between us and toyota and yeah i just came to osaka and i did some soul searching out here and figured that it was for me final threat where i could grow and i could do what i wanted to do made some friends at the first weekend i was in osaka what did i do well i went to the synagogue in kobe and i i i found my fellow jews in japan and made some friends i mean say what you will but i mean it's a good way to meet you to meet friends find somebody that's you had they have these ethnic and faith-based connections with and it's easy it's easier to have the same frame of reference being especially being in a place like japan made some friends and some of them helped me out greatly i i think actually i mean one of them nico despopolis yeah one of my best friends nico helped me out tremendously when i just came to japan i mean he's my tweeter and helped me help me get established introduce me to some some business contacts help me get into business out here help me start making start making yen i came out here one of my friends told me he said i know that this this the suit your suitcases that you're taking to japan are mostly business suits what's up with that i said no i'm going out there too i'm going out there to do business i'm going out there to make a life and i do business in suits and so i came out here one of my suitcases was suits and good nice dress clothes and i wanted to make yen i wanted to do business i wanted to be a japan and the dream and that was what i followed out here and i mean that's that's what i am i guess to a degree right now so in many ways you follow the footsteps of your mom and dad because you followed a religious connection to japan and you basically were a refugee all over again you had to completely relive everything you had to learn a new language build out all the business contacts and so forth how long did it take you to learn japanese i i tried and that language is is labyrinthian for lack of a better term it's a very it's a very difficult language for an english speaker to pick up well i guess yeah actually it's a very good analogy about my parents very good in fact in many ways it felt like that i felt i immigrated to japan just like my parents immigrated to the us because they were actually around the same age i mean a little older but about the same age early 40s when they immigrated to to the us i was in my mid 30s when i came to japan and yeah it was pretty much the same and i kind of felt i it was it was very interesting because i got to experience with my parents experience because they came to that they had to leave everything behind pretty much and in the soviet union and come to to the us and start their life again as adults in their early 40s and i did the same thing with japan in my late 30s and so i actually got this other perspective of what that is like that what it must have been like for my parents the language yeah it took me i'd say to get fluent took me a few years because it is different for all those of you who don't speak japanese japanese is if you really translate it directly into english it sounds like yoda it really sounds like yeah give us an example of that like say a few things of japanese and kind of give us the english version okay let's say for example i'll give you something really really simple right the the cat ate the mouse the cat ate the mouse what you're saying is get mouse eight it literally is cat mouth eight so the verb always mostly comes in the end so it's something something did something mm-hmm and that is nan in japanese when it's a very nuanced language so when you say when you say things [Music] you say a it's it's almost the the canadian a you say oh thinking like today's the weather is really nice today huh like you say now a lot and osaka actually no sakura die you're saying no but it's the same thing and the the the neo or the na is the yoda it's the same exact new one so when when i when i just started really getting japanese i was thinking like god it sounds like yoda like really that was the clicking moment so when you're in philadelphia in middle school day three it finally starts clicking english and you're in japan you're like your empire strikes back yoda that now i understand japanese everything makes sense now especially osaka exactly yeah it's just so much like yoda i'm like wait a second did they design the way yoda speaks from japanese now like thinking i was thinking that yeah thing and learned lots of japanese from from anime and from manga and these things is that how you learn how to read and write or because that's what all the white guys in japan apparently do yeah i was actually never really into manga i never really went to manga i read some i wasn't really into manga i was not really into anime again a few anime but not too many i was i was into inuyasha for a little while it's it's a popular animal japanese see so you managed to skip that entire culture of of yeah in japan yeah the whole world so you were more than bar room japan or what was what was the japanese business culture or leisure culture that you fit into well i guess i was into a human connection what i did was i went out and i made friends i made japanese french japanese speaking first one of the things we used to do would be so wherever i lived in japan little mom and pop coffee shops are really big thing so they're on every corner especially in the city they're called kisaten or kisa are small mom-and-pop coffee shops now you have you could say like like like like which was which would be more just a corporate looking one a starbucks but if you are talking like traditional japanese like wood paneling kind of dark cloud of smoke because you can still spill out of places in japan you get your toast and egg which was it's called morning morning which means morning service in japan it's a traditional thing where from from a certain time to a certain time in in the morning you actually for the price of a cup of coffee they also give you a small breakfast it's called morning service and so usually morning service has a slice of bread like thick thick asian bread and a hard-boiled egg and so i would actually what i would do is i would go around my neighborhood and i seek out these different kisaten and i would go there and i would have a cup of coffee and i would talk to the owner and i would talk to them and that's how i built up my my my speaking skills is is by really going around and just communicating with people and really talking to people and trying to really immerse myself in the language reading as well reading was yeah it was i i took a few lessons but mainly it was just about picking up a book i made great date of the first book that i read in japanese is is murakami's murakami's no mori which is the norwegian forest and it was just all about just sadness and death and fight just it's just the two volumes of just just just like swimming in depression [Laughter] you just you read this in japanese he's got a very very peculiar way of writing he he first of all uses kanji for wars they don't release kanji for so he writes the old way right and and he has these really really weird ways of kind of switching things you're reading and and somebody like reflecting on a memory and oh i remember this young girl that i used to spend time with we ate grapes and smoked cigarettes and in her kitchen while talking about current events and then you turn the page oh yeah and then she died from cancer [Laughter] you're like wait wait i'm missing a b you went straight to c where wha wha what happened what's the point of the girl with the grapes and the cigarettes no no they were still eating grapes here in cancer how do we go from grapes to cancer in literally three pair that's the bill murray [ __ ] with lots of translation man that's great it was just i was it was like what what wait a second wait a second hold on yeah and so that that was this is one of those things where you have an existential problem after reading the norwegian forest and you go to the coffee shop and you're like eating your morning service and talking to the guy in japanese and say i don't understand why she died of cancer what is the what is the meaning of yeah yeah yeah you just well you go to a lot of these people and you tell them that they would see they would see you're reading this like oh can you read that like yeah like yeah but why is it so sad oh like means it can't be helped it's when i lived in japan it was what blew my mind were all the unspoken rules that you're just supposed to know i think you stand on the left on the escalator and osaka and the right on the escalator in tokyo or did i get that backwards right osaka is on the right of the escalator and yeah and then the woman's car i could never for the life of me figure out when i was allowed in the woman's car on the mitasuji line versus not allowed because apparently you could be there you cannot be there but everybody knows but i i didn't know i just i just it all together i just don't wanna cause because actually i get on the i get into the women's car a couple of times by accident at the time and i got a lot of really evil stares in my way so i just avoid it all together yeah actually the escalator that's how you spot people out from out of town because the tokyo people that come to visit osaka they stand on the left of the escalator and then everybody else stands on the right and you're like come on you're tokyo bastard get on the right this is insane tokyo getting in everybody's way because people like try to walk up the escalator on the left and they stand and wait on the right yeah but you can yell at them in the deep kansai dialect too they're all scared because our listeners might not know but a lot of the gangster movies in japan the dialect that they use for gangsters is osaka in kansai that area yeah yeah osaka the second dialect is the de facto it it's it's it's sort of the the the new yorker the new yorker twang of japan but yo yo wha what are you doing i was he's like what the hell are you doing that that's it's it's in in in in osaka dialect yeah yeah it's it's it's yeah it's considered and we we wear this badge proudly it's considered the rudest city in japan well that's just perfect for me because i i'm a very blunt direct rude person and so that's why osaka just made sense that namba the other thing i really love about osaka versus tokyo is like everything's on a grid and everything is in one area so if you want to eat you go to namba right if you want to shop you have the arcade you go down that way and we had an office in hamachi and i is that is that office still there the hamachi office i can't remember actually actually the place is called honmachi hamachi is right well it's it's okay it's okay because you probably think you're thinking of all the fish you always say goodbye japan thanks for all the fish well the yeah yeah well the the physical office is still there but it's not ours anymore yeah but the yeah we did have that office it's actually a really nice area that that office charles there was a a very a very kind of it wasn't too busy but it was busy enough all right all right let's get to the sexy part of the interview let's talk about the early days of iohk this is this is like lore that is almost lost in history now we're this big company worth billions of dollars we have hundreds of employees and we're in 40 countries but that was not always the case and you were one of the very first employees of iohk so you were there in the very early days so let's talk about the early days of iohk how about that what what was your interview i i remember nico referred you to us and we interviewed you in that office i believe in a whole much yes yes you did in fact yeah so early days of iohk as you said we're this multi-billion dollar one of the biggest in the world blockchain ecosystem now and when i was interviewing i believe the first time you came to japan after after after i joined the company we all fit around that the the table in in in the common area in the the office at home watching because it was it was it's a share space and so we used the main room and remember actually all of us fit pretty much the entire company fit around the table a table in in the share room and it wasn't that big of a table it's maybe what like 10 10 10 chairs or something like that right yeah yeah nico referred me the same guy nico despapolis he referred me he he he he knew your your former partner and co-founder jeremy and he he referred me i had an interview over there i'll tell you i tell you how i met nico so jeremy had rented an airbnb for me and that was through nico and i i was in this little tower like in shinkanoka i forget i forget where it was it was like four or five stops away from the office on the mitasuji line and i stayed there for two or three months in this tiny airbnb and i had this very uncomfortable bed but niko gave me a really great rate on it and i said okay well it's okay i can find a way to to make it work and make it comfortable as i think i was only paying like 600 yen 700 yen 70 000 yen or like like sixty thousand yen per month and so that's a great price for monthly airbnb yeah actually yeah nico one of his businesses out here he lives in in italy now he he moved there with his wife because his wife is italian but when he was living in japan one of his main businesses was airbnb and he would rent these apartments out to people traveling and yeah and so he he he that that's how he knew he knew jeremy and yeah that you were looking to have a project manager actually manage the the project the pre-sale project because at that point we were still in trunks two of the pre-sale yeah and well i mean i'm i'm a project manager so one thing led to another yeah and we wrote we wrote for the audience's benefit we wrote all the compliance software so we were the first crowd sale to do kyc i i think ever in the space and and the problem was that there was no software that actually could do it the way that we needed to do it and so we tried to write it and we're like wow this is so much harder than we thought and i i was busy trying to build the science side of the organization so i i was going to ukraine and to america and to greece and other places and and i think was nico spentanitus in the company at that point remember bald nicos yeah yeah nico was was in the company yeah i think he actually just came aboard at that point yeah yes it was just you jeremy nico's ari ari levy cohen yeah and then there was also ricky wakai who also came in good old good old ricky and and i don't know i don't remember if we had mario yet or if we had christian linderin yet i were you hired before christian or after after actually christian i believe came you came on a couple of months for me and yeah and i came on a couple months later i think mario actually came on board around the same time as i did yeah he's one of our researchers he's one of our head researchers in tokyo tokyo tech yeah so that was we were all around the same era where the og crew of input output yeah and actually i gotta tell you charles i i think i told you this in private but when you were interviewing me for the job because yeah this all this compliance offer had to be written you had to be a properly managed project because it was just such a it was just it just grew really really a lot in a short amount of time so yeah and that was i'm i'm very honored to say that was was my team that that developed this software for us and and and then we're we were able to do the the pre-sale with nycp software which was a a very involving job it was we did a lot a lot we wrote we wrote the whole application in meteor i remember that and it was we wrote over 300 pages of documentation just for the it was one of the largest meteor applications i ever it was a horrible choice of a framework for we have a history of that this company being like what is the worst possible choice for a framework to build something and i remember costa and his his wife were you should just use it python and wufoo forms and do everything with a centralized we're like no we're gonna write a bespoke meteor application and it's all just gonna work out amazing and be turnkey and they have this thing called galaxy it's gonna make it so great yeah yeah charles thank you for that it was it was fun yeah that that is the word fun well we did it we did it yeah we we it's then that's what we do in this company we we make their we make our choices and we live with them and we we we we finish things we we start things we finish things yeah so i remember actually this is back when you still had the chance to interview everybody who was joining the company because you were still a couple of 15 people you interviewed me over skype and i remember i remember that conversation vividly because we should program an hour and i remember that you were telling me these great things that we're gonna do and you said dan what this company is going to do big things we're going to create this really great ecosystem we're going to create one of the best blockchain in the world it's going to be science driven it's going to be an ecosystem it's going to be a company that's going to have hundreds of people in it and and and this is this is me coming from the trauma of the dot-com crash and the years that followed the it was it was like fallout the game just roaming the wasteland of the ice and and here comes this guy younger than me telling me that we're gonna do these things these great things and and and i'm a skeptic and i have a really really good [ __ ] of me it's i mean you can try and [ __ ] me but it's and it might seem i'm falling for it but i really don't and when charles when you told me these things i was thinking to myself my [ __ ] meter should go off because he's telling me these grand visions of just changing the world and but then i was thinking what but just something tells me it's not it's it's the real deal and yeah and that's that's really why i i decided to invest so much of my time and and faith and what and what we do really i gotta tell you charles you you gave me that you gave me that drive the the thing that i was looking for the the the division to follow to to to strive towards and it started with that interview that started with that conversation we had and where i said to myself why isn't my [ __ ] meter going off because this guy is talking big big things i should be right away saying okay all right like give me ten percent of that would be cool and in the back of my mind i said okay just to be on the safe side let me not get my hopes high really really high up let's just say i'll be happy with 40 of what charles just told me well charles pretty much all of it came true so what the hell man like what can you do let's talk about the business development here so you did project management for that that whole thing and that that was incredibly difficult sketchy time because we we had to do things that had never been done before and we were doing them in japanese but then i was trying to also build a science and engineering company and who the hell we had no name no brand no reputation like iohk like hong kong is you're a white guy like what's going on you're doing something in japan and it's in the cryptocurrency space and we're like no man it's legit i promise you and it's like okay hire your first wave of academics in ironically of all places ukraine so i went to pavel's conference there and we got roman olynykov and we also brought in mario langerra at the same time and through mario we got bernardo david and bernardo and mario and roman were just enough for us to convince aguilos to take it seriously and we had the greek connection with nicos bentanitus and so nicos nicos met actually aguilas through vasily zikas so nicos went to rpi that's where he got his phd and he went and talked to facilities and he's like oh we're gonna be so great this company is gonna be so big and if you still just i'm not the man you need to know the man you need is agados he's a big guy and if you can get agados everything will be great and so we spent a whole year trying to seduce aguilos and he's like fine i'll write a paper with you where's it's going to be the best paper of all time and the problem was that roman was not really the right kind of cryptographer for that paper and mario had been working at a brazilian bank for a long time so he hadn't been doing research for a while so he was just getting back into the swing of things and his background was like hash functions and symmetric crypt he had no blockchain experience at all and bernardo was good but he was an alcoholic like even an alcoholic for brazilians so he partied man and he was a partying graduate student and sometimes he would be there sometimes you'd not be there so this is the worst team ever to read a paper with but we said to agolas like trust us this is going to work and we wrote the original our boris protocol with him so we were doing all that and then we were still trying to figure out how to be an engineering company and ours and we had brought in richard wilde had brought in sarah kell right at that time and i i was i knew a lot about scala and python and i knew a little bit about haskell and i thought haskell would be a cool language and sarah kell we gave him a project i i'll never forget we gave them rs coin do that go do rs coin and that's your trial and if you guys are really good there we'll go ahead and give you the billy bill byron for cardano so sarah cal went and implemented rs coin we went to corfu greece did you did you come with us to corfu i can't remember actually no and but corfu so i was being interviewed right before corfu and i was actually gonna company right but corfu is came right as my interview process was about to end so i actually had to wait for you guys to come back from corfu okay which ironically actually my my honeymoon destination that's that that's where i went on honeymoon with my wife right so core food yeah so corvo agrees and they showed off to george sinesies and sarah michael john the two authors of rs coin were there and they loved it they're all wow this is a great implementation so we said oh okay well they did that and shouldn't be too hard there was haskell bitcoin at the time and i said let's use that as a template and of course they came and [ __ ] everything up it was it was it was like just put your hopes and dreams in a blender and then try to put them slowly back together after leaving it on puree for a while it was they were too young we were too young but i remember our city actually interviewed you and you tried tried to do an interview with haskell and i don't think you had ever written a single line of haskell in your entire life what was that interview i i wasn't in it so i don't so i so the last time i i worked in a functional programming language was with lisp and that's old people language if you're really old and and and middle aged like me and you've been in i.

t long enough you've heard horror stories about lisp lisp was actually used for robotics and so the reason why i knew lisp was because back in my late teens i was brilliant to robotics as well and i bought a a set of servo motors that were around by a terminal that was run on lisp right and so that was the only interaction i had with a functional programming language i mostly worked on object oriented in java and cnc plus plus well java and yeah and so what i did was we haskell this was about hassle what i did was i just took a really really long crash course in haskell just just three days of nothing but just a cramming haskell and trying to get my my mind around lazy equations and and just why can't i get an output midway through come through the compiler what is that to why don't wait till the end to get an output why does the will not have anything in it midway through because in java you would set up set up checkpoints to check different stages of execution when you're writing a program right so like that's how we troubleshoot in java and set up checkpoints and i would say okay so here this thing that the variable is saying it's got this in it and now it's this now it's this you would read the readout you can't do that in haskell so in haskell doesn't have anything in it until the very end and yeah just it was really i mean i wrapped my mind around it but it felt wrong charles it felt so wrong well to be fair be fair at the type of haskell arcini and most of we were writing was actually wrong by the haskell standards as well i i tried to read that code so many times and i was i i guess i'm just not a haskell guy that's what it left then i talked to haskell guys like eric de castro this is like well i guess i'm not a haskell guy either because where eric had to fix all the all the code those were crazy times though those were absolutely crazy times what was amazing about is we were working so hard we brought all these engineers together every day was a 16 hour 18 hour day and then you had guys like chico crypto and others coming out and saying we just went on vacation for two years and worked on ethereum classic oh yeah it just blew my [ __ ] mind i was like [ __ ] you no we were legitimately working hard and legitimately writing code and these things and actually trying to build cardano and deliver something to market and build an engineering and a science company it was horribly difficult all those things and etc was kind of a side thing and we actually outsourced it to a a a bonus addis team called atex a completely independent firm that worked on that while the core of the company was working on haskell and i tried to recruit galway they were my first firm i went to so we we had sarah kell to start with and then we went to galwa which was an american firm they do a lot of defense contracting and like drone software and formal methods and one of the founders of haskell john launchberry created it and we went to galway we spent three months trying to convince them to work with us and they kept saying sure and then they said no and sure and now and it was so annoying so then we went to well typed ironically because we couldn't get the network stack to work properly and we said hey you guys did cloud haskell can you could you like do some consulting one or two months duncan and he said oh sure it'll only take a month that was like four years ago they were still here still working on things so yeah port duncan yeah but he had a lot of fun anyway yeah and i mean he i mean he's still with us he's a brilliant guy and i just remember that when he just joined us duncan is a really colorful guy he's a very fun guy and very like really easy going like that's not your typical i.