So does that matter if they have possession, but it's also who the beneficial owner is, right?

Yeah, correct.

And this is one of the reasons why I don't think legislation, whether that's legal or taxes, keeping up with crypto.

And that is a great example around properties, because if we think about real estate in New Zealand, real estate has the land information, New Zealand or LINZ, and every property has a legal title and the owners of that property are on that title.

And if banks or a guarantor wants to make an interest on that title, they can do so under the existing legislation.

I'm not a lawyer.

I don't know the mechanics of how that works, but we've all seen a title on a property where there's security granted to a particular bank and you pay a lawyer to discharge those security interest.

break that down a little bit more? Are you talking about like a comparative market valuation methodology or like,

I don't know if you have any reflections on how the internet has changed since over the course of your career, and whether you've noticed anything, or whether you have any observations on this kind of phenomenon.

Yeah, I would, like I would draw, I would draw...

I guess, like, the parallel that I think about is, like, what's happened to Nike is very similar to what's happened to the, like, two-party system of government, which is a bit of an odd way to think about it.

But, like, Nike is getting eaten from all sides because there are no major cultural moments anymore.

So they don't own running because Hoka has kind of come in and taken running.

They don't really own hiking.

They don't really own basketball in the way that they used to.

So, like, why was this a priority for you?

So did you always know you wanted to be a partner of an accountancy firm? Did you know you were going to go down that equity path, that ownership path?

Yeah, I knew pretty early on that I wanted to be a business owner.

I think that sort of came from growing up.

Our family, we weren't poor, but we never kind of seemed to have enough money, or at least that was my impression or that sort of belief that I got involved in.

And my parents would bicker and fight about money and there was never enough.

And maybe that's because I'm six foot four and eat a hell of a lot as a growing boy doing all these sports going up.

But, and look, I never went hungry or anything like that, but there was never enough to kind of go to family holidays extensively and stuff like that.

And for you, what does that look like for you in the next kind of five to 10 years?

Would that be more typical, do you think?

Oh, yeah, a- absolutely.

We see everything and anything.

So the people who are making loss, are making large profits and then losing it, that's probably only about 5% of what we see.

The majority of people have, uh, acquired crypto and just hang on to it and done nothing with it.

Then they don't have taxes to pay yet because they haven't disposed it.

They're not paying thousands of dollars in accounting fees.

who are in quite deep debt?

Yeah.

Typical content would do terribly with them, but this content would do incredibly well, like incredibly well.

And so the lesson that I kind of got out of that was, oh my God, like, the nature of advertising is changing.

Whereas, like, you can place any media in front of any person, and as long as you're willing to pay for the eyeballs, then you can, um, you can serve them anything.

And so that meant that, like, the typical 30-second TV ad was, like, largely gon- and this sounds like, you know, sounds trite 10 years later, but was gonna go away.

And so that insight went to Koala, where I was, um, and, and I was lucky enough to work with Danny and Mitch there, um, who'd, who'd built a great business, and that insight kind of supercharged that business, and we kind of unconstrained, kind of were the first ones to make, like, really, like, meme-style advertising in this country.

And so that insight then held, and then this, like, long-held view I had, which was, like, that the world is gonna change away from, like, kind of the normal corporate culture style and, and, like, the ability for young people to perform at a, at a high level in companies that, um, let them do so was, was just beginning.

[laughs]

But if you're suddenly going to have all this tax compliance, you might kind of go...

Should I bother? Yeah, it's so easy these days to sit behind a computer.

You can trade hundreds of tokens, thousands of trades, multiple different exchanges, click buttons, have the excitement, the sexiness of making significant amount of money up and down.

and not even be thinking about tax, yet it's so easy to do.

Yet the tax rules and also the accounting of it, trying to capture all that data, trying to actually account and tell an audit trail of all those different platforms is really complicated.

So yeah, the tax needs to be front of mind.

And this doesn't just apply to crypto.

So for those listening who might think, eek, what should their first step be?

Um, and is it, are they having to sell their crypto to then pay the tax? Or is, have they squirreled that profit away and it's ready for them to give to the tax man? [laughs]

Yeah, so we've got two distinct type of clients.

Um, we're still in a phase of doing these multi-year catch-ups for clients, what's called a voluntary disclosure.

So someone will come to us with crypto activity from two, three, eight years, and we'll do a big catch-up, and they're still coming to terms with accepting that there's taxes to pay, so they've left their money in crypto not knowing about the taxes or perhaps knowing about the taxes but choosing to ignore it or defer it or delay it.

Whereas the other side of our clients, they've been working with us for some time, they understand the tax.

They're a little bit more structured with governance around them, so they make decisions wearing not the whole pact that they wear when they make a decision, but tax forms a play of their strategy.

So in those cases, those clients are, are sweet.

[laughs]

I wanna, I wanna hear a bit more about this.

Kind of, so like I, I'm like kind of loosely analytically trained, not, not analytical enough to be a proper finance student, um, not creative enough to be a proper, uh, creative.

And so, um, like caught between those two worlds.

And then, um, and then like Facebook Pixel comes out in maybe 2014, you know, approximately.

Um, and then it just turned out that like, um, analytics had arrived in a field where there were historically none.

And so you didn't have to be the most analytical person in the room.

You just had to be kind of analytical enough in a creative landscape.

Um, going from, like, politics to sort of like mattress company to telehealth health company, is the through line this, like, creative o- obsession, like this, like, just media obsession, or is there something else that kind of connects all of these things in your mind?