Chat with Kiki part 5 - "What I Want For the People That I Love is Worth Taking Risks."

Tali: 00:00:00

Hi everybody.

Tali: 00:00:00

Welcome to Orange Hatter.

Tali: 00:00:02

Today we will listen to part five of my conversation with Kiki.

Kiki: 00:00:06

I'm gonna talk about early adoption, and I experienced

Kiki: 00:00:10

that myself with the internet.

Kiki: 00:00:13

One of my close friends from high school, she went on to

Kiki: 00:00:16

study engineering, mathematics, architecture, like so many things.

Kiki: 00:00:20

And she was at Columbia University and she was doing graduate work,

Kiki: 00:00:24

and then she was working on campus.

Kiki: 00:00:27

She was working for this satellite education program.

Kiki: 00:00:31

So Columbia University was.

Kiki: 00:00:32

Very early in establishing a satellite education program.

Kiki: 00:00:37

And so she would talk about it and one day I was just like, "I really

Kiki: 00:00:40

dunno what you're talking about.

Kiki: 00:00:41

How can you do a satellite education program?"

Kiki: 00:00:44

And she said, "well, there's this thing called the worldwide web.

Kiki: 00:00:49

And it was created by the government and shared for the military, and

Kiki: 00:00:54

they realized that they could.

Kiki: 00:00:56

Extend, you know, how it served.

Kiki: 00:00:59

And so they extended it to universities.

Kiki: 00:01:02

So we broadcast these classes outta Columbia to students all over the

Kiki: 00:01:08

world through the worldwide web."

Kiki: 00:01:10

That was very early.

Kiki: 00:01:13

She has since obviously she's a pioneer in tech and she's

Kiki: 00:01:18

CTO, CIO in her, in her field.

Kiki: 00:01:22

Cut ahead few years.

Kiki: 00:01:24

I'm living in Los Angeles.

Kiki: 00:01:25

I'm working as an actress.

Kiki: 00:01:27

I have a, a yoga school too, and I'm, you know, teaching high-level,

Kiki: 00:01:33

one-on-one, you know, very famous fancy people, yoga and I went to visit my

Kiki: 00:01:39

girlfriend, I think for her wedding.

Kiki: 00:01:41

She had moved to Cleveland to work on a big project at the university.

Kiki: 00:01:46

She was like, "You don't have a computer?"

Kiki: 00:01:48

And I was like, "no I don't have a computer.

Kiki: 00:01:51

I, you know, I visit my agent's office, I get my scripts, I drive around, I go on

Kiki: 00:01:56

auditions, I, you know, answer the phone.

Kiki: 00:01:59

I go to my yoga school, whatever."

Kiki: 00:02:00

And she said, "well, we're retiring.

Kiki: 00:02:02

We have a whole room full of computers that we've retired because they're

Kiki: 00:02:06

building a brand new business school.

Kiki: 00:02:09

And I will..."

Kiki: 00:02:11

No, I think she said, "if you come visit me, I'll give

Kiki: 00:02:13

you a computer" or something.

Kiki: 00:02:16

She wanted me to visit her.

Kiki: 00:02:16

So, I visited her and we get this computer and we, we pack it up,

Kiki: 00:02:19

we take it to UPS and we pack it up, and then I get a computer.

Kiki: 00:02:22

So I'm kind of one of the first people I know with like a desktop

Kiki: 00:02:25

computer and it's like a dial, you know, a dial up line or whatever.

Kiki: 00:02:30

So meanwhile at my yoga school, I have some great students.

Kiki: 00:02:35

They work at Disney, they're.

Kiki: 00:02:37

Early digital animators, they're like, like, "do you want a website?"

Kiki: 00:02:41

You know, this is when like it cost like $20,000 to build a

Kiki: 00:02:44

website.I was like, "a website.

Kiki: 00:02:46

I don't know.

Kiki: 00:02:46

I really don't know what we do on websites.

Kiki: 00:02:48

I guess we just put our schedule on it and things like that."

Kiki: 00:02:51

But I was like, "sure I would have a website."

Kiki: 00:02:54

So they built me a beautiful website and had our schedule on it and it really

Kiki: 00:02:57

made me think about like how I wanted to communicate what yoga was, what I taught.

Kiki: 00:03:01

People disparaged me.

Kiki: 00:03:03

It was as though I was like a street hooker on the corner

Kiki: 00:03:09

turning tricks for drugs.

Kiki: 00:03:12

Other yoga schools, they thought I had sold out, trash advertising.

Kiki: 00:03:17

Like, "you have a website.

Kiki: 00:03:18

You have a website."

Kiki: 00:03:19

People said to me like, I would, people actually said this, I

Kiki: 00:03:23

heard this hundreds of times., "I would never have a website, ever.

Kiki: 00:03:27

Like the worldwide web is so dangerous that, you know, you're

Kiki: 00:03:31

just gonna get involved in like pornography, gun sales and drug sales.

Kiki: 00:03:36

You're gonna just be on some list for the FBI or something."

Kiki: 00:03:38

And I said, "it's no different than a business card.

Kiki: 00:03:42

Do you have a business card?"

Kiki: 00:03:43

"Yes, of course.

Kiki: 00:03:44

I have a business card."

Kiki: 00:03:45

"Well, it's no different than a business card."

Kiki: 00:03:47

If someone had a brick and mortar, I'd say, "do you have a brick and mortar?"

Kiki: 00:03:49

And they'd be like...

Kiki: 00:03:50

"Do you have a sign in front?

Kiki: 00:03:52

Is there a sign on the front of your store, law firm, medical office?"

Kiki: 00:03:56

They'd be like, "yeah."

Kiki: 00:03:57

I'd say, "It's just a sign.

Kiki: 00:03:59

It's just a sign on the internet highway of brick and mortars."

Kiki: 00:04:03

It was years before other people, you know, had websites.

Kiki: 00:04:08

So a lot of it has to do the adoption, has to do with the technology catching

Kiki: 00:04:13

up where it's easier to build a website.

Kiki: 00:04:15

It's cheaper to build a website.

Kiki: 00:04:16

It has to do with the affordable technology to have a computer.

Kiki: 00:04:21

I got my first computer for free, you know, and then eventually

Kiki: 00:04:26

obviously smartphone technology.

Kiki: 00:04:29

But so the other thing was in early internet you could shop online

Kiki: 00:04:35

and pay with things, credit card.

Kiki: 00:04:38

And people were like, "I would never put my credit card online."

Kiki: 00:04:42

I mean, hundreds and hundreds of people said that to me.

Kiki: 00:04:45

Other yoga schools would say like, "oh, how do you order your yoga rug?

Kiki: 00:04:48

Your yoga mats?"

Kiki: 00:04:49

And I would say, "actually, I get them really affordably.

Kiki: 00:04:51

I get them in a big roll, and I order them online at this company."

Kiki: 00:04:55

"No, I would never order them online."

Kiki: 00:04:57

I really can't help you there.

Kiki: 00:04:59

Like I guess you have to get on the phone and call them up...

Tali: 00:05:02

Yeah, there's definitely, there's definitely that trust factor because

Tali: 00:05:05

I remember the first time I ordered something, I don't remember what it

Tali: 00:05:09

was, but I remember the first time I had to punch in my credit card number.

Tali: 00:05:13

And I was so scared that somebody, somebody would steal my number and

Tali: 00:05:17

it took years for my mom to feel comfortable ordering something.

Tali: 00:05:22

But once you do it a few times, you know that, oh, it was mostly

Tali: 00:05:26

the fear factor that was keeping you away from the new technology.

Tali: 00:05:30

And so with Bitcoin, I think it's similar.

Tali: 00:05:32

There's, there's that trust factor that's lacking for a lot of people

Tali: 00:05:35

because they just haven't done.

Tali: 00:05:37

And if they, if somebody will hold their hand and walk 'em through it

Tali: 00:05:40

just once or twice just to gain the trust and the confidence, then they'll

Tali: 00:05:44

realize, It's absolutely doable.

Tali: 00:05:46

Yes.

Kiki: 00:05:47

Yes.

Kiki: 00:05:48

We have, like, such tech innovation.

Kiki: 00:05:51

You know, over the last, really I got involved in 2018 with Bitcoin, so you

Kiki: 00:05:56

know, obviously every year since then, we just have more and more innovations.

Kiki: 00:06:00

And hopefully we have more people that we can trust, more businesses

Kiki: 00:06:04

that we can trust, you know, inside.

Kiki: 00:06:06

I was super excited about the Blockfi credit card and of course

Kiki: 00:06:11

Blockfi filed for bankruptcy.

Kiki: 00:06:13

And people lost hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars, because they

Kiki: 00:06:18

were using Blockfi as a trading platform.

Kiki: 00:06:20

I only used it as credit card to get the Bitcoin points.

Kiki: 00:06:24

Maybe over the course of year, I got like 600 dollars in Bitcoin and when it would

Kiki: 00:06:29

hit about, you know, two or 300 bucks, we would pull it all and put it in a wallet.

Kiki: 00:06:34

And so when Blockfi went down, we had about $50 in points

Kiki: 00:06:39

in Bitcoin, which we lost.

Kiki: 00:06:42

So that's another thing.

Kiki: 00:06:44

We don't wanna keep our money on the exchanges.

Kiki: 00:06:47

Uh, even if we buy on the exchanges, we don't...

Kiki: 00:06:50

You might have an app on your phone, like a cash app or a strike app.

Kiki: 00:06:54

You might have a wallet on your phone.

Kiki: 00:06:56

Well, don't keep more money on that than you would wanna lose.

Kiki: 00:06:59

If you're scared, it's not your time!

Kiki: 00:07:01

You know, what can I say?

Tali: 00:07:03

Yeah, it's okay.

Tali: 00:07:04

Yeah.

Tali: 00:07:04

Take your baby steps.

Tali: 00:07:06

It's gonna be okay.

Kiki: 00:07:07

It's like, I, even, a few years ago, I kind of co-taught a yoga

Kiki: 00:07:12

retreat that a friend had set up and we took a, it was in Vermont, and we

Kiki: 00:07:16

took a beautiful hike and there was a waterfall with a, with like, a rock.

Kiki: 00:07:20

And people were jumping off and I was like, you know, other people, young

Kiki: 00:07:24

people, were jumping off the rock.

Kiki: 00:07:25

And I was like, that looks so fun.

Kiki: 00:07:27

Let's go!

Kiki: 00:07:28

I, you know, I wave on the...

Kiki: 00:07:29

people and I scrambled up the rock, like faster than everyone and I gotta the

Kiki: 00:07:34

end and I looked down and I was like, "how can it look so high from up here?"

Kiki: 00:07:38

Like, down there it looks like, I dunno, 15 feet, and up

Kiki: 00:07:42

here it looks like a hundred.

Kiki: 00:07:43

And I was llike, "well, girl...

Kiki: 00:07:46

got here and everyone's waiting for you and you're not gonna

Kiki: 00:07:50

turn around and crawl back down."

Kiki: 00:07:53

So I jumped in.

Kiki: 00:07:54

It was amazing.

Kiki: 00:07:55

And then I, you know, jumped again.

Kiki: 00:07:57

But it's scary.

Kiki: 00:07:58

You know, it's scary, but...

Tali: 00:07:59

There's help.

Tali: 00:08:00

There's help.

Tali: 00:08:00

There's a lot of people out there.

Kiki: 00:08:02

There's hope, and this is just the risk of believing in ourself and believing

Kiki: 00:08:07

that, "what I want for myself, or what I want for my family, what I want for

Kiki: 00:08:12

people that I love is worth taking risk."

Tali: 00:08:16

I hope listening to this conversation has piqued your

Tali: 00:08:19

interest and inspired you.

Tali: 00:08:21

If you would like to learn more about Bitcoin or to read

Tali: 00:08:23

the show notes, please visit orangehatter.com for more information.

Tali: 00:08:27

Or you can email me directly at tali@orangehatter.com.

Tali: 00:08:32

Be sure to subscribe to the Orange Hatter Podcast so you'll be

Tali: 00:08:35

notified when new episodes drop.

Tali: 00:08:37

See you next time.

Tali: 00:08:38

Thank you.