On this episode of Invested, Michael sits down with David Marcus, the CEO and co-founder of Lightspark. Most recently, he led all payments and crypto efforts on Meta/Facebook. In 2018, David started Diem (fka Libra). He joined Meta in 2014 to lead Messenger, which he took from under 200M monthly users to over 1.5B. Previously, he was PayPal’s President. A lifelong entrepreneur, David launched two companies in Europe and then founded mobile payments company Zong in Silicon Valley, which was acquired by PayPal in 2011.

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KEY TOPICS

00:00 - Intro

01:54 - Dropping Out of College

05:07 - Elite Colleges Are Radicalizing Students

07:45 - AI Makes College Mostly Obsolete

15:30 - Libra Threatened the Global Financial Order

17:36 - Janet Yellen Personally Killed Libra

18:55 - Why Centralized Crypto Always Fails

19:40 - Bitcoin Is the Only Neutral Money

23:38 - Bitcoin Can’t Work - Until Lightning

26:05 - Bitcoin Replaces SWIFT and Banks