Hi everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal and today we have Angela Strange, a partner on

the deal and investing team monitoring a podcast on fintech trends, including our general partner

who's an expert on all things fintech, Alex Rampel, and special guest Charlie Wurzel, senior

technology writer at BuzzFeed, who recently wrote a deep feature on the topic.

So let's just get started.

Hello, everyone.

So maybe we could kick this off, Charlie.

You just finished a month-long experiment of going cashless, which actually landed you in a quasi-surgery office, getting a microchip implanted in your hand in Sweden.

So you can tell us what led you along this journey?

Sure. So it started really with a very simple question, which is what is the future of money?

And with regard to, you know, all the buzz about mobile payments and the death of the wallet and a cashless

society, how far along on that timeline are we actually?

And sort of what is what does that future look like and who, you know, who wins, who loses,

all these sort of vague or hard to answer questions.

And so we thought that a fun way to approach that rather than, you know, the traditional,

talking about finance can be, can be dry sometimes and also very interesting.

So I decided to do an experiment where I lived for 30 days only using electronic money or I got rid of my wallet, left it at home and only use mobile apps and the internet and started kind of going deeper and deeper into cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. And eventually I went to Sweden and got a chip

implanted in my hand. So, I mean, it kind of. How did you pay for that? You know what? Actually,

the, uh, the fine people at calm Body Modification in Stockholm did it for free because they are real evangelists for this biohacking movement.

And they're really excited to just have somebody who was going to, you know, push the experiment to the furthest level.

That would have been a great first test transaction.

It would have been really hard.

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