Richard Heart has stated over and over throughout the years on live streams and podcasts that his mission, what he wants out of this career, his one overwhelming desire in life at this point is glory. And there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong with being honest about it and not with how he’s doing it and now, I’m going to tell you why.

Note: all the of following is based on my experiences, interactions and interpretations of Richard over the last few years. I believe them to be accurate and tried to be fair when going through both the criticisms and overwhelming acclaim.

The Playbook

Create a following

This is the first step: you have to be interesting enough for people to keep tuning in and wanting more. Being a marketing master, among other things, this was the easy part for Richard. You follow me and I’ll make you smarter, richer, happier and healthier. Hey this guy knows what he’s talking about, maybe I can learn something. Ok, he’s different and he’s not trying to sell me something, he wants to give me something.

Create a tribe

Many people who have been following Richard for years do so for a reason: he speaks to them. You can’t listen to someone talk for hours, mostly answering questions from the chat, without it either being an audio book or conversation from someone who you believe can make your life better. It’s not what you say, it’s why you say it. Obviously the majority of developers who evaluate Bitcoin wouldn’t call it “spaghetti code”, but hey Bitcoin isn’t making anybody rich anytime soon so we need something to rally against while we work on something better. This is not a quest for ground truth, it’s a quest to improve your life by focusing on reality and if that means bending the facts a little to make it happen, so be it. There is no right and wrong, for the most part, only trade-offs— and we can be honest about those trade-offs. If you can accept this (or ignore it), you can be a part of this community.

He’s been retired for almost 20 years, had many successful ventures and learned from his failures, seems like plenty of wisdom to share. He writes books and wants to fund medical research to live longer and save your life and your family, while getting rich in the process. Seems like a good deal, I’m in.

Create a mission

This is the token, this is the medical research, this is the self improvement book (Scivive), this is the “you go do the work” because he doesn’t work for you, he wants you to have utility and continue to popularize and recruit new members of the team. All of these things give people a sense of purpose and belonging, something to strive for and accomplish and they know it will take many years to do, but progress will happen, you will get rich if you position yourself well and it will be glorious. There is no deception, there is no scam and there is no paid group or promises. A scam creates victims. There are no victims in Hex, only winners and losers, just as you have in every other fair and honest game. Games and game theory become critical to winning in life and in crypto. And once you’re on a mission, and its to your benefit to stay the course and say nice things, you’re in, and that can totally be ok.

Describe it as the crypto parallel to traditional CDs, people understand those. Say it’s designed to appreciate over time, people get that. Whether they can wait or not is a different story, but that’s the price of freedom, you get to choose what to do and you can choose the more profitable action or the less profitable action. But you get to choose.

Everything is a ponzi until it isn’t, anyone who’s capable of having perspective can see this. Or forget the intellectually correct angle, if you like price go up then you’ll ignore it for long enough to win anyways. It just doesn’t matter. Calling something a scam is cheap, scam for who and for how long? Is the dollar a scam because it goes down in value? If so, why is it one of the most successful and popular things in the world? Apart from anti-government sentiment and conspiracies, if you’re in it to get rich and create a system that rewards people that play the game well, to promote meritocracy, seems fine. No expectations of profit, wink wink but if you just hold onto the coins for a while, like everything else they'll go up in price (but most can't help themselves). It’s a transfer of wealth from those who can't hold to those who can.

Create new missions

Oh, Ethereum is too expensive? Great motivation and data to create a new network. Put the pumpamentals in there and create another product designed to appreciate over time. Onboard new people who didn’t get the other products, but this one sings their tune. Donate to charity? Start collecting more watches? All of these things as he explicitly says are to get more people interested from outside the crypto bubble. It’s much easier to get somebody into Hex or PulseChain if all their money isn’t already in Doge or Cardano. Let each mission pump the other one and play well off each other, creating beautiful music.

He says controversial things to punch harder, for his content to be seen and clicked on in a sea of noise. Again, it's a means to an end and the metrics prove it works. When enough people believe in something then it's real, there's no other magical formula... the stock market just works, the dollar works, it works when a critical mass has a common shared belief. More campaigns to promote more products means more followers, a bigger tribe and more funds in the pool to lock people into an ecosystem that doesn’t abuse them or try and get them to do things against their best interest. You buy the coins, you hold or stake them for more and you trade them for stuff you want later.

The simplest thing in the world is the hardest thing to do due to human psychology, so the strong get rewarded. Learn to be strong and you’ll love systems the reward you for success. Think of yourself as weak and there’s no system that can help you. Richard says he wants to save people sounds narcissistic, but that’s if you only go surface deep. He built a system that rewards healthy behavior and most other crypto products do not, it’s that simple. If you can get over any type of condescending tone you feel when he talks to you, if you can get over that hump, you can do amazing things. You really managed to find one of the very few guys who isn’t trying to scam you, so feel blessed and lucky not skeptical and hateful. New missions new people and popular products tend to do well.

Keep it going

Delayed gratification naturally takes a lot of time. It’s not “done” for a long time, and in the meantime we can keep progress and the onboarding going for all the products. People are making 10 and 15 year stakes. The people make the product survive, because they believe more money in now means even more money later. They stop trading and focus on pumping their own bags. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that. The ecosystem around these products is incredible. He’s incentivized people to promote and build new complimentary products which perpetually making things better and each growth triggers another growth in more products, communities and initiatives. The Nobel Prize talk sounds like an arrogant thing to say, but show me people who have designed something that’s had more impact that Hex has and will have in a decade’s time. There’s very few real competitors in this space, most are money grabs while providing no value to society. What’s different about Richard is he figured out how to do both and with swagger. Controversy is a feature, not a bug for him.

Every generation has it’s opportunity to get rich and in this age, the 2010’s and 2020’s it’s primarily crypto. Wealth is made, the pie gets bigger, it just happens faster and more often in this industry. It happens is every other vertical in life, every other industry too, Richard just figured out how to make the game fun and fulfilling. Make a stake and go on doing cool stuff in your life, come back in a few years and enjoy your new wealth. When you need money, cash out the stakes. Or take a DeFi loan against your stakes and never have to sell your Hex or Pulse, the choice is yours. The system is sound. This is a force for good.

End game

This man makes more millionaires. This man provides a platform and incentive for people to donate to charity. He probably owns most of the supply of the coins and usually that’s not ok, but it is here. He’s in it for glory and what would be more glorious than not selling. Way down the road when the price is so high that slow sell would barely affect the price in order to roll the funds into longevity capital and funding, sure then maybe. But again, that’s OK. He’s completely changed thousands or even millions of people’s lives for the better by getting them to stop losing their money trading, learn and practice to think more clearly with mental models and act in a more healthy manner, they’ve read his books, donated to his charities and paid it forward to others. Creating a community that acts and thinks more like Richard Heart is a GOOD thing.

He won't cheat the system by “recycling eth”, pump and dump, none of that stuff because he needs his victory to be pure and indisputable. His selfish reasons for doing what he’s doing is beneficial for all of us, yet people cannot turn off their scam detectors for just one minute to understand the ingenuity, the extraordinary value creation taking place. He knows if he builds a great product and markets it well, the growth will be organic and exponential due to the nature of crypto. All of the skirting around who the OA is, where’s the Ethereum, sacrifice for freedoms, avoiding any language or action that would cause attention from regulators, its to ensure the glory occurs. If any of that stuff bothers you, turns you off from any of Richard’s products, just try and see it from the glory point of view, the bigger picture of what he’s all about.

If Elon Musk can build all the crazy successful companies with his vision, it’s not impossible for others to do amazing things too. Nobody thinks hard things are possible until they happen. Richard by most all measurements has won already, he’s hit the imaginary glory bar, but he doesn’t want a piece… he wants the whole pie.

What it takes for glory

Price needs to go up more than down, people need to fund medical research and they need to be happy with his products, he needs to continue to gain wealth into a fund that he doesn’t use “for himself”, but to go down in the history books for funding the initiatives that he knows will make the world better in the ways he knows how. Who else is going to to more good with it? He wants people to choose freedom and stand against censorship. He wants to be remembered in the history books as a great, if not one of the greatest men that ever lived. This is his highest calling and he’s answered it as soon as he flipped the switch on Hex and his persona gained momentum. The king of delayed gratification does not quit and does not sell. Glory is what he wants and if there’s anyone who can get it, who’s on their way and won’t stop until it’s theirs… it’s Richard. And that’s a good thing for all of us.