Alex Fazel - Why 2025 Is Greatest Crypto Bull Market EVER: Here's Three Ways You Could Lose Everything

Full transcript: Alex Fazel on London Real

3:33 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Alex Fazel, the cryptocurrency expert, TEDx speaker, broadcaster and blockchain educator. You are the Chief Partnership Officer of Swissborg, a team of finance and technology experts dedicated to democratizing crypto wealth management. Swissborg is the largest Web 3 investment and marketing platform in Europe, with more than 800,000 verified users and over $2 billion in assets under management.

4:01 Your aim at Swissborg is to bring tradfy and defy together under one roof and provide true utility to communities all over the world. Alex, you are a massively popular figure in crypto, known for connecting companies and individuals with a shared vision of financial freedom and innovation. Looking ahead, you said this year could mark a turning point for cryptocurrency adoption, the growth of Defy and more inclusive global financial system. You ultimately believe 2025 will be the dawn of a new financial era where innovation and expansion redefine global wealth.

4:35 Alex, welcome back to London Real in Dubai.

4:38 Alex Fazel: Not just 1-2, but three Times Now. Brian, I’m over the moon to be back with you.

4:44 Brian Rose: Dude, it’s crazy. You were here one year ago almost exactly for basically the grand opening of our studio in Dubai. You were the 1st guest.

4:53 You’re the 1st guest this time and I want to go back and see what happens, changed in a year. I also want to take you back literally almost three years where we sat down in our London Real studio. It was my ten year anniversary at London Real and Bitcoin hit the all time high of that cycle that day. I think it was 69 and change that day and we were looking ahead. We were expecting 100,000 Bitcoin by Christmas, Lambos for everybody. And then all of a sudden we walked right into this bear market and we’re back.

5:25 We made it through, but I believe that we have tons of lessons that we can impart on anyone watching or listening. You’ve got crazy history going all the way back to the 16 and 17 ICO days when Swiss Board was launched. But now you’ve dragged me through a few cycles, and what we’re going to do today is talk about six really important points that can make you maximize this bull run and also keep you out of trouble. Because I think the biggest problem people have is the mistakes they make in this bull run. Bad decisions will cost you 10 times more than the profits you make on a good decision, I think. And so I’m super pumped to have you here. OK, so take me back to our last conversation one year ago. We’re here in Dubai.

6:08 We can start to feel that something’s changing, right? I think Bitcoin has started to rally. I don’t think the ETFs have been approved yet, but we knew something was happening. What has changed in one year?

6:19 Alex Fazel: That’s exactly it, Brian. So we literally predicted that the ETFs would happen within the same month of January, which actually ended up happening. And we also predicted that, you know, at the time, the total crypto market capitalization was $1.5 trillion. We saw it potentially going up to six trillion in the cycle and it’s already at 3 trillion dollars. So it went up two times already within that year. So and a lot of the other predictions that we made and some of the signals we called out were right on point. So just the duration of the cycle which we may cover today, that is looking a little bit weird and there’s some unusual factors because we focus really on crypto asset markets, but we didn’t focus on external factors like the global macro point of view.

7:01 So hopefully we can cover that today.

7:03 Brian Rose: Yeah. And today we’re going to be talking about all of those things and that we didn’t cover last time and there’s some amazing slides and graphs and we’re really going to go deep on a lot of these pieces. Like you said, the crypto, total crypto market cap has doubled in a year, but we don’t believe that this bull run is over yet. We had predicted last time that when it got to maybe 6 or 7 trillion, they maybe that was a time to start selling.

7:29 And we’re still a little ways away from that. And we’re going to talk about that today. So let’s jump in with point #1 And that is talking about your investor profile and your mindset. I think this is so important. I get this, ask this question all the time, Alex. And again, this is not financial advice. Do your own research.

7:48 Of course, make your own decisions. But you know, a lot of people say, oh, no, crypto’s too risky. I can’t get into it, but you need to step back and say what is my profile? What kind of capital am I comfortable investing? You know, I run a crypto and D5 Academy and the 25 year olds want to put much more of their portfolio into crypto than the 65 year olds.

8:08 And I think everyone has to ask themselves those questions. So what do you mean when it comes to this? We’ll throw some slides on the screen as well, but what is an investor profile?

8:17 Alex Fazel: So the investor profile, I think Brian, is just understanding oneself, you know, really how we behave because, you know, you can try to classify yourself and put yourself in boxes. But we’re so nuanced as human beings. And really there’s so many questions I think every investor needs to ask himself.

8:32 But today we cover at least the basics, the four or five basics that everyone should have a direct, clear answer to. And that’s probably good enough, more than at least the average investor.

8:41 Brian Rose: Yeah, and most people never think about this. They just start buying meme coins, and then they never really know why they’re doing it. How much?

8:48 And I think that’s why a lot of people get into trouble. Maybe they risk too much. Maybe they don’t know their limitations. And then so many people leave crypto thinking, oh, that that sucked, I lost money. That’s not for me. When in fact, if they just had some of these mindsets in place and had some training and some mentorship, that could get a ton out of this market.

9:07 So you’ve got on this slide we’re going to put up there kind of your risk return mindset. You’ve got a percent of total net worth that you’re going to put into crypto. If you’re a newbie, that’s at 0. If you’re a total crazy D Gen. you’re probably at 100%. You’ve got short term thinking versus long term thinking. And then you’ve got this financial IQ, which maybe you can tell us more about.

9:28 How do people start thinking about these things?

9:31 Alex Fazel: I think the first question on defining who we are as an investor, and you know this better than anyone, Brian, so you’ve been in finance your entire life, is that some people may think I’m conservative or I’m progressive, I’m aggressive, moderate, but it’s a lot more nuanced than that because it really depends on how much of your total net worth is being put into that play to fully understand how you behave. You could be extremely conservative, I could be extremely conservative. But we want to have fun on a meme coin, right? We find this cultish vibes fun.

10:00 We’re like, hey, I’ll just put you know, $1000 or $100, a $100 if that represents 0.001% of my total net worth. Am I an aggressive? No, I’m just having fun. So I think a lot of people rather than thinking am I conservative, moderate or aggressive as an investor are thinking about it wrong. And you really need to attach it to the percentage of our toll net worth for it to actually be accurate. And I don’t know what your thoughts. Are.

10:24 Brian Rose: Yeah, I love that. You know, Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street, who we both met and he’s been on my show four or five times, and he just wrote a book about investing. And, you know, for him, it’s like, you know, for conservative stuff, he’s telling people to go in the S&P 500. But even Jordan says, look, you can have a tiny little of capital on the side that you can have fun with. Put it on some penny stocks, put it on here, punt this, and you can enjoy the markets without putting 25% of your net worth into some risky assets. So I love this concept.

10:53 And I also love it because it gets you used to risky assets. You know, so many people look at memes, especially if you come from the normal financial markets and you say, what the heck is this? This literally means nothing. It’s worth nothing. And yet the market cap is, I don’t know what Dodge is. It’s over $10 billion, right?

11:11 So it there’s clearly value. Maybe you start kind of small with what you’re saying. So people should think about total percentage of capital and how they allocate that to risky assets as opposed to just some general sense is what you’re saying exactly? OK, all right, love that. And that all goes down to kind of your percent of total net worth, your risk return mindset. This investor versus trader is another one. And I guess that’s about timing.

11:36 Can you speak a bit on that?

11:38 Alex Fazel: Yeah. So I guess once we understand who we are, how we behave relative to net worth, that we have disposable income or investable income, then I think really an important step is to understand the different time frames. Obviously if you go into really short time frames or more of a trader, some people will trade at the minute time frame on the charts. That’s something that is too much stress for me. And I know as myself, as a human being, I can’t take that already swing trading, you know, if I want to swing trade, like rebalance My Portfolio over 3-4 months, it’s already stressful for me.

12:09 So I realized that me as a human being, I just the trading gig, I just can’t do it. I don’t have the guts for it or maybe the stamina. So I’d rather see myself as someone who likes to think at least six months before taking any type of profits or reallocating my assets. And for my total net worth, obviously have goals based on years. You know, how much money do I want to make within the end of the year, within three years, within five years, within 10 years?

12:34 What is my ultimate definition of financial freedom? You know, how much money do I really need to be happy? I don’t need billions of dollars. I don’t even need hundreds of millions of dollars. I just know what I need to be happy and be financially free.

12:46 So I think, you know, really and and believe it or not, Brian, if I ask someone, what is your goal in this market to most people like give me a number, a tangible, you know, dollar number or give me a percentage in terms of ROI. Most people don’t know. So these are questions that seem easy, but are that are quite difficult that demand lots of research and reflection, I think.

13:06 Brian Rose: Yeah, if you don’t have a specific goal, I think they call them SMART goals, which is specific, measurable, realistic, and time sensitive. So I want to make $5,000,000 in this crypto bull run. OK, Now that might seem silly to people, that might seem unrealistic to people, that might seem low to some people that are listening to this, but it’s important because now you know exactly what you have to do. OK, How you going to make that 5? You’re not going to make that putting everything in Bitcoin. You’re just not.

13:33 The risk profile isn’t there unless you, you have, you know, a lot of money that you want to put at risk. So that means you have to start changing your risk profile. And we’ll talk about going into lower caps later and stuff like that. But I agree with you, everybody listening right now should come up with a number. What do you want to make over the next 12 months, maybe 20-4 months, maybe 36 months, and then you can start acting according. So I love that.

13:56 The second part is most people I think and get into this market and they trade too often. And let’s be honest, everybody out there from the news websites to the centralized exchanges, which we’ll talk about later to a bunch of other players, they win when you trade is that great movie called Casino with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. And he says, what’s the what do they do with the casino? Keep them playing, keep them playing. Because in the end the house takes everything. And there’s that famous scene where there was that High Roller from Japan who comes in and he makes 10 million and he’s about to leave and they put him on the jet and they’re like, I’m sorry, the jet engine doesn’t work.

14:35 We’ll put comp you at the hotel, you don’t have to play. And of course, he has to go back to the tables and they take all of his money from him. And so I would say be careful when you see a website that comes out and and gets you into FOMO, fear of missing out or FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt and getting you to buy and sell things because ultimately in exchange makes money on the back of that most people should probably hold. I’ll say one other thing.

14:58 I had Dan Moorhead on our show London Real. He runs Pantera, which is one of the big VCs. They were buying Bitcoin for their fun back in 13, I think. And he said, Brian, we’ve got 45 full time day traders managing some of our, you know, spot spot funds. And he said to me, Brian, we barely know what the hell we’re doing. So how do you expect an individual to try to be able to stay on top of these markets?

15:23 I believe it’s impossible and I believe you’ll go crazy trying to do it. Exactly. I’ll say one more thing. People think that a trader is one, a person that sits at their eight screens all day long and looks at the screens. No, a good trader doesn’t look at screens all day long because that’s a waste of time.

15:38 A good trader does their research, puts on their positions, and then go works on the rest of their life. Be a good parent, get a good physical practice, research the next thing, build your business. But you don’t need to be looking at a screen all day long. So that’s my take on it.

15:52 Alex Fazel: It makes, it’s such good. It’s really, really valuable advice and a lot of the best traders that I know, and I know a guy who’s actually trending on finance, he’s the top trader on finance right now. Chris M Crypto.

16:03 Brian Rose: No one is up there too, Yeah. M Crypto, he’s gonna he’s gonna be the great trader as well yeah, he was the number one trader I think on his ripple trade he did a few weeks ago or something so yeah. And they’re really tight on their goals. You know, as much as you know, you, you’re feeling FOMO or FUD when there’s a goal, there’s a goal. You know, one of my friends who was the head of derivatives at Morgan Stanley back in the 90s and he, he’s great career, he’s incredible fortune.

16:28 He always told me, Alex, even if we knew that the stock would go up in price or whatever product they were trading, the goal is the goal you execute at that at particular goal. That’s what the guideline is and that’s what it is. What’s it what it is?

16:42 Alex Fazel: I think it’s all about goals. And one thing about financial freedom, Brian, I think which is really important when it comes to setting our life goals, our life financial goals is I always tell someone that imagine through low risk interest, you can earn between 3:00 to 5% a year on the capital that you have there.

17:00 If you want to take slightly more risk, maybe there’s some, you know, products that can in real estate that can real 7 to 9%. So if you took all your capital or a good percent of your capital and you put it and you would earn 4 to 5% a year, or if you’re a little bit lucky and you have good connections, maybe 6 to 9 percent a year. How much capital would you need to get that annual income that you want to just live your life freely, you know, and do whatever the heck you want? And for example, a good friend of mine said I want $20 million because I know if I put $20 million and let’s say I put 7080% of that, let’s put $15 million in a, in a bond, for example, that can generate 4 to 5% currently on the markets. That’s a lot of money, right?

17:41 That’s more than $1,000,000 or roughly $1,000,000 a year doing nothing, let alone the money that you’re reinvesting that’s making money elsewhere. So $1,000,000, we’re talking about $150,000 a month. I mean, that’s more than enough for me. But it the most important part is, as you said, is having those goals and sticking to them, I’d say.

18:01 Brian Rose: Yeah, very much so.

18:02 And going back to your earlier point, I had a student one time in my class and he said something really good. He said I judge the success of a trade not by how much money it makes, but if I stuck to my rules, yes. And so again, you look at MMM crypto, when he puts a big trade on, he’s got the stop loss in and he’s got already probably his profit taking level already locked in. So these these people that are doing this, they put that in and they don’t, then they don’t make emotional decisions down the line and they’re protected on the downside.

18:33 And that way they can put the trade on and literally set it and forget it. They can move on. You’re not thinking about it at 4:00 in the morning, You’re not checking crypto on your phone. I think checking crypto prices on your phone is a bad sign that you’re not doing your risk management correctly. And so I just say these are great points. And also, yeah, find out what you need. How much do you need and then kind of me decide accordingly. Do we cover pretty much everything financial IQ? You kind of talked about that?

18:59 Alex Fazel: This is, as you can see the slide says intelligent investor. I’m going to just say that my title is the dumbest title possible because I don’t believe in the intelligent investor. Brian, after really looking into this and for example, when I look at the value investor like Warren Buffett, how well he’s performed from the 50s all the way to 90s. But then you look at his performance in the 21st century, he’s actually underperformed S&P 500. He’s missed out on a lot of huge tech stocks, including the AI stocks, including some of the Fang stocks where he came in way too late. He got Apple right.

19:33 Late though. But late though, right? And Microsoft, I mean, he was literally friends with Bill Gates. So I mean, you cannot forgive that, you know, and and still missed out on the Microsoft stocks. And so he missed all crypto as well. And he missed all crypto big point, the best performing asset of all time.

19:48 So what I realized, Brian, you know, the whole value investor, intelligent investor, Benjamin ground book. I think the best term, and correct me if I’m wrong, is not intelligent, but the adaptable investor, if that makes sense. Like I feel like adapting to investments, to trends in life is going to bring you way further. You know, when you look at the longest living creature on the planet, like the cockroaches or the worms, are they the strongest, the survival of the fittest?

20:15 No. Are they the most intelligent? No. But are they adaptable? You know, can if there is a meteorite or something that hits, you know, our planet, would they would they manage to hide somewhere or would would some animals go sea creatures go under the water and avoid that? An explosion to survive at the end of the day, adaptability I think is key.

20:33 And even when you look at Fortune 500 top criteria, like if you look at all the CEOs, they will say that they’re not necessarily the smartest person in the room. Obviously, Elon Musk is he’s one-of-a-kind type human being, but most of them are also have the trade of adaptability because they can pivot where the market needs, where, where there’s demand for specific product or service. So, I don’t know, call me crazy, Brian, but I feel like adaptability is maybe a better word than the intelligent investor, the adaptable investor.

21:02 And especially so in Web 3 and crypto markets because I mean, look at this cycle, we’ve got all these new narratives we never saw coming. We never saw this mean coin super cycle. We never saw these other aspects like Desai and we never saw AI coming or let alone AI agents, which is super hot now. We didn’t see so many things happening here. All these rise of all these L ones, you know, I thought we’d get less L ones, another’s brand new ones. There’s so many things happening and if you can’t adapt to that and you’re stuck in the old days, you’re going to miss all these trends.

21:32 Brian Rose: And I’ll say something about Warren Buffett. You know, I’m good friends with Dan Tapiero, who runs a couple big multi billion dollar funds, one’s called 10 T, one’s called 1 RT. We’re actually investors in their Full disclosure with our our investment club and ventures arm. But Dan said, he said, look, Brian, if you give me an hour with pretty much anyone in the world, he’s like, I can pretty much orange peel them. I can walk it through. But he says there’s one factor that makes the difference of my success.

21:57 And he said it’s not their education level, it’s not their wealth, it’s not what country they came from, it’s their age. And he said if you’re under 50I can pretty much get you to get this. If you’re over 50, I’m going to struggle. Now take that up to 80 plus like Warren or my dad, and you can talk to your blue in the face and they’re going to look at you like you’re crazy. Now, I talked to my son Damon couple days ago.

22:22 He’s seven years old. He’s all over Roblox. He owns more digital assets than, you know, probably Dan Tapiero does, right? And when I tell him that he can convert his digital assets to real money via crypto in the marketplace, he’s like, yeah, duh, dad, of course I can. That makes sense. So he gets it because they grew up with digital assets. They grew up with digital technology, but Warren didn’t, and I think that’s why he missed those edgy trends like the Internet and you know, a lot of these other plays, including crypto, and he still thinks bitcoins rat poison. And I hate to say this, but I’m going to say it. A lot of those people, they’re going to take those views and they need to take them to the grave with them because they’re just not going to change.

23:01 Alex Fazel: I don’t think you can teach really old dogs new tricks because they’re not adaptable like you said. Now look, Warren obviously did a lot of things right and he probably didn’t put money into bad trends, but he missed some things as well. So I would say I agree with you and. Sometimes Brian being too intelligent is actually dumb, yeah.

23:21 Brian Rose: That’s funny. I saw some comment as somebody on Twitter and they said, you know what?

23:26 In this cycle, your newbie friends are going to make more money than you 100% because these people haven’t been burned. And they’re going to go in with probably maybe too much risk appetite for their own portfolio. But in the short run, they’re going to make money. And let me just remind you, in the bull market, everybody’s a genius. Everybody keeps talking about the one main coin to make money.

23:45 They conveniently forget about the 10 that lost money because our brains do that and wait until the market starts to dip. You’ll really see who has their clothes on when the water goes out. And so, yeah, get ready for all the greatest traders in the world coming out this year. It just happened to buy some stuff. But let’s just see what happens when the water goes out and the markets go down. Who’s left holding the money?

24:06 And that’s the aim here. How much cash do you have in the register at the end of the cycle? I don’t care if you made a 20X, if you gave back 19X of that, that’s not helpful. So that’s kind of what we’re talking about today. Exactly.

24:18 OK, let’s talk about point #2 And that’s the site, the start of this super cycle. We’re going to stick a graph on the screen that talks about maybe the hangover that we had from 2022. Can you walk me through this concept? Because again, when you and I sat down in 21 in September, October, it was Bitcoin all time high. Then we went through what people in crypto said was probably the most brutal winter they’ve ever seen. Talk to me about that.

24:45 What happened? How did you feel going through that?

24:48 Alex Fazel: Yeah, absolutely. And and I know it’s a bit of a bit of a bold statement, you know, as you said earlier as we were chatting before the show, is it wasn’t it before the Super, the Super cycle or isn’t the next one the Super cycle? But the way I would define it is, is really by measuring global liquidity and global liquidity can be broken down into two core segments, institutional capital and retail capital.

25:10 And I think as you know, obviously with ETF and Ethereum ETF as well, not just a Bitcoin one. And they’re predicting other ETFs, institutional interest is definitely starting to come here. And they’re some of the greatest investors of all time. You know, the CEO BlackRock, which as you know is the biggest financial institution in the world. They own literally everything. They are super bullish Bitcoin and obviously they want to sell. There’s a some sort of incentive as well to do so to share this positive sentiment.

25:37 But to me, it’s the start of the Super cycle because we have institutional capital and retail capital now. The issue that I’m seeing now, Brian, is that some of the retail capital, especially if we’re talking about the current people who are already orange pilled, already love the markets. We lost a lot of money in the 2022 to 2023 era. We had so many black Swans that that’s already kind of distorting the duration of the current cycle, which remember, like our three signals from the previous show, we talked about the average duration of a bear cycle versus, you know, and we had The Four Seasons.

26:12 Now it’s complicated because we’ve compromised. We’re kind of like walking on one leg, you know, limping. We’ve been injured by all the black Swans and malpractices of the previous cycle. So I, I just really define the Super cycle as that intersection of institutional capital coming in, retail capital coming in and people not just there for Bitcoin are really understanding all the value accrual created by the Daps in the entire. Ecosystem, OK.

26:38 Brian Rose: And so these big Black Swan events, like we saw FTX dropping 11 billion, we got Terra Luna dropping 40, we got Mashinsky dropping 58 billion, you got another 7 billion in scams and rugs, and Voyager dropping another four. That’s 100 billion gone. That burned retail so bad that it’s taking a while to recover, is what you’re saying. And so just to define super cycle, it’s a cycle that lasts longer than we would expect. And I guess your point is, is that retail got so bruised up and they took so much pain and so much maybe paranoia that they’re slower to come back, is what you’re saying? OK.

27:17 Alex Fazel: And that’s why maybe the duration kind of metric signal will not be as accurate as it may have been in the past. I mean, obviously we still have the four year cycle, but how long will the summer last is is a very difficult question to answer.

27:29 Brian Rose: It’s. Interesting because every time we start in a bull cycle, people they want to believe there’s a super cycle, right? Because the longer it lasts, the better.

27:37 So you always have to kind of check yourself, you know.

27:40 Alex Fazel: But as the instruments get bigger and, and, and broader and there’s institutional liquidity, we would expect these to widen out. And we are going to talk about that a little bit later as well about how we think these cycles will widen out global liquidity and crypto liquidity.

27:54 Brian Rose: This is something that’s interesting to talk about. I don’t think we went this macro last time.

27:59 What do you see there and, and, and what do you want to talk about when it comes to, you know, interest rates and all these things happening around?

28:07 Alex Fazel: And I’m going to need your help on this one, Brian, because you actually lived it. You saw it before your eyes. So you’re not just like me reading, you know, different papers online. So I, I think as you’ve actually experienced that you’ll have many comments. But what I realized is you know, from the justbeforethe.com bubble when they start introducing monetary policy, when they started released controlling the market with the FOMC meetings with the Federated interest rate. Because there is a very clear graph which says that, you know, before the.com bubble era, like the interest rates didn’t have such a significant impact on riskier assets like the stock market.

28:43 But once they introduce monetary policy where they had a bit, a bit of a switch where they can control the interest rates more than all of a sudden that concept of risk on risk off markets appeared right. And so ever since that pre.com bubble era, I would say early 2000s with Maddie Greenspan and all the guys that you know are working for the Fed, they realize that they can control this machine, this big financial machine a little more. And all of the investor sentiment would literally depend on this little switch that they have. And ever since that right for the past 20 years, Brian, you can see how important these meetings are on on the sentiment of the market and how we see the future of the economy and. Yeah.

29:27 Brian Rose: And it’s funny because people that are new to the markets, they come in and they say, why are we all walking around on egg shells and tuning in to see some, you know, old white dudes come on a microphone that are employed by the US government. And we’re trying to read the tea leaves by the vocabulary they use to see if they think the economy is going too fast or when they’re going to raise or lower rates. As we listen to Jerome Powell and people are saying, why is this even exist? In fact, Elon has even said we should abolish the, the Fed and, you know, allow the the president to make those decisions.

30:02 Now, I don’t know if that’s the best thing, but the point is, is that most people that they’re shocked that this really controls the world. Now, when I got to Wall Street in 1993, I just come from MITI, got an engineering degree. I took some finance courses. I literally put all my stuff in a van. I drove into the Manhattan.

30:18 It was crazy and scary and big. I studied for a month and got my Series 7 exam. My Series 63, I went down 33rd floor of Bankers Trust Plaza and it was a trading floor the size of a football field. About 400 crazy alpha males and females screaming their heads off, each making like 5 to $10 million a year and they would run you over if you got in their way. Like literally physically everything. And they all said, look, the thing that matters the most is the federal funds rate.

30:45 That’s what the Fed issues money at for overnight loans. And at the time, it had not been raised for a while and the good times were rolling. And they explained, Brian, when they raise the rates, it makes borrowing money more expensive, which means companies won’t borrow it. If you lower the rates, it makes it cheap, which means they borrow it and they spend it and everybody grows. It’s that simple. So the lower the rates are, the cheaper the capital. It means you can go finance a new restaurant very cheaply. You can go buy some new cars cheaply. You can start a business when things are really expensive. It’s hard to do that.

31:19 And so by dialing this up and down, it used to be the only way they control the economy when I started. And so we would wait for that rate. And I’ll still never forget, I think it was February in 94, they jacked the rates up and nobody saw it coming. It went from 3% to 3 and 1/4. And the whole market freaked out, bottomed out, sold out. Everybody lost a ton of money.

31:41 And they ended up raising those rates, I think all the way to 6%. And it freaked the markets out. But what you said was correct. Within the next 10 years and 15 years, that wasn’t good enough anymore to control the economy. Now they start changing long term rates and medium rates by buying back bonds with the cash they had.

31:59 And that’s known as quantitative easing. And now you saw that during COVID time, not only do they raise the lower front rates, they now will buy back assets by printing money. And now they can really control what we call the entire yield curve. And that means they can really play with the economy more and that is now controlling risky assets more. And now since crypto is getting so big, it’s starting to affect our crypto markets. Whereas before they were uncorrelated, now they are. Exactly, exactly.

32:29 Alex Fazel: And I think your analogy with kind of like that toning up, toning down is the best analogy. It’s almost like when they tone down, like the party is on, right? Like everyone’s dancing, having a great time. As soon as they bring back up the interest rate hikes, it’s like, oh, the party’s over, let’s go back home.

32:44 Brian Rose: Yeah. So it’s literally that switch.

32:46 It’s like a magic switch. And, and their remit is literally two things. It is to keep inflation at a target of 2% and to keep unemployment low. That’s all they say they look at. And by the way, how do they calculate inflation?

33:01 I mean, a lot of people correctly say their calculations are terrible because they don’t put rent in there. They don’t put housing prices. They pick certain goods. And if you look at a place like Venezuela or some other countries, the government literally can play with that index. And if you think the US government is above that, like, you’re kidding yourself.

33:18 And so some people say that index is nonsense. It doesn’t really reflect the prices people pay. And the only problem is Trump gets in and he says lower rates because every president wants to ride a growing economy. And so I think handing it to the president is a bad idea because any president will just drop rates to 0. And so I think it’s important to have, you know, someone like Jerome Powell with A5 year cycle that’s independent of politics.

33:42 But I think the whole thing needs revisiting. And so you’ve got a great graph here where you’re literally showing those drops in rates and those raises and rates. And you’ve got these little smiley faces that say game over. You know every time the Fed started raising rates is when we saw crypto bear markets happen at least the last two cycles, right?

34:04 Alex Fazel: That’s exactly what I wanted to like display on that little graph.

34:08 Game over means as soon as the investor sentiment started going down because they saw that interest rates would go up eventually based on this this machine of this Fed that we have, then all of a sudden the markets would crash. And you can see here like usually the market tends to peak when interest rates are below 2% because as you said, you can borrow money easily you can trade you can use it for leverage brings all that liquidity going back to the previous side like this machine is literally almost like, you know, once they bring it down, it’s like water that liquidity just boom just comes into the markets and people have a higher risk appetite. So that’s why this whole risk on risk off market came and there’s, there’s too much power, as you said, like coming from the Fed at this point.

34:53 And I think right now that the issue is the reason why markets are kind of sluggish these days is because you know, originally as you, as you said, the interest rates, they try to aim for 2%. But now some of the big consulting firms are saying that, you know, we would have anywhere between 3.75% to four, 4% of interest rates, you know, next year. So the sentiment is not so good. And you saw the inflation numbers are not really, they’re a bit stubborn. So people are kind of in this, this midst of how, where, where are we going?

35:22 And it’s very uncertain.

35:23 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah. So if you see the very end of that graph on the screen, you can see they recently cut interest rates by 50 basis points, which means 1/2 of a percent. I think that was like in November and then they recently in December cut them by 25 basis points. Now at one point we expected 3 or 4 cuts at the end of last year, but they didn’t do that because inflation still looks like an issue.

35:46 And of course, the thinking is if you drop rates too low, everything grows too fast and then inflation goes up, which means your money becomes useless. And so now they’re being careful. The other thing to look at is the 10 year yield rate is now at, at, at a high, high level. And that’s telling the world that, uh oh, it looks like we might have some inflation and some growth that might be out of control, even though Trump is saying, I’m going to drill, baby drill.

36:09 And he thinks that cheap energy is going to pull all prices down. And I think he’s probably right. And so, you know, he doesn’t want to see the economy slow. He wants to see rates drop, but it’s not obvious they’re going to be taking rates down a lot this year. And I think we got that news yesterday.

36:25 In fact, you know, Bitcoin came off from like one O 2 down to 9796. Think he got freaked out a little bit. So these things are real and they’re correlated. That being said, I’m very bullish and I’m very bullish on this new administration. And I’m surprised, honestly, that we’re not even higher because I think Trump is going to slash and burn.

36:44 You got a president that is not going to stick to any precedents. He’s going to drill, baby, drill. He’s already courting investments. So Masayoshi Son of SoftBank already committed to 100 billion, maybe 200 billion. There was an announcement yesterday at Mar a Lago, the developer Demac, who is massive here in Dubai, maybe it started in Dubai. You see buildings all over the place. He just pledged to invest $20 billion into American luxury property and data centers.

37:10 Literally is there at Mar a Lago with Trump. You got a businessman in the charge and now he’s bringing literally money into the states. He’s going to cut taxes, he’s going to drop energy prices, he’s going to cut regulation. You got Vivek Ramaswami and Elon in there at the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE. Not financial advice for that meme coin, but Elon loves having fun. And you got so many things that I think will grow the market and keep inflation low.

37:36 And you’ve got a massively pro cryptocurrency administration. So Trump himself and his brother, his sons, Don and Eric, they have their own B5 protocol called World Liberty Financial. OK, Now look, it might not be significant yet, but the point is they’re literally in the markets. His head of commerce is Howard Lutnick, who runs BCG, which used to be Cantor Fitzgerald, which was a Hughes broker when I was doing business. He their company does all the custody for Tether, the biggest stable coin in the world and Bobby Kennedy, when he’s not making America healthy again, converted all of his savings into Bitcoin two years ago when he got orange build by the community.

38:14 So it’s not a couple promises by a president to get votes. You’ve got almost everyone in his administration. Pro crypto. Gary Gensler is going to resign in 12 days time. Beautiful.

38:26 We’ve got a brand new SCC chair coming in who’s pro crypto. So I’m surprised the market doesn’t recognize that and I’m still bullish. I think we’ll get more cuts next year, so we’ll see.

38:36 Alex Fazel: Yeah, absolutely. I I think these targets that we have on this slide just to follow up on your point, Brian, like Donald Trump himself and his administration can change the name of the game.

38:46 That’s the thing. He has a lot of weight on his shoulders, but you know how much he loves Mark stock market rallies and it’s it’s a huge one of his validation biases, right, that he’s going to want to re re portray again and again. He really cares about finance. He’s a he’s a financier himself. So.

39:02 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s one of his metrics, and it was a great phrase that says what gets measured gets improved. You know, if you have a metric you track with your business, be careful because you’ll do everything to get that metric. And Donald Trump watches the stock market, and when it does well, he thinks he does well.

39:19 And that’s a great sign, I think, you know, for everybody. Here And as you said, if he can drop inflation, which will then impact the interest rates as well, then that’s that’s where we get really excited, all of us together, yeah. Very much so. Talking about the dollar, because, you know, we have some graphs up here that talk about the US dollar index and Bitcoin versus the US dollar. You know, a lot of people have probably never looked at these graphs before. A lot of people don’t even look at the dollar and the strength of this one currency, I think, versus other currencies. Why did you include this?

39:49 Why is this important?

39:50 Alex Fazel: So I got to be really honest, it doesn’t come from me. It comes from some really smart macro traders and then just economists that are way understand this topic way better than I do but. There’s a very clear correlation to crypto markets and the strength of the dollar. As the dollar goes up.

40:06 Obviously there are pros and cons to everything. You know, like when you’re traveling as an American U.S. dollar overseas, you have much way more purchase power. When you’re importing goods, it’s good, but when you’re exporting, it’s really, really bad for the economy. And I think what’s the issue right now is that we have a strong dollar, but we also have strong inflation so that we don’t necessarily have the purchase power of the US dollar.

40:28 And so that it’s a it’s an issue because if the dollar is too strong, it’s probably means that there’s a lot of demand and people who are a bit bearish about the cycle or uncertain, say the least. And also maybe there’s less power from all the other countries, from all the other Fiat currencies that go against dollars, Swiss franc, euro, British pound. So ideally, and like Trump has mentioned this, in 2017, he wanted to weaken the dollar because he knew that the global economy and this machine would kick off as he again, and it’s very good for, you know, risk on, you know, assets or markets, so.

41:00 Brian Rose: Yeah. So, but we believe the stronger dollar will pull Bitcoin higher

41:04 Alex Fazel: Exactly. And then also it is denominated in dollars as well. And so that’s something to watch. We want to watch this metric. Yeah, exactly.

41:12 So hopefully, you know, Trump can kind of like retrace the the part, the dollars is a little bit of power and then you know that money goes back into the risk on assets. So you can see here that the inverse or the negative correlation is really interesting. As soon as the dollar peaks, you know Bitcoin price like like lowers and and vice versa. When Bitcoin price goes up, the dollar tends to be weaker all. Right.

41:32 Brian Rose: We’re going to keep an eye out for that. It’s definitely going to be fascinating to watch China this year. China’s really struggled the last couple years and most people were sure that by 20-30 China’s economy would beat the US And now people are saying that won’t even happen until 2050 or 2070. I think we really started to see some of the holes in their game with the real estate market. And you know, just quickly, you know, you can talk about socialism versus capitalism all day and you can talk about the ethics and the morals.

42:01 But the best argument for capitalism is it’s the fastest feedback loop of information possible. What does that mean? It means back in the day and in Russia in the 70s and 80s, they might say, OK, we need 4 power plants, let’s go build them and let’s hope that works. In America. They only build them if there’s a demand for the power and there’s no demand, they go bankrupt. And so you get this information feedback loop in real time. You know, you got 1 hot dog stand, it does well, you make 5 more.

42:29 If no one’s eating hot dogs, they all go out of business and the capital gets allocated efficiently. And I think with China’s big boom in the last 10 years or 20 years, it wasn’t being allocated efficiently. Now, they were doing a lot of things right and they got a big population and a lot of promise. But I think unfortunately, it gave them the wrong feedback loops. And we know they probably overbuilt in real estate.

42:51 They over invested and they were never getting signals that that was the right thing to do. So we’ll see what happens, but it’s just very bullish on the US, which should be bullish for the dollar as well. So there you go. It’s Trump’s. I just need Trump to stay alive.

43:06 All right, that’s all. Another episode. Let’s talk about new and renewed bubbles. You and I were on the phone a few weeks ago and you were dropping this IP on me, and I’d never heard it but talked about before. You said, Brian, that these new bubbles and those renewed bubbles, and they’re very different and people need to understand or they’re not going to know how to invest. And I know you’ve got things down here like game Phi and D Phi RWAAI Phi.

43:31 What do you mean when you talk about these bubbles?

43:34 Alex Fazel: Yeah, it’s it. Thanks so much for the question. And it’s something that I put a lot of thought to it and I realized that, well, first of all, the the pros of bubbles is that it’s getting people to compete to create new technology and solve new problems, right? So I was looking at the.com bubble and obviously we have some of the Fang stocks for those who are watching, you know, who came out like, you know, some of the big ones, a big tech like Amazon and Netflix came a little bit later, but Google and and So what I realized is, you know, bubble has a bit of a negative connotation to it when it’s actually a huge pro.

44:05 I mean, that’s how we advance the civilization. That’s how we build new tech. And what I realized is there are trends that just they’re one off wonders and they fade out. So if there is a bubble that’s created and you never see it come back, and that’s probably it was just the wrong choice. They were building the wrong tech.

44:24 But what happens when a bubble comes and goes and then reforms? So the new that renews and all of a sudden then there must be something in there because there’s demand. Maybe we haven’t found a formula yet, but eventually when it will come, it will come really big. And so I’m really bullish on renewed bubbles, like the renewed bubbles. I don’t know how many cycles it may take.

44:46 We had a beginning of AI crypto stuff with Singularity net. You had a lot of these founders on your show in the previous cycle. So AI Fi is a reforming bubble. So it’s something that’s coming back. And we’re also realizing on the web two side, there’s some malpractices, you know, some shady unethical practices and web 2 AI. So that is exciting to me and it’s not the first time it came. There’s demand again.

45:09 It’s starting to grow again. So how many times will it take for a renewed bubble to really set itself as a major disruptive asset class? I cannot give you the answer to that, but I’m much more excited and putting money in bubbles that are renewed, like the meme coins thing. Many, many people say it’s a bubble. No, Dogecoin is old man, the 4th, 3rd or 4th oldest cryptocurrency. So the meme thing has already existed, but now the new bubble that’s shaping is maybe an IP, It has something new to it, has different culture to it, and maybe it’s going to connect to some sort of IP, whether it be a cartoon, whether it be the goods that the Pengu guys have, like toys. So I really like renewed bubbles. And my only thing to say here, and I don’t know if you, you agree with me here, Brian, but if there’s a new bubble, get in and out, enjoy the upside.

46:01 But it’s very unlikely that in the very first bubble that you get it right. I think there’s a really high failure rate. So just like you know, everyone, you know, 98% will become irrelevant, maybe a few winners. But for example, D side, which is trying to create this scientific data go against pharmaceutical companies. This is a new shaped bubble, and I would be very careful because I think it’s going to take a lot, a long time for us to be able to democratize data from the hospitals, which are very conservative, which is a very broken system when it comes to transparency to the farming school industry.

46:36 That to me is a far fetch. If you want to play it, make some money. Yeah, but probably you want to get out.

46:42 Alex Fazel: I don’t know what to think about.

46:43 Brian Rose: You know I’m going down memory lane right now. So in 1999, I was in London and my buddy from MIT called me up and said, Brian, I want you to meet someone. And I was like, well, who?

46:53 He’s like, I want you to fly to New York tomorrow. I’m going to introduce you to a guy. And we went out to lunch. I’ll never forget it was like one of those power lunches at The Four Seasons in Midtown. And I met a guy named Jimmy Finkelstein and he was starting a company called luxuryfinder.com.

47:06 And my buddy convinced him that me as a 27 year old was his new CFO. And I said yes, I signed the papers and I moved from London like the next day. I left all my furniture there. I didn’t care. And I was part of thefirst.com boom, all right?

47:22 And we were going to sell jets on the Internet right when books were barely being sold on the Internet. And it was all luxury goods. And it was crazy. We raised $15 million from all the huge players in the Hamptons, Leon Black and all these famous people, all with their big houses in the Hamptons. And I rode that bubble like a Mad Men for like 9 months.

47:41 My, all my buddies in New York hated me because they were all in finance. And I was like, bro, finance is old news. This is where the money is. And I used to say this is Columbus and the New world. What was his ROI? And they would just roll their eyes. And then what happened in March, 28th March 2000, the bubble burst and the NASDAQ crashed.

48:00 And I’m telling you three months after that, if you said the word tech in New York, somebody was going to punch you in the face. It was so bad. And I thought it would never recover. And I remember back then Google hadn’t even been created yet. There was like 17 search engines, Northern Lights and AOL was still big and all these others. And I, I got so damaged in that that I thought, man, tech is never going to come back.

48:24 But what happened? It came back with a vengeance. And Google was building in that bear market. And pretty soon it came out and all these other came companies came out on Amazon. And that was the second, the the reemergence of that bubble and that ended up dominating.

48:37 And look at the S&P 500. It’s all tech and it’s all, you know, Internet companies for a while. So I’ve been through what you’re talking about and I agree with you. That first bubble, you have to be very careful, very careful. And look, you can make money, but you want to get out because it’s going to correct.

48:55 And some things will die forever, like the tulips, you know, in Holland was a one off thing where people were paying, you know, I think a year’s salary for a Tulip in in Holland. And there was leverage and all this stuff going on that never happened again. But all the tech stuff did happen and meme coins and a bunch of others will re emerge. So I think this is interesting. Are you looking at things like Defy?

49:18 Are you looking at things like Gamefy? Are you looking at things like RWA that already have been here for one cycle?

49:24 Alex Fazel: Exactly. Yeah, So and I think the next slide at the three sectors that I’m the most interested in is AI Fi obviously, because I think there’s something really, really big, the crossroads between crypto and blockchain in general, it just makes so much sense. And then number 2D Fi, as you said, there’s a new bubble of restaking, No liquid staking became restaking. And there’s some other asset classes that are really interesting that I think, you know, eventually you’re, you’re going to be able to have like on chain stocks or equity that’s going to have more composability and use cases than any stock market out there.

49:59 So it’s going to bring utility to stocks. So let’s say, for example, like D5, what it can do for the future of finances. Let’s let’s imagine Amazon doesn’t pay dividends for your stock, right? Well, when you have it on chain and you’re giving, you’re doing LP ING for the Amazon synthetic stock with USDC, if you strategize it well, you could be making interest on your Amazon stock. So these are things, this composability of D Phi is something that the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones or or New York Stock Exchange cannot do.

50:28 So I think that D Phi is just it’s still in the infancy stages. If RW perhaps is a bubble of that D Phi bubble, it’s kind of related. And RWA, it’s not the first cycle, you know, we had we have many money, money make up. Oh, sorry, money markets that that have come there. We have, you know, some of the Avenue Protocol and we have some of, you know, the stable coins and stuff like that. So, yeah, I really think, Brian, that this is something to capitalize on, you know, if you you make a good strategy around it.

51:00 Brian Rose: Yeah, I agree with those sectors. You know, Michael Saylor is famous for recently saying, you know, you have an Apple phone. How come you can’t hold a share of Apple stock on your phone? And you know, his concept is why not get all these assets on the blockchain and then you can have it literally on your phone. Like you can have a Bitcoin on your phone and you can have custody of it and you can trade it 24/7. And I also just had Anthony Pompliano on my show. I really like Pomp.

51:24 He’s a really interesting guy. And when Bitcoin jumps over the weekend, he always posts and says Wall Street right now is kicking themselves because Bitcoin is doing tons of volume. It’s showing the world where the markets are. And they’re waiting till Monday morning at 9:30 before they can trade anything. And he’s always poking fun at these old school, you know, financial markets and Defy can potentially change all that. So I love that AI Fi is really interesting to me. We have our own, you know, ventures portfolio. We’ve invested just over $20 million now into about 100 protocols.

51:57 And we get pitched all the time with CE OS. We get to see a pretty much 6 live pitches a week. And we had an AI Fi company in last last night, actually Monday night. And, you know, they are very aware that we don’t want massive centralized powers controlling our AI. Now, look, a lot of people are smart enough to be suspicious of big tech, all right?

52:18 And we had a few run insurance back in 2020 by being censored by big tech, including Facebook and YouTube and all of the social media platforms. Mark Zuckerberg came out yesterday and said they’re going to stop censoring people and start using this Community Notes format that Elon made famous on X, where you’ve got really independent people that actually flag things and they don’t pull content down and censor content. But they did used to do it, and I’m very suspicious of them.

52:46 Just why? I’m suspicious of Sam Altman holding all of the AI models in his back pocket. That’s not open source. I’m suspicious of Google Gemini. I’m suspicious of Anthropic run by Amazon and invested.

52:59 I would so much rather have that on the blockchain where I control my information, where I can see the provenance of the information going into my AI results, typing into the Google Gemini. What, what do you think of this person? You’re going to get back out a censored version. And we’ve already seen some of the mistakes they make. And if you believe everything you, you read on Wikipedia, you better check yourself.

53:23 And so I’m really bullish on AI Phi, because AI is going to change the lives of ourselves and our children 100 times more than a search engine or a YouTube world. And we’re doing some heavy investing in that sector. And I’m really bullish. Look, there’s going to be plays that aren’t right. There’s going to be a bunch of other plays that are great. So I’m excited about that reemergence.

54:39 Alex Fazel: Yeah, it’s really cool. This concept is is quite a simple concept and and as you said, you know, it’s really important to identify these things. Game of Fire is probably going to come back as well. We didn’t get it right in the previous cycle, but that makes us think and that’s what’s really important.

54:53 Brian Rose: Yeah, I mean with gaming, it’s just, I think people don’t understand how big that industry is.

54:57 It’s bigger than all of Hollywood, all of music, all of music, all of television, I think all of sports combined. Gaming is bigger and people hear that they’re like what? And we’re actually about to invest in like an E sports company on Web 3 blockchain. And he said, Brian, we had three times the number of viewers that the NBA Finals had for one of our E sports competitions. You’re like what?

55:20 You know, they fill stadiums with kids playing games and that’s the Web two world. When that finally gets to Web three, I’m very bullish on Game 5.

55:28 Alex Fazel: And I just want to capitalize on that because you said something really important, Brian. So if we zoom in into that, why are these bubbles so important is because if someone does find the right tokenomics for a game that has a really legitimate game that really brings everyone from the player, the viewer, the guy who was doing E sports or maybe betting some money prediction markets. If you really bring that single use case that’s going to bring so many other projects they’re going to want to build on Web 3 because you have that one success, successful use case, then we’re good to go.

56:00 And for example, what I love about that is let’s say there’s a game on Avalanche that does really well. That bubble will help so many other assets. So we could actually pull Avalanche and it’s tire ecosystem adapts the price up, right? Because if that Gamify project sends AVAX token higher, because it brings all these new users, all this new capital, that’s inflows on their chain. And the other adapts will also probably have price appreciation.

56:27 But then even Gamify projects from other chains will also have a push from that bubble. And investing, at the end of the day, is all about future sentiment, right? You’re just putting money based on how you feel about the future. And that one, that one case study, that one successful use case, Bryant, in terms of bubbles, can really change the name of the game.

56:48 Brian Rose: Yeah, I love it. And I agree, bubbles are important. You know, even though I was in that brutal.com bubble, it put a lot of eyeballs on it.

56:56 It created a lot of development, a lot of capital that ended up coming to fruition, you know, a few years later. And so look at this. Look at meme coins on the cycle, you know, the meme coin, you know, excitement, you know, brought us so much more liquidity on Solana. It brought us pump fun. It brought us all of these new projects and new memes that were successful.

57:14 Some crashed. But yeah, it gets the attention of people because it it shows there’s an interest and a need and it’s solving problems for people. So, yeah, I like how you look at a, a bubble is not a bad thing. All right, we’re going to move to the next point. We’re moving fast here, and that is talking about the duration of this bull cycle and how even bull cycles look.

57:36 This is really important and this is something we’ve been talking about for a year. When’s it going to end? Is it three months? Is it 6 months? Is it nine months? Is it 2 years?

57:45 Is it the rise of the Super, super duper cycle, which we all want it to be because that means we all make more money. But then we all have to be realistic. And so you know, what do you mean by this? And, and maybe we even talk about what is a market cycle. You got a great graph here where you talk about accumulation, markup, distribution, markdown. I don’t think most people even understand this concept.

58:05 Alex Fazel: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

58:06 It’s the technical terms and jargon is quite complicated. So rather than having these technical terms, you know, as we can see here, Brian, we can just break it down into Four Seasons. And the reason why I think seasons are really good to understand market cycles is, well, first of all, it’s usually a four year cycle. A lot of people say that the Bitcoin cycle is 4 years. No, actually risk on assets is a four year cycle. And that’s just because it’s around the Fed. Again, going back to the Fed interest rates and the Fed rates, because that’s they usually take a four year span, the forecast, you know how the future will be And it it’s not too long, it’s not too short.

58:41 And it’s also happens to be very similar to most presidential terms. So the three to four year cycle is usually a very common thing. And so the way I, I like to simplify for people run out there is just think about, as you can see here, maybe spring, summer, fall, autumn and, and winter. And it gives you really clear action items for that, right? Like so in spring, you want to accumulate, you want to grow your bags when it comes to summer, you water those, those plants.

59:07 So you maybe add a little bit of capital here and there so you can even grow your portfolio even more. When it comes to fall before winter, you harvest your crops, you take your profits, take that money out. And then during winter, instead of stressing out, you have a really nice vegetable potage right here with the family.

59:24 Brian Rose: Got it. I love that.

59:25 OK.

59:27 Alex Fazel: And then right now, we would believe we’re somewhere in this markup phase. Yes. OK.

1:00:01 Don’t Yes, we haven’t hit the euphoria stages yet. I would say somewhere halfway, halfway there. Please remember like Brian, we had that target of from $1.5 trillion in total we’re.

1:00:13 Brian Rose: Going to get that slide. So I love people just to get your head around this. And again, look, it’s never predictable, it’s never exact, it’s never always accurate, but it’s a pretty good sign. You know, it’s funny when I’m, when I got to Wall Street, I remember, you know, I got there and there was like an emerging market desk and there was like a stock desk and there was a bond desk and a foreign exchange currency desk. And I, I kept hearing about all these cycles. That was a Latin American crisis, and then there was the Asian crisis, and then there was the Russian crisis. And then of course, later we become the mortgage crisis. And I looked at these people and I’m like, doesn’t anybody learn here?

1:01:02 Because the, the Latin American debt, every five years they would have a crisis. So everybody would buy too much and then it would crush and then buy too much and crush. And the same thing happened with Russia. You know, maybe 8 or 10 years, it would do really well and then crush. And I remember asking them like, don’t we ever learn as humans? And they said, no, we don’t.

1:01:21 We’re emotional creatures. We think we’re logical, but we actually justify our emotional decisions backward dated with logic, right? And So what happens is when things get exciting, like the Tulip crisis in Holland, everyone wants to get the Tulip. And your wife wants a Tulip and your daughter wants a Tulip or the cabbage patch doll or whatever. And you buy it and it gets crazy and everyone believes the zeitgeist.

1:01:40 And then it gets overbought and everybody cries and dumps and then everybody cries and everybody re evaluates and they go back in. And so these are real. And as long as we’re humans in the market, I don’t think that’s going to change, you know, and now it might change what that curb looks like, which I think is where we’re going to go next. But that’s something that’s just human. And so this next slide is really interesting.

1:02:03 You’ve got the bull market average duration. You go back to 17, back to 21, and now you’re talking about 2425 here. What shocked me about this graph, Alex, is how short those bull cycles were in 17 and in 21. You’ve got three months in 17 and basically four to five months at the end of 21. And that’s not much time to to make that money.

1:02:28 Alex Fazel: Yeah. And in the really heated part of the summer, you know, as you said, it’s, it’s three months, four months, potentially four to six months. So that when it gets really, really scorching hot outside, you know, where you need your, your, your, your cream and all that kind of stuff, that’s when you start, you start thinking about, you know, autumn and fall and, and be ahead of time and go against your emotions. Because we talked about this many times, Brian, But fighting greed is so much harder than fighting fear, right? It’s so hard.

1:02:57 Brian Rose: So if it goes up more, you told me that all the time, But what if it goes up another 2X? What about a 3X you know? And it’s, it’s so hard and you know, we have a group of people call our investment club. It’s like 133 people, hardcore London Muellers and we all invest together. So there’s 20 million in capital.

1:03:15 We all invest. And I’m already starting to tell them that we need to start getting in the mindset of taking profits. The problem with euphoria is when you’re inside of it, you, you don’t think it’s ever going to end. And a lot of people look back at their life and they look at the decisions that bad decisions they made in bad times. But I think it’s the bad decisions you made in good times.

1:03:37 What I call it is the wake up in Las Vegas with a tattoo on your arm and a newly married bride or husband next to you. And you’re like, what the hell just happened? You just had the greatest part of your life last night and you woke up to some bad decisions. That’s what these bull markets can do. And you think you’re invincible.

1:03:55 You think you’re Superman. And if you look at some of the icons of the last cycle from Doquan to Bankman, Freed to Machinsky, they all thought they were God because they were printing money. Everybody around them thought they were gods because they were printing money. And they thought it would never come down. And it always does. And so it’s it’s time right now for everybody to talk to themselves and say, hey, we got to take profits. And one of my guests on the show once said something really good. He said, Brian, nobody ever went broke taking profits. Absolutely, You know, But the problem is as humans, when we take profits and the next day the crypto goes up even 1%, you walk around hating yourself because you left money on the table.

1:04:36 But here’s the truth. No one out there is ever going to buy the low and sell the exact high. So don’t try to, if you’re within 20% or 30% of that, you’re going to make more money than you ever need. And so try to start thinking about this discipline now. So important. So.

1:04:50 Important, So important. And yet I know experts in this market, it didn’t do it in the last cycle. Yeah, they told all their people to put their stop losses in and then later told me live on my episodes that they didn’t put any in and wrote Bitcoin from 69 down to 16.

1:05:07 Alex Fazel: So yeah, yeah, man. And Joe’s emotions, right?

1:05:10 Like life learnings, right? Yeah.

1:05:12 Brian Rose: Look, your next chart is talking about this, the the duration of the cycle. And I think this is really, really important because right now, you know, Bitcoin has gone up from I think a year ago it was in the 30 thousands and now it’s right around 100,000. And yet we think this has some ways to go here. And so it’s already been going up. You know, I guess you could call this the spring or parts of early summer, but it’s already gone on for a while, I guess the longest bullish cycle so far.

1:05:43 Alex Fazel: Yeah, Yeah, exactly. So the first part of the summer is supposed to be 12 to 15 months is what we forecasted actually last year. OK. So because the cycle, the bull cycle started in November of 23, it’s actually been 15 months for the first part of that markup stages. And technically, we’re supposed to have only four to five months left from now, which should be the Euphora stages. But because of all the uncertainty now is that they’re going to be delays.

1:06:11 Are we going to rely, as you said, on Trump and his administration to set us in, to send us into the last euphoria stages? That’s something that unfortunately we can’t really tell. And that’s why, you know, like one, one single signal is not enough. It’s good to have three to five, right? If one goes off and say OK, what else can I look at in order to understand when I when I need to start taking profits and generate that wealth to go through the winter? It is so hard to do because when Bitcoin hit its high at 69,000 and you were at London Real Studios and we did that epic episode, everybody in the market, everybody thought we were going to hit 100K by Christmas or at least we were going to be much higher.

1:06:48 Brian Rose: Everybody thought this was the beginning and everybody was wrong. And when everyone’s wrong, the pocket usually sells a hard because everyone’s positioned the same way. And so just because everybody on crypto Twitter is telling the same thing, they’re not going to know necessarily when this is at the top either. And that brings us to point #5 which I think is one of your best pieces of IP, which is looking at the entire market capitalization of, of all of crypto and Web 3.

1:07:14 And this is really, really important because I, it’s an amazing metric. And if you look at the cycles on this graph, you go back to 2014 where it peaked at 15 billion. You look at 18 where it peaked at 775 billion. You looked at the last cycle around 2022, it peaked at 3 trillion. And now you’re forecasting what’s coming up next. Tell us some more about this metric. Yeah.

1:07:36 Alex Fazel: This is, I think even more relevant than the duration because, you know, there’s a very popular saying like Brian, which says your time in the market beats timing the market because it’s impossible to fully time the market. And that’s why I see signals. If we have these three to five signals, you have to use them in tandem, so not separately. So this plus this plus this plus this, if all these tend to tell me something reflects some sort of message to me, then that’s when I need to start taking profits.

1:08:05 But as you said, you know, I think you know, we in terms of the crypto assets total market capitalization, we’re aiming between 6 to $9 trillion. Once again, if you know yourself as a more conservative person, then maybe even at the total market capitalization of five trillion, you start DC ING out to six trillion. If you have a little more guts and you’re a little more aggressive, then maybe you start D seeing out from six trillion to seven. If you’re a straight up D Gen. and you really think that this is the Super duper duper duper cycle, as you’re saying, maybe start D seeing out from 7 trillion to 9 trillion.

1:08:39 It’s up to you, right? But I think this is much more relevant than the average durations. It’s a great metric and it’s right on there on coin market cap if you follow them for for prices and right now we’re around 3 1/2 right now.

1:08:52 Brian Rose: Interestingly enough, one of Dan Papieros first fund is called 10 T holdings, which is 10 trillion market cap, which is where he saw it going I think in about 10 years time from when he started that back in probably 20 or 19. So it’s interesting to see that other players like him are thinking about that as a metric. So that’s another one to really, really look at and think about. Next slide, you talk about risk return assets and I think this is really interesting because you talk about the size of the protocols that we’re investing in with Bitcoin pretty much being the big daddy, it’s the biggest one out there. And then going all the way down to these, you know, tiny companies that maybe just just launched for their, you know, very first token generation event. What can we get from this graph?

1:09:37 What are you trying to tell people?

1:09:39 Alex Fazel: So I’m trying to tell people that, you know, when you have these categories from a mega cap all the way to a micro cap, you know, the lower you go in terms of market capitalization, the higher the risk you’re taking. So what tends to happen is, you know, when you go into full-fledged euphoria, you know, and people, their risk appetite and sentiment goes up. They’re like, there’s lots of liquidity even on some of these small or even micro caps. Then they go much deeper into their risk tolerance and they make much bigger gains as well by investing in some of these projects.

1:10:11 Obviously, as you said, I think you know Brian, if you’re spraying your and praying, you know, across let’s say 20 micro caps, you know, at least 10 or 15 will be useless. But those few that actually do succeed, they could generate like we’re talking about life changing wealth like 100 XS hundred 200 XS. Yeah. So if you time that well, what’s really important is if you go from that’s mega cap and you take that risk with the market when the the the risk on appetite and everything is ready. Once you go down to micro cap, don’t forget to go back up to the mega caps or even buy real estate or buy something, maybe that’s even negatively correlated to crypto. Maybe a car, maybe a painting, you know, sculpture, whatever you you really, really like.

1:10:57 But it’s really important that if you go down from mega cap to small or micro cap that you go back up and don’t stay drowned out there.

1:11:04 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a great concept. And let me throw like something super practical. And so I always tell my students and, and on my live broadcast, I always look people dead in the eye and say, right now owning Bitcoin is the stupidest thing you can do. And people get shocked when I say that because I’m a huge fan of Michael Saylor. I’m a huge fan of what he’s doing with micro strategy. I’m so happy that Trump wants to make Bitcoin a national reserve and hold a million of those.

1:11:28 I’m so happy BlackRock is pushing the ETFs, but at the same time, I realize in this cycle, where is Bitcoin realistically going to get to? Is it 200,000? Some people say that’s a little toppy. Is it 250? I don’t know.

1:11:40 There’s some people that say it’s 800,000, but I don’t know. The point is, what are you going to double or triple your money in Bitcoin? But the fact is, is that if you invest in some of these smaller caps, there are much bigger returns out there. There are 5X and 10X and 20X returns. There will be more risk, but in the beginning of what you think is a bull market, it’s probably when you want to make hay when that sun’s shining.

1:12:03 Now that being said, you got to get out of those things and put it back into safer assets as the market starts to turn. So let’s say for example, you know in your crystal ball, this this market’s going to last one year and that come December, that’s going to be our all time high in Bitcoin and it’s going to start coming off the next year. Well, guess what? That means that you’re going to have to start moving from those super micro caps, those mean coins that are based on nothing with really low market caps.

1:12:33 You don’t have to start moving that back into the ETH and the bitcoins and maybe even out of digital assets entirely. Maybe you move it into an S&P 500, maybe you move it into a piece of real estate. Maybe you move it all the way to cash. And you might say, Brian, what do I want? My money in a dollar?

1:12:48 It’s got inflation and blah, blah. OK, Yeah, but guess what a dollar is worth? A dollar is worth a dollar, and maybe you want to even put that into a dollar on a bank account because you think maybe even the stable coin might have some risk. The point is, is I totally agree with you. If you go down that ladder, be ready to climb back up that ladder. Just like a diver, right?

1:13:07 If you go deeper in the sea, don’t first come back to the surface.

1:13:10 Alex Fazel: Yeah. And as you said, I think one thing that’s that’s really, really important is in if you go back to the dollar on the Bitcoin component, right? So I’m 100% with you. I’m not interested in Bitcoin. Even if it’s 200K, that’s a 2X from now. I think there’s so many 5 to 10X’s out there that it’s not worth my time personally.

1:13:27 And I think you said something really important. And even when we go back into winter, right, we’ve harvests our crops, we’re having a great potage stooped together. I want to be able to buy back other coins that are not Bitcoin. I want to buy, let’s say for example, some Hyperloop, you know, from the the Dexes. I want to maybe buy some monad. I maybe want to buy some 0 gravity. And I want to buy some of the projects, which I think, you know, have come into this cycle that have enough treasury to survive across the bear cycle.

1:13:56 We’ll be building incredible tech and we’ll come back with even higher highs in the next full cycle. So as you said, going to the US dollar and looking waiting until you know the knife has dropped but never catch a falling knife and and being able to buy assets, I will very unlikely buy Bitcoin again.

1:14:13 Brian Rose: Yeah. You want to have dry powder in those bear markets to pick up assets for pennies on the dollar. Back to your new bubble issue versus old bubble.

1:14:21 Some of these protocols you just mentioned you believe have real decent longevity. So why not use those times to pick it up on the cheap? And I’ll give one more reference back to to Dan Tapiero, who I think is probably one of the best traders I’ve ever met and I’ve met them all. I worked in in New York, I worked in Chicago, I worked in London, I worked in Tokyo. And he’s one of the OG traders in October of 22, right when FTX announced their bankruptcy.

1:14:48 It’s probably the lowest point in the bear market for emotions and sentiment. Dan was buying assets through his fund for pennies on the dollar. He was going back and basically re upping his allocations in equity of his entire digital asset ecosystem. I think he deployed like 10s if not hundreds of millions of dollars in that quarter.

1:15:12 Alex Fazel: OK, Very few people have the balls to buy when it looks like a falling knife.

1:15:18 But Dan is a great macro trader and for him he said, look, this is inevitable. The digital asset ecosystem is coming, and I’m going to use this as a time to buy. So there are some rare people out there that do exactly what you’re saying. For us normal mortals, it’s harder to do. But to know that people are doing out there and to be able to get out, I think that’s really correct. And that’s the best thing.

1:15:38 Brian Rose: So yeah, prep for that. Look, while we’re on this point, you know, I think we want to talk a little bit about these small caps and talk about what happens every single day, and that is the issuance of new tokens, right? It’s something that goes on. You know, again, for us, you know, we’re constantly investing in seed projects in blockchain and crypto. And a lot of the companies we’re investing in now have token generation events called TG, ES, sometimes like a week later, sometimes 4 weeks later, sometimes three months later. But they’re coming very quickly.

1:16:16 And so I’m on the phone with CE OS all the time that are talking about their TGE strategies. And of course, they’re trying to go from say a $10 million market cap where we’re investing or a 50 million and they’re trying to go to a billion, 2 billion, three billion. That’s their dream. They want to go up that cap table like we just described. But they all all a lot of times don’t know how to do it.

1:16:38 And issuing that token is become probably, you know, one of the hardest things to do, one of the more controversial things to do because there used to be a pattern in the past and it seems like those patterns have changed. And I was wondering if you could give me your thoughts on that. Again, we are talking to a lot of CE OS. We’ll probably get 300 live pitches this year. And I always ask them how they’re generating tokens.

1:17:01 And so I’m really getting a lot of feedback on what they’re thinking, what they’re hearing. I’ve also seen already 2030 tokens issued from our portfolio alone, not to mention hundreds of others. Some have performed really badly and some have done well. And so you’ve been in this market for eight years now. How do you think about this and how have times changed?

1:17:24 Alex Fazel: How dark should we go, Brian?

1:17:26 Brian Rose: Let’s get real here. It’s called lemon Real, baby.

1:17:29 Alex Fazel: Let’s go real. Let’s get real. Then, and I’m going to try to avoid any names because I’m going to create a lot of enemies in this show, but I need to really reveal the truth. It’s time to come out and say what’s wrong and all the unethical practices that are happening in the industry. And I think, Brian, just as a reference, you know, I love to talk about the size of a pie and the beauty about Bitcoin is the incentive model.

1:17:52 You know, whether you’re a miner, whether you’re a hodler, whether you’re someone sending the funds, really the incentive model is perfectly balanced, which is extremely hard to do. As you know, when you’re in business and you have multiple parties, you become super political because everyone wants a bigger piece of the pie. And what we’re seeing with these micro caps and small projects is the number one issue that we had in the beginning of this cycle was coming from the VCs, really greedy, nasty VCs who would invest at a $10 million valuation and they would do their best to sell the next round at $100 million valuation, even if the project had absolutely 0 progress, no tech built.

1:18:31 We’re talking about the months after. And then they’ll pump that valuation up to 1 billion to 2 to $3 billion. And once it would go into the exchange, the centralized exchange to launch the token, even if the token retraced 50% down, which was the case for many, because you’re launching at a three, four, $5 billion FDV. Even if your TRACE is half, let’s imagine they invested at a $10 million valuation, it goes on the exchange at a $2 billion valuation, it loses 50%, it goes down to a $1 billion valuation. So all the retail investors have lost half of their money, right? While the VC himself is still at a $1 billion evaluation, investing at a $10 million.

1:19:14 Evaluation. Yeah, it’s 100 X It’s 100 X, yeah. And what happens with the VC, he’s like rubbing his hands thinking, oh, we’re going to raise our next fund because look at our performance and they look at the charts. No, but look at the valuation we got in on. We did 100X on that one.

1:19:29 We did 20X here. We did 30X here. And you know, some of these guys, you’ve seen them at how they brag about their spreadsheets and showing all these returns on the behalf of the community, which lost a lot of money. So going back to the pie, the VCs were taking a really large slice of this pie, those bastards. Luckily enough, many people called them out. Now there’s another problem that we’re facing, which is the centralized exchanges.

1:19:52 And I’m going to throw a lot of people under the bus and revealed some truth here today that the VCs eventually realized that that those practices no longer work. Need to involve the community, do community rounds, don’t bring up the pump devaluation that high so that the community can make some gains. They’ll be more loyal and they realize they’re abusing the system. But when you’re a centralized exchanges and you know a few of these projects as well, and I can tell everyone watching out there, I know at least five projects.

1:20:18 So it’s not a one off. It’s already been quantified that when you’re in exchange and you’re going to charge $1,000,000 for a listing, imagine the poor project has only raised $3,000,000. How much of that treasury is getting beaten up? Even if you charge half $1,000,000, which is very common these days, half $1,000,000, and then they’re going to ask for a percentage of the token supply and that token supply, depending on the exchange, they will absolutely abuse you. We’re talking 10% of your total supply, sometimes 20% of your total supply. 1 meme corn that I know that launched on a tier one exchange, which is at a $1 billion valuation at 20% of the supply is $200 million.

1:21:02 Brian, are you talking about abusing the system, $200 million for listing ERC 20 token? It cost you less than 5K and you’re charging them money and then you’re asking for a security deposit. So you’re saying like on top of that $500,000, let’s add another 250 or $300,000. Oh, in case your token price goes below the price where we launch, oops, your security deposit disappears. So when we think. Tokens they get have no vesting or hold back schedule. No vesting.

1:21:30 They can dump them in the market immediately. Absolutely mind blowing. Any other investor. No other investor gets 100% and locked in TG. I’m, I’m literally spitting how much it gets me upset.

1:21:39 You know, I’m frustrated because these projects that have been working so freaking hard, they get absolutely abused on the listing fee, which is an absolute scam of the money, the token supply which they dump to get that security deposit. So they’re getting 3 revenue streams, Brian. And then on top of that, with two of the projects that I know recently they opened up perpetuals leverage trading on another exchange that it was actually being listed on. And I there’s something really weird about this, Ryan.

1:22:07 I mean, there’s already too much of the pie that’s being eaten. But then when you see some really weird behavior where some people are shorting, they. Doubled up and shorted the token as well. Leverage 100X. Because they knew it was going to dump because they were dumping their own. That’s crazy.

1:22:23 Brian Rose: Yeah. That’s just abuse. Yeah. And The thing is, we’ve seen this happen in the stock market over the last 100 years. The reason the Securities and Exchange Commission exists is because this abuse was happening, you know, during the Great Depression and the stock market crash of 1929.

1:22:37 And they’re all these abusive practices. Where were people playing funny games with this and doing things that were not in the interests of the investor. And they put rules around it. Now, look, the SEC is antiquated. It doesn’t apply to crypto.

1:22:47 The point is, is that these are old tricks on Wall Street. OK? I worked on Wall Street and when I talked to my students, man, we got tricks up our sleeves. We got 20 different ways to scalp your money, and you don’t even know what’s happening. And what we’re seeing here is the same thing happening because centralized exchanges are not crypto platforms. Swissborg is actually, but centralized exchanges are like stockbrokers from 100 years ago.

1:23:12 They’re not on the blockchain. They are literally a bunch of, it’s like a boiler room like the movie. They’re guys that are pumping and dropping these tokens. They’re taking as much money as possible out of these clients and that OK, it just happens to be in crypto, but it could be in any other asset class and people need to get wise that that’s what they’re doing. They’re not actually providing a lot of value add. Now they sell you on the fact that they have a bunch of retail clients, OK, and they do, but that’s not worth what they’re charging right now, especially with those deceptive practices on top of it.

1:23:44 Alex Fazel: It’s one thing if they offer their retail your tokens, but when they’re dumping your tokens and shorting your tokens and fleecing you? And then they’re abusing on their own market making, so they’re taking fees on the market making the trading volume. And then on top of that, Brian, they have hidden order books where they can actually pay with a spread. They’ll be like, OK, instead of 10/20 basis points, we’re going to put 2%. There’s so much volatility.

1:24:07 No one’s going to get it. Even the professional trader is not going to, is going to struggle to, you know, make a request of a CCSV file, download the spreadsheet. Look, was it exactly the same price of the same time? How many people actually go that far? Right. So the the abuse is just so bad, Brian that and the good, the good thing is that a lot of the foundation, so the blockchains, you know, like I talked to the guys at SUI, when they see the SUI token, you know, 90% of the trading volume going on to sexes centralized exchanges, they want it back on their chain. So they already know that the centralized exchanges are abusing the system.

1:24:41 But the problem is most of these projects don’t know how bad it is. And the retail, you know, out there, the people with the investors or community members are losing a lot of money because they’re also getting borderline scammed by the centralized exchanges. So that that pie is, I feel like this, Brian, is worse than what the VCs were doing at the beginning of this full cycle. It’s horrendous.

1:25:02 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think you’re 100% right.

1:25:04 And like you said, both sides don’t know what they’re doing. You and I personally know specific projects that we’ve actually both invested in through our our venture funds that were great projects with promise that I would argue have now been ruined forever because of the behavior of some centralized exchanges. And that’s real. And these are people that work two years for this. They thought they were doing the right thing.

1:25:26 They thought they were getting the Holy Grail of listing on this tier one exchange and then all of a sudden it literally can crush their project, you know?

1:25:35 Alex Fazel: And the problem out of all this, Brian, is when I tell these projects they have all the evidence in the world, I said, do me a favor, go out, go out. You’re going to get so much empathy. You’re going to get so much support from the communities and you’ll be a rock star for revealing the truth. And you know what they say, Oh, we can’t, Alex.

1:25:54 I’m like, why? It’s because they’ll delist, they’ll delist us. They’ll delist our token. I’m like, that’s not the right excuse. And I said it almost makes me think of like a huff daddy type case where they hold you by the testes, right?

1:26:10 They have so much power that you’re afraid to reveal the truth because you think it’s going to actually destroy who you are, to destroy your company. Literally like one of those really dark cases. I’m sorry for going this dark, but.

1:26:24 Brian Rose: No, this is the opposite of why we’re in this marketplace. We’re in this marketplace because it’s decentralized.

1:26:30 We’re in this marketplace because it’s transparent women’s marketplace because we can do whatever we want to do with our own money. And now it’s being dominated by the centralized entities that looks just like Web 2 looks like like we had to wake up here. And I know we’re making progress and I get great pitches on my calls recently of these amazing Dexes with all sorts of liquidity factors and leverage trading and everything you want to do on a sex that’s on a decks. And I know you guys provide amazing services when it comes to that, but it’s still a problem. And guess what?

1:27:00 It’s going to be a problem this whole year, I think, because they still dominate. And the problem also is retail doesn’t know what’s going on. And so in my Academy, what I do is I try to educate people on what you’re just talking about there. And you know, I get my students to set up centralized exchanges because that’s the only way to get Fiat into crypto right now. And they hate the process.

1:27:20 And then I get them to do their first decentralized finance trade and they come back and they complain about the gas. And I’m like, OK, you want to complain about the gas? Let’s complain about what the centralized exchange is doing to you because they’re ripping out more money than the gas. But guess what? You don’t know it.

1:27:34 And that’s what you’re alluding to. How do you know what the price of Solana is when you go to buy it on your exchange? Is it 215? Is it 218? Is it 220?

1:27:42 Is it 221? In an instant it can change. I don’t know. And so the exchange says, yeah, you don’t know. I just made 3 bucks off your trade, maybe 4 bucks next time, maybe 2 bucks.

1:27:52 This is what they do all the time. And so you don’t know that because you know, you don’t have the time to actually trace it to find out where mid market is. But if you did that on the decks, you would know that. And so I see this as the future, but it’s a real education process. The problem with crypto is people in crypto have never traded anything in their lives.

1:28:10 They don’t understand these kind of dirty Wall Street tricks people have.

1:28:13 Alex Fazel: 100 an I think it’s really imortant for rojects to understand their maturity level within the company. There are levels to the game right? If you’re really begging and they’re asking you huge money at one of the Tier 1 exchanges, and that’s probably because you’re not good enough. You’re not hot enough as a man, you’re not hot enough as a chick on the streets, you have to really work on yourself so that they will come towards you.

1:28:34 You know, if you’re a really hot project, you list for free. So once again, if the push and pull that power dynamic is not there, it’s probably that the project’s not ready and therefore it’s OK compromise with just one exchange. You know, some of the best performing tokens, they’re on a Tier 3 exchange and a decks. You know, we had two token launches that did well. They didn’t need it.

1:28:55 They just had Swiss Borg, they had Dexes. And by the way Brian, 30% of all spot trading volume is on Dexes right now. We just hit an all time high last week. So the centralized exchanges will feel the pain eventually, right? Because they realize people are just put a liquidity pool, it’s on chain, it’s available to all. I would I see the future Brian being multi chain Dexes for your token.

1:29:18 So if you if you believe in monad, then you’ll have your liquidity pool there and you access their country or their community, right? Or their nation or their world, if you Solana right now is the number one blockchain for spot trading volume. If you think Solana is the right fit, then you have your decks and your liquidity pulls on Solana. So I really see, I see the future where you know, US exchanges, we get regulated because the Dexes will fall under scrutiny of the MIC on already some laws are talking about like requesting KYC to the Dexys and AML, that kind of stuff.

1:29:53 So I really see a world in the future, which is the vision where we’re taking with Swiss Borg is we get all the licenses, we get all the the KYC done, we get all the the ease of use with the Fiat rails. And that should go directly on chain. You know, where all the liquidity goes on chain. And we no longer have these sexes extracting all that value from the pie.

1:30:13 Brian Rose: Yeah, I mean, that’s why. We’re all here.

1:30:15 That’s why we’re all here. And that’s the whole, that’s why anybody comes into crypto. It’s a promise of a brand new future. And unfortunately we’re still hungover in this kind of old past, you know, in different areas of the market still. But this is one that’s really glaringly obvious. And it really snuck up to bite us because a year ago when I was here, it wasn’t really happening yet, you know, and it just started happening.

1:30:35 Alex Fazel: And again, if you know, then you know, but there’s a lot of people that don’t know. And just to forward your point, again, you know, if you have the community, if you really have the user base, if people really believe in your project, then you should be able to list those tokens and have buyers. And if you don’t, well, you probably should work on that. And if you have crazy users, then the sexes will be calling you and then you can negotiate accordingly.

1:30:58 So, you know, do all the basics, really just build. And again, it’s still a fine line. Like I know people that have gone that route with great user bases and had some success. I know some people that have foregone all of it and listed on no exchange and just on the decks and struggled to find people to buy. And, and some have done it really well.

1:31:17 Like, you know, we have a common investment that use board pad and then bam. And they were off to the races. But they had a great product, great communication, great community and great vision. So it’s just just something for all the founders out there and investors like you should know this is going on. And if you’re a, if you’re listening to this and you’ve made it through this far, you’re smart enough to not use centralized exchanges.

1:31:39 OK, you are, I think. So you’re smart enough to start using other things. And I try to stay away from those things with a 10 foot pole. So there you go.

1:31:48 Brian Rose: You know, look, you talked about and you kind of finish off here by talking about this concept of an adaptable investor. And I think maybe that’s a great place to kind of close here. And we’ve just hit people with all these different ideas and all these different metrics probably scrambled some people’s brains.

1:32:06 But like I said in the beginning, the decisions you make in the next 12 months can literally make or break your future. You can, this is the only market in the world. And I’ve traded stocks and bonds and commodities, you name it, where you can create a generational wealth in one crypto cycle. Da Vinci was here last year, and he said you can make generational wealth in one cycle. Maybe in the back of the day you needed two cycles, but you can do it in one. But you’ve got to make great decisions. That means making correct decisions and not making the incorrect decisions.

1:32:36 And so how would you wrap this all up as people trying to become adaptable investors, not intelligent investors?

1:32:43 Alex Fazel: It’s a really good point and I hope, you know, if I could write a letter to myself, Brian, you know, to myself when I’m 506070, that’s the only advice I would give to myself as an investor. I said always stay a child at heart, you know, a life learner, never become a master, always stay a student. Because I think when we see some of these great investors from the past, like Warren Buffett, Petership with gold and all these things that have had that fixed mindset, that rigidity, all of a sudden they, they’ve lost the ability to make, you know, significant wealth so adaptable at all times.

1:33:22 And you know, I, I had a really cool instant, you know, I tattooed around table with Tim Draper. I remember I saw you at the karaoke when it was really embarrassing. But but one thing that I did learn from some of these people, as they are really children at heart, they really are, They’re still kids. And kids are curious, you know, kids are always willing to try something new, to listen to new things. And I think, you know, as much as we want to think of ourselves as intelligent, whether we’re a value investor, whether we’re in growth of investor, regardless of conservative, moderate, aggressive, which as you know, I, I really don’t believe we fit any of these boxes. I think it depends on the instance. We’re so nuanced as human beings. And, you know, once again, going back to the beginning, the creatures that I’ve lived the longest on this planet were managed to do so because they’re adaptable. The Fortune Power Rangers CEOs managed to create, you know, like occurrence because they’re adoptable and all these people generating wealth.

1:34:20 Most of the cases, the greatest investors of all time will also be because they’re adoptable. So becoming a Bitcoin maxi, any type of restriction of mind and the lack of freedom of thought, I think is the the biggest punishment or poison to an investor. So I hope that I made a point here that the intelligent investor is actually a stupid thing.

1:34:41 Brian Rose: It’s a great point. It’s a great point and it’s all about checking your ego at the door at the end of the day. And it’s a tricky thing to do because the ego also gets you to show up.

1:34:52 And the ego is the reason you want to make money in the 1st place, because you want the best for you and your family and your future. That’s great. But as soon as it pigeon holes you to where you think you’re smarter than everybody else or you think that you know better than everyone else, that’s usually when the market comes back and just punches you in the stomach. And you know one thing about the markets, they do teach that way, but you don’t want to be the one that learns the hard lesson this cycle. And because these don’t come around very often, you know, you want to wait four or five more years for the next one. And that one’s going to be very different than this one. A lot of institutional domination. I don’t know if they’ll be this many opportunities for retail. So you want to get it right.

1:35:29 So how do you find a way to check that mind at the door to where you don’t become a maxi in anything? You know, you don’t think you know the world the way it is because in the crypto markets that changes every few months. The whole narrative changes, the meta changes, as we’ve heard, you know, And so you have to be flexible, adaptable, realistic. It’s not an easy thing to do, you know, but it can be done. Can’t be done. So find a way.

1:35:56 I always tell people this is the year to, I mean, if you can drop your vices, get your physical practice, get your nutrition and your diet and your sleep, get your relationships in place, cut out negative people because you need your brain to be super clear and make really focused decisions. And all those things you’re doing, they’ll help, they’ll, they’ll make, they’ll cause you to make bad decisions. And this is the year you need to be on point. Now in a bear market, fine, take a year off, you know, but now just be on point. So that’s what I would say.

1:36:27 Alex Fazel: My own point is, is really a good way to wrap things up and, and I think one last thing, if I may say, is like it’s very important for people not to want to make, you know, lots of money overnight. You know, I’m, I’m really an advocate of time, as we talked about, you know, time in the market beats timing the market. And you know, whenever we see these type of verticals like very, very steep increases is probably we’re reaching the euphoria stages. So stay safe out there guys And I understand the steeper and the more intense the actual angle, the harder it will fall on the other side so. So be ready to take your profits and enjoy a beautiful winter.

1:37:04 Brian Rose: And then to that, how do people follow you on X? How do they learn more about Swiss Borg? What’s the best way, Alex?

1:37:10 Alex Fazel: Under score Fazel FAZEL Swiss, Borg, Swiss and Borg like Borg, like a Cyborg. I so yeah, please give us a follow in and try out our app. You know, it’s a pretty cool app. We’re trying to go against the the sex movement. We call ourselves better than sex. We’re bringing the value on chain. Cex that is.

1:37:29 So yeah, please guys, if you believe in that vision, which I think is the vision of the future, the Med exchange will change the name of the game.

1:37:36 Brian Rose: Nice. And your board pad has been really successful lately and it’s been doing these really cool launches. And I know all of your protocols have been happy you got more of those coming as well, right, And doing things in a different way than say, the centralized exchanges.

1:37:49 Alex Fazel: Exactly. You need to change the standard and I’ve and I hope more people out there, if they’ve ever experienced this type of abuse by centralized change and don’t be afraid to be vocal. I think you’ll get the support.

1:38:00 No vulnerability pays sometimes. So I know there is ego, I know there’s fear, but I think we we just need to make the the movement a better movement.

1:38:09 Brian Rose: I agree. I think it needs to come out and be accountable. Maybe we started that today. So there you go.

1:38:15 Well, fantastic. I appreciate everybody listening. Just say this is the year of crypto. I think we also teach a four week kind of from zero to hero crypto boot camp where we get people literally doing defy trade, setting up centralized exchanges, they do liquidity pools, they do everything stop losses. And so we do that.

1:38:32 And then we also have a small group of people that’s actually getting access to our deal flow and that’s all called our investment club. And so people welcome to check those things out. We do a lot of education, a lot of community building. And then I love this time. I love this market. What do you think we’ll be talking about a year from now? That’ll be interesting.

1:38:49 Alex Fazel: That’s. Going to be interesting.

1:38:51 Brian Rose: So yeah, I’m going to ask you, where will Bitcoin be when we sit down in January of 26?

1:38:57 Alex Fazel: 26 So I think the drawdown and the retracement in corrections will not be as brutal as they were in the previous cycle. So just like the way up will probably be an average, not as sexy as it used to be normalized little bit. OK, so I would say January, I think this market is going to have a bit of a breather and it will last a little bit longer as Trump will be back in power.

1:39:21 Brian Rose: Cross fingers please. And are we hitting 200K in Bitcoin this cycle?

1:39:26 Alex Fazel: I think it’s possible 200K as possible. I actually my original forecast was 130 and I still think it’s more likely to be 130 a 150. But way things are going 200 is feasible and then maybe like a maximum 50% drawdown. So if we go to 1:30, maybe it goes back to 70, something like that, 65.

1:39:48 Brian Rose: And you think by January next year, we’re coming off of the high. So we’ve already hit that high somewhere. And who knows, whatever summer, August or autumn, and we’re coming off that high. But it’s a long gated cycle.

1:40:00 Alex Fazel: Exactly, Exactly.

1:40:01 Brian Rose: Yeah. I think 200 is the top of that range. I do think it’ll be more than 130. But, you know, it’ll be very interesting to see what happens from here. And yeah, hopefully it lasts and it’s coming down to like 180 around then. And we’re still also smart enough to realize it’s the time to start taking profits if we haven’t done that earlier. So hopefully we can do that.

1:40:21 But making those decisions in the middle of it, man, it’s so hard to do, so hard to do, so hard to do. So I’ll leave on that note. Try to have a plan before it happens because in the moment, your emotions will take over and your emotions, emotional decision making is almost always the wrong decision. So if you can, try to set that logic beforehand and put a framework up, do your best to do that, and away we go. Dude, thanks so much.

1:40:48 Alex Fazel: I get so much out of these. I think this was super educational and let’s do it again. Anyway, so much brother.

1:40:59 Brian Rose: Yeah, definitely. I love it, man Good.

1:41:03 Alex Fazel: I just want to say thanks to Web Three TV for making this happen and setting this up with this amazing studio and looking forward to next time, brother.