Ran Neuner - Bitcoin to $150,000 by 2025? Crypto Expert Ran Neuner’s Bold Prediction Explained!

Full transcript: Ran Neuner on London Real

3:46 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is… This is London Real. I am Brian Rose.

3:59 My guest today is Rand Neuner, the entrepreneur, broadcaster, and blockchain expert. You are the co-founder and CEO of OnChain Capital, the blockchain investment fund and advisory service. You previously built and sold the biggest marketing company in Africa at a deal valued at over $150 million. In 2017, you created and hosted CryptoTrader on CNBC, the world’s first televised crypto show. Then in 2020, you founded CryptoBanter, the popular live streaming platform dedicated to producing cryptocurrency and blockchain news 24-7 to a global community.

4:35 You believe the immediate future of Bitcoin and crypto depends on who wins the US election, but you have said you’ll be extremely disappointed if Bitcoin doesn’t reach $150,000 by the first quarter of 2025. Rand, welcome to London Real. And you, sir, have done your homework because I don’t mean… Wow, you’re really dug deep and you’ve done the homework. Give me that much.

4:57 You’ve got quite a history, which I’d love to get to a little bit later, but now I’d love to jump into it. You were at Bitcoin Nashville, and you left saying that you realized you weren’t bullish enough on Bitcoin. And I thought that was pretty interesting coming from a guy like you who’s been in the market for such a long time. I know you sat down with Mark Usko, with Max Kaiser. Kaiser was on my show in 2013.

5:21 That’s when I bought my first Bitcoin. I was on his show in London. He no longer talks to me because I talk about altcoins, but that’s another story. But what was it like being there, Rand? And with Trump speaking and Senator Loomis proposing that bill and Bobby Kennedy who’s been on our show speaking, what was the vibe and why did you feel more bullish when you left?

5:42 So, you know, I think all too often we make the mistake of looking at Bitcoin in a very short timeframe. And like now, we’ve been looking at Bitcoin and, oh, for 173 days, Bitcoin has moved sideways and down which hasn’t been the nicest 173 days in crypto. But when you zoom out and I’ve been going to the Bitcoin conference, I think, since 2019, when it started in San Francisco. And I remember the room that it was in in 2019 in San Francisco. And then I remember all the subsequent events, the Miami event, et cetera, et cetera.

6:13 And, you know, I kind of zoomed out and I thought to myself, let’s just look at how far we’ve come. So if you look at like, it was last year, the year before, we had the mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, standing next to the bull. And that was the highlight of the event. I’ll remind you, right? Fast forward to a year or two later, and I’m just, I’m getting my ears confused because I’ve been to so many of these things, but fast forward a year or two later, two presidential candidates, BlackRock talking at an event, Kathy Wood, Cynthia Loomis.

6:45 I’m like, hold on a second. Maybe we’re looking at this thing with like blinders on with blinkers on, and we are looking at it in the wrong timeframe. If you just look back at the progress that we’ve made since I’m going to go back to 2019, but that’s quite brave. Let’s just even go back two years and look at the exponential. Two years ago, the ETF wasn’t even a discussion.

7:06 It was like, there’s no chance we’re getting an ETF. All the ETFs for the previous 11 years had been declined by the SEC. And here we are two years later. We have a Bitcoin ETF approved. We have an ETF approved.

7:19 We have a presidential candidate who is most likely to win completely embracing Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. And you have another presidential candidate who’s coming third in the race speaking about it. You have BlackRock on stage. You have Kathy Wood on stage. I’m like, hold on a second.

7:36 Actually, when you zoom out, the rate of change in adoption of this asset is exponential. And I think a lot of people are just getting stuck on the sideways choppy movement that we’re having in one period of time, which is the last 180 days or whatever it is. Yeah, even two years ago, I mean, the conference wasn’t too far after or right before maybe FTX was happening. I mean, it was the lowest of the low at the time. Like you said, the ETF wasn’t even in the conversation.

8:04 And now you got Trump speaking saying twice, I’m going to fire Gary Gensler. And Trump said, verbatim, don’t sell your Bitcoin, didn’t he? I mean, it was crazy, the stuff that was coming out. Look, I don’t know if Trump likes Bitcoin, but I know Trump likes Bitcoiners. So I don’t know if he really gives a shit about Bitcoin, but he knows that Bitcoiners are the right people to be surrounded with.

8:26 He knows that they’re wealthy. He knows that they’re smart. And what he does know is that they are passionate. And not only does that mean votes, but it also means that it means prosperity for America when you’re the president, right? And so I think that Trump loves Bitcoiners.

8:41 And to me, the most encouraging thing is, remember in Bitcoin Nashville, that Trump was leading the polls because I think it was still Biden in the race. If I’m not mistaken, I don’t think it was that pivoted to Kamala Harris yet. And so he got a huge acceleration in the polls. A lot of it backed by this Bitcoin stance of his, right? Yeah, very much so.

9:03 You know, I ran for office here to be mayor of London twice, once in 21, once in 24. It was my only interaction with politics. I never studied it in school. But I realized quickly, politicians care about two things, money and votes. That’s what they care about.

9:17 And so they care about an issue, like you said, that embodies passion and that also has potential money and funds involved. And I think Trump seized on that. And you can argue left and right whether he really cares about crypto or not. But I’ll take it over the stance of the current administration and then the last four years. And I think he’ll follow through.

9:37 We also see J.D. Vance, 39 years old. Rumor is he’s got some big fat bags of all coins. He’s got a quarter million dollars of Bitcoin. And now his transition team, who’s the guy from Cantor Fitzgerald, who’s been, I think, working on the Tethercoin for a long time, there’s a lot of signs that he will not only just talk the talk but also walk the walk if he gets elected.

9:59 Yeah, I mean, I think the vice president is not really important in the big scheme of things. People vote for the president. I think this whole thing about president, vice president, J.D. Vance, I think, is less relevant. I think this is right now a race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

10:20 Surprisingly, Kamala Harris is ahead in the polls, which is extremely surprising to me. But maybe it’s only surprising to me because I live in an echo chamber. And my echo chamber is crypto people and crypto people generally hate the left wing. Seems to me, though, the average American doesn’t really hate the left wing because most of the polls actually show that Kamala Harris may win. That said, Kamala Harris hasn’t started campaigning yet.

10:44 So what you’re seeing is, you’re seeing she’s ahead in the polls but she hasn’t opened her mouth yet. And she opened her mouth this weekend for the first time around an economic policy and that backfire and the odds went against her, against her. So I think as with all American elections, they’re all very, very, very close, and they all come down to the wire. That is an American election. And I think, to be honest, that anything that we look at between nine elections doesn’t really matter.

11:13 I think what matters is the night of the elections. We know this in U.S. politics. So I’ve kind of taken the stance of chill, like, let the cards fall as they may because actually the only thing that matters is the results on the last day. Yeah, I know polling market went from having Trump at like 70% and now it’s back to 50-50 or below.

11:40 Now, some people say that might have been moved that way because the people are cutting their losses. Other people say polls are all biased and left-leaning. But you’re right. She’s still favoring. She’s come out with a great media strategy, a couple of hiccups.

11:52 Now they got the convention in Chicago. There’s going to be some crazy riots and demonstrations. She’s going to have to open her mouth more. So we’ll see. But you’re right.

12:01 We got what? 70-some days, 78 days or something like that. So you’re right. It won’t matter until the day of. And then it’s only going to matter for five states.

12:09 That’s it. Exactly. And that’s why I’ve learned that it’s a futile exercise to be calling U.S. elections specifically three months before the elections. I mean, I’m going to remind you that Hillary Clinton was polled to beat Donald Trump the night before the election.

12:28 And it was like I don’t remember the exact polls, but it was crazy in Hillary’s favor. And here we are. So, you know, that’s I think the reality is just just forget about what the polls are saying. Listen to what the people are saying. And then let’s see what happens closer to the time in terms of whether Carmilla has what Carmilla’s policies actually look like relative to what the U.S.

12:50 People actually want. Now, you’ve said you think she could sack Gary Gensler before the election. Can you go deeper on that? No, no, no. I don’t think she can.

12:59 I think she should if she wants to show up. If she really wants the crypto vote, then what she should do is put her money where her mouth is and be a person of action. Now, she’s a vice president. She could influence people by saying, look, you know, we realize that we’ve been so bad on crypto and so we got rid of Gary Gensler. Because otherwise, the reality is, no matter what she says, no one’s going to believe her.

13:20 Like if she turned around and said, now I’m becoming pro crypto and I think Bitcoin people should have a chance. And I mean, what would you think? Would you believe that she’s actually not changed her tune and is pro crypto? No. No.

13:35 The actions have been terrible. What would get you to believe it? Yeah, that would do it. But I doubt she could get that done, get him sacked. But that would, that would get me.

13:45 I just wonder if it’s on her radar of all the things she’s trying to juggle in her brain. It should be, but I’m just wondering if it is. I don’t think she cares about crypto at all. I think she’s going to realize very quickly that she can’t win the crypto vote. And I think what they’re going to do is they’re going to focus on all the other places where they can win votes.

14:07 And I think they realize more and more that, number one, you can’t win crypto. Number two, I think crypto people know that if Carmilla Harris wins, it means four more years of Gary Gensler. It means four more years of Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren is very, very, very influential on the inside. Everyone knows that.

14:23 And so I think if you vote for the Democrats and you vote for Carmilla Harris, you’re voting for four more years of Gary Gensler and Elizabeth Warren. Also, what I’m struggling with, and again, maybe it’s because I live in an echo chamber, but America is the land of the free. America is the land of opportunity. America is the opposite of old Soviet Russia, which was seen as socialist, right? America is supposed to be the opposite of China, which is seen as a communist slash socialist country.

14:54 And yet people in America are starting to vote more towards left-wing, almost socialist policies. It baffles my mind. It baffles my mind that this is the way that the U.S. people are voting. But again, maybe that’s the way that I’m seeing it because I live in an echo chamber, and my forces of influence are crypto, crypto, Twitter, friends, all right-leaning friends, you know what I mean?

15:23 So I think let’s have a closer look, closer to time, based on policies. And I think, you know, if Carmilla comes in, we’ve got four, maybe eight more years of swimming upstream. That’s just what it is. I’m hoping that Trump will come in. I mean, I’m hoping that Trump will come in.

15:43 Not because I particularly like Trump. I just like Trump’s policies more than I like Carmilla’s policies, specifically for the industry that I’m in. Do you think the Democrats have any chance of coming around, or do you think with Warren in the background, it’s really just going to go one way if they get reelected? I mean, I’ll tell you what I think, but do you think there’s any chance? I mean, there was probably Democrats there at the Bitcoin conference, and a few that would tell you different?

16:10 Do I think the Democrats can come around? No. I think there’s no incentive for them to come around. I think that I don’t, you know, when I deal with Trump, I know I’m dealing with Trump. When I deal with the Democrats, I don’t know who’s setting the policies, right?

16:27 Like, you know, I get the feeling that Biden was a puppet for some greater forces. I get the feeling that Trump is not a puppet to anyone. So at least when I’m dealing with Republicans, I know what I’m dealing with. I know I’m dealing with Trump, and I know that Trump is Trump. When I’m dealing with the Democrats, I know I’m dealing with a puppet, and I don’t know whose puppet it is.

16:48 So, like, I think you understand what I’m saying here, right? Like, it feels like the Democrats are more disingenuous about this disconnect between the person and the party. Let’s put it that way. Yeah. And look, when you look at America, I know it’s really hard to watch.

17:07 It’s hard for me to watch, you know, because I grew up there, and it’s a place where freedom of speech and just freedom in general, financial freedoms, I thought, would always be respected. And then you look at what happened in the last 10 years. It’s hard to watch. I think it has a lot to do with technology companies. I think it has a lot to do with the, as Elon would say, the woke mind virus that was then exported through these technologies.

17:28 I think it has to do with an information war and through the weaponizing of information. I mean, just see what they did with Kama over the last few weeks. It’s amazing that most of the mainstream news medias are painting this picture, and people will buy it. The Democratic Party is nothing democratic about it. It’s all kind of scary.

17:46 And even the technological innovation of crypto, it’s the only tech innovation the U.S. hasn’t led since its founding, you could argue. And it’s hard to watch. It’s really hard to watch. Look, I immigrated, I left South Africa with the intention of going to live in the United States.

18:06 And I landed up wanting to go and live a dream that I had since I was a kid, and that was to go and make it in New York, because if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And it’s the land of opportunity. And when I went there, I was completely out of touch with U.S. policies and Obama, in my mind at the time, was the most amazing president. He was charismatic.

18:28 He had amazing policies or so it seemed. And I wasn’t involved in U.S. politics in the least. What I knew is there was a guy called Jay Clayton, who was the head of the SEC, and he didn’t like crypto very much until the day they left. Ironically, the day after they left, he seems to have gone full bull crypto, right?

18:44 Anyway, my experience of living in the United States was I went and lived in a Democrat state. I went and lived in a blue state. And to be honest, it was the worst two years of my life. I lived in New York for two years. Absolutely the worst years of my life.

18:58 Why? I’m an entrepreneur. I probably represent everything that America needs to be and promises to be, right? I’m about freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of expression.

19:08 The ability to try new things and to flourish. The epitome of capitalism. I am the ultimate ultimate ultimate capitalist. I believe that the whole world should be run by capitalists. I landed up in New York where Hollywood, the marketing machine, led me to believe that it’s the land of opportunity.

19:26 It’s the land where people like me will thrive. I was faced with exactly the opposite. In fact, I was faced with socialism. Nothing less than socialism. Why?

19:38 It is a country where it was a city, but it represented the whole country. It is a country where there are extremely high, prohibitively high taxes. There is, there are prohibitively high licensing, licenses, registrations, permissions that are required to do anything that you want to do. If anything, it is, I would say the opposite of the land of the free. You know, if you want to do crypto, well, you can’t, you need a bid license.

20:05 Can you get a bid license? No, it’s impossible. Okay. Let’s forget about crypto. You want to do real estate?

20:09 You got to get a license. Can you get a license? Well, yes. Who are you paying? How much are you paying?

20:14 Every move that you make in New York, whether you open a restaurant or whether you open a barber store, you need to get a license. You need to pay taxes. You need, there are things that you can’t do and what you can do. I’ll give you an example. When COVID happened, I was the ultimate entrepreneur.

20:29 And what did I do? I launched a company that does digital fever screening at corporate offices to stop the spread of COVID. My company was stopped by the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration. Why was the company stopped by the Food and Drug Administration? Because we were taking people’s temperatures with, without FDA approved thermometers.

20:51 Can you tell me why the Food and Drug Administration has to approve an outside thermometer, something that doesn’t go into your mouth. It’s a digital thermometer that scans you from a intercom. Okay. But I’m just trying to show you that there was so much bureaucracy in place that it was absolutely, absolutely impossible for me as an entrepreneur to operate. In crypto, I didn’t know what was legal and what wasn’t until eventually I stopped operating.

21:20 In the next business, which I launched, which lasted a couple of months, what I was doing was trying to help curb the pandemic. How was I doing it? By taking people’s temperatures exogenously. It wasn’t happening inside your body. Why was the business unsuccessful?

21:37 Because the FDA didn’t approve the way in which I was taking people’s temperatures. Okay. That’s not the land of the free. That’s not the land of opportunity. That’s not the land of capitalism.

21:47 That is a highly, highly over bureaucratic, over licensed society. And that is what I experienced. Now, I then wanted to move to LA because when the pandemic came, Yoko was the worst place in the world to be. And eventually I made a decision with my wife to actually move to Miami, lived in Miami for a couple of months, realized Miami is the exact opposite. You can operate in Miami.

22:10 There’s not so many laws in Miami. There’s a whole lot less licenses in Miami, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I’m saying like this dream that the Hollywood marketing machine sends you about the land of the free and the land of opportunity, it’s garbage. It’s not. In fact, I have more freedom and more opportunity in South Africa, to be honest.

22:32 And to be honest, I’m not targeting South Africa because South Africa is a little country in the bottom of Africa. I’m just saying that don’t think that the US is the land of the free and the land of opportunity. It’s not. It used to be many, many years ago, but it’s now on a downward trajectory. And if we get another four years of Carmen Harris, from a socialist point of view, I’m sure that there’s many, many, many advantages to the majority of people.

22:56 And she’s already started speaking like that. But from a land of the free land of opportunity, no, sorry, it’s not. Is that new place the Middle East? Is that new place Dubai? Look, Dubai also has its… Dubai is very smart because Dubai realized, like many other jurisdictions, that the way to win is to attract brainpower and money, right?

23:23 So usually, not always, but usually they come together. So when you attract the brainpower, the money comes with it because the brainpower usually holds a lot of the money, right? Dubai was very smart. And they said, look, you know, we will sell our soul because remember many years ago, non-married couples were not allowed to live together in Dubai. And now today you can pretty much party in a bikini on a beach with your girlfriend and three prostitutes, if you like, right?

23:54 So Dubai sold its soul to get people to come in and invest in Dubai. Now, Dubai has also got a lot of licensing, of course, and a lot of bureaucracy, but it’s much less than the United States. So I think, yes, Dubai is one place, certain places in Europe. Lisbon, for example, Portugal is attracting a lot of people. So I think the world is starting to split between countries that are on the decline and countries that are on the increase.

24:28 I think anyone will tell you, anyone, Democrat, Republican, I think anyone will tell you that the U.S. is definitely on the decline. I think most people will tell you that in the last two to three years, London or the U.K. is on the decline. Like I hate to say it because I’m a U.K. citizen, I’m a U.K.

24:44 Basketball holder. But I think most people will tell you that the U.K. is on the decline. I think most people will agree that Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Qatar, are very, very, very much on the app. I think most people will tell you that Portugal is very, very, very much on the app, right?

25:03 So I think that, I mean, we’re just talking about the consensus, the consensus trades. But it seems like the world is really splitting between countries that are on the down and countries that are on the app. And I think that, unfortunately, and I say unfortunately, because I really want the U.S. to win. I think it’s in our best interest, in everybody’s best interest, that the U.S. wins.

25:24 Because if the U.S. doesn’t win, then who does win can be China, who does win can be Russia, you know? I think another great example of a country on the app, India. Like you want to take a country that’s, you know, that is really, really, really on the app. India is like one of those countries where 10 years ago, India was nowhere.

25:44 Look at India 10 years later. I don’t agree with all their policies, but you cannot deny that that is a country which can be a superpower. So I say that I really want the U.S. to win because I’m Western in my culture. And because I’m Western in my culture, even though I don’t agree with a lot of the U.S. policies, it’s the one that I relate to most.

26:09 I relate more to the U.S. than I relate to Russia, or I relate much more to the U.S. than I relate to China. And so I think it’s in our best interest that the U.S. wins because the alternative is, you know, a Russian-ruled world or a Chinese-ruled world.

26:25 That’s not ruled, obviously not ruled, but I don’t mean ruled by, in the sense of that they’re going to colonize every nation, but I mean they’re going to influence. You know, if Ray Dalio is right, and it’s the end of the U.S. empire, then the question is, well, whose empire is it next? Is it BRICS, which is Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and then of course Saudi Arabia and a whole lot of others? Who is it?

26:54 Give me another example of a country that’s very much on the app, Argentina. You know, Argentina can be a powerhouse, and it seems like under, you know, the extreme right wing of Javier Millet, we actually could see Argentina hit its heyday again. And, you know, that’s exciting to watch, but then the U.S. and, to be honest, the U.K., like, I mean, London Real, let’s talk about London, you know? It just feels like down, bad.

27:25 I don’t know if… You’re not wrong. And I get to spend a lot of time in Dubai, and I spent kind of two, three months there in the early part of the year, and I came back, and also running for mayor, I get to dive into transportation system, national health, and just see all the stats. And I mean, it’s shocking. It is a decline. It just is.

27:44 And the safety and all the other issues, it’s 90-day between the two. Name one thing that New York has that Dubai doesn’t have better. Name one thing. In the old days, you could have said the justice system. So the proponents for the U.S. versus Dubai, what they would say is they would say, you know, Dubai is great, but Dubai has a very stringent, non-fair justice system, right?

28:18 And that you could have said. But then you look at a case like Trump, and you look at how they treated Trump, and then you say, are you really trying to tell me that the justice system in New York is fair after seeing what the world saw around the Trump case? Well, hold on. Like, honestly, Dubai has better restaurants, okay? Dubai has better restaurants.

28:42 Dubai has way better hotels, like way, way, way better hotels. Dubai has way less traffic. Dubai has, I think, way hungrier people. Like, the energy that I used to have when I was in New York, where you used to jump from meeting to meeting, and in the meetings, it was productive, and you were dealing with high-caliber, hungry people, has been replaced. In New York, all you’re dealing with is accountants and lawyers.

29:11 Because every transaction, you need a team of fucking lawyers to navigate what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do. I don’t feel that way when I navigate in Dubai. The law is simple. It’s straightforward to the point. Yes, there is a law.

29:22 You got to respect it to the point. You don’t need 10,000 accountants and lawyers before you do every single tiny transaction. You don’t need to waste that many. Yeah, anyway, rant over. So we…

29:33 You know, I always try to describe Dubai to people. I say, if when you look around Dubai, I said, you don’t see anybody that’s phoning it in. Like, everybody is there intentionally. And you could say, oh, this person’s not being treated very well. Okay, they traveled from their country to be in Dubai because it’s a better place for them, and everyone is hustling to some extent to build a better version of themselves.

29:54 When I look in London, you go to New York City, you look around, I would say one in three people is phoning it in. They don’t want to be there. They’re collecting a check. They’re na, na, na, na, na. And it’s just a sea of parts of mediocrity.

30:08 And being around that vibe, like you explained, it definitely pulls you up, and I notice it when I’m there. Yeah. And then people say, oh, Brian, you don’t have freedom of speech there. And I laugh out loud because my stuff was being censored by the regulator in London back in 2020. Our technology companies that are Western-based are censoring my free speech.

30:27 So I laugh out loud when they say, oh, you don’t have that elsewhere. So yeah, I have to agree with the things you’re saying. And it’s great to see it as a parallel world. I don’t think it’s going to change over the next 10 or 20 years. But yeah, these democracies kind of walk around like they’re holier than now, but they kind of need to look in the mirror.

30:47 I want to ask you a couple questions because you also noticed, or made the notice, that when you were at the Bitcoin conference, it was crazy to see BlackRock there. Obviously, we’ve seen them push and maybe even get through the Bitcoin ETF. Then we saw the Ethereum ETF land, which I know you’re super bullish on, and you think that’s a bigger moment than people are making a big deal of. And now there’s a rumor of the Solana ETF. Can you talk about those big trad-fi institutions and these ETFs, and do you think they’re a much bigger deal than people are even giving them credit for?

31:20 Sure. Today, someone asked me a question. They said, is Bitcoin a correlated asset or not a correlated asset? What do you think I answered? You said, well, I know you think it’s going to catch up with the NASDAQ, and so it’s not as correlated.

31:37 The answer is we don’t know. And the reason why we don’t know is because when people talk about correlated or non-correlated assets, they don’t mean in 200 days or 300 days. They mean in the last 100 years or 50 years or 70 years, have the two asset classes actually moved together or not together? That’s really when people talk about gold being a non-correlated asset or like people talk about that in the context of 50 years of history. Now, people say to me, okay, but you’ve got 10 years of history on Bitcoin.

32:14 No, I don’t. I have 10 years of which the first seven to eight years were a bunch of geeks buying up a minimal supply of this thing because it was very, very, very difficult, if not impossible to get your hands on to Bitcoin, right? The real test for whether Bitcoin is correlated or uncorrelated is when real capital, not our small little monkey capital that we’ve got in the crypto community. I forget you about it. Not a $1 trillion asset class.

32:43 I mean trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of assets. The real test to see whether something is correlated or not correlated is when the institutional capital can move in and out freely without massive barriers of moving Bitcoin around and stuff like that. Do the asset classes move together? So I think when you’re talking about the ETF, we only really now seeing the birth of Bitcoin as an investable asset. Yes, I know we’ve had fun and we had a great advantage because we all bought it.

33:18 We all bought Bitcoin before it was an investable asset. But the real measurements, tests, et cetera, for whether or not Bitcoin is a, any kind of investment asset is now. And so far, I think it’s doing pretty well. It’s the best performing ETF of all time. We’ve got over $20 billion of net inflows since January in six months or seven months.

33:41 Holy shit. So far it’s doing really, really, really fucking good. Right? So that’s the real test. What about Ethereum?

33:51 What about Ethereum ETF? Same thing. Like in the long term, I think Wall Street is going to be more excited by the ETF. I’d say long term. In 10 years, I think Wall Street is going to be more excited about the ETF.

34:06 Why? It is technology. The more apps that you build on it, the bigger the ecosystem grows. It is the new internet. And Wall Street understands technology.

34:15 They understand the internet. Their metrics are geared up for, for, for, you know, you talk about gold valuation models. It’s like probably a handful of them, of which like the stock to flow is probably one of the most prominent ones. How many technology valuation metrics are there? Lifetime per customer, average cost of acquisition per customer.

34:34 But Wall Street understands tech. ETH is a tech ETF. Bitcoin is a digital gold ETF, which is a store of value ETF, which is pretty linear. The gold market is a $12 trillion market at the moment, market cap. Let’s say maybe more.

34:50 I haven’t checked recently, but you’re talking about $12 trillion market cap. The technology market is so much bigger than that. That it’s like, it’s, you can’t compare it. And so I think in time, and when I say time, my time frames, as you’ve realized, I’m thinking about this from a very macro point of view, like I’m thinking like, ETH is probably on a risk adjusted basis. I would say probably ETH is the asymmetric bet at the moment.

35:18 So like my focus right now, if you’re looking at a 10 year time horizon or a five year time horizon, ETH. Now, based on what you just said, what does that make Solana? And when do you think that ETF will be approved in America? I think a lot of it depends on the outcome of the elections. I think Donald Trump gets into power.

35:39 We get a Solana ETF before May next year. If not, if the Democrats are in power, it could take a long time. I mean, BlackRock hasn’t even filed no real reputable organization other than a VanEck has filed for a Solana ETF. The race for the Solana ETF hasn’t even started. Let’s just put it that way.

35:59 So what I think it means for Solana, I think Solana from a technological point of view right now, from a, again, risk adjusted point of view, Solana is better than ETH, which is better than Bitcoin in terms of risk adjusted returns. I’m not saying that the ETH asset is better than the Bitcoin asset. I’m not getting into that discussion. We can get into it, but this is not that discussion. You’re talking to me about investment returns based on the investment public buying.

36:27 Solana is better than ETH, ETH is better than Bitcoin. What else do you like? What else is in your portfolio? You’re a DeFi fan, a D-pen fan, a gaming fan. I see it very different.

36:42 I think everything we’re building is DeFi because what is DeFi? Decentralized finance. What is decentralized finance? It is, well, to me, everything we do in blockchain is decentralized finance. Bitcoin is peer-to-peer money transfer is peer-to-peer value transfer, big and small.

36:59 That is decentralized finance. Let me ask you a question. Memes are meme decentralized finance. To me, they are. Why?

37:06 Because memes are the creation of value out of the attention economy and the immediate trading of that value. Now, when you talk about decentralized finance, that is exactly what decentralized finance is. So I think when you say, I kind of say everything that we do in blockchain is DeFi because we are creating value and trading value across the globe at the speed of sound with no cost. That is exactly what decentralized finance is. So DeFi, I mean, bullish on blockchain.

37:45 Generally, my investment thesis is L1s are super important. So ETH, Solana, maybe there’s going to be one challenge L1. I said, okay, maybe SUE is that L1. I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. Who knows?

37:58 I like SUE, but that doesn’t mean that you need to like SUE. I think the L1 problem is for all intents and purposes solved. Between Solana, SUE, ETH, and it’s L2s, which you can call L1s, let’s just call it base layer. I think the L1 problem is pretty much solved. And to be honest, backing new L1s is probably not the smartest strategy in the world at the moment.

38:22 Now we’re moving into the application layer. So, you know, you mentioned Deepin. I like Deepin. I think that it’s going to be a long time before Deepin replaces centralized physical infrastructure. I think we’re building the building blocks, but it’s going to be a long time before render replaces Nvidia or AWS or whatever you want to call it.

38:47 But, I mean, I think we’re putting together the right models and, you know, I think that these things are going to work. Personally, I think that if you break blockchain down to its finest form, which is just the transfer of value from point A to point B and the speculate and D5, then you’ve got to try and get into the applications that make the most sense. Exchanges, perpetual exchanges. Because I don’t care what the value is. I don’t care whether the value is an NFT, a meme coin.

39:20 I couldn’t give a shit what the value is. I know people are going to trade the token, right? Because whether the value is a meme coin or the value is an NFT or the value is a utility token, I know people are going to trade it. Therefore, my thesis is always hold the DEXs. I also know that people are always going to take leverage.

39:37 So, always hold the derivatives platform because you know that people are going to trade people want dopamine, right? So, because you know that’s going to happen, always hold the thing. Then the rest of it is pretty much have fun. So, if 80% of your investment thesis is in L1 plus exchanges, derivatives exchanges plus exchanges, then the other 10, 20% can be in DEAPN. It can be in meme coins. Who gives a shit?

40:08 Just be in the stuff that makes the most fun. And if you’re trading something, remember that crypto comes in waves, and the hot narratives today aren’t going to be the hot narratives tomorrow. So, have the foresight to get out of meme coins before it’s too late. That’s pretty much how I see the investment thesis. You can get deeper.

40:27 You can get deeper. But I just think that the risk return on effort and return on investment of going deeper and trying to find more opportunity in crypto is not worth it. So, you can go and look for, I don’t know, the identity layer in Solana, but why? Just buy Solana, buy the L1, and have 10 to 20% on meme coins and fun. And that for me is optimal time versus effort investment allocation versus return.

41:09 I mean, are you going to double or triple or quadruple your investment return by finding that one gem in that one niche industry that nobody’s looking at? Probably not. Like, honestly, honestly, probably not. You know, rather just buy the best game or gaming studio, buy the best meme coin, buy the best DEAPN project, put 20% of your cash into those and put 80% of your cash into the L1 and the trading mechanisms on the L1 and spend the rest of the time with your family and on the beach.

41:38 Like, honestly. You mentioned games. Do you think games will bring the next billion users into blockchain? We’re seeing also some very good AAA games now coming out. Do you think that is the narrative or is it going to be something like meme coins or something else that bring people in?

41:54 I’m going to give you a very controversial stance here. I would expect nothing less, Ran.

42:05 Again, why are we in blockchain? We are in blockchain because we want to create and trade value. Now, the problem with these games is that the value trading and accumulation element of it is such a small part of the game, right? That it’s 90% Web2 and 10% Web3. What I mean by 90% Web2 and 10% Web3?

42:29 The games are all Web2 games. And they bring in a Web3 element where in the Web2 game you didn’t own the sword and you didn’t own the outfit, and in the Web3 game you do own the sword and own the outfit and you can therefore trade it. So it’s 90% a Web2 game and 10% a Web3 element. That’s the problem, right? So do I think that games can bring in the next billion users into crypto?

42:54 100%, yes. But I think that the industry is attacking it in the very wrong paradigm. The games that are going to bring the next 100 million people into blockchain are not the same type of games that are being played in Web2 with a 10% Web3 component. I think we have to redefine gaming. Now, Ton did this in a way, but not really, but kind of, in creating tap games.

43:20 Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, hamster combat, not coin. That’s like they’ve taken the first step in the right direction. That’s it. The first tiny, tiny, tiny step in the right direction. But every other game that I’ve seen, unfortunately, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to take a Web2 gaming paradigm, bring it into Web3 and add in a Web3 component to it.

43:48 And then the problem is that the game is not as fun as it was in Web2 and it doesn’t give you the dopamine hits. Blockchain is about trading value and people enjoy trading value because it gives them a dopamine hit. And it gives them a dopamine hit because there’s a feedback loop in your brain which when you say something is going to go up and when you participate in the community and it actually does go up, in your brain it’s a feedback mechanism that says, I am successful.

44:20 The more successful you are, the more motivated you are. The more successful you are, the more motivated you are. It’s a virtuous cycle that happens in your head. The Web3 gaming narrative hasn’t been able to trigger. Brian, why are you in blockchain?

44:36 Because number go up. Simple. Yes, of course we like the tech, but we like the tech because number go up. If you invested in blockchain and number went down, you wouldn’t like the tech. No matter how libertarian it was and how much it stood.

44:54 If you invested and number went down, you would hate it. How do I know this? So number one in my previous life, I was in marketing and I really, really, really understood the human brain and I understood why humans do what they do. That’s how I became such a good marketer and that’s why I sold my company for 150 million. As you said, it was the biggest acquisition on the African continent.

45:17 Then I also launched two meme coins. One was called Gummy and one was called Baked. I launched two meme coins. They got to $250 million market cap each. Very successful by some measures, but both of them are down at $10 million or $20 million.

45:33 I don’t know what the number is today. I haven’t even looked to be honest. And my coins or our coins launched at very, very, very high valuations. They launched immediately at 100 million plus and they only went down from there. So they went up 100, 250 and then went down.

45:49 Okay. What I realized is that there were other meme coins that went up and stayed up. Okay. What was the difference between A and B in my meme coins? Let’s just call them the ones that I spoke about.

46:06 They started high and they went down. And as a result, people didn’t like them. They didn’t like them because they didn’t, number didn’t go up. In the meme coins that worked, Pepe, Brett, I mean, all those ones, they started low and they went up. And then I got thinking about the psychology behind Bitcoin.

46:29 The reason why we like Bitcoin is because we’ve made so much money on Bitcoin because we started low and it went up and it reaffirmed our suspicion ahead. Ethereum started low, went up. For me, the most important thing about a token is that it starts low and it goes up. The reason why we all fucking love Solana, Solana started at a dollar and it went up. That’s why we all like Solana.

46:52 If a token comes onto the market, $10 billion market cap, yes, there are a handful of VCs that love the token, but the community will always hate that token and that token will never, ever fucking work. And you can take that to the bank. I’m willing to bet you that in five years when we look at this industry and we say, what are the tokens that worked versus what are the tokens that didn’t work? The tokens that worked, every single one of them is a token that started low and went high.

47:17 I’m willing to put any money you want. I love that thesis. Love it. You mentioned TON. Are you bullish on this ecosystem and Telegram with apparently a billion users and all the games and the mini apps and all that?

47:30 Well, where did it start? Let’s quickly look. TON was less than a dollar when I bought it and that was… Hold on, let me just give you some timings here. So, TON was $1.17 in August 22.

47:44 TON is at $6. TON has done that. Now, let me ask you. Does TON have more friends or enemies? TON has more friends because more people have made money than lost money, right?

47:57 Because it’s done that. The chart has done that, okay? Therefore, TON has a higher probability of success. That’s just simple thesis. Okay.

48:07 It also has access to 900 million users and yeah, I think TON’s got a great chance of success. It’s one of our big holdings in our portfolio. It has a huge chance of success. Love the platform, love the ecosystem. Is it the best piece of technology?

48:23 Nah. But remember, for crypto, which is network effects, you need two things. For network effects, you need technology and you need adoption. You don’t have to win on both. I’ll give an example.

48:39 The email protocol that we all use every single day called SMTP, it’s a shit piece of tech, okay? It’s old, it’s outdated, it’s antiquated, it’s a piece of garbage. Like honestly, you could write… I don’t even know. Chart GPT could write you a better protocol than SMTP.

48:55 But everybody’s using SMTP. So if you’re going to use email, you better be using that same protocol, right? So if you have adoption, you don’t need the best technology. We know that. That’s a fact.

49:07 So I’m going to say this. I’m not comparing technology, but let’s say that there’s one blockchain with better technology and there’s one blockchain with better adoption. Who wins? Chain with better adoption wins, hands down. Your technology has to be just good enough so the user doesn’t have a bad experience and your distribution has to be fucking unbelievable.

49:27 Again, Bitcoin, good tech or bad tech? Slow tech, expensive tech, bad block size tech, right? But it’s going to win. Why? Because it has adoption and you can’t beat it on adoption, right?

49:43 There we go. You’ve answered the question. Will Tonwin, that’s my bet on Ton. That’s why I’ve put the bets on Ton. I’m a simple guy.

49:50 I’m simple. Don’t look too deep. Just follow the principles. What do you think of AI on the blockchain? Decentralized AI, open source AI versus the narrative in centralized and the mainstream.

50:05 I know you have a lot of friends that work in AI. I think long term AI on blockchain must converge. And I’ll tell you why. The future is AI agents speaking to AI agents. That’s the future.

50:18 And I’ll give you like one. I always use this example, but I think it’s a very powerful example. Let’s say that you and I are both driving self-driving cars or both being driven in self-driving cars. We’re both in London and we’re on the road. I’m on the way to the airport.

50:31 You’re on the way to work. And we’re in 2028 and we’re being driven by self-driving cars. The roads are congested, completely congested. I am in a hurry. You’re not in a hurry.

50:43 My car comes, my car is driving, gets to your car. There has to be a conversation between these AI agents where your car moves out the way and lets my car go through, right? Now, what is that? That’s a bidding process. That is, I’m willing to pay 10 pounds to get to work and you’re willing to pay five pounds.

51:02 And so therefore I will go faster than you, right? That’s just how it works. Now, what is that? That is AI, two AI agents negotiating and concluding a transaction. Okay, now, in that conclusion of that transaction, are they gonna each put out a visa and put in the last four digits?

51:21 And no, they’re just gonna trade crypto. They’re gonna trade value and say, thank you for letting me pass. Smart contract says car one has moved, car two has overtaken. Therefore, criteria A and B have been met. Therefore, smart contract pay one removed from the other.

51:38 That’s the convergence of blockchain and AI. You can’t do it with the traditional money system. You can’t like, what are we all gonna run accounts with? There’s certain banks that don’t trust each other and certain countries that don’t trust each other. There’s just no way that an AI-powered world can run with a current banking system.

51:57 You need an immediate trustless flow of value between one entity and another entity, which in this case are AI agents. Now, fast forward 10 years, the whole world is just a series of transactions between a bunch of AI agents. That’s what it is. You can already see it. I book a vacation, you go to chat GPT, book me this, book me that, find me this, find me that.

52:18 It’s a matter of time before, like you have a personal virtual assistant which basically does everything for you and they need to pay. They’re not paying on Apple Pay. I promise you that. They’re not paying on Apple Pay. They’re not paying on Visa or MasterCard.

52:31 So how they’re paying? They’re paying via some kind of cryptocurrency. Okay, great. So there’s your first use case of AI.

52:41 Are you invested accordingly or you think that’s just the future? I am invested accordingly, but let’s define when you say invested accordingly. A very, very, very small part of my portfolio is in AI investments. Why? Because the market is not…

52:59 AI in the real world is in its beginning stages. In the crypto world, AI is in the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of the beginning stages. What do we know about all the projects from the vintage of the beginning stages? They all die and they’re replaced by a new vintage of projects which have a higher chance of success.

53:20 Maybe one of this vintage of projects will make it. That’ll be the Bitcoin or ETH of this cycle. I don’t know who it is, but there’s so many projects out there that for me, the probability of putting my money on that one is a shot in the dark, right? And so I would rather focus on the L1s because no matter what that AI play is going to be, it’s going to work on an L1 and it’s going to trade tokens because it’s going to trade value. And so then actually, maybe the better bet is to just focus on L1, the value trading protocols and take 1% of your portfolio and just put it into some random AI plays.

53:59 And to be honest, probably do the opposite of what the market’s telling you. So if the market’s telling you that fetch AI and just put it into something, who cares? Honestly, who cares? Just put it into something. It’s a roulette.

54:09 And that’s how it’s going to work. But you’re talking with such a small portion of your portfolio, it’s 1%. So AI is about 1% of my portfolio. You feel about AI in general. You’ve got young kids, as do I.

54:22 I’ve had a lot of conversations with some big players in the AI space here on the show. And when I go down that rabbit hole, you can go pretty dark. I’m just curious what you think. When the fax machine, when the email came out, people went pretty dark about it and said, how are we going to displace our fax machine? When electricity came out, people were like, how are we ever going to displace gasoline?

54:51 And honestly, this is just another technology. Whenever there is another technology. I saw an advert the other day of people. I think it was like a thing of how the printing press was being displaced by the internet or something like that. And people were saying like, how bad it was that the internet was replacing the printing press and how it will never happen.

55:11 The reality is the unknown is always dark. And it just, every technology has a way of just working, humans and every technology has a way of just working it out. You know, even the smartest minds in the space, Elon Musk and I said that there’s a 20% chance that AI turns out badly and there’s an 80% chance that AI turns out well. That’s great odds for me. Like if you told me there was a token that there was an 80% chance the token would do well.

55:46 And there was a 20% chance that if it didn’t do well, the world would pretty much be destroyed. I put my money on the 80% because if the 20% does materialize, then my investment is not the problem. Then I’m probably worried for my survival. You know what I mean? And so it’s like, the way I’m looking at it is people are always scared of technology.

56:08 It’s great. It gets us to ask the right questions, but I’m much more excited about the opportunity that AI brings and it’s already bringing into our businesses. Something else is designed by AI, descriptions written by AI, everything AI, you know? Yeah, the only counter argument is that none of these techs had agency in the past, but you know, that’s a whole nother rabbit hole to dive into. You know, every tech has a rabbit hole.

56:36 Every tech has a rabbit hole, come on. Internet, the rabbit hole was porn and people are going to take so much porn and this and blockchain is going to be money laundering. Every technology has a rabbit hole. Every technology has positives and negatives and people always feel uncomfortable in the midst of a technological revolution, always. And it’s natural.

57:01 I’m an optimist, as you can hear. I know things will be okay. And therefore, I’m choosing to focus on opportunity and not the outcome. Also, to be honest, no amount of how much we stress about AI is going to change the negative outcome. What it could do is prompt governments to regulate it more and all that will do is shift the AI landscape from one place to another, but certainly not stop it.

57:34 So, I don’t see governments all around the world in unison regulating that AI should not be progressed because there may be some dark outcomes. Some countries, like the US, may put some restrictions. The UK may put some restrictions. Apparently, they’re putting restrictions on a lot of things there. But then places like Dubai will say, hey, we’re not putting those restrictions on.

57:57 I don’t see the whole world in unison ever putting the same restrictions, specifically not on technology because technology equals opportunity. And countries are competing amongst themselves. And whereas you may say that inside countries is not capitalistic in nature, the countries themselves are capitalists in nature, each one wanting to seize the best opportunity for themselves. So, let me tell you, inside China, they may not be capitalistic at all. They may be very socialist.

58:30 But let me tell you, China as a country is one of the most capitalistic countries in the world. They want to conquer. They want to compete with the US. They want to reduce prices. They want to increase tariffs.

58:40 They want to do everything to compete capitalistically with other nations. Right? That’s what’s going to happen with AI. So, let’s not even focus on it. I think it’s such a waste of time to focus on.

58:52 Focus on opportunity because there you can change the outcome and you can change your outcome. Focusing on the negative will make you worry about something where you can’t change the outcome. We definitely can’t change the outcome with AI, I don’t think. And the only way you can get governments around the world to act in unison is with a deadly virus we found in the past. Even then, Miami was different from New York and some countries, Sweden didn’t do any lockdowns.

59:22 That wasn’t unison. Again, you had Sweden’s in the world and Sweden didn’t do a lockdown. And they said that, you know, they’re not doing a lockdown. And some countries did vaccine mandates and some didn’t. And some people based where they lived based on the vaccine mandate.

59:40 For example, I lived in Florida because I hated the way that New York was dealing with it. So, you know, they’ll never act in unison. They may be more doing the same thing but they’ll never act in unison. And as long as there’s one that’s not acting in unison, the whole thing falls apart because then everyone will gravitate to the one that suits them. You know, one of the reasons that I listen to you carefully when you talk about your portfolio is because of the portfolios you’ve had in the past and how you’ve been open and honest about lessons you learned from things like Luna and things like that.

1:00:16 Can you tell me about what you learned from those days in Luna, even when you had to talk to the public about that, which I think also helped build your media company and things that people should learn from what you learned by having a lot of your exposure in an asset that looked like it was going to be the next thing? Yeah, you know, I studied a CFA and I did a bachelor’s degree in investment and management research. And ultimately, if you narrow down everything about a CFA and everything about doing a bachelor’s degree in investment and management, all that teaches you is the concept of diversification.

1:00:55 Like, really, if you were to narrow down, a CFA is you ask your client what their risk tolerance is and what their cash flow expectations are and what their time horizon is, and then what you do is you build a diversified portfolio. That was like the one outcome, and I did that. But I guess it took a real lesson for me to actually really learn the importance of diversification. Why? Because one token or one token ecosystem was over 60% of my portfolio.

1:01:27 It went to zero in four days. 60% of my portfolio went to zero and the other 40% halved because the entire market went from X to half X. Black days of my life, the worst days of my life, terrible days of my life. But also, sometimes we have to learn very, very tough lessons to make sure we don’t make a mistake ever again. And I can tell you that how I’m playing in this cycle is, I don’t care how much I believe in Bitcoin or ETH or Solana or SUI or Arweave or Rune or Nier.

1:02:03 None of them will ever take too much of a big chunk of my portfolio. None of them. I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s a fucking sure thing. I will never let that situation happen again.

1:02:15 As a result, let me tell you. Maybe I look at my portfolio and say it could be performing better, but I sleep way better at night. I know that no matter what token goes down in my portfolio, my portfolio is safe. Okay. That’s a great place to be.

1:02:33 Maybe on the apps, I don’t get all the upside. But what I’ve learned about blockchain and having been a multi-hundred dollar millionaire in the previous cycle is that your value on paper means nothing and the only thing that actually matters is the value that you walk away with outside of the speculative asset class at the end of the cycle. And you can decide for yourself when the end of the cycle is, but what matters is not what your valuation is on paper.

1:03:05 What matters is what you can materialize out of that valuation. And I guess that’s one of the biggest lessons that I ever learned. Yeah, I mean, and I think the other lesson I learned is, and I’ve always thought this, but sometimes it’s very, very, very, very, very hard to love and respect the people who have differing views to you more than you love and respect the people that have the same view as you. So it’s very, very, very hard to love the Twitter trolls more than you love the people that follow everything you say blindly and reaffirm everything that you say.

1:03:48 Just think about it. You got like your buddies on Twitter where every time you tweet, they like your tweet. They tell you what a god you are, how amazing your call is. And then you got this one guy who says to you, I don’t know why you’re investing in Solana, they take his flawed. It’s a piece of shit. Okay.

1:04:03 And you got to find it in your heart to love the guy who is negative more and to give him more attention and to respect his point of view more. Then the people that are giving you positive reinforcement feedback, completely unnatural, but probably the smartest thing you can ever do. Do you know how much time and respect I give to trolls? Crazy amounts, ridiculously weighted amounts. But you know what?

1:04:37 The time that I spend with people who are reaffirming my views is time wasted because I already have my view. The time that I spend with the people that are challenging my view in earnest, that’s the best time. That’s the most important time. That’s great advice. Tell me about those dark, Luna days.

1:04:57 I remember you saying that you had walked around the office and people wouldn’t make eye contact with you. They knew things were so bad. And then you decided to do a live stream and like put it all out there and tell people what was going on. And correct me if I’m wrong, but that stream seemed to maybe kickstart a lot of what you do now at Cryptobanter and also seemed to give you this second wind, this second wind of fighting and getting right back into the market.

1:05:25 Okay, so let’s go a whole lot of steps back. I discovered Luna in 2018 in Korea. I was one of their first investors. We bought a lot. We carried on buying.

1:05:37 I really thought that Luna was the future of money. I thought that an algorithmic stablecoin was much better than a government-backed stablecoin by nothing. And I still actually hold that view. I just think Luna was the wrong execution in hindsight. I genuinely thought that Luna was the future of money.

1:05:53 And the people that are surrounding myself made me reaffirm my suspicion. And so we were in the paradigm. And the paradigm is that Luna is the future of money. Luna is the future of money. Luna is the future of money.

1:06:09 My show and my community is very much a reality show. What I think is what I say. It’s not scripted. What I think is what I say. It’s a reality show.

1:06:20 And so we told our community that we were all in on Luna. And we were all in on Luna because we thought it was the future of finance. And then one day, over 50% of upward folio was in the future of finance, over $100 million. And one day, over four days, it went to zero. I don’t know if you’ve ever lost over $100 million.

1:06:43 I don’t know if you’ve ever understood what losing 80% of your portfolio is like in four days. After you spent seven years building up this crazy portfolio. Then in five years, six years, building up a crazy portfolio worked hard every single day. And in two days, it pretty much just goes to zero. Okay. That’s bad.

1:07:09 I felt no blood to my face. I felt defeated. I was awake, but I was not really here. People would talk to me, but I was like, I was deep in my own sorrow, anger. The worst grieving and mourning process you could ever imagine.

1:07:26 Let’s just put it that way. Problem is that I wasn’t only carrying my grief and my sorrow. I had a community of 500,000 people who all put their money into Luna. And it was because I got so excited about Luna. And when Luna collapsed, fuck you, you scammer, I lost my life.

1:07:46 Some people were like angry with me and blaming me for the whole collapse. Forgetting that they were the ones that actually pressed the button that actually bought others. Well, others just sent me messages saying, I’ve lost my life savings. I’ve lost my wife. I’m getting a divorce.

1:08:00 I spend my wife’s money. Remember, I’ve got my own, I’m carrying my own problems on my shoulders and I’m now carrying a community of 500,000 people’s problems on my shoulders too. You know, in life, I think there’s times where you are faced with a decision and the decision you make defines what you are or who you are as a person. And I think you can’t define what you are and who you are as a person when things are going good. In fact, that doesn’t define you at all.

1:08:29 In fact, all we learn from success is arrogance. That’s all we learn from success. The real test of who you are is when things go bad and when things go really bad. And I can say that that was the point in my life where things went the most really bad, like the most really bad, the biggest loss, the biggest pressure from the community, the biggest, like you name it, the biggest. The biggest, biggest, biggest pressure.

1:09:04 The biggest test for you is what happens to you under the worst kind of pressure. And that was the worst kind of pressure. And so, you know, I had a decision to make. Now, either I could have tapped out and said, I’ve just lost my portfolio, I’ve just lost face with my community. And believe me that that was the way that I was swayed.

1:09:26 I’m out of crypto. I hate this place. I don’t, I don’t ever want to be seen in front of a camera ever again. It’s too much responsibility. This was a very, very, very rough and very, very, very tough place.

1:09:39 Or I could do the exact opposite. I could get up and I could fight back. And if I was going to fight back, then the objective was to get higher than where I was in the previous. It’s not to get to where I was before. It’s to, it’s to teach the world a lesson.

1:10:01 And look, I made the decision that I was going to build a bigger community and build a better business and that my community were going to make money the same way that I made money and that we’re going to beat our previous high. And, you know, something inside me kicked in. I don’t know if it was, you know, animal instinct, testosterone. I don’t know what it was, but I can tell you that from that day is when we actually started to grow our community exponentially.

1:10:26 We started to build a better portfolio. We started to build a more diversified portfolio, a portfolio that we had less risk and a lot of return in. And that is that is where we are. That’s pretty much how we got to where we got to today. So have you done it two years later?

1:10:44 Have you surpassed where you were? Well, right now, no, but we were. So like in April, in April, when the market spiked, we were higher than we were before. And of course, the markets come down now and a lot of altcoins have come down now. But, you know, we’re long term multi cycle players.

1:11:01 So, yeah. How do you build a media company? What are the lessons you’ve learned from Crypto Banter? I’ll tell you the best way to build anything is to, number one, be completely open and honest with everyone around you all the time. Maybe even to open on everyone around you all the time.

1:11:32 So there’s never any politics. Number two, you’ve got to have a very, very strong mission. So, like, my mission is not to make money. Like, I don’t really, like, honestly, I’ve got enough money for me and my kids to live very well. I don’t need money.

1:11:46 Like, seriously, I wouldn’t mind some more money. And, you know, maybe, maybe I’d love to fly private instead of flying commercial. And maybe I’d like to buy a yacht, you know, and own a yacht instead of maybe chartering yacht. But you’re talking about incrementals. The reason why I do what I do is because I have a superpower.

1:12:08 And my superpower is I think that I can build the richest community in the world. And when I say build the richest community in the world, I know that if I do a lot of research, and then I switch, and then I make moves on the chessboard based on the research that I do. And then I communicate exactly what I learned and why I made the moves on what I do. And I communicate that to my audience. I have a sneaking suspicion, more than a sneaking suspicion.

1:12:39 I have a high level of confidence that they will become richer. And so what you realize is that I’m not a doctor. I don’t, I can’t do brain surgery that will save people’s lives. I can’t cure disease that will save people’s lives. What I can do is I can make people financially free.

1:12:58 And if I can make people financially free, that might be a very important gift. Now, let me just quickly run you through what that gift actually is. So people think financial freedom is about having money. It’s not. That’s not what financial freedom is about.

1:13:15 Most people, the way I said, you get one life on this world. You get one life in this world. Your life is 34,400 days on average, right? That’s like a 90 year life. If you live for like 90 years, more or less average life, good life, 34,400 days.

1:13:33 You want to maximize what you do in the 34,400 days that you do. I think around 34,000 days. Just work with me. The problem is that most people, for most of their fun part of their life, when I say fun part of your life, you’re out of school, you’re productive. Most of that time you spend thinking about how to make money so that you can eat and you can sleep and you can have shelter over your head.

1:14:00 95% of people in the world spend 95% of their waking time worrying about how to payable, what they’re going to eat, where they’re going to sleep, where their kids are going to eat and where they’re going to sleep. Okay. That is jail. That is worse than jail. In jail, you don’t worry about food and you don’t worry about where you’re going to sleep.

1:14:22 The lights are always on. For most people, even though they’re not in jail, they actually are in jail because you get a guy who’s not financially free. You got kids, I got kids. Imagine you weren’t financially free. Imagine every single interaction you have with your kids.

1:14:37 Imagine the guilt that would consume you or the pressure that would consume you to make sure that you could provide food for them in their next meal. That is how 95% of the world live. We are the 5% that are financially free, but 95% of the world live like that. For me, my mission is to make people financially free. My gift is the ability to make people financially free on a mass scale.

1:15:02 I can make mass impact on a mass scale by doing something that I absolutely love, which is learn, act, tell people what you learned and how you acted and be fully transparent about it in such a way that they can never, ever, ever catch you out or think that you may not be being ingenious or that you’re being disingenuous. That’s the formula. The formula is switch on the camera. No, the formula is switch on the camera so that you become accountable. As you switch on the camera and you become accountable, it will force you to do more research.

1:15:41 The more research you do, the smarter you will get. The smarter you will get, the more people will follow you. The more people follow you, the more money you will have from sponsorships and everything else to invest more into research, which will make you even smarter, which will make the people watching you even richer. I think crypto is a great, great, great mechanism to make people financially free, but it doesn’t need to be crypto. Switch on the camera around travel, create videos around travel, do research around travel and monetize that research.

1:16:16 The more you make the content, I think the key to having a successful media business is switch on the camera, put your face in front of an audience, be accountable to that audience, be transparent and honest with that audience. When you make mistakes, be the first one to shut in the mistakes. Be human. I think that’s the difference between mainstream media and non-mainstream media. What is the difference between us and CNBC?

1:16:41 CNBC will never, ever, ever admit when they make a mistake. They will never admit on a lie that they made a mistake. All they do is broadcast the news. Jim Cramer will broadcast the news. Have you ever heard Jim Cramer say, once I heard him crying, he wrote a letter about how he trusted Facebook.

1:16:57 The difference between them and us is this is a reality show. And if I make a mistake tomorrow, I’ll say, guys, you know, I called Bitcoin to go up, I made a mistake. It went down, but this is what I plan to do. Honesty, transparency, integrity, doing something that I love every single day, and the outcome of that is building the most profitable community in the world. That’s the formula.

1:17:22 And so five years from now, does that mean you’ve got more people working for you, making videos, more live events, more people around the world? How does that evolve from, like you said, videos online to other aspects? I want to make everyone rich. I want to build the most profitable community in the world. I’m obsessed with making people around me rich and giving them the gift of financial freedom.

1:17:49 For as long as our formula works, we will keep reinvesting as much money as we can into making more people rich. If our formula breaks, we’ll reevaluate and we’ll try and find a new formula that mixes with our mission. You’re talking to me, what I’ll be doing in 10 years, maybe it won’t even be crypto, maybe it’ll be property. If that’s what makes people rich, and I have an edge that everything I learn will make people rich in crypto, I care about the outcome.

1:18:16 The technology, which is crypto, is just the tool that I’m using to get people to the outcome. The outcome is make people rich on a mass scale. That’s it. Rand, tell me about your parents and how you grew up, because I got to know what makes a guy like you. Is this an anomaly? Did you have mentors?

1:18:39 Are you like the weirdo in your family? What is it? Because you’re a rare individual. I think that I grew up in a family where we were five kids with one working parent, so I don’t think that we never had luxuries and our parents tried to give us the best lifestyle that they could possibly give us. They did a great job, but we were always five kids with one income-earning parent.

1:19:14 My parents would send us to a private school and negotiate better fees because they didn’t have money in place of giving us fancy clothes or we were the only kids in the school that never got a car when they turned 18, where everybody got a car. That was the circumstance. I was by no means poor, but I was by no means wealthy. We were always the poorest in our level. We were the smallest fish in the big pond.

1:19:48 Our parents always tried to make us the small fish in the big pond. We were always the poorest people in the rich school. We were always that kind of thing. But then there’s a certain element of nature versus nurture. And why I said that is because I got four brothers.

1:20:04 We’re five boys. And I think that out of the five boys, I’m the most obsessed and most hungry. And I have been ever since I was two years old or three years old. I’ll tell you three stories or two stories that will trigger this. Number one, when I was three and a half years old, my mom said I went quiet for like two or three hours.

1:20:27 And she knew that when a hyperactive kid goes quiet for two or three hours, something’s wrong. And she came to my bedroom and I was thinking, she said to me, what are you thinking about? I said, I’m thinking about how I’m going to make money when I’m older. So I was already obsessed with being better, making money, winning. Second story is when I was five, I had a great idea.

1:20:52 My parents threw away an old calendar. And I saw this and I just learned to use a pair of scissors. And so when they went to work and left me with a nanny, I cut out all the pictures in the calendar. And when the nanny went to wash the laundry, I ran out of the door and I went to sell these pictures, door to door, five-year-old. Just imagine, a five-year-old leaves home and walks door to door in Israel, knocking on doors, selling pictures from an old calendar at the age of five.

1:21:19 True story. The story ends like my parents and the police were waiting for me at the house and there was a missing person’s report and they thought the kid had been abducted, but I came back with a pocket full of money. And so from a young age, two things really drove me. One is, or a couple of things drove me. One is I wanted to be rich.

1:21:37 I don’t know where they came from, but I wanted to be rich. The second thing is I always wanted to win, and that hasn’t changed. Like today, I have to be the number one streamer in crypto, otherwise hell breaks loose. Now, it’s a lot of pressure. It’s that fear of you have to be number one.

1:21:53 I am the number one streamer in crypto today. I have the biggest live shows in the world. I’m obsessive about monitoring my performance relative to everyone else. I am paranoid that people will catch up to me. And so I act accordingly.

1:22:04 I’m obsessed and I must make sure I’m at the top of my game like an athlete is in their game. I’m an athlete, but my field isn’t a running field. It’s the field of business. So that coupled with that real OCD where things, I have to win. I have to win.

1:22:21 I have to achieve my goal. What is my goal? My goal is to make people rich. If I don’t make people rich, if I don’t achieve my goal, if I’m not the best streamer in the world, my advertising business was the biggest advertising business in Africa. We won every single award.

1:22:36 Our nearest competitor wasn’t even 50% of our size. It’s that obsession of winning and that paranoia that someone is trying to catch you all the time, even though that paranoia, that person is so far back, that drives me to be like, honestly, I think we are so much better than our streaming competitors at the moment that I don’t think our nearest streaming competitor is 50% of where we’re at as a station, not as a person as a station and as a person, but as a station that, and I’m trying to make that gap more comfortable for us because I have a paranoia that they may catch up to us. And that’s what I have.

1:23:14 So it’s this, it’s a hunger. It’s a paranoia. And it’s also the fact that I never had. And so I know what it’s like to have not have had. And I have to make sure that I never get back there ever again.

1:23:27 I swear to you, Brian, I’m a very wealthy man today. And every morning I wake up with a paranoia that I’m going to go back to where I was in the beginning of the race. And I was poor and I was, I was the only child that couldn’t afford sushi. I was the only child that never got a car when they turned 18 in my circle of friends. I was the only child that never wore Levi’s jeans or diesel jeans, could never afford it.

1:23:48 I was the only child that had to wear unbranded sneakers because we couldn’t afford Nike and Adidas and whatever everybody else wearing. I’m not going back there. I’m not going back there. And I wake up every morning and I have a pact with myself. It’s a ridiculous thing because I can’t go back there.

1:24:05 I’m not, nothing’s impossible, but the probability of me going back to the starting point are so low that I wake up with that paranoia every single fucking day. And it drives me every single day to be better. I have this paranoia of going back to zero or to not winning. And I just, I can’t allow myself not to win. I just can’t.

1:24:29 I wish I could because I would probably have a much higher personal lifestyle. I’d probably be able to spend more present time with my kids and more present time with my family. And I’d probably be able to enjoy none work experiences a lot more, but I can’t. I can’t because I have to win. I have to win.

1:24:50 And even though this weekend I didn’t look at crypto at all, I still checked my competitor’s views to see that they hadn’t done anything spectacular in the last 24 hours, which I should be paranoid about. And I think that’s the psyche that drives me to do what I do every single day. Beautiful thing, but it also can be a tough guy to live with. I’ve lived with that guy as well. And I used to drink a lot in my former years.

1:25:13 And I think when I was trying to get away from that guy, who was always critical of me in my head 24 seven. And I’ve now found a way not to drink to find some way. But yeah, it’s, it can be a bug and a feature at the same time as you just got to walk that line, right? I’m sure you’ve you’re familiar with that. Exactly.

1:25:34 That’s a bug and a feature. It’s a bug that you can, that if harness correctly is a feature that I’ve got terrible ADD. And again, that’s a bug. But if you harness it correctly, it can teach you to absorb information quicker than anybody else in the room. Why?

1:25:50 Because you know that you, that your brain is going to shut down before everybody else’s. And so as a result, the bag can turn into a feature. So is that this obsession that I have is, it’s a bug. It’s not a feature. It’s a terrible thing, but I’ve turned it into a feature where I can use it to change other people’s lives.

1:26:10 And so that’s when the bank becomes a feature. I think as we get older and we get to know ourselves better, we find ways of making all these things work in unison. And you know, when I used to work in the city as a banker and, you know, it took me a while, but by the time I was 40, I was making a ton of money and I was totally miserable. And now I find that when I make other people money, it makes me really happy. And so when I’m building a community, when I’m teaching people, when I’m creating, when I’m a part of something, now I’m happy.

1:26:43 And I find other ways where if I can train or do meditation, I can find a way to get away from my constant task, master brain. And so I’ve found ways to, to, to interact with the world where everybody wins. Because I found when it was just when Brian was winning, I was, I was the most unhappy I’ve ever been. And I think all of these things kind of come with, with age. And I still got a lot more to learn.

1:27:06 Mass impact, mass impact on a mass scale. That’s, that’s what I want to be remembered for. I want to be remembered for making a mass impact. That’s, that’s what I want to be remembered for. But on that note, I have a family to get to.

1:27:18 So, yeah. For the time, if people want to become part of our community and follow you, what’s the best way to do it? CryptoBanta on YouTube or at CryptoMan RAN on Twitter. Rand, thanks so much for what you do. Thanks for the honesty.

1:27:33 I’ll see you next time at the next conference. All right. God bless. Thank you. I really enjoyed this.

1:27:39 Thank you very much, man. Thank you everyone. Follow this man. We’ll see you next time on London Real. Bye.