Full transcript: Brian Rose on Cryptonites TV
0:00 Brian Rose: Ten years of London Real, I’ve had some of the most intense people on my show. I’ve had like a thousand guests and some of them changed the course of my life. So I’ve had some come on that challenge me to run an Iron Man race and a vegan diet and I did that. I had one that had a castle in Scotland that invited me up to learn his high performance techniques. I had another one that had me go down to Costa Rica and drink ayahuasca with him.
0:19 So they’re always forcing me out of my comfort zone by learning, by taking action. So when it comes to teaching people, I always think, that’s action. Don’t watch another video about Bitcoin. Don’t read another article about ETH. Go and buy a small amount.
0:35 People need to push themselves into something that they’ve been told their whole life they’re not supposed to be good at. Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. He raised his hand when he was eight years old and said, in class, when are we going to learn about money? And they said, no, no, we don’t teach money. He said, but you teach me Spanish and math and science and biology.
0:53 But we don’t talk about money. We don’t teach you. So our whole education system is designed to implicitly tell you, the smart people manage your money. Your pension fund, we’ll manage it. We’ll manage it.
1:03 So I think, honestly, we just need a real relationship with our money. And that’s what owning Bitcoin is. It’s you, for the first time in your life, actually having a relationship with your money. I’ve got two sons that are four and five years old. And they walk into London Real Studios and we’ve got a typewriter mounted on the wall.
1:18 And my son Kate said, what’s that? And I said, it’s a typewriter. We used to type on pieces of paper and get messages. I said, why? And I think these young men later will ask us, what’s a bank?
1:28 Why was there somebody with this big expensive office that you pay for, time to control your money? I think they’ll look at it like a horse and buggy.
1:47 Alex Fazel: All right, guys, live from Tolkien 2049. And I have a treat for you. We’re going to interview one of the living legends here in London, Brian Rose from London Real.
2:08 Someone I really looked up to, I was inspired by, to create this show. And we’re going to cover some very meaningful topics with regards to Bitcoin. Really a completely different angle. And I’m telling you guys, you’re in for a treat. Man, I am so pumped to have Brian Rose from London Real.
2:28 I’ve been looking up to you for so long. You set really the standard when it comes to quality interviews on YouTube. Thank you so much for educating the world and so many different topics, Brian.
2:38 Brian Rose: Look, it’s my pleasure. It’s been 10 years now since I’ve been broadcasting over 1,000 guests and something like a half a billion views.
2:45 And now we’re going big into this whole DeFi and crypto and blockchain space. And it’s never been more exciting. So thanks for having me. I’m so excited.
2:53 Alex Fazel: And what’s really cool about you, Brian, is you’re actually from TradFi.
2:57 So I guess, because a lot of people from TradFi are very skeptical, especially Wall Street, kind of frowning upon this whole DeFi and Bitcoin thing. I would love to hear from you. Like, what is your story, Brian? Did you have a light bulb? Do you have an aha moment?
3:10 An epiphany where you’re like, oh, Bitcoin makes sense to me. Please give us a background. I’d love to hear more.
3:15 Brian Rose: Yeah, look, I totally did. And you’re right.
3:17 I started my first job on Wall Street in 1993. I was 22 years old. I was at Bankers Trust. It was the 33rd floor right next to the World Trade Center at the time. And I was a kid and it was this crazy, intense environment.
3:30 300 alpha males and females screaming at the top of their lungs, fighting for hundreds of millions of dollars. I went there straight from MIT because they were looking for technical, rocket-science type kids to do all of their analysis and risk management and to price all their derivative instruments. So I spent quite a lot of time in that space, in that kind of Gordon Gekko, Bud Fox world from the movie Wall Street. And it was amazing. I learned so much.
3:54 There was a lot of money to be made. I moved to London to do the credit derivative side of that. And then, you know, around 2011, I just, I stopped. I couldn’t take that lifestyle anymore. And I started broadcasting on my channel and just completely did a 180.
4:09 And, you know, I was having conversations with all sorts of cool people, Navy Seals, rock stars. And every now and then, Max Keiser would come over in 2013 and scream about Bitcoin. Joining me is my good friend, Mr. Max Keiser, who’s the host of the Keiser Report on RT here in London. And he tours the world with his lovely bride, Stacy.
4:29 They both live next door to London Real Studios, I know.
4:32 Max Keiser: We hear you making a racket all the time. I keep over here to find out what all the noise is about. And now I’m on the show.
4:38 Brian Rose: I got to know Max.
4:39 He moved in, like, next door to me. And he came to my house for Thanksgiving. And he transacted at Bitcoin at my Thanksgiving dinner with, like, a buddy of mine from Goldman Sachs for $1,000. I remember watching it, thinking this is weird. But I didn’t really get the message.
4:51 And then Andreas Antonopoulos came over in 2015, 17, and 19 and talked about the future of money, the Internet of money, what it could be. And what we saw right now was email compared to the Internet. You know, he said, this is just one use case scenario. And we were like, OK, this sounds amazing. But it didn’t really grip.
5:10 And last year, we spent the whole year fighting for freedom of speech and going head to head against YouTube. This year, I ran to be mayor of London, fought back for free and fair elections when they tried to ban us from campaigning. And then, towards the end of that run, I looked at the corner of my eye what was happening in DeFi. And I thought, wow, these guys are innovating in a way we were doing at Bankers Trust back in the day with these incredibly complex instruments, yield swapping, options trading.
5:34 And I saw the amount locked and the growth rate. And I just got it. I said, this is something special. And this is what I want to do for the next 10 years.
5:44 Alex Fazel: The crashing of crypto markets actually helps the acceleration of DeFi markets.
5:49 And it makes them anti-fragile. Quote, some things benefit from shocks. They thrive and grow when exposed to volatility or randomness disorder and stressors. And they love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Now is the best time to invest in DeFi.
6:06 Now is the time. When you see volatility, when you see these cryptos crashing, now is the time to invest in DeFi. What are you going to do? What are you going to do right now? I’m not talking about tomorrow.
6:17 I’m not talking about next week. This opportunity won’t be here next month or next year. What are you going to do right now? This is your moment. I feel so energized.
6:27 And now I get to use all my TradFi knowledge that honestly was just sitting kind of dormant for a while. I thought the whole Wall Street days were just a couple stories here and there. But now I can really see the innovation. I actually used to be a banker for 15 years, a greedy banker. And I know.
6:44 And I used to work in New York City and Chicago and the city of London. So I’ve got some questions today about my former employers’ institutions and how they’re using companies like Nexo to really get into this space. And being at a bank, they’re very conservative. They’re very slow. They’ve just heard about Bitcoin this year.
7:04 But they do want to be involved. And they’ve got a lot of capital. And it’s really important that we bring them into this space. It’s amazing that 10 guys and a dog in Tel Aviv or 15 girls and a cat in St. Petersburg can put a decentralized exchange online and test it in a way that on Wall Street, that would be one of 10 banks.
7:22 We’d have 20,000 employees, a balance sheet aligned to the Fed. And we didn’t have to innovate because we were already making tons of money. And so now you see this space and it’s just incredibly to be a part of it. And I’m just, I love the vibe. I love the vibe of the people like you and just everybody here who’s just super positive.
7:41 Brian Rose: And I also think, like one of my guests told me yesterday on the show, it could actually save humanity. So that’s a whole other story.
7:47 Alex Fazel: No, but it’s a really good point. By the way, I feel your energies and the vibrations are so positive. It’s amazing.
7:52 But like you said, the freedom of speech. You know, the other day I walked into somebody and said, what is Bitcoin to you? I asked the person, what is Bitcoin to you? And she looked at me and she says, she didn’t mention electronic cash or digital money or Internet of money or the intersection of gold or virtually like, you know, all these definitions that we see out there. She said, to me, it’s freedom of speech.
8:12 Just like you said, is that a bit too far fetched? Or can you kind of see that point?
8:17 Brian Rose: You know, the deeper I go into the space, the more I realize that it’s not technology. I actually had the CEO of Polygon Sandeep Nawal. He said, Brian, this isn’t technology.
8:26 This is a paradigm shift. He said, we used to have kings and queens right here in Europe. A few hundred years ago, tell us what to do, right? Nowadays, we have governments and banks that are, you know, custodians for our wealth and our future and even our children’s education. We’ve never actually been able to own our identity, own our information and go peer to peer and exchange value, whether you’re an artist or a broadcaster or just to give you value without that third party involved.
8:50 And it represents a whole new version of humanity. And yes, there is a freedom of speech issue there. There’s a censorship issue and just, you know, that peer to peer value transfer without a Facebook or an Amazon or an Apple taken out of a third of the transaction or an Airbnb. They were great for Web 2.0, but now it’s Web 3.0 and it’s empowering. And I had a guest, Jeff Booth, on the show two days ago when he said, And he’s a mild-mannered Canadian guy.
9:17 He doesn’t make these big statements, but he thinks it’ll make us more accountable, more transparent, creating this system that makes us better humans. So it’s something to think about. There’s something big happening here. And it’s not just about making some profits on a token trade. There’s a bigger picture of things happening.
9:36 Alex Fazel: And I think we all feel it, you know, with the energy. Yeah, I really, really feel it. And I would love to ask you, you know, like Wall Street, I mean, obviously you kicked off on Wall Street. There’s some people like Paul Tudor Jones, but Mike Novogratz, right? He was one of the first Bitcoin advocates and a lot of people are showing lots of hate on him and stuff like that.
9:52 Do you have a chance to chat with Novogratz or some of these Wall Street guys and they share a similar version of what made them, you know, be so energized, you know?
10:00 Brian Rose: Yeah, so big fan of Mike Novogratz. He obviously runs Galaxy Digital and we’re supposed to have him on the show in the next month or two. We’ve had Dan Moorehead on of Pantera Capital, who they’re good friends, but Dan’s got $3 billion invested in pure blockchain plays and funds. He used to work actually with me at Bankers Trust at the same time.
10:17 We walked by each other in the cafeteria. I didn’t know him at the time. And so he comes from that old school banking background and Novogratz is that classic hedge fund guy. I always say, have you seen the TV show Billions? Novogratz is a version of that guy, you know?
10:29 He’s a little old school. He’s in his late 50s. He’s super smart, but he’s been there and he’s taken the hits and he understands trading, but he’s also no dummy and he can see what’s happening here. And he’s the first to admit that he might not understand why an NFT has gone up by a thousand X in two weeks. But he’s there also to admit that something’s happening here when you see a community have so much value in something like a dogecoin.
10:50 He said there’s elements here that are real. And so I like Mike’s perspective to it. I like to hear Dan Moorehead. I had Anthony Scaramucci on my show, who I had last year talking about how he famously spent 11 days in the White House. But he’s got a billion dollars of Bitcoin on his funds as well.
11:07 And he’s educating institutions. So most of these people are seeing the light. And one thing I know from banking is that if your customer is asking you for Bitcoin exposure and you don’t give it to him, the next guy will. And so banks are traditional, but they also know when someone’s going to eat their lunch for them. And so these people are opening their minds and they’re getting into this space and we’re seeing it happen.
11:31 And I think it’s only going one way. So that’s what I see. And most of my old school hedge fund buddies in New York like Novogratz, they have positions on PA and they’re talking about putting it into their funds.
11:42 Alex Fazel: Very, very cool. And speaking of NFTs, I have a question for you because recently celebrities, including yourself, you have huge followers.
11:49 Do you see a good use case for celebrities having their own token, their own NFT, like Floyd Mayweather? There’s some characters out there, right? UFC fighters. Is that a good use case for NFT, do you think?
12:00 Brian Rose: NFTs are fascinating. They change all the time.
12:03 If you look at the definition, it’s non-fungible token, which can mean almost anything. It could mean a piece of real estate on the blockchain. One of my students here today said he put one of his racehorses on the blockchain and that blew everyone’s mind. It could be a business. It’s just something that’s non-fungible.
12:17 Right now we’re seeing it expressed in usually digital art and JPEGs and GIFs that sometimes seem to have very little value to anybody in the normal space in the art world. And yet we’re seeing the crypto-punks and the degenerate apes and the ETH rocks, for God’s sakes, going for millions of pounds and there’s 100 of them, they’re black and white JPEGs, and they clearly say this has no value. But there’s something happening here. The big mistake, I think, in NFTs, and this was told to me by Raul Paul, who’s a great visionary, he runs Real Vision, and he said the mistake people make in NFTs is thinking, how can I extract value from my fans with this NFT craze?
12:53 He said the NFT has to add more value to your fans. So I’m hesitant to jump in for this, it might look like an easy land grab, and I think you need to think about, how can I add value? And I think every artist needs to challenge themselves. There’s something you’re missing that the fan wants that in the past you couldn’t deliver. So right now if you’re an artist, it’s an MP3 that goes via Spotify, and that’s maybe your only relationship with that fan.
13:18 Mayweather, maybe you buy a pay-per-view. How can you be creative with all these curious things? You know, maybe it’s a membership, maybe it turns into something else, maybe it has all these other aspects of it. That’s where I think NFTs add value, and they have long-term perspective. So right now I’m watching, but I want to make sure when we make a move, it’s this intelligent value-added move, and I see both kinds happening right now.
13:42 I see some what look like mistakes and land grabs, and I see some that look like really intelligent plays. And again, what’s the future? We did some big episodes last year with some controversial people. One of them was the largest livestream of a human conversation in history. Does someone want to own that NFT?
13:59 These are the questions I’m asking myself, and I know they do, but I’m still waiting until we have something that I know is going to add value. So that’s what I see, but this space is real. Art always precedes society. You know, we both like to breakdance. If you look at hip-hop in New York City in the 1970s, it was something that happened in the Bronx, and it grew out of a lot of pain and hardship, and it created something that’s probably a multi-hundred-billion-dollar, trillion-dollar industry, and it started as a bunch of kids spinning on their heads, as graffiti, as two turntables and a microphone, and I think we’re seeing NFTs like, what’s that weird thing?
14:38 It’s actually a sign of the future, so I think we need to adopt it and understand it. And I’ll say one more thing. A famous futurist named Marshall McLuhan has a phrase, which is, the medium is the message. And what he’s trying to say is, when you change the communication medium, that actually is the message. So when you went from spoken word to the written word, written word to the radio, radio to films, films to television, now television to YouTube, you know, what you and I produce, it changes, and the message is in the medium.
15:06 And so what we’re seeing here in NFTs is, the medium is now blockchain, and that’s the message. It’s not like modern art that’s on your phone and digitized. It’s a completely different conversation that’s going to be just as new to us as radio was, as movies were, and as YouTube was. So that’s the way to look at this space. And again, it’s fascinating.
15:26 Alex Fazel: I love it because you’re mentioning freedom rights, a message, it almost feels like some sort of political philosophy, or just a philosophy in general, the way you’re putting these words together. By the way, that quote of, an NFT shouldn’t extract value but add value is a gem in itself. All right, guys, question of the week. Do you believe that Bitcoin can be defined as a political statement? Yes or no?
15:50 Let us know in the comments section below, and you may win a reward. I have one use case I want to share with you, Brian. Like, I wanted to buy this Coldplay ticket the other day. They have this, like, limited concert that’s happening at the O2 Arena. And, you know, some people, they just go on and they just buy hundreds of tickets, and then they auction them for 10 times the price, and some fans do not get to see the band that they want to see.
16:14 Is that a use case for NFTs? You talked about memberships earlier, right? Where if I really love someone or a band, you know, I want to just own the tokens or the NFT and just make sure that I get a seat to see the people I love, rather than a guy just trying to nick off some secondary market. How do you feel about that as a use case?
16:29 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think there are so many incredible use cases for something like that.
16:33 Say, for example, an event, you know, with an artist. Again, it’s always been a problem when it came to, you know, ticket scalping and it’s an issue the industry doesn’t like because it ultimately doesn’t add value to them or the fans. So that is definitely a base use case. I had Richard Muirhead in our show last week from Fabric Ventures, and he said, Brian, I went to a concert in Paris where I got to go backstage and meet this, you know, really interesting young Russian singer, and I had this experience.
17:00 He said, imagine, Brian, if that was all tokenized, and also the information was tokenized, where I could then, you know, connect with the people in that VIP experience, and I could reconnect with her, and I could have something for the next show. He said, it’s hard to even imagine what you could do with NFTs as opposed to just kind of a non-fungible ticket that you have. It could be so many more levels. And again, it’s hard for me sometimes to imagine what those could be.
17:24 It could be also a place in the metaverse. It could be some other pieces. So base case, I don’t see how any sporting event in the next 18 months isn’t somehow an NFT that’s scannable. It should kill the scalping industry, but also it’s a collectible, right? Wouldn’t you like to show your kid 20 years from now that you were at the Coldplay concert?
17:44 And look at that. Look what dad did. Like, that’s cool. It’s time stamped. There’s value right there.
17:48 So yeah, tons of possibilities. And again, we’ll see mistakes. We’ll see bubbles and bursts. And then we’ll see things that blow our mind. We’re like, wow, that’s five dimensions I never understood, and that’s all going to be in the NFTs.
18:01 Alex Fazel: Super cool. Would you tokenize yourself what the fans really want to do?
18:04 Brian Rose: Wow. I haven’t thought about that. It’s so strange, because I’ve had conversations with people like that where they’re like, well, if I buy the NFT, I own the copyright.
18:11 No, you don’t actually. So when Beeple sold his next 5,000 days for whatever, 42,000 ETH, he actually didn’t give you the copyrights. You just own the NFT. So it’s weird with ownership and the transfer of ownership. Also, you can tie in future NFT trades to where the artist gets a kickback.
18:28 Imagine that. How many Picasso paintings have changed hands? And yet the artist probably saw none of that money, just the first sale. The lowest price. Imagine every time something transacts, the artist gets 10% back, and that would change the face of everything.
18:41 So, yeah, tokenizing myself. Look, stranger things have happened. Again, when I heard the racehorse was tokenized the other day with one of my students, I just fell off my chair. That’s crazy. The racehorse.
18:50 Alex Fazel: Because a lot of people were saying, like, some futurists that I talked to said, listen, what if you saw Justin Bieber on YouTube as a young kid and he needed money and he didn’t want to go and see the artistry and raise funds through, you know, different music studios and stuff like that? And what if he said, I’m going to tokenize myself? You can buy me. And if you believe in my artistry, you know, obviously the tokenized part will go up and value in the future.
19:11 I know it sounds a bit crazy, but maybe, right? That is the future, I think, with artists. And I meet so many struggling artists that don’t know how to start. Even when they do start, they have to go through these streaming platforms where there’s nothing left. And yet what they really want is a relationship with the fans that you can have through these tokenization.
19:26 Brian Rose: And you’re right. Imagine if Justin Bieber came out now on YouTube and yet now we were blockchain enabled. And he could say, hey, I’m doing this, you know, thing. I’m putting a token out there. And you’re thinking, wow, look at this really interesting young kid.
19:38 You really could start building up value there. So it’s fascinating to see what we could do there. It’s crazy, man. It is crazy. So you’re going to have to watch the space and just see how we can do this.
19:49 And again, the audience is doing some interesting things there, you know, by trying to tap into some of that artist’s audible content. And I know they did a deal with TikTok. So to be continued, I’m just trying to watch and hold on. And also, I’m trying to look at the gaming space because I think the gaming is actually the precursor to all of this. I was talking to Alex Mashinsky of Celsius last Friday.
20:09 He’s got $300 million of his own money in his own Celsius network. I’m like, that’s a pretty good endorsement for your platform. I guess you think it’s secure. But they’re always looking to the future and like, what are the use cases of these things and how are they going to empower them? And so it’s just going to be interesting to see what happens next and just how we can empower them.
20:28 Alex Fazel: It’s crazy. They had the seal of Axi Infinity yesterday.
20:32 Brian Rose: Yeah. And they generated $780 million in that one game. It’s crazy.
20:37 It’s crazy. The gaming stuff is just powerful to watch. And just to finish with Alex, he said, but Brian, business is a game. And my kids look at everything as a game. Life is a game if you really think about it.
20:48 You know, it really is. And so the gaming industry is almost way ahead of us. Right? They’ve got people with identities with already tokenization has been going on for a long time. They actually kind of see what’s happening first.
20:58 They have a glimpse of the metaverse where some of us don’t. And again, they’re having real revenues and people paying to play that are extracting that value in the real world. I’m not a gamer because I’m 50. But I need to go deeper in this space because, again, I think like NFTs, it’s going to show us what’s coming next. Again, there’s so much to keep your eyes on here.
21:19 Alex Fazel: It’s too much to process. Do you think that you’re from traditional finance and now you’re into what people like to call the future of finance? Like, do you think that we can gamify investing as well? Do you think in the future? Because now it’s kind of like, I have to do it because I want to preserve my wealth or I want to grow my wealth.
21:36 But could it be fun, do you think, one day? Is that a bit too far fetched?
21:39 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I mean, we have to look at investing in general. Like, that model’s kind of changing.
21:43 And when I do talk to a VC like Tim Morehead or Richard Muirhead, I say, isn’t VC kind of Web 2.0? And I asked Danny Kulichov about this from Abe. And he said, VC is kind of who wins? The VC holders, the equity holders, the founders win. But the users don’t win.
22:00 So VC, almost by definition, doesn’t get it. And Web 3.0 is that everybody’s involved in it. And so everyone has early stage tokens. Everybody’s the user. There’s all these value-added pieces, whether you’re a gamer or not.
22:13 So I think that’s changing finance. I also think people need to push themselves into something that they’ve been told their whole life, they’re not supposed to be good at. And again, Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, he raised his hand when he was eight years old and said, in class, when are we going to learn about money? And they said, no, no, we don’t teach money. He said, but you teach me Spanish and math and science and biology, but we don’t talk about money.
22:37 We don’t teach you. So our whole education system is designed to implicitly tell you, the smart people manage your money. Your pension fund, we’ll manage it. We’ll manage it. So I think, honestly, we just need a real relationship with our money.
22:49 And that’s what owning Bitcoin is, or even financing Ethereum on Abe. It’s you, for the first time in your life, actually having a relationship with your money. Whereas before the bank held it, you were told implicitly or subconsciously, you’re not smart enough for it. So I see my daughter, she’s 17 now, she owns an asset for the first time in her life. She owns some Ethereum.
23:09 I think now she’s starting to have a relationship with money. Whereas when you and I grew up, the only asset we would ever own is maybe a house. When we got old, we usually worked for a paycheck. Again, Kiyosaki says, poor people work for money. Rich people make money work for them.
23:23 It’s a whole paradigm shift. And I think crypto actually gets people thinking about asset ownership.
23:28 Alex Fazel: Exactly. Don’t you think like DeFi is, it really falls into what Robert Kiyosaki is saying in Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Because there’s so many passive incomes that you can build up your wealth so that eventually, to remember the quadrant, of course you do, right?
23:42 Where passive income pays for all your debt and liabilities. And you don’t have to actually touch your wealth eventually, right?
23:48 Brian Rose: Yeah, and just his points of people know, most people work for a paycheck. So you’re conditioned every month to get this thing that you need, and you can’t see much beyond that. So you do whatever you have to do to get that paycheck.
23:58 Wealthy people see it a different way. They see why I own assets, and I make money work for me. So as soon as you can own an asset, which used to mean owning real estate, maybe owning a company, maybe buying gold, now you can own a token, you can own a coin, and it’s already getting you in that mindset of I own assets, my money works for me. I think it gets us out of this trap that we’ve all gotten into in this capitalist system, and that’s why I love the crypto space, because it forces you to be on the right side of that quadrant, whereas most people would have to buy a house or own a business, and that’s a harder jump for people.
24:31 So it’s bumpy right now. When my students get into DeFi, they’re like, what’s going on, and I’m a little scared, and you have to own your own security, but I think it’s the way forward. I’ve got two sons that are four and five years old, and they walk into London Real Studios, and we’ve got a typewriter mounted on the wall. My son Caden said, what’s that? And I said, it’s a typewriter.
24:49 We used to type on pieces of paper and give messages, and he’s like, what’s, you know, why? And I think these young men later will ask us, what’s a bank? Why did you use banks? Why was there somebody with this big expensive office that you pay for, time to control your money and not giving you access to it? I think they’ll look at it like the horse and buggy.
25:09 I think it’ll be something of the past, but it’s all about education.
25:13 Alex Fazel: Beautifully put, man, that’s incredible. Talking about education, your DeFi course, do you mind sharing us a few sneak peeks of the course, and maybe some of the parts of DeFi, some aspects that really blow your mind and that you personally love, just love to talk about it. I’d love to hear more about it.
25:28 Brian Rose: Yeah, definitely.
25:29 So 10 years of London Real, I’ve had some of the most intense people on my show. I’ve had like a thousand guests, and some of them changed the course of my life. They’re always forcing me out of my comfort zone by learning, by taking action. That’s the story. Look at David Goggins, US Navy SEAL.
25:43 He’s like, action, action, action. Most people quit at 40%. Push yourself. So when it comes to teaching people, I always think, that’s action. Don’t watch another video about Bitcoin.
25:53 Don’t read another article about ETH. Go and buy a small amount. And so when I set up the DeFi Academy, I thought, I’m going to force people into taking action with small stakes, make them very uncomfortable, so they’ll learn really fast. And if it costs a couple hundred bucks in the way, it’s the best education you ever had, it’s the return on investment. So I get my students right away.
26:15 I push them on to the centralized exchanges. I push them to get small parts of these coins and stable coins. I push them right into a decentralized exchange and force them to go into this crazy instrument that doesn’t feel as comfortable as some of the centralized exchanges. And then I push them into putting on a yield swap. I push them into putting on a liquidity pool, and I push them into putting on a simple call option, because I come from a derivatives world.
26:38 Derivatives get a bad rap. They are blamed for all the crises. The financial crises. But they’re just a way of managing risk. So I force people to buy a seven-day call option for 50 bucks on Ethereum, and I make them hold it and watch what that ride feels like.
26:52 Where did my money go? How come it’s in the money? How come it’s out of the money? And after seven days, they learn more about options than you would at MIT, Sloan School of Finance, where I learned options. And I learned more with one trade than I did with a bunch of learning.
27:05 So I think getting people to take action is what’s most important. And that’s what I love. I love the fact that we can just jump in and do all these things that normally you’d have to call up a Wall Street broker, and you wouldn’t understand how much they’re taken out of the trade. You wouldn’t understand the risk. Now you can do it yourself.
27:21 So it’s exciting. There’s a lot of pitfalls. There’s regulation. There’s code that breaks, as we’ve seen happen recently, the compound. But it all makes us stronger.
27:30 So that’s what’s exciting.
27:32 Alex Fazel: That reminds me of a saying in Confucius that says, I hear, I forget, I see, I remember, I do, I understand. So all about action, action, action. And that’s exactly what Roger Verre used to do. I used to live in Tokyo.
27:46 And when people were really skeptical like, yeah, this, this, this, he said, do me a favor. I’m going to give you money right now. And you just get them to download the Bitcoin wallet. And he would do a transaction. He would send the money.
27:56 And it’s very hard to argue after you experience that action, that specific actionable.
28:01 Brian Rose: Yeah, I love Roger. We had him on the show beaming from Tokyo. And he actually offered all of my viewers free Bitcoin cash.
28:09 Alex Fazel: No way.
28:09 Brian Rose: Yeah. And a bunch of them sent them emails. He said, Brian, I’m getting thousands of emails here, a bunch of my team. And he sent them free Bitcoin cash. Again, what a great way to get users to adopt.
28:17 And I had my mom, Betty Rose, she’s 76 years old from San Diego, California, on the phone the other night. And I said, Mom, get your phone out. You’re getting the hot wallet. And I’m sending you crypto. I did the same thing with my 17-year-old daughter.
28:29 She came on the show. And now both of these women who before would have never been in this space now have crypto. I sent my mom some stablecoin. And she said, wow, it’s like $1? And then she was like, oh, wow.
28:41 And again, she’s 76. Robert Kiyosaki is 77, 78. He owns Bitcoin and Ethereum. These are smart people that understand asset ownership that are getting into this space. How many more signs do you need?
28:52 It’s time to get involved now. It’s incredible. We did a community event just two days ago. And we had an 82-year-old who came down all day from Manchester. And he said, I’m contributing to DeFi.
29:02 I don’t need the money. I’m very successful. But I’m happy to be a part of this movement.
29:06 Alex Fazel: Which is like we were talking about earlier, like a philosophy, the freedom of rights, and all just being a part of what we believe can change the world for the better. The energy in this space is incredible.
29:16 Brian Rose: And again, I got, you know, typically like 100 students will meet on Zoom. They’re from all over the world. Usually my Kiwis and Aussies are up at 3 or 4 in the morning for my live calls. And they’re all privileged to be in this space. And I said, who used to be the weirdo at the party talking about crypto?
29:30 They all raised their hand. And yet now they have a bunch of people they can talk to this about. And they feel great. And it’s all about creating generational wealth and creating financial freedom to the 2 to 4 billion people in the world that are just unbanked. Let me just say it’s the last human right that I think we’re violating on a daily basis.
29:45 You know, freedom of speech is something we talked about last year, free and fair elections. But not having access to financial markets, it’s just, it’s something, it’s a travesty that we don’t give that to people every single day. And my mom, she’s 76 in San Diego. She can invest in property and now Ethereum. But what about the equivalent, you know, incredible woman in, you know, Ethiopia that grew up with single mom, raised three kids just like my mom.
30:09 But her only options were local currency or a piece of property that could be seized by someone else. So guess what? She worked really hard all of her life, but she has no way to store that value. But if she had digital property, which is what Michael Saylor calls Bitcoin, imagine if she had a mobile phone where she could do that. Her whole life has changed.
30:26 So people like to be a part of building something that I think helps the world. And we can see it right in front of our eyes. And so, yeah, the energy in this space is off the charts.
30:37 Alex Fazel: That is the perfect note to finalize this interview. And Brian, you know, I have to thank you on behalf of the community because people like you with your influence, you know, becoming like global speakers to communicate the message and to grow the community and educate people more importantly with actions is there’s nothing more we can do than that.
30:57 I mean, it’s the best contribution, best form of contribution.
30:59 Brian Rose: My pleasure, man. It’s a privilege, man. I get lucky. I get to come to work every day and talk about these great ideas.
31:04 So I appreciate that. I appreciate what you’re doing here as well. Again, I love people that do all the hard work like you’re doing to sit down and create these great productions. You’ll have no idea who’s watching your videos, you know, and sometimes you see and it’s 100 views or 10,000 views, but, you know, someday you’ll meet the person that was watching those things and you’ll be like, wow, you were watching that? And you’re making a massive influence on people.
31:26 So I appreciate what you do and let’s just keep educating the world, man. This is going to be an incredible, incredible experience for the next 10 or 20 years.
31:32 Alex Fazel: Definitely will, my friend. Thank you so much for coming on this show.
31:35 Brian Rose: Thank you so much.
31:36 Alex Fazel: Awesome having you. Guys, if you liked it for you, don’t forget to like, subscribe, comment and blast that bell notification to get access to more of these timeless interviews with these amazing guests. Tune in every Wednesday, premiere at a PC near you, 8 o’clock GMT. See you next week, guys.
