Full transcript: Brian Rose on Kyle Chasse
0:00 Kyle Chasse: This is your guide to walking away a winner this altcoin season and beyond. If you’ve ever made money in crypto only to lose it all just as fast, you’re not alone. That pain, it’s a pattern. All the most battle-tested veterans have faced it again and again until they finally learned the rules of this game. What you’re about to hear could change your future forever.
0:23 Today, you’ll meet someone who’s been through every cycle. Made millions, only to lose it all, get canceled and erased by the system, only to come back smarter, tougher and completely unfiltered. This is what happens when the stakes are real and the system tries to wipe you out. Listen to this.
0:42 Brian Rose: And on April 6th of 2020, I had the second largest YouTube live stream in the world.
0:48 In the world. The biggest stream was Trump’s coronavirus briefing from the White House that night. Now, based on the numbers of we had of live people, it would have been the most watched podcast in history. It would have beat at the time Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, when they were smoking weed, which was like, I think 10 million views. Ours would have been 20 million plus. And that episode ended and 30 minutes later, YouTube deleted the video and they banned it. Nine years that had never happened to me once, Kyle.
1:18 Kyle Chasse: Imagine having everything you’ve built gone in 30 minutes. Man, it would devastate me. And his was way bigger than mine. Most people would never recover. But Brian Rose isn’t most people.
1:30 He built London Real and turned it into a global platform with 1.5 billion views, interviewed the biggest names in crypto and finance, invested over 21 million dollars in Web3 startups, ran for mayor of London and still stepped into the boxing ring at age 53. This is a man who turns setbacks into bounce backs and never stops building. He’s also the rare investor who will challenge everything, even the so-called golden rules like this.
2:01 Brian Rose: Yes. So I always say that right now, owning Bitcoin is the stupidest thing you can do.
2:07 I personally believe that because controversial.
2:10 Kyle Chasse: Sure. But winning this game means seeing past what others can’t and surviving the gut punches, not just riding the highs. And if there’s one thing Brian’s learned, it’s this. The toughest opponent in the game is fear. If you don’t learn to conquer it, the market always claws back your gains.
2:28 Brian Rose: I always say that everything you ever wanted in your life is, you know, on the other side of fear. And so I believe that all of your investing decisions and your business decisions and even your personal life decisions are all about getting through that barrier of fear.
2:45 Kyle Chasse: But here’s the secret. All winners know it’s not about the perfect entry or exit. It’s about staying in the game year after year until you finally get it right.
2:55 Brian Rose: Some old OG Kyle pulled me aside and he said, Brian, it’s not about timing the market. It’s time in the market. And I looked at him and I was like, damn, that’s that’s that’s powerful because I was coming up four years full time in the market. And I was like, all right, I’m just now really starting to understand what’s going on.
3:15 Kyle Chasse: So if you’re tired of watching your hard earned gains vanish, if you’re done repeating the same mistakes, and if you want to break free the cycle and leave with a winning mindset, lock in ladies and gentlemen, your guide to success starts right now. Let’s welcome Brian to the stage. All right, Brian, welcome to the show.
3:34 Thanks for thanks for being here today. Bitcoin is at new all time highs. Ethereum is going headed back that way. But what I want to first talk with you about is, you know, you’re kind of in a unique position where you come from TradFi, you know, now you have this kind of media led VC, you’ve deployed over 21 million dollars in crypto projects. You come from the TradFi background. And you’ve also interviewed with hundreds of hours of high signal interviews, maybe, I mean, even from Robert Kiyosaki to people in the crypto industry, Michael Saylor, etc. You know, which gives you a unique perspective, what’s something that you could share with the with the audience that maybe someone with your experience only has?
4:16 Brian Rose: Yeah, look, it’s a great question. Colin, thanks for having me. You know, I have this, this really unique background, like you said, I, actually graduated from MIT about five years after Michael Saylor did. And at MIT, they taught us how to think for ourselves. And Michael always talks about that, where I think they gave him a piece of the space shuttle when he was 19 at his, in his aerospace class, and literally asked their opinion. And he was like, Oh, wow, they really want us to think. And so I had that technical background. I watched the movie Wall Street too many times at my fraternity house. And so I went with that engineering degree and went straight to Wall Street. They were hiring the
4:57 Rocket scientists to price their derivatives models. And then I traded interest rate derivatives in the US and then credit derivatives in the UK for like the next 15 years. So that was my trad fi. Then I watched too many episodes of Joe Rogan. And I tried to be the Joe Rogan of the UK. And you know, that was 14 years ago, we started London Real. And along the way, Kyle, we were always talking to the latest ideas, whether it was like went off cold plug, whether, you know, some mindset or some new diet. And I had Max Kaiser on in 2013, and I bought my first Bitcoin. But we never really went deep on that. And so it wasn’t until four years ago, when I ran to be mayor of London and lost, and it was a really devastating weekend that I thought, you know what, we need a new direction. And I went into crypto and defy, started teaching it. And then realize these these pre sell tokens and early stage investments was a great niche for us. When we added our media component, it’s really taken off. And so it’s weird, Kyle, when I look at this, it’s almost like I was made somehow, you know, for this space, you know, with the financial background, and also the derivatives background, because derivatives on Wall Street remind me a lot of blockchain and defy. And then like you said, I’ve spoken to not just crypto people, but people like Robert Kiyosaki, who has become a good friend of mine, he’s been on the show probably 10 times, I’ve interviewed him all over the world.
6:21 And he says things to me like, Brian, the difference between a rich person and a poor person is their relationship with fear. I mean, man, you know, think about that on the way home. Or, you know, Robert loves Bitcoin and Ethereum, because he loves real assets like real estate, he’s suspicious of Wall Street derivatives and stocks and things like that. And so when I put all of that together, and I’m a bit older, Kyle, I’m in my 50s. And I look at crypto, which is a lot of younger people, I feel like I can bring some of the things I learned on Wall Street, like how to trade the trend is your friend, a lot of these old things that the OGs on Wall Street taught me, I can bring the tech in there as well. But I’m also someone who can take all the guests from my show as well and try to bring a philosophy. And so I tell all my students and my LPs, we have a 10 year view on the market. We think this is the internet of ownership.
7:11 I believe 10 years from now, every minute of your life will involve a blockchain transaction. And if we truly believe that, then let’s put our goal there. Let’s not care about what the price of Bitcoin is daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly. And let’s invest that way. And if we do that, we’re all going to win. And so part of what we do in my community and my LPs is we just keep people calm, because the volatility in crypto will make you do crazy things.
7:36 And so I think my job as maybe an elder statesman is just to keep people calm, long term focus, remind people that in the 90s, I lived through the Russian crisis, the Asian crisis, then the financial crisis, there was always a crisis on Wall Street every three years. And it’s just like you start to see these cycles of fear and greed in humans. And they apply the same to crypto, except they’re faster and bigger. And so I think when in doubt, zoom out, don’t transact. I think Kyle, the media out there and Twitter and the crypto news websites and the exchanges, they’re trying to get you so emotional that you over transact.
8:16 If it’s up to me, you would transact 1% probably of what you currently do now, maybe 5% and just slow it way down. Longer term perspective. I also try to encourage the audience to have a 10 year horizon. Certainly that’s, I mean, I guess I was in Bitcoin a bit earlier than most, so things moved quicker then. So I didn’t have to quite wait 10 years for significant financial freedom. But I think today, a 10 year horizon is very realistic, and it sure beats that 40, 50 year horizon of a traditional nine to five.
8:48 Kyle Chasse: One of the things I want to double click on and get your thoughts on, you know, you said that the quote from Robert Kiyosaki, the only difference between a rich and a poor person is fear. Can you elaborate on that a bit more and why it was so impactful for you?
9:04 Brian Rose: Yeah, and again, he said it was their relationship with fear. Also, you know, I always say that everything you ever wanted in your life is, you know, on the other side of fear. And so I believe that all of your investing decisions and your business decisions and even your personal life decisions are all about getting through that barrier of fear. And one of my very famous mentors, he’s got kind of a castle in Scotland, a lot of people know who I’m talking about.
9:33 He said fear is exactly that F E A R false expectations appearing real. There are these phantoms in our life that force us to live these quiet lives of desperation. And whenever we go into our fears, we realize that 95 96 97% of those fears are completely unfounded. And I would argue, Kyle, that most people are sitting inside a cage that’s not even locked. And all they have to do is open that front door. And I think that comes from in with investing with relationships.
10:01 I mean, I just went into the boxing ring for crypto fight night in Dubai two months ago. And I was I was frozen paralyzed in terror about 12 hours before. But once I got in that ring, I realized it was nothing more than a sparring session. And so look, even I am subject to being blocked by my fears, and it’s stopping me from doing things. And I think that same same is true about investing. And I think a lot of people are scared of crypto. I’ve got a student right now who had been scammed and drained. And so she was so scared, Kyle, just to do a transaction on Uniswap with her metamask. And once we got her through it with 20 bucks, she just relax. And she’s like, Okay, cool, I can do the next one. I can do the next one. So I would just say to anybody listening, if you can identify your fears, they’re not things to avoid, but actually things to go into.
10:50 Kyle Chasse: Okay, so just to make it crystal clear for those, you know, who are looking to change their financial situation, that relationship with fear for the people who have a poor man’s mentality, how does that obstruct, you know, that them achieving the next unlocking the next level and financial wealth? And how do the people with the rich mindset approach it differently?
11:11 Brian Rose: Well, again, you know, another thing Robert says is that schools teach us to be poor. And I think that goes to the lack of financial education we have. So when I ran to be mayor of London, last year in 24, I actually called for the creation of the London coin, and I was going to put 100 pounds of crypto into the wallet of every man, woman and child to try to just start that path of financial education. Look, luckily, we have YouTube now. But what I find is for most of my students or my community, they watch all these videos, Kyle on YouTube, but they don’t take any action. They don’t pull the trigger. And one of my mentors used to say, he said, all you do is spreadsheet it to death, because you’re scared to actually take action.
11:52 And so if someone is out there with, you know, no net worth or little net worth, look, you have an access to education you never had before. But a lot of people just watch these videos, Kyle, they never actually do anything. The next step is to pull the trigger. And again, start small. So it means investing in $50 of Bitcoin or $50 of gold or $50 of an equity, or, you know, get involved in a presale token on a very small scale. But most people are are in fear of those things. And sometimes it’s it’s fear of success, sometimes it’s fear of failure. So I would encourage people not just to learn, but to take action. And that’s the biggest difference, I think, between the winners and losers, and the wealthy and the not are those who take action despite of the fear, and continue taking action. Because that’s where you learn. That’s where you get the data when you actually take action. I don’t think Kyle, you can learn from other people’s mistakes. I only think you can learn from your mistakes. And that has to be done with like transactions and action.
12:48 Kyle Chasse: Sure. I mean, I think that you can I do think that I think the hardest lessons are usually ones that you have to learn personally. But I do think that we can also learn from other people’s mistakes. You know, this is why it’s good to read books and educate and watch YouTube videos. I mean, on my channel here, I try to teach people about the things that
13:06 Have cost me sincerely or dearly. And of course, you know, there’s times when people forget those principles, like when there’s a bunch of greed in the market, and everyone everything’s going crazy, people forget those core one on one principles. And then when they learn the lesson themselves, then it’s set in stone. But I think one of the things that you said about, you know, join a presale with a small amount of money first, right, or get into something small, you have to get that comfort level up and you have inevitably you’re going to lose on a lot of these bets that you placed early on. So with that being said, for someone who’s watching who doesn’t have a lot of money to their name, but wants to get started on that path, that 10 year horizon of financial freedom, there’s a lot of people that say Bitcoin, you know, itself isn’t going to be the tool to do that. Because maybe, you know, maybe someone needs to do a 50x over the next 20 years in their life or something like that for them to really be comfortable financially. And maybe Bitcoin doesn’t do that. I personally think that maybe over the next, I don’t know what the time horizon is, I don’t know if it’s 10 or 20 years, but I think Bitcoin still has another 100x or 90x left in it. I think $10 million target is realistic, especially if it’s dollar denominated as dollar continues to be printed away, everything priced in dollars is going to
14:19 Increase in value. But point is, though, as someone who does, you know, look for more outsized returns than what Bitcoin potentially can do over the next five or 10 years. For someone watching, what would your recommendation be for them who, you know, wants some place bets over the market, whether it’s Bitcoin, Ethereum, ETFs, crypto stocks, startups, you know, pre public launch tokens, presales, things like that.
14:50 Brian Rose: Yeah, so I always say that right now, owning Bitcoin is the stupidest thing you can do.
14:56 I personally believe that, because in this cycle, I just had Michael Turpin in here in the studio three days ago, he’s got a book called the Bitcoin supercycle. He’s calling for $193,000 Bitcoin, this cycle in November, and that’s it. Now, there could be a supercycle, but that’s what he’s calling for. And based on today’s prices, that’s like 80% up, I think. And there’s, I believe that there are bigger opportunities out there. And we know that in crypto, there’s also a lot of risk. But you know, on Wall Street, I traded stocks, bonds, derivatives, commodities, every single instrument, I’ve never seen asymmetric returns like crypto. Also, I’ve never seen access to people all over the world that can have access to these instruments like crypto. Because when I was on Wall Street, you had to be an individual by net worth to get into a lot of our structured deals. And it was really unfair. It’s only the rich got richer.
15:45 If you are new to this space, first, you need to get some Bitcoin. And it’s weird, Kyle, you asked from that, because my stepmother, who’s in her 70s, is pinging me in San Diego saying, you know, tell me more about Bitcoin. And I said, just buy some. Until you own a little bit, you’ll never understand it. So I’d say to anybody, buy 20 bucks and 30 bucks, because it’s like placing a bet on a football match. Once you have money in it, you watch it carefully, you learn the players. And once you have a little Bitcoin in your wallet, you’ll check it every day, you’ll start reading the news, and you’ll get a feel for it.
16:16 The next thing is, you have to buy some programmable money. So some Ethereum, I think, is obvious next step. But you can keep it small. You start with 20 bucks of each, and you can keep it small. And then I would start expanding your horizon into maybe another layer one, you know, like a Solana or a Tron or something, and then you can expand it even more.
16:34 But those are liquid tokens. And I personally believe our investment thesis at London Real Ventures is that pre-sale tokens is where the magic is. And that’s investing in companies before the token is generated. We look for incredible founders and, you know, great narratives and some type of unfair advantage. I think that’s where the big gains are in this cycle. There is high risk there as well. And it’s been a tough two years in that space.
16:59 But strangely enough, as of today, things are looking much more bullish on that side. And so, yeah, I agree with you, Kyle, if you’re kind of starting off in this space, holding Bitcoin might not get there fast enough. That being said, it’s been the greatest performing asset with the lowest Sharpe ratio the last couple of years. Michael Saylor is calling for $13 million Bitcoin after the rally this morning. Like you said, Kyle, it’s about 100X, but that could take 20 years.
17:25 In the meantime, I would also try a few things on the risk profile. And look, regardless, even if you don’t make a few million in this bull cycle, you’re going to learn so much. And I’ll say one more thing. When I was at the Satoshi roundtable last year, I think you were there as well. Some OG Kyle pulled me aside and he said, Brian, it’s not about timing the market. It’s time in the market.
17:49 And I looked at him and I was like, damn, that’s powerful because I was coming up four years full time in the market. And I was like, all right, I’m just now really starting to understand what’s going on. So start logging your time now is what I would say to everybody.
18:06 Kyle Chasse: So I wanted to give you an opportunity to kind of clarify because what you said essentially was it doesn’t make sense to hold Bitcoin right now and that presale tokens are the best opportunity.
18:19 But if you look at the last two years of data, it’s exactly the opposite, right? Bitcoin has outperformed everything else and presale tokens have vastly underperformed. In fact, lost people money. But I know why you said that and tell us why you’re giving that advice today, right, as where we are in the market currently.
18:39 Brian Rose: Yeah, I mean, you know, I we came out in the in the in the year 2021 and we watched that cycle happen. And that was a very different cycle than this cycle. And of course, they always say what history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And so our thesis investment thesis was, okay, we will ride a similar wave and curve as the market did in 20 and 21. And where we saw lots of unlocked value happen in these presale tokens. And it did not happen over the past two years.
19:09 And Bitcoin outperformed, it became the darling asset back in the Gensler days and and the previous administration, it was really the only thing that wasn’t deemed a security. And so the Michael sailors and people could pile in on it. And then once we got a new regime with Trump, everybody else was comfortable with it. And so it’s outperformed by far. And I think I remember talking to someone at the same Satoshi a year and a half ago, we all looked around and said, maybe instead of all these other bells and whistles, we should just hold Bitcoin.
19:39 But we didn’t. That being said, I still believe that right now we’re looking at the the future Amazons and Googles and Facebooks of the blockchain. And I feel like we have invested in them. And I see these companies as doing incredible things in the ecosystem. And so even though they’re down, I see tremendous upside. And I also remind my LPs, this is venture investing. Okay, five, six, seven of these things are going to zero. And one, two or three are going to do incredible returns.
20:07 And then that’s been our philosophy. And so that’s that’s the way I look at that right now. And by the way, if someone’s getting into this now, I still would argue you want some Bitcoin and some Ethereum, I just think you want some of your portfolio in riskier assets like presell.
20:24 Kyle Chasse: Right. And I think so I think that your philosophy makes sense. If we believe that we’re seeing a rotation right now and an upcoming altcoin season, then that totally makes sense, especially with Ethereum still not yet back at all time highs. Bitcoin broke all time highs a long time ago.
20:42 We know that Bitcoin dominance usually max tops out around where it was last week. So all time high of Bitcoin dominance is like, I forget what it was 70% or something. And we were at 66% the other day, so it was close. But all cycles historically have had this rotation happen in altcoins. And then if that’s true, then what you said makes a lot of sense.
21:04 Kyle Chasse: My next question would be, how do you plan on managing your portfolio if we have an altcoin season? And during that time, are you looking to take profits into dollars, take profits into Bitcoin, not take profits at all? You have such high conviction in these investments that you made that you truly believe they’re going to be the next Amazons and Facebooks, et cetera. And so what’s your strategy around how to play this altcoin season?
21:34 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a very important question. First of all, I hate the word altcoin, and I’m sure we all do, because especially these days, it can mean such a wide range of things. It could mean Cardano, and it could mean some meme coin on pump fund that came out in the middle of the night.
21:53 And so, you know, this altcoin season is a debate I see in a lot of my WhatsApp chats and stuff that I think you’re in as well. We might want to define that as maybe, you know, top 400 market cap coins or top 200 market cap coins versus maybe the top 1000. And then maybe we don’t talk about the rest, because not everything is going to get its heyday. And a lot of that did happen in 21. And people think that might happen, because your altcoin and my altcoin can be completely different things. So you have to define that not everything is going to win in this sector. I do believe those top 100, top 200, top 300, top 400 will see a lot of incredible liquidity and gains as things bleed down. We’re also fighting against if you believe the Bitcoin super cycle or the cycle, we don’t have a lot of time left, Kyle. And so Turpin says, Thanksgiving, Bitcoin’s crashing down. You could argue the altcoins might go a couple of months after that. But if you think that cycle is there, then you’re right, you’re in a real conundrum.
22:49 Do you dump your future Amazons and Googles, or you hold them through the next bear market? These are my thoughts. We have vesting schedules and presale tokens. And because we’re KOLs, and we have a media channel, we get really accelerated ones. But still, sometimes that still means 12 months. And the truth is, is that you’re not even going to have those tokens vested before potentially the market goes down. And so I’m already telling my LPs and my group members that first of all, when this really season kicks off, first of all, we’re not going to be able to make intelligent decisions, because our coins will hopefully be going up at these massive amounts like today, but every day for say 40 days in a row, if it happens, we’re going to think we’re geniuses and gods and the greatest traders in the world. And we’re going to think that Bitcoin is going to a million this cycle. And so I’m trying now to see the idea in all of my group’s heads, that we need to start taking profits. What does that look like?
23:41 I think it’s up to stablecoins. I don’t think it’s up to Bitcoin. If we’re so close to this cycle. And when you talk to Michael Turpin, he’s going to short Bitcoin at the end of the year. I was honestly pondering that today. And I think that’s too aggressive. I think it’s out to stablecoins. And I think by the end of the year, or if we see Bitcoin dominance, like you said, down close to 50%, honestly, I think you take your profits on the tokens that you have vested.
24:08 And the rest, okay, as they vest, you can make those decisions. So you’re almost forced to have a little bit of a long term play. But you know, I would rather my group see some profits than do a round trip, Kyle. And that would break my heart to see people come out of this cycle with absolutely nothing. You can never sell the top. You can never buy the low. Don’t try.
24:27 Let’s just make some capital. And so we can keep playing this game for the next 10 years.
24:33 Kyle Chasse: And so on that 10 year horizon, let’s say that you take profits out and stablecoins when you, you know, if you, and then, so now, so now, like, if you play the, if you play this cycle well, now you’re sitting on a bunch of cash, right? Coming into a market correction. And then what happens then do you, so next time around, if the cycle resets, then is your plan to go ahead and then buy more altcoins at the bottom, buy Bitcoin at the bottom, what would you do?
25:00 Brian Rose: I think if Turpin’s right and calls this for your cycle, then I’m going to probably, you know, get a tattoo of him on my chest and I’m probably going to buy Bitcoin a year after the top of this cycle. And then what I’ll probably do is look at the presales, maybe a year or a year and a half after that. But again, that assumes that the next cycle will be like this cycle, which I’m sure it won’t. So I’m sure I’ll have to reevaluate, but honestly, Kyle, I probably won’t be jumping back into presale tokens anytime soon after this peak, because when you’re too early, it really hurts. It really hurts. And also there could be completely new narratives by then, but also maybe not, you know, maybe these fundamentals don’t change ultimately, but I don’t think I’ll be jumping in because when you’re too early in altcoins, it really hurts. Really hurt.
25:51 Kyle Chasse: Speaking of narratives, are there any narratives that you are excited about moving forward? You know, we’ve seen, I think, for me personally, I think that
26:00 Kyle Chasse: The smart contract base layer is saturated. I think that we already have fantastic base layers with tons of money, tons of treasuries, Solana, Sui, Ethereum, Layer 2s, etc. And that was, of course, the place to be in the last cycle and maybe the cycle before, but certainly the last cycle. From the investments that you’ve been making, you know, which kind of sectors are really exciting for you?
26:21 Brian Rose: There’s one thing that’s happening that I guess I was going to call out the elephant in the room, and that is maybe not sort of a sector of blockchain, but just the treasury companies. Obviously, a lot of people are talking about them. I’m getting pinged left and right. Pantera sent me a message a month ago, you know, with their own treasury fund. And that’s always an interesting indicator. There are obviously OGs in the space, and I’ve had Dan Moorehead on the show. Obviously, it started with Bitcoin. Now we’ve seen Ethereum, Joe Lubin’s involved in that, analyst Tom Lee. And now we’re seeing it all the way down the chain. Even Justin Sun, I think wants to do a Tron treasury company in America. And you’re hearing about all of them. Now people are saying this is the bubble that’s going to break everything in next year.
27:06 Brian Rose: And there could be some validity to that. But it depends on the player, you know, you could argue the strategy that won’t happen to, but you could argue at another company that’s, that’s levered up and will cause the equity price to come crashing down, that it could cause some selling. So this is definitely something to watch. I see so many of these starting. And it reminds me a bit when there’s just a hot narrative, and everybody wants to jump in, like AI, maybe a couple years ago, but AI on the blockchain was probably overdone. AI wasn’t necessarily so treasury has me concerned.
27:37 As far as the sectors on the blockchain, you know, real world assets is something that’s been talked about for years and years and years. And I saw so many pitches that came through the last couple years. And honestly, Kyle, most of it was garbage. And it was just high in the sky. And just not just had nonsense, you know, we’re going to tokenize the racehorse, and we’re going to tokenize this and that and the Fendi bag. I’m just like, bro, no one cares. But, you know, let’s look at it. The stable coin, I think, is up 800% in the last year, as far as stable coin interest and volume. It’s the original real world asset. Of course, it’s a simple real world asset. Robinhood just tokenized all of their stocks, which they didn’t have to do, they could have run it on their own proprietary system.
28:19 So we’re seeing this more and more being adopted. Real estate, that’s the thing. Will this actually happen? Now, there’s private programs in Dubai. I still haven’t seen it en masse. Obviously, BlackRock’s doing it with T-bills and stocks. But if this can open up, it opens up everything.
28:39 And it’s moving already when it comes to the securities. So I think that’s very interesting. I just had Yatsu of Anamoka in here two weeks ago. I know he was on your show as well. I love Yat. We’re actually investors in Anamoka and the Mokaverse and seven of their companies.
28:51 Gaming has struggled to finally kick off. Yat actually said they’re probably the biggest altcoin treasury company in the world, which is an interesting thing to think about. I’m a huge fan of Yat’s long term vision. But the games haven’t kicked off yet. And I don’t know when they’re going to. I just got asked to look at another game pitch. And I said, I don’t even want to look at another game right now. I’m not so bullish on that.
29:17 Stablecoins look like they’re going to eat up the entire world. And I’ll say one thing, Kyle. I used to think that a British sterling pound stablecoin and a Brazilian AI stablecoin and an EN stablecoin were ridiculous because I thought it was only going to be dollar. But if these things actually open up bank deposits and accounts around the world, I see these actually happening and all of that liquidity pumping into our ecosystem. And I’m starting to see that as more of a future. We own, I think, a little bit of circle via our investments with Dan Tapiero and his 1RT fund. So I’m always watching that. The stablecoin narrative is strong.
29:54 Maybe it’s too late to invest in. Not sure. AI on the blockchain has struggled for valuations as a few companies, but I’m super bullish on it because I do not trust centralized control. We struggled with big tech censorship in 2020. And I’m sorry, but I don’t trust Altman, Google, or anybody to control the AI because AI is worse than censorship. It gives you one answer and you don’t even know where the answer came from. You actually don’t even know if that answer is correct. And we actually just invested in a company called NARIS Protocol that’s actually going to be trying to validate all of the information you get because what if somebody hacks your chat GPT in the future, Kyle, and just starts telling you nonsense?
30:39 You’re never going to know because there’s nothing to map it out to anything real or validated. And so, again, I believe we’ll get a resurgence in decentralized AI. I think it’s necessary, but right now, all the money is piling into Silicon Valley and to the big companies. It also worries me a little bit.
31:01 Kyle Chasse: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m very curious as a creator myself, your story behind YouTube, from what I understand, you had about 2.4 million subscribers, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of hours watched.
31:16 Kyle Chasse: And then you were de-platformed. Wild. I’ve been working my butt off to get to where I am today. I’ve got about 155,000 subscribers, and the amount of money and effort I put into that is mind-blowing. It’s not easy to get there. I can’t imagine the effort it took to get to over 2 million, almost 2.5 million subscribers. So I’m curious about that story, what happened, and how did it feel?
31:44 Brian Rose: Yeah, so this was back in 2011. I was 40 years old. I was working in the credit derivatives banking industry here in London, and the previous decade had been incredible.
31:56 It was one of the biggest derivative products. I had made all the money I dreamed of as a little kid. And I’ll be honest, Kyle, if you looked at my resume or LinkedIn profile, it looked like I had everything anybody would want, right? I had the big apartment, all the stuff, and yet I was absolutely miserable. I was drinking myself to death. I didn’t have any family. I didn’t really have many friends. And making money in the banking industry, it’s great if that’s your only goal, but it’s not very fulfilling. And so what happened is I actually took a meditation course, because this is before YouTube had videos. And six weeks later, after meditating, I walked into my MD and I quit my job. And I walked away.
32:39 Kyle Chasse: Sorry, are you being politically correct here? Was it really meditation or was it something more like ayahuasca or something?
32:46 Brian Rose: No, ayahuasca came later, funny enough. But it was actually meditation. It’s weird, because I’ve been training martial arts for about 10 years.
32:53 But just doing that transcendental meditation every day, for the first time, Kyle, I could see Brian. And I’m like, Brian, what are you doing? I’m an engineer by training. And my income was going up every quarter, and my happiness was going down every quarter. And I was like, what are you doing? I was like, this is so stupid, what you’re doing, it was like, I don’t know, I got clarity, I could just see myself. And I’m like, why are you repeating the same thing, expecting a different result? Now, look, at the time, because of my martial arts training, I was watching Joe Rogan from the UFC. And I started watching his podcast before anybody knew about it before it was on YouTube, I was watching it was on Vimeo.
33:31 And, you know, that was in the back of my mind. And so when I quit my job, I also was dreaming that maybe I could be like the Joe Rogan of London. That’s true. Now, it took me 10, 10 months, and a lot of encouragement to myself, because I’m really introverted by nature, I was terrified to do this. And then in October of 2011, I did my first show called London Real. And that was 14 years ago, and I started with zero subscribers, and zero users and zero views. And my promise to the world was I’m going to publish an episode every Sunday, no matter what. That’s it. And that’s been my journey the last 14 years. And we just kept publishing. At first, it was literally in my kitchen with webcams, and my guests were anybody stupid enough to come over to my house, like literally, I bet in America, very few people have heard of a podcast in Britain, nobody heard of a podcast before. And so this is before zoom, any of this stuff. So we kept on this journey, and I started getting bigger guests and bigger guests. And pretty soon I got Neil deGrasse Tyson, and then I got a member of Parliament, and then blah, blah, blah. And then Joe Rogan invited me on his show. So I was on episode 271 on his show two years later, that was huge to be recognized by Joe. And we kept going, Kyle kept going, became partners at YouTube, got our first 100,000 subscribers, you know, the silver button, I’m sure you got one, it was a big deal. Got our goal button, you know,
34:55 At a million, it’s a huge deal. It takes a lot of time to interview people all over the world, crazy things started making documentary films opened up an academy so we could pay the bills because it was never a, it was never supposed to be a business at first, right. And then the lockdown hit in 2020. And on April 6 of 2020, I had the second largest YouTube live stream in the world in the world. The biggest stream was Trump’s coronavirus briefing from the White House that night. Now based on the numbers of we had of live people, it would have been the most watched podcast in history. It would have beat at the time, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, when they were smoking weed, which was like, I think 10 million views, ours would have been 20 million plus.
35:40 And that episode ended. And 30 minutes later, YouTube deleted the video and they banned it. Nine years that had never happened to me once, Kyle. And it made me so angry that my first reaction was to re-upload it and re-upload it and then upload a vlog saying this was nonsense. And I got into this massive public fight with YouTube and the BBC and all these government agencies that were trying to censor us. And that was my 2020. We became famous and infamous.
36:12 We fought back. We created our own platform. We did a stream with a million live viewers and YouTube started to really hate us. I interviewed all sorts of people that year from Bobby Kennedy, who at the time was, you know, public enemy number one, Andy Vaxer guy, who’s now in the White House. I interviewed Martin Koldo for the Great Barrington Declaration, now in the White House. I interviewed Robert Malone, now in the White House.
36:37 All these people that were totally blocked back then that are now forming policy. And YouTube eventually deplatformed us for medical misinformation on September 9th of 2023. And to be honest, it felt like a big part of me died, Kyle, because my whole life was there. And like 99.9% of my videos are not controversial. They’re documentary movies. People have stopped me on the street and said, I’ve saved their lives. I’ve saved them from addiction. I’ve saved them from relationship issues and they deleted all of it in one fell swoop. And there isn’t a damn thing that I can do about it. Well, I’m fighting back. Don’t get me wrong. But you can’t argue with them. And I meet people all the time here in London. Oh, Brian, I used to love your videos.
37:23 Are you still broadcasting? I’m like, yeah, every week. And they’re like, wow, I don’t see you. I said, yeah, because censorship works. It works really well, especially when I have a monopoly and all the tech companies are monopolies. Let’s be honest. And so that’s where we are right now.
37:38 You know, as we speak, there’s a congressman that’s received a letter from us that’s going to be trying to push this in YouTube because post Trump, they’ve now relaxed all of their policies, right? Facebook doesn’t check anymore. Even Google and YouTube said they’re only going to take down a video if it has more than 50 percent of the content that’s controversial. And yet my plot, my channel apparently is being held by a C-suite executive in YouTube. And they’re got their thumb on it that says, do not put this channel back no matter what, because we really upset a lot of people in governments. And I believe the governments were putting pressure on the companies. We know that from the Twitter files. So that’s what happened to us.
38:19 Kyle Chasse: So what was the main message in that episode that was it just that this whole thing of it’s a scam or the vaccines are a scam or what was the main message?
38:28 Brian Rose: So when 2020 happened, I think we all remember we were all a bit taken back, like what the hell is going on here, right? And it hit us here in Britain, I think around February. February, March is when things started getting crazy of 2020. So we were on the very tip of the spear. I think we were before anybody else in the independent media space for pushing hard. Other people came later. Rogan came later in the year and other people really started pushing it. And thank God, because it took it to the next level. But on March, in March,
38:58 I couldn’t get anybody to come on and talk to me, Kyle. All the doctors were scared. I wasn’t getting any new information. And I thought to myself, who can tell us what’s going on here? I was part of a WhatsApp group with a bunch of doctors in the UK.
39:10 And there were like a million and a half people are going to die. And it was looking really dark. And I had this guest on my show from a couple of years past, who’s known as this conspiracy theorist, his name is David Ike. If there’s anybody who can tell us what’s going on, it’s David. But I also knew he was dangerous and potentially toxic.
39:29 So I had him on in March, and I didn’t tell anybody, Kyle, he just came on, we didn’t stream it live. And I published it. That thing got watched like millions of times. Old friends from high school, I hadn’t heard from the 20 years texted me and said, Hey, I saw your episode. I’m like, Whoa. And on April 6, we brought him back. And this time, I told everybody it was live. Apparently, the BBC had been trying to get us deplatformed, because they had been complaining to YouTube about our anti COVID messages. And when they saw a stream, they put pressure on YouTube with a front page article on the BBC the next day.
40:04 And then YouTube took us down without even talking to me. And you’re like, Well, why is the BBC care if I’m publishing on YouTube? And you get into all these things. Now, if I told you back then, Kyle, that the government was behind all of it, and they were pressuring the media companies, you call me a conspiracy theorist. If I told you that Dropbox, the platform, the Twitter, the platform, the PayPal took my account off.
40:28 Vimeo took my account off. Instagram pulled me all at the same time. If you said that was people working together, you were crazy. And I thought I was crazy. I didn’t think that was true. But it turns out on the Twitter files, we can see the government was pressuring all of that. So so that happened. And to this day, by the way, David is he cannot travel to any EU country, he can’t literally travel to Australia, or to the United States, because of his speech. Isn’t that incredible?
41:00 Kyle Chasse: So obviously, the deplatforming has cost you millions of dollars at worst, 10s of millions more likely. Because YouTube is a private company are, well, are they? I don’t know. I mean, it’s publicly held by Alphabet, right? But nonetheless, that’s still essentially a private company. It’s not like a public entity. Can you sue them for not because you’re because of all the evidence has come to light around COVID and the vaccinations and things like that, over the past year or two, and maybe what you guys were saying on that show wasn’t so far fetched after all.
41:37 Brian Rose: Well, so this is an interesting question. And when this happened in 2020, you know, you looked at the landscape and you said, Well, it’s a private company. And so, you know, we can’t tell it what to do, because they have their own policies, right? And so it became very blurred during the lockdown. Because if you remember, Kyle, the only way of getting information was online.
42:01 Kyle Chasse: And so when you there’s like precedent that when you when you start saying
42:06 What can be said on one of these public platforms, that that’s also the way that people are exchanging information. And so if you ever saw, for example, Russia Today publish, it would say this is a state influence broadcaster, of course, when the BBC would publish, it wouldn’t say something like that. So there would be there was an argument, I think there was a previous case of saying that this was actually a public forum. And you could actually make force them to follow the law.
42:31 The crazy thing that actually I found out, Kyle was my government refused to act. But when we look back through the files of the administration, it was the government that violated my rights by pressuring the private companies to violate my rights, who legally could isn’t that kind of crazy.
42:47 Kyle Chasse: So so with them, would the government be the one that you would want to try to sue now? I mean, I think technically, the truth is not a single lawsuit against a major social media or tech platform has ever ended in success. Yes, one. And so going down that route is pretty frivolous.
43:02 Kyle Chasse: It’s not your channel.
43:03 Brian Rose: No, it’s probably not going to get our channel back. Look, I’ve tried a lot of different methods in a lot of different ways. And right now we’re trying to do it through DC. Because quite frankly, that the companies have changed. And the narrative has changed. It’s just we’re kind of a legacy platform. And I think we we just made so many people upset, because we pushed a lot of buttons in 20 and 21 that other people didn’t. If I started my channel today and published all that content, it would be fine. But because we did it in the past, we couldn’t. But look, I’ll be honest, Kyle, it was my number one lead generation, 95%. It was everything for me. I put everything on YouTube, I invested everything in YouTube. And because it’s not web three, I don’t know the data, right, Kyle? So 2.4 million people, here’s the thing, 2.4 million people in the world, Kyle, want to hear what I want to say. I want them to hear what I want to say. And yet a centralized tech company gets in the middle and says, Guess what, you guys can’t talk to Brian, Brian can’t talk to you, and we’re going to block it in the middle.
44:02 And since I don’t have their information, like I would on web three, that social graph is gone, and it’s held and disintegrated. Now, luckily, I had been playing a little web three game in the past, and I was taking my viewers and bouncing them to my website to watch the full episode. So I was actually doing like a, you know, web three reverse engineering direct relationship with my customers over the years. So we had an email list. But look, it’s it’s been the hardest thing as a business to deal with. And then personally, all my content is gone. It’s just gone. And the videos that would pop up in people’s feeds when they would need someone to talk about addiction, like Abra Maté, or Dr. Jordan Peterson, or suicide, or drug addiction, or my own struggles and confessions, those videos aren’t there anymore. They just don’t exist. It’s like genius, blackball, like the, like that venue, that Venetian dude, it just he never existed. So yeah, it’s brutal. And it’s real. And it’s a reminder of web two.
44:58 Kyle Chasse: Yeah. So for those people who are watching this, and they want to know where to get your content, how do they do that?
45:04 Brian Rose: So it’s on our website at London Real TV. That’s all there. It funny enough, Google doesn’t really care about censorship. So like the episodes can be up there and they can be indexed. It’s just YouTube that seems to be ultra sensitive about it. I’m I’ve actually just sent a letter to a congressman in Florida, to ask him if he can bring this up on the floor. And I’m asking our entire audience to reach out to their congressman to see if they would bring it up.
45:30 Because I believe that if YouTube just had a little bit of pressure like that, they would be like, Oh, yeah, okay, it’s fine. But the problem is, once you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind. And it just really hurts us from doing a lot of good work, including in web three, we can still publish on Instagram, we can still publish on rumble and Facebook. But YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world owned by the largest search engine in the world.
45:52 These are monopolies that dominate our lives, which is why we don’t want them controlling our new AI reality either.
46:08 Kyle Chasse: 100%. Brian, thanks so much for coming on today. Really appreciate it. Fascinating stories.
46:20 Brian Rose: Thanks, Kyle.
