Gabriela Rose - How To Talk To Your Daughter About Crypto

Full transcript: Gabriela Rose on London Real

2:30 Brian Rose: This is London Real, I am Brian Rose, my guest today is Gabriela Rose, my 17-year-old daughter who enjoys politics, literature, and Japanese anime. Today, we’re gonna talk about cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance, or DeFi, from two very different perspectives. One of those is a 50-year-old man, that’s me, born in California, who spent 15 years in the banking industry and currently teaches students from around the world how to use crypto and invest in DeFi.

3:11 And the other is this young lady, 17-year-old, born in London, who is off to university soon, who has never owned crypto in her life. At least not yet. We’re gonna change that right after the broadcast. With recent articles and mainstream media proclaiming, crypto is the future of finance, why Gen Z is ditching traditional investments. I wanted to have a real conversation with my daughter about money, investment, cryptocurrency, blockchain, DeFi in the future.

3:38 We also welcome your live questions. Gabby, welcome to London Real. Thank you very much. It’s great to finally be here. It’s great to have you here.

3:46 This is the first father daughter crypto chat. How are you feeling about this whole time? What do you think?

3:51 Gabriela Rose: I’m really happy to be here. I think my brothers have been monopolizing your social media for way too long.

3:56 Brian Rose: So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, your brothers are four and five years old and they do, they hog the social media, right?

4:02 Gabriela Rose: With their pirate-like behavior. Especially on Instagram, so. All right, well, it’s good to have you in the mix.

4:09 Brian Rose: And I’m glad you’re here and I’m super excited to have this conversation. This is unlike any other, I think you are a more popular guest than like our last five guests. Oh gosh. Well, because this is a real conversation we’re having between generations about things like finance and money. This is the same conversation people are gonna have with their mothers and their fathers and their sons and their daughters or their nieces of the nephews or maybe their coworkers and community members.

4:33 So I’m really glad we’re doing this. I wanna give everybody a little bit of background. Last Sunday, we were at home eating sushi, right? Having lunch. And by the way, we’re home alone, right?

4:44 The two of us, so everything’s a mess because mom is with the boys in Bulgaria on the beach, right? But the two of us are hanging out, and I think you said, while we’re eating sushi, what’s Bitcoin and what’s this DeFi thing you’ve been doing? And then for two hours, we ended up talking about, you name it, blockchains and inflation and all this other stuff. And it was fun, right?

5:09 Gabriela Rose: It was.

5:09 It was.

5:09 Brian Rose: And you had some really good questions. And I just thought to myself, we should try to continue this conversation live so other people can kind of see what’s going on in your head. I’m thinking that this is a good idea. It’s out of my comfort zone, but there’s definitely some transgenerational insight that I’d be happy to help share with the world.

5:29 Gabriela Rose: Okay, good, I’m looking forward to it.

5:31 Brian Rose: And again, I think this is the same conversation people will have with their parents and other people will have as sons and daughters. And again, we’re very different, obviously age difference, but also experience with crypto difference. So I think this is important. Funny enough, I was talking to your grandmother, my mom, 76 years old, in San Diego, who knows a little bit about assets.

5:51 She’s got 50 properties in San Diego. She spends her time running those. It pays for her lifestyle. She likes to travel around the world. And Betty Rose, who was in the movie Reconnect, by the way, much to Hersha Grin, she was literally writing down how to spell Ethereum and Bitcoin, and she was looking to invest.

6:08 So this is total transgenerational, three generations, now talking about crypto and DeFi, and that’s why I’m so excited about this space. So, before we get started though, everyone’s dying to know, what university are you going to, Kathy?

6:22 Gabriela Rose: I have absolutely no idea. I have written up a short list of 15 options, which I will hand to you by the end of next week. It’s already complete.

6:30 Brian Rose: Any names you want to just throw at me?

6:33 Gabriela Rose: I don’t want to over-promise anything. Really? No, no. Okay, any place, geolocations.

6:38 What is it that you always say? It’s about the journey, Brian. It’s about the experience. It’s not always about the end result or what big name I’m gonna graduate from. I’m not about the big game, and I’m already proud of you, young lady, no matter what you do, and I just wanna make sure you have an incredible experience for the next four years after high school.

6:56 Brian Rose: Any general regions or continents that these places are located that you could just give us a hint? I don’t think that’s very wise of me. A name or two? Is it gonna be America?

7:07 Gabriela Rose: Okay, you might be going to America.

7:09 Yeah, I will definitely be going to America. Okay, all right, look out, America. The Abbey Rose is coming. All right, good. Well, maybe we’ll get some more questions later and talk about it.

7:18 Brian Rose: All right, shall we start? Let’s talk about this. Okay, so we got a lot to talk about today. And again, I’m learning so much in this DeFi space and I teach a lot of people, but I thought we should start off and talk about maybe the mindset of money first before we start talking about Bitcoin or a stock or a bond or something. because one of the things I was never taught as a kid is how to think about money.

7:45 No one ever taught me that. It was go to school, get a job, get a paycheck, and that was kind of your life. But no one ever taught me what to do with money. And it wasn’t until a few years ago where I had a guest on, his name is Robert Kiyosaki. He wrote a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and he said this to me.

8:02 He said, Brian, poor people work for money. Rich people make money work for them. Now it’s a hard thing to hear, but Robert doesn’t work for a paycheck. He thinks that’s a dead-end road. He said you have to acquire assets.

8:20 Robert likes real estate, he likes gold. Robert actually buys Bitcoin now in his 70s, but he likes assets that create wealth. He doesn’t like paychecks, and he doesn’t like other instruments that he doesn’t understand, like the stock market. And I took a lot from that, and I started to think about owning businesses, and of course I own London Real, but I wish I had learned this much earlier, even at your age. So what we’re gonna talk about today is not just about Bitcoin going up and down and Ethereum and Dogecoin or whatever.

8:50 It’s really about you thinking about owning assets as opposed to getting a paycheck from a company. Does that make sense?

8:59 Gabriela Rose: Yeah, it’s all about financial freedom and not being dependent and living your daily life on a check by check basis. Yeah. It offers stability.

9:09 Brian Rose: It does, and unfortunately, like your whole education system and mine actually prepares you to work for a company because it was kind of constructed during the Industrial Revolution in this country in Britain. And it was actually just meant really for the workers’ kids to do something during the day. And so without you knowing it, you have great schools you’ve gone to, and I went to good schools, but they kind of subconsciously train you not to make mistakes and to try to do everything right and to get a job, and unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the best way to think about money.

9:43 So, hopefully today, I’ll start to introduce some ideas. Luckily, I had a mom who invested in real estate. My grandparents, one was a, owned his own farm, so he grew barley and potatoes, so he was an entrepreneur, and one of them was a cattle rancher, so he had his own business, too, and had assets like cows and horses. So, and then my dad started a company, so it’s kind of in my DNA, too, which probably helped, but I wanna talk about this stuff today. So, how does that sound?

10:09 Good?

10:09 Gabriela Rose: Yeah, I remember a time when we talked about it before, when I think we were talking about potential future jobs. And I was like, what about working for the government? What about being a civil servant? And you were furious.

10:23 You were like, absolutely not. No, you don’t wanna be working for somebody else your entire life. You’ll never make it to the top of their hierarchy, become an entrepreneur. That’s the quickest way to success. and no offense to any civil servants out there.

10:39 Brian Rose: I was almost a government worker as the mayor of London, but no, what I was trying to tell you is to think about owning something at some point, you know? And unfortunately, even your university that you’re gonna go to in the States or wherever you choose to go, it’s gonna kind of get you into this mindset of what’s your job after school? And again, there’s nothing wrong with going into the industry, whatever sector you choose and learning for a few years. But I think you should always be thinking in the back of your mind, I need to make money work for me, which means owning assets that could be a company, that could mean gold, it could be a property, it could be Bitcoin, but to accumulate assets, because that’s how you’re gonna make your money work for you.

11:20 If you wait for a paycheck until you’re 70 years old, you’re gonna live this life of dependency that’s gonna, I think it’ll hurt the quality of your life. So I think that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Sound good? All right, you asked me on Sunday when we were in sushi. Do you remember the first question you asked me?

11:36 Gabriela Rose: Like, what did you ask me? I don’t remember, maybe to… I think it was like, what’s Bitcoin and what’s this DeFi thing you’re doing because I keep seeing you on social? It was something like that, right?

11:50 Brian Rose: And so I’ll ask you, do you know what Bitcoin is?

11:53 Gabriela Rose: I have a very rudimentary understanding of it. So if you could…

11:58 Brian Rose: Well, what do you know so far?

12:01 Gabriela Rose: Bitcoin, there are 20 million in circulation. I know that they either operate on proof of work or proof of…

12:10 I’ve done some research.

12:11 Brian Rose: What’s Ethereum based on?

12:13 Gabriela Rose: Proof of… I’ve done some research.

12:15 Brian Rose: Okay, what else?

12:16 We’ll get to that. What else?

12:18 Gabriela Rose: Okay, Ethereum, crypto. I read the 11 page wide paper by…

12:23 Brian Rose: You read it?

12:24 Gabriela Rose: Yes, I did.

12:25 Brian Rose: Wow, well, this is a lot of changes in five days.

12:27 Gabriela Rose: It’s really short, and it breaks it down really well, so.

12:30 Brian Rose: Okay, all right, well, let’s just get everybody up to speed on Bitcoin, because again, Gabby asked me on Sunday, what’s Bitcoin? And I get a lot of people asking me what Bitcoin is, and so I try to explain it to you the same as other people.

12:41 So the way I see it now, and this could change over the next couple of years, is that Bitcoin was an idea created by this fictional character, we believe, named Satoshi Nakamoto, and he or she, or it, wrote a white paper and described an idea of transferring value through digital money that was verified as accurate through something called the blockchain and proof of work. A bunch of these computers trying to solve these complex cryptographic formulas in order to make sure that it was correct. And that was the security of this network.

13:20 It was just an idea. Like no one had ever built anything like this. It was just someone that came up with an idea, But it was almost like a beautiful solution. Kind of like the steam engine was, you know, like 150 years ago. What if we did this, this, this, this?

13:31 It works. And everyone was like, wow, that could change the world. And it did. This was something else. But it was just an eight-page white paper or a 10-page that you read.

13:40 All my students have to read it too. Anybody can go see it. I think it’s on bitcoin.com or something. It’s out there. We’ll put a link below.

13:47 And it’s a little complicated, right? But you can push yourself through it. And then a year or so later, someone decided to actually put it into place. And slowly people started trading little bits of this Bitcoin and it started becoming slightly more valuable. At first it was worth like a penny and then it got a little bit more valuable and then it was worth a dollar and then it was worth $100.

14:09 I bought some back in 2013, it was worth about $85. And at the time, we still didn’t know what it was. Max Keiser was talking about it. You remember he came for Thanksgiving dinner?

14:20 Gabriela Rose: Yeah, okay, yeah, he wore the red pants and the yellow shirt, yeah.

14:24 Brian Rose: And they traded a Bitcoin at our Thanksgiving dinner table for $1,000, I think it was 2015, I think. So, and again, more people started using it, they saw the beauty of it. And these days, people look at it as digital property. I think that’s what we were talking about on Sunday, right? I had a guest on named Michael Saylor, he’s the CEO of this company MicroStrategy.

14:47 It’s a public company, it’s got like $4 billion worth of Bitcoin. And he said, Brian, it’s like digital property, which is a weird concept, right? Does that even make sense to you? It kind of suggests that it will last a long time. It’s what?

15:02 Gabriela Rose: That it’s almost permanent, not quite, but it will definitely outlast governments and different currencies that we might adopt. But isn’t Bitcoin only worth as much as it is popular? is popular so right now there’s a lot of mediums and trends circulating and I think it’s peak popularity but will it ever grow old?

15:23 Brian Rose: So really good question. First let’s talk about the digital property aspect because that’s really important because you said it kind of implies it’ll be around forever, right?

15:35 So your grandma owns 50 rental properties in San Diego. She slowly bought them over the last 30 years. Now those pieces of land, those will be here for a long time, right? Until the planet explodes, right? So that’s a piece of property that will be there.

15:53 Now maybe the building will come and go, but Betty Rose owns that piece of property as long as she wants to. She can pass it on to me, maybe it’ll go on to you, maybe it’ll go on to your kids, but that’s a piece of property that’s not going anywhere. Agreed? Yeah. Okay.

16:09 So when Michael and other people talk about Bitcoin, they say this is the same thing, but it’s digital and it’s not going anywhere. Now Michael thinks it’s the best investment for the next 1,000 years. He says it’s that. Now you said it’s only has value if people want it. Is that what you said?

16:26 Gabriela Rose: Yeah, both have supply and demand.

16:28 Brian Rose: Yeah, now let me ask you a question. What if people don’t want property in San Diego, where grandma lives? What if people think that San Diego’s played out, the weather’s too warm, nobody wants to be by the beach, And so they all wanna move to Iceland instead. Like that could happen, right?

16:46 Gabriela Rose: But it probably won’t if there’s more humans on the earth.

16:50 Brian Rose: You agree? Yeah. Okay. So people are thinking the same thing with Bitcoin.

16:54 Like you said, there’s a fixed number of coins. I think it’s 21 million total. I think there’s 18 million circulated. The rest are gonna come out as mining fees over the next few years. But then it’s a fixed asset that no one can increase.

17:09 Like the government does with money. We can talk about that in a bit. Just like property on Earth, right? Is it really a fixed asset?

17:17 Gabriela Rose: Because there’s a limited amount.

17:19 Once it’s all been mined, won’t the prices skyrocket? Okay, cool, so let’s talk about that. First of all, when it comes to property in the world, do you agree there’s a fixed number amount of property? Yeah. All right, we can’t really create a new piece of Earth.

17:32 Brian Rose: No. Unless the ocean goes up or down or something, or you build something out on land, on the ocean. So there’s a fixed amount of property, And it’s good to make a comparison to property markets, I think. So Betty, a grandma, owns property because she understands it and believes it will go up over time as more people are in the world and they still demand places to live. Cool?

17:53 Okay, so Bitcoin has created, I think in the next 10 years, that will be total of 21 million. No, I think it actually scales over time, but it’ll basically be somewhere around this amount, 18 to 21 million. And nobody, no government, no higher power, No, you know, higher beam can come and create more Bitcoins just like no one else can create more pieces of property. So people feel like this is an asset that can’t be messed with or screwed with by a government or a bank or anybody else.

18:24 And so as long as the technology doesn’t break, people feel like this is a good investment. At least some people do. Yeah. Does that make sense?

18:32 Gabriela Rose: Yeah, until the point gets hacked into and it all collapses.

18:35 Brian Rose: Right, okay. Yeah, yeah. Right, so you make a good point there, right? What happens if it gets hacked? Now, there was a hacking a couple days ago, somebody hacked into some poly network and hacked out $600 million worth of coin.

18:48 Of course, we’re in the internet age, so the hacker went on Reddit and did an AMA about his hack, only in the internet age, and talked about it and gave half of it back. Now, this wasn’t Bitcoin or Ethereum, but he hacked into one of these blockchains. So, good point, let’s talk about it. This is technology, it’s unproven. Bitcoin’s been trading since maybe 09, so we’ve got 12 years, but you can’t see it, you can’t touch it.

19:15 So you got a bunch of old guys in America, like Warren Buffet, who have been trading and they own airlines and they own underwear companies and they own restaurants and they say, this is a joke, like there’s nothing here, I can’t see it, I can’t touch it, it’s got no value, so why would I buy it? And then you got other people that say, actually, this is a store of value that’ll be worth things in the future, because I can transfer money to you without asking the permission of a bank. I can do it with very little fees in a very quick amount of time.

19:46 And that is where people see the value of Bitcoin and people believe it’s secure because of mining. So does that answer your question about being hacked?

19:56 Gabriela Rose: Yes. Do you think Bitcoin will be hacked in the next couple of years?

20:01 Brian Rose: I think it’s, you know, Some people are never going to stop trying, especially as a value increase.

20:07 I think it’s a matter of time, to be honest. You know, you might be right, but Bitcoin is the most traded. It’s been around the longest. It’s also one of the simplest cryptos out there. And so most of the Bitcoin fans, we call them Bitcoin maximalists, who believe that there’s Bitcoin and there’s nothing else.

20:24 Everybody else is just kidding themselves with their little coins. They say this thing’s been stress tested and it’s bulletproof. And they have a point, it’s pretty strong. The next in-line currency, Ethereum, which you talked about briefly, which is like Bitcoin, but it’s programmable, and it doesn’t necessarily have a fixed number of coins. So people say, oh, you can mess with it.

20:47 That thing’s a little less than half the size of Bitcoin. And it’s been around since 2014, seven years, and hasn’t really been hacked. Hasn’t really been hacked. Not yet. And that’s the thing about this technology and if you try to explain this to Somebody who grew up, you know 50 years ago. They’ll look at you and say I can’t see it. I can’t touch it I don’t see the value of it So why and that’s the kind of the arguments you get on the back of it. What do your friends say about Bitcoin about Bitcoin?

21:18 Yeah, the girls you go to school with what do they say?

21:22 Gabriela Rose: They don’t talk about it so much. I have a few friends that do invest in stocks but the problem is they don’t know where to start. I think my generation, because such a huge percentage of Bitcoin is a scam. So they really, it’s not that accessible yet, I think.

21:43 Brian Rose: Okay, so they’re still wary of crypto.

21:45 Gabriela Rose: Yeah, most of them.

21:46 Brian Rose: And do your friends use Robinhood or one of those online trading platforms, or do you even know?

21:52 Gabriela Rose: Not my friends, no.

21:53 Brian Rose: So you’re not necessarily in the crypto clique.

21:56 Gabriela Rose: Not yet.

21:57 Brian Rose: So I was reading some surveys recently, by the way, and a couple numbers just to throw out here. First of all, one in four students in the world own crypto. Okay, so that’s an interesting stat. The other one, which I thought was interesting, and this was published by Interactive Investor, showed 45% of new investors, age 18 to 29, so almost you, made their maiden investments, means the first investment ever in their life, in crypto, last month.

22:23 So that’s interesting, it was double the amount that invested in like a fund. So it’s like the younger generation seems to be more comfortable in buying crypto and crypto assets, whereas the previous generation would have bought stocks. Yeah. Well, it makes sense. They were raised with a lot more technology around them, so.

22:43 Yeah. What else were we talking about on Sunday? We were talking about governments printing money. We were also talking about DeFi, right? What do you know of DeFi?

22:54 Decentralized finance.

22:55 Gabriela Rose: Mmm. Wow. Wow. Absolutely nothing.

22:57 Brian Rose: Yeah, it doesn’t else right? Okay All right.

23:00 Gabriela Rose: So should we talk about what defy is please?

23:03 Brian Rose: Okay, because this is a new term for a lot of people It’s a really interesting term and you’re right. It stands for decentralized finance. But what the hell does that mean, right?

23:13 Decentralized finance as opposed to centralized finance. Most of us know centralized finance as our banks our local bank I remember when my mom took me to the bank when I was a kid, it was this beautiful building with marble floors and really well-dressed people. Everything was shiny and I went and gave them like my $14 and they opened up a savings account, right? Right then, I should have wondered what’s going on, right? Who’s paying for all this, right?

23:41 Little did I know I was paying for all this, but you know, no other businesses were that nice on the outside but the bank was and the bank held your money and the bank gave you advice on what to do with your money, and the bank would transfer your money and it would take a few days, and the bank sometimes would tell you you can’t have your money, and the bank sometimes would tell you you can’t do that with your money. But it was these big institutions and we trusted them with our money, right? I still remember when you and I opened up your first savings account.

24:09 Gabriela Rose: It was horrible.

24:10 Brian Rose: Horrible? Yes. All right, what do you remember that day?

24:14 Gabriela Rose: It was just unnecessarily over the top and complicated.

24:17 It’s as if they were doing everything they can to make me uninterested in the process. And you know what, at the end of the day, I did probably what they wanted me to do. I stuck my money in there 10 years ago and I haven’t looked at it since. I feel more of a connection when I’m buying poor cutlets from the butchers. It was that exciting opening up a new bank account.

24:36 It just, you’re not expected to know what you’re signing. And it’s like they have a very parental role. They tell you, you don’t have to know what that means, just leave it to us, but what happens with the banks aren’t there?

24:51 Brian Rose: You know, with COVID, we’re all waiting for the big drop. We’re all waiting for a recession and it hasn’t come yet.

24:58 And a lot of people still have their money in banks. So it is definitely something to be wary of. Wow, those are really good observations. Okay, I wanna talk what you said about recession and COVID shortly because that’s interesting. And it’s interesting that you’re thinking about that and talking about that, you know, when you got all sorts of other things on your mind too.

25:14 So that’s interesting, I wanna come back to that. So I gotta take some of the blame when it comes to you and your first bank account and your introduction to the centralized finance system. So I’m just gonna say it, the guy that’s fighting for financial freedom, the guy that’s trying to break down the banking industry. Yeah, you’re only 60 pounds, by the way. Yeah, so when Gabby, you were like, I think you were probably like nine, maybe, or 10.

25:42 I was like, look, you’ve got some money because I think you were doing chores or you were doing something. So you had like 25, no, I think you had like 60 pounds, maybe it was a little bit more, and I said, you need to put this in a bank, it’s a savings account, we’re gonna go. So we walked down the street, Bellsized Park, we went into a NatWest branch, right?

25:59 Gabriela Rose: And I have an account with them as well, and you know, good and bad things to say about NatWest. We walked in there, and like you said, it was a really uncomfortable experience.

26:08 Brian Rose: You had to have your passport, right? You had to fill something out, and you gave them your money. There was no way I could access it. And there was no way you could access it, right? You know what they did?

26:17 They sent you, they sent me, every month, a printed piece of paper with a number of your balance and you never saw it and you never had a relationship with your money. So that meant that it meant nothing to you and you were taught from that day that the bank holds your money and that you don’t get to use your money. So you’re being subcommunicated thanks to your dad. Indoctrinated right you are being indoctrinated yeah into this institutional relationship with your money So first of all your money is still there You never got to touch it You never got to understand how to lend it to borrow it to invest it you could never transfer it to friends whereas Right after this episode We’re gonna create your hot wallet on your phone, and I’m gonna send you a little bit of crypto and from there Imagine if you were nine or ten years old you could literally see your money You might even be able, even at nine or 10, to lend it out for interest overnight.

27:18 You could send it to your friends, you could receive it. You might even be able to invest it in something. That’s what DeFi offers. It offers not just the bank is no longer involved, the bank doesn’t make the decision. It means- It’s also a hands-on approach to learn.

27:35 There’s risk involved, there’s not someone over your shoulder telling you what you can’t buy. They told you you couldn’t can buy crypto anymore. So yeah, like when I want to teach you something else What do we do?

27:47 Gabriela Rose: We go out in the world and we do it

27:49 Brian Rose: So if you’re gonna ride a horse with put you on a horse There’s such a stigma when it comes to learning about finance in the world. Why is that?

27:57 Gabriela Rose: It didn’t know anybody that Takes finance for a level or college. I know that they got called snobbish upper class Just privileged.

28:05 Brian Rose: Is that what happens with people to study finance? Yeah There’s a lot of shame around money there is a lot in general talk about that talk okay on the spot. Yeah, okay What is that I mean like we’re in England there’s shame around money as in people don’t like to talk about Absolutely. Okay, you’re not meant to talk about it discuss it But that also prevents us from learning from it and you know with the bank You’re not expected to know what you’re signing It’s almost as if they make you feel too stupid to understand and they don’t want you learning So at the end of there, you just leave with them and just pray for the best.

28:41 Maybe you don’t even look at it twice like I did.

28:43 Gabriela Rose: Yeah, your money’s still sitting there. I don’t even know. I don’t know what to add.

28:47 Brian Rose: But what you said is exactly what Robert Kiyosaki said in his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

28:51 He said, schools don’t teach you about money. And when he was a kid, he raised his hand to his teacher, he said, when do we get to learn about money? And they said, we don’t talk about money. He said, but you’re teaching me Spanish, and you’re teaching me history, and you’re teaching me science, and you’re teaching me math, why don’t you teach us about money? And the teacher said, no, no, we don’t do that here.

29:13 Now, I’m not saying there’s some conspiracy there, but we don’t actually educate our children on money. Why isn’t there a class in school of you opening up your first business and creating your own accounts for the first time? Like you said, I bet when some of your friends do study finance, it’s less about money and it’s more about finance, okay? The banks do this and the banks do that, but it’s not really about maybe what money is. And again, so many people love Robert Kiyosaki’s book because it’s the first time they were ever taught about money, and again, they were told that saying, poor people work for money, rich people make money work for them, and it’s like a light bulb thing.

29:55 But I don’t think, strangely, the banks don’t necessarily want you learning about money. The system isn’t programmed, And so this is an interesting time because we’ve never seen people that have access to their own money. So in the last few years, all you crazy kids are buying crypto, okay, according to these studies, right? Because I think, and let’s talk about the next point you made. Are you a little suspicious of governments and banks and maybe even parents as far as that we know what the hell we’re doing?

30:30 Gabriela Rose: No. You’re not? No, I’m not. Do you think we know what we’re doing?

30:35 Brian Rose: It’s more bravado than anything else when it comes to raising kids, I think.

30:40 Do you think that people invest in crypto because it gives them a chance to not have to deal with their banks?

30:49 Gabriela Rose: Yeah, it’s a fair safe. It’s entirely your own. It’s transparent. There’s legitimacy in it.

30:57 Brian Rose: It’s like what you said, banks have been the greatest scam for like the last 30 years. You said it, not me. Again, I do think the last three or four or 500 years we’ve been taught this, the bank is your relationship.

31:09 Gabriela Rose: And I was just having flashbacks to the bank my mom took me to in San Diego and it was this beautiful thing and it was this arm length piece. But I think now people, especially younger people are saying I can buy Bitcoin and I can invest it and I can send it on my mobile phone in one minute And I know what it’s doing and I don’t have to get someone’s permission or a bank and I like the fact that I have A relationship money and I think that’s what we’re seeing now. Yeah, we have more options

31:37 Brian Rose: So that is what defy is it’s decentralized finance and it’s peer-to-peer And that’s also why it’s growing at the fastest rate in human history that we’ve seen any technology grow That’s it the wheel remember the wheel. That was a big deal back in the day, right the steam engine Made in England. Thank you very much by the way, was a big deal.

31:56 The internet was growing about 63% year-on-year growth, which is massive. That year-on-year growth means it goes whoop. But crypto, according to one of my recent guests, is growing 113% year-on-year growth, which means by about 20, 27, I think four billion people will own crypto. Right? But isn’t that scary?

32:17 Generally, when things rise that fast, if you look at credit crunch, of the Wall Street Cash, and people, when ordinary people tend to over-invest, it, you know, the consequences eventually come about. Do you think something similar might happen? That’s a great question, Gabby. You know, the two closest things to the rate of adoption right now were the internet in like the late 90s, which was about 60-some percent, and mobile phones, right? Remember, you probably remember not having a mobile phone, but like, barely.

32:52 You remember seeing them. I remember when there were no mobile phones. So the adoption of those two technologies was pretty quick, like 60%. This is almost double that. And you’re very right.

33:02 When you get everybody rushing into a market, sometimes it gets overvalued and crazy things happen. So you probably heard of the dot-com crash, maybe. So everybody, and I was part of that. I was in New York City, it was 1999. I was the CFO of a dot-com startup.

33:21 We had given $20 million to build this site that sold luxury goods to people. It was called luxuryfinder.com. And we all thought this was gonna be the next big thing. And the markets, the prices went really high, and then about a year and a half later, the prices crashed. So how do you invest while knowing that?

33:40 How do you protect yourself? So that’s a good question. One thing that’s important to remember is people look on that as a failure, but what they don’t realize was When the prices did go up and did go down, everybody kept using the internet. So even though the price of the stocks went down, everybody started using Amazon, they started using Google, later they started using YouTube and email. So even though the price went down, people kept, more people kept using the technology.

34:08 Does that make sense? The same thing you see with crypto. So, you know, last year, middle of last year, there was a drop in the prices of the crypto. And when the prices of the crypto dropped, a lot of people lost money, they got out of it. But the people working on the technology in the background in DeFi creating all the apps and all the protocols that allow you to lend money or borrow money or transfer money or do insurance through the blockchain, they were like, this is still gonna be big.

34:39 So they were still coding away. Just like Google is a search engine, even though the stock market crashed, The two guys at Google said, people wanna search the internet. The internet’s growing, it’s not going anywhere. This is a great idea. And they kept building, and that’s why they’re a trillion dollar company today.

34:57 So, you’re right, there will be price spikes. And we see them on Bitcoin. I mean, we see volatility in Bitcoin. Probably because there’s a bunch of crazy kids out there buying crypto who’d never bought anything in their life, maybe, but you’re right. We don’t know where it’s gonna go.

35:13 And it’s new. You told me that if Bitcoin did crash, you’d cry. I’d cry. Yeah. You said it.

35:21 If Bitcoin got like hacked tomorrow, I would be disappointed because I see something incredible. If digital property actually exists, Gabby, think about it. It changes the world forever. Now, we talked about this on Sunday, I want to talk about this now. Your grandma, Betty Rose, lives in San Diego, California.

35:42 Now she was born in America, she had amazing parents, my grandparents, I’ll talk about them all, get emotional, who taught her really good values, who taught her to work hard. She went to college at one of the colleges you might be looking at. She graduated, she became a teacher, she was a mother, single mother, raised the three of us, but she had access to invest her spare money into properties in San Diego. And that’s why today she’s retired and she can live off those assets and you know, she travels everywhere.

36:13 Grandma’s crazy. Grandma will travel, she’ll travel to Iran, North Korea. She’s going back to the caucuses. She’ll go everywhere at 76. She’s gangster.

36:23 But the only reason Betty could buy property in San Diego is because she was lucky enough to be born in America. Does that make sense? The problem with property as an investment is you have to have valuable property near you or you can’t get access. Now let’s take a woman who’s my mom’s age who was born in Ethiopia as opposed to San Diego, okay? About halfway around the world, almost exactly, right?

36:48 Halfway around the world, different continent, both are pretty warm, okay? But in Ethiopia, you don’t necessarily have access to buy a property that will hold value, okay? Now, there’s a lot of countries around the world that goes through cycles, and you know, whether it’s Venezuela or Brazil in the 80s or African countries, Asian countries, they go through cycles. And the problem is, is that when you go through a down cycle, you don’t have any assets you can trust.

37:15 Because your property can be seized by governments. Your business can be taxed or seized. Your currency, and you brought this up on Sunday with Germany and the, what, the Wehrmauer Republic or something, right, you can tell me. Sometimes the currency itself becomes so worthless that, like what? What were they doing with it?

37:32 That they had a high inflation and they had to change the currency. And people had so many bills, It literally is a wheelbarrow. Right now in Venezuela, they’re making purses with the currency because it’s worth more as a construction tool, as a piece of paper than it is as a value. So this woman in Ethiopia, this is my mom’s age, never had an option to invest her savings in an asset that would be stable. So say, you know, Betty Rose, Ethiopian Betty Rose worked hard just like my mom.

38:07 She was raised by good parents. She, maybe she was a teacher as well. And she had some extra income and she invested it in the currency, the local currency. Maybe she started a business, maybe she bought a property. But over the course of successive governments and hyperinflation, today she has no assets.

38:27 So when bad times happen, she maybe has no food, maybe she’s got no shelter, she’s got nothing to give to her kids. Why? Because of where she grew up. Bitcoin changes all of that. It’s in their name, decentralized.

38:41 It’s available to anyone as long as they have a phone. And it’s, yeah, exactly, very well said. And right now, three and a half billion people have a mobile phone. I bet this woman in Ethiopia has an Android phone that she uses, or she shares it with people, but a lot of these places have them and they share them. So she, right now, could put the savings in Bitcoin.

39:02 Now, Bitcoin’s not gonna be taken away by government. At this point, it’s not gonna be inflated, so she can save something for a rainy day. She can put something away, and now she has an option to invest in digital property, whereas before her, and there’s two billion other people in the world that don’t even have access to that. So what happens? They live lives of difficulty and trials.

39:25 It probably affects their children. Maybe it means they can have children. Maybe it means more tragedy, more death, more problems, because they don’t have that store of value. Does that click? Every time I talk to you about this, it makes even more sense to me.

39:37 He had a great analogy for diabetes that I really liked. Oh yeah, okay. So the diabetes analogy is this, and again, Michael Saylor taught me this, and he’s, again, he’s the first CEO of a public company to, you know, have the conviction to say, I’m gonna invest the extra spare cash we have in Bitcoin. Okay, this is before Elon Musk did it. Okay, he basically got Elon Musk to do it on a tweet.

40:03 So Michael was last year, And I wanna get back to what you said about the potential recession and the pandemic. Michael watched the pandemic and he’s expecting a big market crash. And instead, the US Federal Reserve printed a bunch of money and bought all the stocks and pushed them back up to the levels they should have been. And we’ll talk about printing. Yeah, exactly, quantitative easing.

40:25 So it’s a nice way of saying we’re gonna print money, create more assets, unlike Bitcoin, which is fixed. They printed more money in six months that I think they had in the previous 20 years. Now check me, I’ll come back on that stat. Just to prop up the economy to keep everybody calm, keep them from going crazy and rioting and stuff. And Michael said, as the CEO of a company, I’ve got, I don’t know how much he had on his balance sheet, a few billion dollars of spare cash.

40:51 A lot of companies have cash. Apple sits on a bunch of cash, Google sits on cash, because they’re basically monopolies, they make a ton of money, they don’t know what to do with it. Michael said, holding it in cash is actually, I’m doing a disservice to my investors, something’s wrong with me, I better find a better asset. So he said, he looked at gold, he looked at property, and then he looked at Bitcoin. And he said, this is the best asset that I can use in my fiduciary duty as a CEO of a publicly held company, which means the shares are public, the SEC regulates every one of his moves.

41:24 He said, we’re gonna buy Bitcoin with that. And he bought $4 billion worth of Bitcoin And the stock price went up like eight or 10 times. So the market said, yes, please do more of this. Elon Musk bought one and a half billion on Tesla, I think a few months later. And he was one of the first guys to really say this is the right thing.

41:42 And he told me, Brian, for the next 1,000 years, what’s gonna be around? Is Facebook gonna be here in 1,000 years? No, I don’t think so. He says, is the property gonna be there? The beachfront property?

41:52 I don’t know, maybe the tides are gonna rise. I don’t know. But he said, Bitcoin, I think will be here. So he used the analogy of a diabetic, and I think he’s talking more about maybe Betty Rose, and again, this woman in Ethiopian Africa. He said a diabetic can’t produce, I think, fat cells, right?

42:14 So if a diabetic eats food like sugar, they can’t actually convert it into fat cells. So they can have all of the food they want, but they can’t store it, because a fat cell is your storage for a rainy day, right? A fat cell keeps you alive in the difficult times. He said, he looks at Bitcoin the same way, and he said that woman who’s in Ethiopia right now, she might be creating income, but if you can’t store it in a place that’s reliable, you’re basically like a diabetic, and a diabetic literally will starve to death even while eating because they have no store of value, because they can’t convert that into a fat cell.

42:52 So he says, basically, yeah, The Bitcoin allows anybody in the world to not be a diabetic, right? To create that. Having that fail-safe when governments collapse or get greedy or inflate the price to the point where one day you might look at your savings and realize they’re worth nothing anymore. It’s… Yeah, it’s a real option.

43:17 And the fact that it’s borderless and anonymous and permissionless, that’s the other thing. I don’t think we even talked about this on Sunday. When you go to the bank, we had to do it with you because you had to show a passport. The bank has to say you have to prove all of these points before I give you an account. So a lot of people don’t have access to accounts.

43:39 Say you have a criminal record. Say you were born in this country. They won’t even give you an account. And that means billions of people can’t even get access to those finances. So that’s another piece of friction there that was probably not fair.

43:53 We talked about printing money. Let’s talk about that and then I wanna hear about what you said about recessions because that was interesting. So the US government can print more dollars. Isn’t that crazy? Isn’t that crazy, that concept?

44:08 Thank you. First of all, does that make sense? Because you were taught in school times where governments printed too much money, right? Yeah. What did you learn about Germany in the 30s?

44:17 Germany, they weren’t able to pay with reparations, So the government just made more money to keep up with it. And then Wall Street crashed, and it was worth even less. They printed even more to try to combat that, and they just got to a point where people were carrying suitcases of money just for a loaf of bread. And so I’m wondering, is that going to happen in the near-time future? Because our government is printing a ridiculous amount of money, and when is something going to happen?

44:45 When are we going to pay back for it? When are taxes going to raise? Who does, where is that money coming from? Who does our government owe money to? It just doesn’t seem right.

44:56 These are amazing questions, Gabby. Like you’re right, again, and you’re right. And you’re 17 and you’re asking the questions that honestly the adults aren’t asking. Furlough, paying money to people for not working, it just doesn’t make sense. You’re so right, because it doesn’t.

45:12 Gabriela Rose: Where does the money come from? Where does it come from?

45:16 Brian Rose: Yeah, and that’s the question. I’m like furlough, okay, we decided to pay people because it was COVID and it was a time of crisis, okay. But who’s gonna pay for that?

45:27 You’re printing money to buy stocks and to buy assets to keep the market value up, but who’s gonna pay for that? Like you said, are taxes gonna increase? Like something has to change, right?

45:38 Gabriela Rose: Like it doesn’t take a degree in economics to know that, and you’re asking these questions.

45:43 Brian Rose: Now, like you said, in Germany in the 30s, they printed more money to try to pay their debts, right?

45:49 And who did that hurt the most?

45:51 Gabriela Rose: The people. The people, right, it was like the pensioners. Oh, anyone with savings. Anyone with savings, it disappeared.

45:58 So again, back to my analogy, that woman in Ethiopia, if she had saved a bunch of her local currency, hoping one day she could retire on it or pass it on to her grandchildren, guess what? If money’s worthless, and that happened in Germany, That happened in Argentina, that happened in Brazil, happening in Venezuela right now. Basically, the currency is worthless. Now, Betty bought property. Now, the property has a good thing, which means the government can’t make more property, and it’s a real asset.

46:29 So she chooses property, probably for the same reason.

46:32 Brian Rose: You told me about your grandma in Bulgaria, right?

46:36 Gabriela Rose: This is a really good point, actually. I’m so glad we brought this up. You said, Baba, we call her Baba, by the way.

46:43 Brian Rose: And you told me where Baba keeps her money. You wanna tell us?

46:48 Gabriela Rose: In her bra. She’s a very tight-fisted woman. Won’t let anyone near it.

46:54 So she holds onto the cash and she doesn’t trust a bank. And I think she also holds some gold. Yeah, under the mattress, hidden at all times. It’s good, people are going to see her right now. But this is interesting because this human behavior is everything, because it shows you their relationship with money and their relationship with governments and banks.

47:14 Brian Rose: So, Baba, who grew up in Bulgaria, I don’t know a whole history of Bulgaria, but I mean, it was under communist control for probably most of the time until the 80s. I’m guessing the banks probably did some inflation. We know the Russian ruble dropped in value when the wall came down. Baba is a really smart, no joke of a woman, right?

47:37 Gabriela Rose: She’s a strong Bulgarian grandma.

47:39 Terrifying.

47:40 Brian Rose: And she’s smart, and she said, guess what? I’m gonna keep my money, first of all, not in a bank, but in my underwear. And I’m gonna also own gold, and I’m gonna hold that gold as well. So again, look at the behaviors.

47:54 People aren’t stupid. Even if you go back to Russia in the 90s, people held dollars because they knew that was more valuable than the ruble, because what some of those governments do is they come in and say, oh, you had 10 rubles in your account? Now you have one. They devalue the currency. Now that hasn’t been done recently because it’s unpopular.

48:10 So like you said, who’s gonna pay? Now the US government used to have something called the gold standard, right?

48:17 Gabriela Rose: So right before 1971. But Nixon changed that. Correct.

48:20 Brian Rose: President Nixon said, we’re gonna change that. Because before that, $1 had a dollar’s worth of gold held in the Fort Knox, it’s in Tennessee, it’s like this big vault with like tanks outside. And we held all the gold. And it was actually, I think, illegal at some point for people to even own gold because the government didn’t want you to have a currency, right?

48:39 Gabriela Rose: A little bit like they didn’t want you owning crypto.

48:42 Brian Rose: We’ll get to that shortly. So a dollar is worth that same amount of gold. And then Nixon came along and said, but wait a second, if we take it off the gold standard, then we can control money and we can print some here and we can spend it here and spend it there and we’ll print more and we’ll print more. And so he started doing that and it got crazier and crazier and crazier. And then when COVID happened, it like doubled in the short amount of time because they panicked and they thought this is the best thing we can do.

49:10 But when will it stop and who’s gonna pay for it? That’s the big question. And that’s why people are attracted to Bitcoin because there’s only 21 million and nobody can change that, it’s programmed in digitally. It’s also not under the control of a government, can’t be devalued, yes you have the tech risk.

49:26 Gabriela Rose: Is it under the control of government?

49:28 Miners, big companies are buying huge amount of computers and miners and they’re getting them to, they’re using the nodes to mine crypto. The Chinese government has a huge supply. So is it really power to the people when big businesses and corporations who can afford the mining are monopolizing?

49:47 Brian Rose: Okay, so let’s get to talk about mining and then we’ll get back just to finish on that point. So with Bitcoin, the whole algorithm from Satoshi was all about security was provided by forcing people to try to make really difficult calculations in order to prove that something was correct.

50:05 And if you prove it, you get some Bitcoin. Now the calculations take so much computing power that they can’t be faked and that people compete with each other to prove those calculations that add onto the blockchain. And each future block takes more computations so it becomes more difficult and more difficult. That’s what the miners do. And the reason they do it is because Bitcoin has value and as it goes up, then it makes sense to make mine.

50:28 But the miners don’t control the network. They don’t control the algorithm. they don’t control the blockchain. So I would disagree with you. I would say that the miners themselves make money off of it, but right now they don’t control it.

50:39 And by the way, China banned Bitcoin mining, but they’ve banned Bitcoin like three different times. So again, that’s more of a news story. Last thing I’ll say about mining is a lot of our new blockchains are going to something called proof of stake, like you mentioned, as opposed to proof of work, which means you don’t need a bunch of computers literally doing nonsense calculations, putting out heat into the atmosphere, as Elon Musk complained about, even though one of my guests said, if we all turned our air conditioning off, it would be more of an energy save.

51:09 I swear, mining was- Than mining. Mining was the 40th most costly use in electricity ready by country. Yeah, it’s not as high as people said, and also, Ethereum with 2.0 is moving to proof of stake, because these computers, they’re not exactly, If they were doing calculations to figure out the human DNA, we’d be like, okay, please keep doing that. But the calculations they’re making are pointless. They don’t actually do anything for humanity.

51:37 So Ethereum is finite because eventually we’re gonna find out the coins. Yeah, but we’ll probably give them fees to continue evaluating the transactions. Bitcoin will probably stay as proof of work because that’s what it is, the original, the maximalist like that. Ethereum will move to proof of stake probably next year with Ethereum 2.0. So it’s a good point you made.

51:56 We’ll see what happens. You mentioned China, let’s talk about China, let’s talk about Russia, let’s talk about the US. My mentor, Dan Pena, famously said that if you knew who was behind Bitcoin, it would go to zero. He said who benefits from stealing someone’s financial system, especially the West. He said China and Russia, look out for these people.

52:16 Gabriela Rose: These governments are also talking about creating their own coins, right?

52:20 Brian Rose: Fed coin, that’s what Robert Kiyosaki calls it. Fed coin, which is the US controlled US dollar coin. So it’s a digital currency as opposed to a paper currency or a banking currency. China is thinking about doing the same thing, they’re regulating it, they’re banning things because they wanna control, but the market keeps going.

52:37 Gabriela Rose: So they don’t like the idea of not being in control, right?

52:41 Brian Rose: Because if the government can’t print money and buy things, then it’s no longer in control. So it gets very nervous when people start getting into crypto, which is why we see regulation from banks, et cetera. I wanna ask you about what you said about recession in COVID, is this something you worry about or your friends worry about recessions and what happened last year with COVID and what do you guys think about or talk about?

53:08 Gabriela Rose: It’s not something that’s commonly discussed. Nobody enjoys thinking about something bad that’s going to happen, but it’s just because we all know that when the economy grinds to hold, it’s bad for everyone. So the government artificially starts pumping money back into the economy to get it moving. But it’s just, it’s just everyone, everyone was talking about a big crash after COVID. You know, something, nobody worked, you know, with the, in the pandemics.

53:37 It just, we’re just waiting for something bad to happen. And it hasn’t yet, which is suspicious.

53:45 Brian Rose: Are you friends talking about this too? No. Just you?

53:50 Yeah. Okay. It’s just interesting you said that because like you never mentioned this to me. So it is suspicious, and a lot of people out there think that this will correct at some point.

54:00 Gabriela Rose: Isn’t the government already in massive debt?

54:02 Brian Rose: They are in massive debt, and then they become in more massive debt, and in more massive debt.

54:07 Gabriela Rose: How is that gonna affect us?

54:09 Brian Rose: Well, some people say, and I’ve had guests on this show, like Max Keiser, like Robert Kiyosaki, like James Rickards, who all say, you’re gonna have to pay the piper. And when that day comes, all these markets are gonna crash because they’ve been inflated by the printing of money. It’s only backed by the US government’s word and maybe the military that’ll come in and drop some bombs on you if you disagree.

54:31 Gabriela Rose: But that doesn’t create money, does it?

54:33 Brian Rose: So you bring a good point, Gabby, and I think that’s why more people are looking into something like crypto where they feel at least they’re in control. Yes, there’s a technology risk for sure. There’s also security risk. A lot of people don’t know how to keep their crypto safe.

54:49 At a bank, one thing we will say, your money in that West and your savings account, I guarantee it’s still there. If we can go find your account number, maybe we’ll do that after this, and I can go find your statement, we could go there with your passport and you could get your 80 pounds back. You probably would have like no interest after 10 years, you’d probably have like 30p of interest. But you could get it back, it has that security. The problem with crypto, and that’s why I get students from around the world, is because that crypto, if you lose your private key, which is an alphanumeric number that you store on your hot wallet or your cold wallet, If you lose it, it’s gone, and it disappears forever.

55:25 Or if somebody calls you up and says, hey, can I get that key number, and you give it to them, it’s gone. And most people aren’t used to that. So there’s a real problem right now. People are losing money, they’re getting it stolen from them, and then those are the issues. And that’s what we have to address with decentralized finance.

55:42 But the flip side is, you’ve got something growing that’s about the people. It’s power to the people, right?

55:49 Gabriela Rose: And it’s financial freedom. and there’s no banks and governments involved. And so with decentralized finance, you literally have people out there, programmers in Tel Aviv or in St. Petersburg in Russia or in Singapore, anywhere in the world, four guys and a dog, three girls and a cat, they create a new decentralized app that shows you how to lend money to one each other through Bitcoin and all of a sudden it works and people, they see value.

56:16 Brian Rose: Whereas before, you’d have to wait for me, put on my suit, go into my bank, create this thing, and I charge you a ton of money for it, and I wouldn’t bother innovating because I’m still making a ton of your money anyways, and I got fat bonuses. I’ll do that next year. I’ll do that next year. With this, they’re all being motivated to innovate, innovate, innovate. Yeah, it’s a lot like when the government, you know, made all the key industries, nationalize the key industries.

56:48 You know, like if you look at the TFL, Same by the government, it’s just, it’s a mess. Did you learn about this in history class?

56:55 Gabriela Rose: No, not really.

56:56 Brian Rose: Okay, but you’re right. Most people don’t know before World War II, the tube, and Gabby’s talking about TFL, if you don’t live in London, it’s a transport for London that owns all the bus and tube networks here.

57:07 But also other key industries like gas or electricity. The TFL is a subway network. It used to be a bunch of private companies that had the Northern line, the Central line, and they would like each charge you different amount of money to train the line and after the war they centralize them all and put them all into a government and like you said when the government tries to run something it just does a pretty lousy job there’s no competition there’s no innovation they you know there’s a really high level of elitism so they just like they waste the budgets giving each other checks and helping their friends out so it’s and this a similar thing happens in the banking industry where you’ve only got 20 or 100 players and they’ve created this mind control with you, Gavi, right?

57:53 Like I was on a call with my students last night in my DeFi accelerator and the first time I heard this and I wanna see what you think about this, I said, it’s like all of you grew up in a zoo. You grew up in a cage in a zoo and you’re a wild animal but you grew up in this cage, right? And you got the fake plants and you got the fake stream. This is starting to sound like plateaus now. Yeah, but listen to me, listen to me.

58:16 And every day I throw some meat out and that’s your food and you think this is your reality, okay? That is what I think the banking system has done to you for the last couple hundred years. It’s put you, a free spirit, a free animal out there into a cage and said, this is your reality, your financial reality and I control it. Now you think something’s funny, you know something’s weird, right? You know people are looking at you, You know the tree isn’t real, right?

58:45 But you get fed some fresh meat once every few days. So you’re like, okay, I can do this. You know something’s not right. And that’s kind of what’s going on, I think, with the banking industry. You haven’t had a real relationship with your money.

58:56 You get drip fed a little bit of money. It gets taken away from you, but you don’t have a real relationship with your money as if you would if you were born in nature, where you could see the consequences, the pluses, the minuses, you could be in control. And yet all of us don’t know we’re sitting there in the zoo. Complacency. Complacency.

59:14 And these banks, they’ve got you as captive customers and they’ve told you you’re not smart enough to understand your money. They’ve told you go get a job and get that paycheck every month and you’ve got to pay the taxes and the then and then and then and then and afterwards you put some away for your pension fund and we’ll invest that for you because we’re smart and you’re not and every year they take out a big chunk of your money and you don’t even know it because you don’t see how they’re doing the sleight of hand. And that’s what the banking system’s done.

59:39 It’s made a lot of people rich. I was one of them. I’ve seen it on the inside. You just gave me a nasty look there, young lady. I was one of them.

59:48 I got recruited to the bank because it was exciting. They paid a lot of money. At least I thought I was gonna make a lot of money there. And I did. It was exciting.

59:59 It was interesting. It was actually financial innovation. When I started on Wall Street in 93, I feel like the guys and girls do right now in DeFi. because we were creating the most cutting edge financial products, they were complicated, they needed engineering, they needed high level mathematics, and we were creating these crazy products and offering them to our customers, and the customer’s like, I’ve never seen anything like that in the world. It doesn’t look like a stock, it doesn’t look like a bond, it’s exactly what I want from my risk profile, and I can bet on this and not bet on this.

1:00:29 And we were like these crazy rocket science financial engineers, and it was fun, and I loved it. But I also saw how the banks, they were controlling everything, and they didn’t let anybody else in that little arena. You had to have a balance sheet, you had to have 10,000 employees, you had to have a license with the Fed, and nobody else could be involved in this market. So when I saw DeFi, I was like, this is the same thing, except it’s peer-to-peer, and banks aren’t involved, and governments aren’t involved.

1:00:54 And that’s why it’s growing so fast. And that’s why it’s exciting. One more thing. One of my guests said, there’s this concept out there of Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0. Wanna hear about this?

1:01:09 Okay, so Web 1.0, the first time we started experiencing the internet, it was email, okay, and it was like an internet browser where we could search things and look up websites. Okay, I remember doing this back in 95. It was like, wow, I’m sending an email. I go to a website. It was the brand new thing and it was super cool.

1:01:29 Then more innovation came and we saw things like Facebook, where you go in there and have a community of peers and Amazon, I could order something. YouTube, Netflix, right? I could watch a movie, I know you’re on Netflix quite a bit. Right, you watch a movie, that’s Web 2.0, but all that was controlled by a company, and Facebook controls it, and guess who gets rich when Facebook does well? Facebook gets rich, okay?

1:01:53 How do you transfer value? Facebook takes your information and you’re the product. Now it’s Web 3.0, where now we’ve got crypto. So now, who makes money if Bitcoin goes up?

1:02:06 Gabriela Rose: We do.

1:02:06 Brian Rose: There’s no corporation, there’s no gatekeeper on the internet. But there is a cautionary tale about keeping all your eggs in one basket. And there is a cautionary tale about tech, about concerns, and a good point about eggs in one basket for sure. But this is a layer of value exchange that we’ve never seen before. On Facebook, you could like, you could share, you could make a friend, but you could never send a friend any money on Facebook, right?

1:02:31 Now we can, and we control it, and guess what? When it goes up, we benefit. because when Facebook shares go up, do you own any Facebook shares? No, but you have a Facebook account, or at least you used to. Oh, no.

1:02:43 Not anymore, that’s played out. But we all have Facebook accounts, but we never got the value of the network we look for.

1:02:48 Gabriela Rose: And you were sure that Bitcoin will stay on top of all this innovation?

1:02:51 Brian Rose: I’m not sure of anything. It will always stay relevant.

1:02:53 I’m not sure of anything, but all I’m saying is. Bitcoin 2.0 won’t come out. Let me just finish up. And then everything you have is worthless. Let me finish.

1:02:58 This Web 3.0 is a revolution because it allows all of us to participate in the upside of the technology. And that’s why people are excited to buy Ethereum and buy Bitcoin and buy all these coins because they profit when their own network does well and they can exchange value. And there’s not Mark Zuckerberg becoming a trillionaire. There’s not Jeff Bezos becoming a trillionaire. We all make money in the process.

1:03:23 And that’s why it’s growing faster because there’s not some corporate entity there. Now, you asked a couple questions.

1:03:30 Gabriela Rose: What did you say? Is Bitcoin gonna be around forever? Do you really think so?

1:03:34 Brian Rose: I actually feel really comfortable with the technology of Bitcoin. I think it’s pretty damn bulletproof. And I think it’s gonna be an asset we need to have for a long time. Now, I’m going all in on DeFi. The next 10 years, we’re gonna be going in on DeFi, investing, teaching.

1:03:49 DeFi is more about the Ethereum blockchain because it’s programmable. Bitcoin is more about digital property. It’s really simple. It actually, it doesn’t have big goals and dreams like you do, right? It’s happy just to be what it is now.

1:04:03 And some people like that, it’s really simple. It’s like digital gold, okay, buy it and sell it. Ethereum wants to be the next bank. And so I am a big believer of that, but that brings more risk as well. So I’m super confident in the Bitcoin technology.

1:04:20 Ethereum, less proven, more questions. The other blockchains, less proven, more questions, but more new innovations. Cardano’s a new chain coming up. We got the CEO here in a couple weeks. That’s the next chain, I think, that could pop off.

1:04:34 I feel really comfortable about this technology, but you don’t know. That’s the big, like, if.

1:04:39 Gabriela Rose: If there was like a golden ratio in how much of your earnings you should keep in a bank and how much you should put in Bitcoin, what would it be?

1:04:47 Brian Rose: Really good question, really good question. So, I’m not a financial advisor, I just wanna say that right away.

1:04:53 But, you know, when I talk to my students and I talk on YouTube, I always say, you know, You never wanna put a big chunk of your personal assets in one place ever, like you said, eggs in one basket, really good analogy, right? So I always tell people, we’re talking 10% of your portfolio to maybe maximum 25% of your portfolio to even consider investing in the DeFi and the crypto space. Now, everybody’s an adult, and even though our government and our banks don’t treat us like adults sometimes, right, and they tell us what to do, and they don’t let us take the risks we wanna take, we can talk more about that.

1:05:28 We did last year a lot, you can still do whatever you want. I mean, right now, I can go out and buy, you know, three bottles of vodka and drink myself to death. I can buy a bunch of aspirin and kill myself. I can jump off the top of the building, right? I have all these rights.

1:05:42 Are you okay?

1:05:43 Gabriela Rose: I’m fine, thank you. I’m feeling good. I don’t wanna do those things anymore. But, but the government won’t let me buy certain crypto assets.

1:05:53 Brian Rose: That being said, everyone’s free, and you’re an adult, you can do whatever you want, but I tell people, really conservative. I’m actually really conservative. You know that about me to a certain extent. You’re pretty conservative, too. I like that about you.

1:06:04 But I only say 10 to 25%. So even if you think Bitcoin’s gonna change the world, if you have a million dollar net worth, I would say keep most of it out because you should have some real estate, you should have some savings, even in your bank. Fine, I’m good with that. Banks aren’t going anywhere. Fiat currencies aren’t going anywhere.

1:06:23 The dollar’s gonna be around for a while. I believe that, I really do. And so we have to be in both worlds. But I do think crypto’s gonna change the world. I think it’s gonna go up massively in value.

1:06:33 I think we’re looking at an ecosystem that could be undervalued by 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 times. So some of these assets could go up by 100 times in the next 10, 20 years. I believe this is the biggest thing you and I will ever see when it comes to technology and growth. I believe, now you might see more than me. It’s gonna be around a little bit longer, maybe.

1:06:54 So that’s what I think. All right, you’re walking into your future, okay? You’re going to university next year, you got a whole future ahead of you. Working, finance, and all that stuff. How does all this stuff make you feel about your future?

1:07:10 And what are the big questions you have?

1:07:13 Gabriela Rose: I definitely wanna jump on it as fast as I can. Really? Yeah, while the prices are still low before it becomes even more popular. Really?

1:07:22 Brian Rose: Yeah. And what about having this relationship with money? I mean, let’s be clear, you don’t own any crypto. So you probably don’t have a great relationship with money. I do.

1:07:32 You do?

1:07:32 Gabriela Rose: I think so, yes.

1:07:33 Brian Rose: All right, tell me, I wanna hear this. Okay, living in boarding school for so many years. How many years live in boarding school?

1:07:39 And explain to someone who doesn’t live in England what a boarding school is and what it’s all about. Because in America, when I grew up, I didn’t know a boarding school if it hit me in the head. Basically, your dad just sends you up in some remote forest in England. I dare you. but it’s it’s it’s it’s incredible incredible people incredible education and it forces you into real life situations at a very young age it forces you to become independent and you know it doesn’t coddle you boarding school just you know it thrusts you into the real world and says deal with it so living on my own for nearly seven years now seven years I’ve been in boys go for for seven years, young lady.

1:08:23 Gabriela Rose: Okay, five, going on six. I think it’s four. I joined in the eight, late year eight, okay. Late year eight,

1:08:30 Brian Rose: and you’re in what year now?

1:08:32 Gabriela Rose: 12, going on 13.

1:08:33 Brian Rose: Okay, so four, four and a half years. I didn’t ship her off to boarding school when she was nine. Thank you very much. You were like 12, 13. Just turned 13.

1:08:41 Okay, and just so people know, it’s out in the country. It’s almost like a mini college campus, is what I would say. It is, it is. You’ve got your own library. We’ve got the purple bubble.

1:08:49 And Jim, and you live on your own, You have to get up on your own and like it’s it makes you independent. Yes. Yes There’s there’s no parents there cleaning up after you fold in your laundry. You have to do everything in your own and basically I I handled my own money and I worked under budgets and it was very serious because If I if I ever spent one month and then I don’t like the school food guess what? I’m not gonna eat anything for a week. So, um, it definitely It forces you to adapt some modicum of self-governance Did that ever happen?

1:09:22 Gabriela Rose: We didn’t eat for a week No, okay, but it could have could have okay So you feel like you do have a good relationship with money and you understand budgets and if you overspend Yeah on all the good food and as a result that I feel like I have a lot of trust with you And I and I always have a pretty Have a pretty big leash. I have a lot of a freedom at home with what will I spend?

1:09:45 Brian Rose: But there’s also a lot of trust that goes with it. So Okay. Yeah, look I will say that um Yeah, you have made leaps and bounds in your maturity since you went to boarding school. I think one of the greatest things you’ve ever done. You’ve grown up in massive ways.

1:10:04 You take a lot of responsibility for yourself. I’m very proud of you, very proud of what you’ve accomplished. And I think being away and having to really deal with your own stuff, your own budgets, not to mention all the girls you have to deal with as well and like all those social situations. I can’t imagine, you know, and there’s nobody to come running to. Like we’re not there to help you and protect you and you know, break up things and fix your problems.

1:10:30 So you really like stepped up your game. So I appreciate that. And it sounds like you have also got a relationship with money that I didn’t even know about. But you’re not managing your money on a hot wallet on your phone. So you’re not able to actually invest your money, send it to people, which is something in the next few years you’re really gonna have to do is you become an adult.

1:10:56 I guess you are an adult, right? So you feel like you have a good relationship with money, but you want to get in crypto because you want to make a lot of money. I don’t know if that’s the best reason to get in there, but you also see that maybe it’s a way for you to actually start developing a better understanding. I don’t necessarily want to profit off it right away. I know you’re all about the long game, But I just,

1:11:17 Gabriela Rose: I want to be a bit more aware.

1:11:18 Brian Rose: Okay, all right. Ultimately, I think this is about financial freedom. I think it’s about being able to control your future, having a relationship with money. I do think what we’re doing in DeFi is also creating the infrastructure for those two billion people in the world. We call unbanked, again, like that woman in Ethiopia we talked about who previously wouldn’t have access to anything.

1:11:38 If these people can have access to Bitcoin, to DeFi, to lending, to borrowing, imagine like how their life just massively improves. And I think the whole world will massively improve on the back of it. So, after this broadcast young lady, we’re gonna set up a hot wallet on your phone. Deal? Deal.

1:11:56 And I’m gonna send you some ETH. A little bit of ETH. Okay. And I have a couple requests for you. I’m in a bed.

1:12:05 I challenge you to do something with the ETH. That’s my challenge, all right? And I might want you to do a few things. First of all, I want you to send a small amount of that eith to someone else at your school, okay?

1:12:19 Gabriela Rose: Let me try to find someone who’s also got a hot wallet and you gotta find a way to send her some money.

1:12:25 What would I wanna give my eith away?

1:12:27 Brian Rose: I don’t know, like you guys must transact there for stuff. I don’t know, find some value exchange. Will you do that? One, second, there’s a way you can lend that money and get interest on it overnight.

1:12:37 We can talk about that, I’ll show you how to do that. But it’ll also show you what that’s like to earn interest on your crypto, okay? And the third thing I want you to do is to buy another crypto asset with the ETH. So I want you to turn some of that ETH into something else. Your choice.

1:12:52 You can turn it into one of those doggy coins if you want, or a kitty coin, or you can buy something else like Cardano or Uniswap or whatever, but I want you to buy something else as well. Will you do that? Yeah. I’m not gonna give you that much ETH by the way. I know.

1:13:04 You can earn the ETH. I will earn the ETH. Okay, all right. All right, I’m gonna go to some questions from people. Did you have any questions or anything we didn’t talk about that we talked about before?

1:13:15 Gabriela Rose: Not really.

1:13:15 Brian Rose: No, that’s it?

1:13:16 Gabriela Rose: We’ve covered everything. We covered a lot, okay. All right, we got a bunch of great questions here.

1:13:20 Brian Rose: I’m seeing them, so I appreciate everybody coming here. Appreciate it. First a few comments from people. We got Jenna Trone on Instagram that says, America welcomes your young lady, Brian. So the Yanks are already waiting for you to come there.

1:13:35 Sona on YouTube says your interaction together is adorable, adorable, huh? Thank you. Okay, right. Are we always like this?

1:13:42 Gabriela Rose: What kind of like this right kind of sometimes I’ve assumed you a lot Yeah, fight over sushi Okay, we got a heart fish on Instagram that says The financial system is not fit for the challenges of the 21st century anymore.

1:13:55 Brian Rose: We need a more entrepreneurial approach to education Do you agree with that? I do you agree with that? Yeah, the second is to be some reform. Okay, I Agree, we need to find some way and again your brothers. They’re four and five years old Okay, and I know they hog social media. Not today. You’re hogging the social media today, but I mean who’s gonna teach them about money You know me is there a better person? No, there isn’t a better person me, but and I will and you maybe can help me, too This is the next generation, but I’m worried that everything they’re taught in school and again The teachers aren’t bad But the education system is a hangover from a time where people were forced to be workers and work for the entrepreneurs Right, so it’s still got that hangover in there where it basically says in so many words You know you got to go get a job and you got to trust us to do this complicated stuff And I want to make sure that your brother’s Damon and Kaden are empowered like you are to create assets Okay, so remember that into the sheet mentality make money work for you young lady

1:14:58 All right, that doesn’t mean you can’t work for a consultancy firm or a Technology company or a bank after you graduate like that can be good but you can learn a lot, but it means always be thinking, how can I own something? Fair enough? All right, a couple more comments, and then we’ll go home and see the cat and the dog. We have a dog temporarily. Somebody said, Nepalese on Instagram says, where’s a good place for one to start learning about crypto with no prior experience, okay?

1:15:30 And this is a good question. So many people are investing in crypto, and yet there’s like zero education out there, except some TikTok videos, some YouTube videos, and there’s some good stuff, but there’s nothing that seems to take people to the next level. And that’s why we decided to create our academy, and that’s why I get people to do the things like I’m telling you to do. I basically, I ask you to do things you wouldn’t normally do. So I’m gonna give you some ETH and get you to do those transactions.

1:15:56 And that, I think, is gonna open up your mind. I hope, I hope. We got Redview on YouTube that says, pretty smart young lady. Thank you. She is smart, very smart.

1:16:09 A couple of people saying this is a great segment. We got Carla over here that says, like all important matters in life, it’s the job of parents to educate their kids regarding finances. And she says it’s really great to see this. So that’s really important as well. And some of the people say they’re really feeling this and like this conversation is really good.

1:16:31 I should become a permanent feature in the show then. I think maybe you should come back, right? All right, let us know in the comments if you want Gabby to come back and talk about finance over the years. Maybe we can make this a regular segment. I can be the little guinea pig of London Real.

1:16:45 Yeah, but like you’ve been doing some research obviously in the last few days, like you know, proof of work, proof of stake. Like you didn’t know that on Sunday. That’s very normal. So you’re learning. The truth is Gabby, everyone’s learning.

1:16:57 I am too. I tell my students like there’s no experts in DeFi because it’s also new and it changes every day and there’s breakthroughs and there’s problems and there’s regulation and your bank NatWest texted me the other day and said, to protect me and my money, I’m not allowed to send money to a crypto exchange. So we’re all dealing with regulations, misinformation. You know, you’ve heard this one. Crypto is for money launderers and drug dealers.

1:17:26 Have you heard that one?

1:17:27 Gabriela Rose: That’s quite an intense claim, but yeah.

1:17:30 Brian Rose: And they use that early on. I mean, but if you really look at the numbers, all the money launderers and drug dealers, they use banks like NatWest and HSBC. That’s where they launder their money.

1:17:41 The banks are trading all the arms internationally and funding these wars. Yeah, and they get fined on a regular basis. It’s where the money is, so it’s where it gets laundered. Actually, the crazy thing about the blockchain is you can actually see every single transaction. Even though it’s anonymous, you can see it.

1:17:56 So when this guy or girl hacked into the network recently, you can see it all go here, and then you can see them move some over here. So it actually has a traceability to it. And it’s actually not true that it’s used by all these dark forces. It’s becoming used by everybody. Now, the real test for me is when your grandma, Betty Rose, buys her first Bitcoin or ETH.

1:18:21 When that happens, Gabby, we got three generations in crypto and DeFi. What do you think of that?

1:18:27 Gabriela Rose: I can’t wait. Maybe I should get you to send Grandma some ETH. Oh gosh.

1:18:32 Brian Rose: All right, maybe that’ll be your fourth task. Okay. To send Grandma some ETH, yeah? All right, so if Grandma’s watching, Gabby’s gonna send you some ETH, which means Betty, you gotta set up a hot wallet, and Betty’s thinking, oh my gosh, here we go. But like, it was really interesting when I was telling Grandma about this stuff a couple Sundays ago.

1:18:51 She was really listening, and she’s a smart businesswoman. Like she spent time in sales, she’s on properties, and she was like asking me questions and writing things down. So I think it could be sooner or later before she jumps into it. Final thoughts about crypto, about money, about being here today, any of that stuff, what do you think? Are there any more questions or?

1:19:16 Gabriela Rose: I think that’s mostly it.

1:19:18 Brian Rose: What are your final thoughts?

1:19:20 Gabriela Rose: Final thoughts, I’m just really excited to set up these hot and cold wallets.

1:19:25 Brian Rose: Really?

1:19:26 Gabriela Rose: Yes.

1:19:26 Brian Rose: You’re excited to get involved? Yes. Why?

1:19:29 Gabriela Rose: I mean, we’ve talked so much about it. I just want to experience the hype for myself and maybe start my own little London Real business.

1:19:37 Brian Rose: London Real business? Yeah. What does that mean?

1:19:39 Gabriela Rose: Maybe I can start teaching my own courses.

1:19:42 Brian Rose: Teaching your own courses?

1:19:43 Gabriela Rose: Mm-hmm.

1:19:44 Brian Rose: Okay. And accept crypto as payment. I think it’s a great idea. Yeah.

1:19:48 It’s a great idea. I mean, we’ve been teaching for seven years in our academies. One of the things we do is teach people how to create their own businesses based around their own. for me. Yeah, and based on their own IP.

1:19:56 And with crypto, you can do it and you don’t have to wait for NatWest to give you a business account, and maybe they won’t if you’re 17, and you can do all that. So, all right, we’re gonna get you set up, but you’re right. I don’t believe the reason to invest in crypto is to make a lot of money right now. I think that’s a bad idea. I always tell people that wanna get rich quick or people that wanna day trade it to go somewhere else.

1:20:17 I’m talking about understanding this is the future of money, this is the internet of money, and like, just knowing this is gonna be here for the next 10 years and investing in that, that’s the reason you should do it, in my opinion, all right? Okay, all right, Gabriela Rose. This has been a good episode. We didn’t tell your mom about this until a few hours ago,

1:20:40 Gabriela Rose: right? No.

1:20:41 Brian Rose: Right? She got shocked. Baba doesn’t know in Bulgaria, so she’ll find out. Grandma will know in San Diego, so everyone will get to watch this. Again, these are really good questions.

1:20:52 I appreciate you asking me. I’m gonna have you back for a regular segment. I would say to anybody out there who’s watching this, who’s a parent or who’s a kid who wants to have this conversation with their parent, start having these conversations now. Again, even if you try to explain what I said about one of these things and it’s 10% right, you’ll at least start a conversation. And that’s how all this stuff happens, people talking and like ideas, that’s what I would say.

1:21:17 And lastly, I’ll say again, I’m very proud of you, young lady. You’ve come a long way. You’ve become very mature and responsible and I trust you and I’m looking forward to getting you out of the house next year and sending you on your journey to university. Yeah?

1:21:35 Gabriela Rose: Yeah, I’m guessing gap year is not an option.

1:21:38 Brian Rose: Gap year? In America we don’t have gap years. That’s a British thing, right? Yeah, you’re not really thinking about gap year, are you?

1:21:44 Gabriela Rose: No, I’m not.

1:21:45 Brian Rose: Oh, okay, we can talk about that later. All right, so Gabby will be back next time to talk about universities, what happened with your hot wallet, and your crypto picks, all right? We’ll do that maybe in three months. Okay, I promise it is. Deal?

1:22:01 Gabriela Rose: Deal.

1:22:01 Brian Rose: Okay, all right, thank you young lady. I appreciate you, I love you. And thank you everybody for watching. I hope this conversation helped.

1:22:07 I hope it helped you maybe have this conversation with your child. Please leave us some comments and some feedback and let us know if you want Gabby back. And we’ll see you next time on London Real.