Hassam Rawat - Lingo’s Goal To Onboard The Next Billion People To Web3: Real Assets, Real Rewards, Real Adoption

Full transcript: Hassam Rawat on London Real

3:45 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Hassam Rawat, the entrepreneur, business leader and Web 3 expert. You are the CEO and Co founder of Lingo, the world’s first gamified real world asset rewards ecosystem with the mission to onboard the next 1 billion users to Web 3. Lingo stands out by investing in real estate properties worldwide and then using 100% of that net rental income to buy back tokens.

4:11 By combining real estate, blockchain and the community driven rewards, Lingo is revolutionising the $200 billion loyalty industry by creating an exponential reward system for users worldwide that truly prioritises community benefits. Ultimately, you believe Web 3 is the most exciting sector in the world and believe it will revolutionise the entire global value system. Hassam Welcome to London Real.

4:36 Hassam Rawat: O’Brien, thanks for having me.

4:38 Brian Rose: It’s great having you here.

4:40 I just want to start by saying that Lingo is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures, the world’s first media powered investment firm, where our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting edge Web 3 and AI companies while giving our partners marketing exposure across the London Real Media platforms and academies. We heighten awareness, create customers and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network. We are super excited to be part of this journey with you. So let’s jump in.

5:08 What is lingo?

5:09 Hassam Rawat: Well. First of all, thank you for for your backing and the, the trust that you and your community has put in Lingo. And So what Lingo is, is the world’s most rewarding crypto. At least we’re trying to build the world’s most rewarding crypto. And so that’s a strong kind of a statement. There’s a lot of cryptos out there, and there’s a lot of cryptos with a lot of value.

5:34 Brian Rose: What does that mean to you? The most rewarding crypto.

5:37 Hassam Rawat: Well, I’m not talking about the value of the token because this is what this is what the, if we succeed in the mission, we’ll ultimately yield to, but at least what we can control is how can we make this as rewarding as possible for the community and, and, and hopefully, if we do this right, good things will happen in, in, in general. And so why, why the most rewarding and, and why go that way? It, it ultimately comes down to the world we’re in today.

6:05 Like if if you think about the narratives we’re being fed, it’s we’re supposed to be in the most prosperous era in history. But does it really feel like it? Like does it really feel like it the most prosperous era in history? Like dead is at all time high. We’ve never had so much loneliness around the world, statistically depression all time high. And it’s not supposed to be the case. We’re supposed to be in the most peaceful, the most prosperous era ever.

6:30 But it it doesn’t feel like it. I don’t, I think 1% of the world’s wealthiest people Owens more than the bottom 90% combined. And so it seems like the system is rigged against everyday people. And so that’s why we think the crypto was would was a potential answer to that problem. And it’s a huge problem that that impacts millions and billions of people.

7:00 And when we see crypto today, it’s adopted by around 400 million people. It’s probably the second fastest technological adoption in history after AI. And so even if you slow the crypto movement down by half, we’re reaching a billion people in the next 5 years. And, and, and, and that’s a big deal because ultimately crypto was, was initially this movement started by giving power back to the people. And so if this happens, if we’re reaching a billion people by, in five years, this could potentially yield to an industry that is now at 2.5 trillion.

7:36 It could be $10 trillion potentially in five years. And if this happens, Brian, it, it could be the biggest redistribution of wealth in history. And and so we were trying to think how can we use this technology in this very extremely powerful movement or historic movement to solve for people’s everyday lives? Because we think like life should be more than just going to work and paying your bills. Like when you wake up in the morning, you want to feel excited about something.

8:11 This everyone, everyone has some dream or some it can be small, it can be big, but you want to feel sad about something. And we really believe in this. So if you’re familiar with Masters hierarchy of needs, we think Bitcoin and a lot of other projects is solving for 99% of that. Hopefully if that works and it’s starting to work, we just want to solve for that top self actualization part. And we’re fighting for people’s rights to enjoy life.

8:36 And so the way we’re doing this is by trying to build the world’s much rewarding token.

8:41 Brian Rose: Talk to me about the rewards and how you you really try to think about community first. I think you’ve said before that quote today the tech is easy. This is a quote from you. Applications aren’t hard to write, but they’re really hard to market and really hard to persuade big communities to use them in volume.

9:00 You said at Lingo, we’re cracking that code. And so when you think about rewarding that community, like what comes to mind? Because I know you’re constantly like, you know, giving away holidays and iPhones and perks, and you’re always thinking about how to reward that community and keep them involved. And that seems very front of mind. Of course, the second aspect is how you pay for those rewards, which I want to get into because that’s kind of unique. But is that something that was always really important to you? Like, how can we change their lives? How can we add value to their lives besides just making them money?

9:35 Hassam Rawat: When I was nine years old, it’s the only and 1st. It’s the only class of in primary school that I remember. And that’s because it really hit me. The class was about the future. And so I saw this drawing with it’s the first time I think I’m telling this story.

9:53 It was a drawing with flying cars and hoverboards and laser sunglasses. And I was like, whoa, this is so cool. It it’s really, it hit something in me and I was like, this is like, this is what I want to do. Like, and for me, the, the best way to do this to, to try and achieve what an amazing future would look like is technology and entrepreneurship and start-ups. It’s, it’s the only way that I’ve found in my opinion.

10:19 And so that’s why it’s really important. It’s, it’s trying to envision a world where in the future, the life of people and life in general is, is, is, so is, is so cool and how we can use technology and network effects and, and, and, and start-ups to really make this happen. And so when I joined crypto 7 years ago, I’m so shocked to this day. I mean, we, I’ve seen you in many conferences. How many times do you ask people, what do you do? Oh, it’s a layer 4 ZK sync account of traction roll up AIDPNRWE memecoin, what you know, and, and so we are OK, so back to the macros.

11:00 If, if this industry is going to attract $5 trillion, this could be the, the biggest redistribution of wealth in history. That means this will come from either institutions or retail because it’s not going to come from from the actual market. And so if this will come from these two and we’re focused on on retail, on everyday people, we’re like, let’s just try and identify what stops people from from joining crypto. And if we can solve for that, maybe we solve some real issues. And so for us, it boil down to three things. Number one was that crypto is really hard to understand. It feels like you need a PhD in white paper analytics to understand what the project is.

11:37 The second is that it feels like fake Internet paper money. It doesn’t feel tangible and so serious people. And if you’re responsible, you start having kids, you start thinking about saving. You’re like, should I gamble on on on a coin? It doesn’t feel really tangible.

11:52 And the third issue, which for us was the most important, is that is, is community loyalty. Because when you analyse the top 300 tokens on coin market cap, you see that they have one thing in common and it’s not product and it’s not tech because half of them don’t even have a product. The number one thing they have in common is they have a massive community that’s engaged around what that token stands for. The problem is there’s no.

13:15 There’s no, we haven’t seen a, a, a sustainable community loyalty mechanism yet. And communities is what we understand. Well, my Co founder build the world’s leading premium loyalty company was sold it to, to, to top four of their group later on. And so we would like if, if, if we do a token that solves these 3 problems, if it’s easy to understand, if it’s tangible and we can have a mechanism where community loyalty is sustainable and growing, then maybe we solve some real issues. And so lingo is these solve these 3 problems. 1 is really easy to understand.

13:52 What is lingo is you buy a lingo and then you get free stuff. You can get small stuff like vacations and, and, and Nike shoes and, and mobile phones. You can get better stuff like vacations, you can get really cool stuff like Cybertruck, etcetera, etcetera. So that’s how it works. You hold some lingo and then you can win some stuff.

14:09 Brian Rose: The big stuff, small stuff, exciting stuff. Sounds easy to understand. Yeah, so important. But then how do we finance this?

14:17 Hassam Rawat: Yeah, because when you and this is tied to how is it tangible and how does it link with community loyalty? So when you look at the most common mechanism to finance or sustain community loyalty in projects, it’s usually dumping tokens.

14:31 It’s either air drops, which means dumping tokens, or it’s taking, which also means dumping tokens along the line. And so we try to think of a way where not only could we finance and sustain mutuality, but how can we make it grow more and more and more and more. So our model looks a bit like McDonald’s, you know, like McDonald’s is a burger company, but on the back end, it’s really a real estate company. If if I’m not mistaken, I think they’re the world’s number one real estate, private real estate company.

14:58 Brian Rose: I think so. Or somewhere on the top.

15:00 Hassam Rawat: And so for us on the on the front end, it’s Lingo is a rewards token. But on the back end, we acquire what we call RWA real world assets. The way it works is every time people trade the token, we charge some fees and then we acquire assets with those fees.

15:15 And then what we do is obviously all these assets generate cash flow and we use 100% of the cash flow to finance rewards for the community. And the way it’s engineered, it’s kind of like a flywheel. So the more rewards we can give to the community, the more in general, it will attract a bigger community organically. But bigger community means your trading volume goes up. If your volume goes up, then you can acquire more assets. If you have more assets, then you can have more rewards, more rewards, more community, more community, more assets, more assets, more rewards and up and up and up. And this is the vision.

15:49 It’s to create an exponential flywheel of assets going bigger and bigger and bigger community getting rewarded more and more and more. And in theory, it should work. I’m not saying it will, but if it does, it’s going to really, really work. And revolutionise really what’s going on the blockchain space because no one is doing this right now.

16:09 Brian Rose: Like you said, a lot of places really just print more tokens or give more tokens out to AirDrop to staking with the hope that that token will one day go up in price and cover them. But it’s not that much of A sustainable model. It’s a bit like printing more Fiat currency and just hoping for the best.

16:27 So with you engaging in these real world assets, there’s real yields and if you can get that going, it goes exponential. That’s your plan?

16:35 Hassam Rawat: 100% and not only in crypto like in 2021 we saw projects trying to do this. So they came with the idea of will charge transaction fees and then it will give those to the community and it it really took off. I think Sheba was one of the first to do that and then they stopped the model Safe Moon and also try to do it, but it crashed completely because the model was not sustainable. But the the whole movement started with, hey, let’s charge fees and then give it back to people. They only missed one thing is these fees in itself are linked to the token value.

17:05 So when the token crashes, the the rewards also crash. So we took that model, but instead of giving back tokens to people, we invest that in real assets that generate tangible value, whether the token goes up or down. If Safe Moon had this model, you would have hundreds of millions of dollars today of assets around the world generating rewards for, for people. And so that’s what that’s what we’re trying to do. And if not saying it will work, but if it does, like imagine you’re working, we’re in London now you’re working around the city.

17:35 There’s a big building here. It’s owned by a bunch of people. And the, the, the only purpose of these buildings is to make profits for the, for the shareholders, which I don’t have any problems with. It’s a capitalistic society, but with technology, you can really flip the script and disturb this, this model. Like imagine instead of walking around using this building owned by a bunch of people in another building owned by another holding company, Imagine if you’re walking around and you have huge buildings.

18:02 That’s, that’s, that’s here for one purpose only. It’s here to generate profits just to reward the community. That would be an insane world. And technically it’s, it’s not impossible to do with this technology. So that’s what the the vision is.

18:16 Brian Rose: Talking about real world assets because that’s a term we hear a lot and what that could mean. I know you’ve started buying real estate and that come those kind of like rental yields or what goes back to the community. Do you foresee other investments in the future? Maybe, I don’t know, tokenized government bonds or anything else that’s on the horizon that could act as an RWE that would then reward your community?

18:43 Hassam Rawat: That’s a good question. We could technically invest in in any kind of assets. The reason why we chose, we chose real estate in particular is one for the the increased utility because you could buy bonds, you could buy financial products and they would give you yield and that’s it.

19:02 But if you buy hard assets, you could also generate yield for, for rewards. But on top of that, you could have added utility, you could have stays for people, you could organise events, etcetera. So we, we found that if we’re spending investing anyway, might as well have better, better returns on the one hand, tangible, on the other hand, intangible returns. And then the second, the second reason why real estate is was, was was important for us is just the perceived the value of it. Because when you talk to most people and they think of crypto in a very fancy fake Internet, people in money way, when they know there’s a brick and mortar that you can touch and feel, it’s reassuring.

19:43 Brian Rose: Yeah, and for good reason, right? Because we’ve seen the value of tokens, you know, drop suddenly to 0, you know, FTXFTT tokens, all that. So there is something assuring and tangible and understandable about real world assets. And you said that’s one of the three things you’re trying to solve. And if people can look there and like you said, maybe they have kids and they’re thinking all crypto, that looks speculative.

20:05 But if you’re like, no, you get free stuff. It’s backed by a real world, tangible assets. And we’ve got this amazing engaged community like that’s what we’re doing and it’s nice and simple. That goes a long way, I think, from people.

20:17 Hassam Rawat: Yeah, and, and, and this is still crypto, this can still go up, this can still go down. But if it goes down, at least you’re not obliged to sell because at least there’s still assets generating cash flow for rewards.

20:28 And so that’s also something that we we’re not seeing in the industry is your. So you probably know this guy’s big influencer in, in crypto, one of the biggest, top three guys. We had an event together in Dubai. I think you were there. They were the biggest VCs in the space, the biggest.

20:45 And, and he told me, do you know these guys, all these GCS, do you think they’re investors? They’re not investors, they’re gamblers. Like crypto is a big casino. It’s a $2.5 trillion casino and it’s, and so it has it’s market. And I don’t, I don’t hate, although I’m investing in crypto since since seven years. But but if if we are to onboard billions of people hopefully in the future, then I think it can transcend the the gambling aspect.

21:09 Brian Rose: OK, Hassam. Talk to me about the rewards because you clearly made a decision not to give people more tokens. You’ve made a decision not to give people cash or stable coins. You could have done that, but now you’re giving them these perks, these kind of cool things, these exciting things, these surprising things. Why do that?

21:28 And is that also part of building a community? Because I want to talk to you about how to build a community and and what creates loyalty because these are really important questions. I don’t think a lot of people know how to create community. I don’t even know if those top 300 projects you talk about truly understand their community. Maybe they do, but I’m curious, why did you decide on that reward then?

21:48 Then how do you choose those rewards?

21:51 Hassam Rawat: Yeah, good, good question too. We just, we, we think rewards and that’s a very vague term. It is more tangible and it relates emotionally more to people. So maybe your dream is to buy a car, maybe your dream is to go and see your favourite football team or you want to buy these brand new Nike shoes. But you need to save, you need to do the right thing, which I encourage you to do.

22:24 At least you have a chance to maybe get something really, really cool and, and enjoy life’s pleasures. So for us, it, it, it, it felt like it was more meaningful to people than just, hey, here’s a token. You just made 500 bucks, so good profit, go and sell it. We just felt the vibe with the community when we, when we, when we tested utilities on, on, on the reward side, and then what rewards we give, we let the community decide. So right now we have a rewards ecosystem where we partner with around 3000 brands and ultimately is the community.

22:58 If we see that the community they like more of shoes or vacations or mobile phones or NFTS, we’ll do it. And the model allows us to to yield those rewards for the community.

23:09 Brian Rose: I guess it’s almost like, you know, when a company gives away like a holiday or when on a game show, it gives away a free car. And it’s like that has an emotional value to people, right? And sometimes that exceeds the dollar value.

23:23 You could give your employee a bonus or you could give them a raise, or you could give them a gold watch. And like, that’s a very a human thing, right? That intangible value. And you’re tying into that with your community.

23:36 Hassam Rawat: 100% big believe in that We we, we had a campaign that was quite successful around 5 months ago.

23:42 We, we took Twitter by storm, 15,000,000 tweets in six weeks. And my head of growth, he was, he was working, working tirelessly day and night on this campaign And we were, we were still a relatively small project back then. After that things blew up. We oversubscribed by $32 million, raised 50 mil, you know, our investors, etcetera. But but back then we were still like this little start up with with big dreams trying to trying to make a name for ourselves.

24:07 And this went really well. And my, my head of growth is from Poland and he, he, I had to go back and I was like, Hey, dude, like we’ll just, we’ll just fly business class. I could have given, given him a bonus, you know which, which we did, but we’ll just, we’ll just, let’s just fly business class. He was like, dude, it’s the first time I fly business class in my life. This is so cool.

24:27 Like the emotional aspect of it is very, very big and it transcends money, I think. And if we can do that at scale with like hundreds of thousands of people, imagine the not not only the financial gain, but the actual.

25:42 The actual gems or or or sparks that you can add in in, even if it’s one day in someone’s life and if you can compound that, I think it can be something beautiful.

25:51 Brian Rose: Tell me about this campaign you run, because you know, like you said it, it builds out your brand, it got you tonnes of recognition, it got you tonnes of followers. You know, everybody in crypto, maybe everybody in the world in marketing is looking for that thing and you guys found out what it was. So how did you do that?

26:10 Because that’s a pretty unique thing, to be able to attract that much interest in a world where everyone’s fighting for people’s attention.

26:17 Hassam Rawat: Well, if we want to get, let’s get tactical there. And if you have a, if your audience has a project they want to run in Web 2, and I think this can be helpful. So what we did, first of all, we iterated on the idea. We, we’ve been pitching, trying to raise funds for two years back in 2021 and really saw like, what are the loopholes? Do people like it, not like it?

26:37 So, so the actual idea, your model, your product needs to be good for this to work, obviously. But once this is good, how do you blow things up? How do you how do you how do you share your message across a lot of people in a very short of time?

26:50 Brian Rose: OK. But the key was you had iterated over and over again to where you had the right value prop as a company lingo. That was one of the ways that you were able to grow it. Yeah.

26:59 Hassam Rawat: We were pitching every single day with 10s tonnes of people every single day for like 2 years until we, we refined the model. But once we got that, we had to now share the gospel with, with, with people. And So what we did was we talked to founders of projects that went viral in the last three months. That’s important because the last three months or six months in, in, in like 1 month in, in crypto feels like 3 months in the real world. It’s, it goes so fast.

27:30 And so we talked to around 3 or 4 projects and we asked them, what’s your 8020? Like what, what are the 20% of things that you did that yielded 80% of the results? And So what we did was we aggregated those, those 20% for the five projects and we built an experience that combined everything at once. And so for example, one of the projects was Tabby and they, it’s a really cool project. I think they’re backed by Ban and Slabs and Animoka.

27:58 They blew up the community by a million people in six months organically. And they were one of the first to craft and experience. So it felt like they had like little islands on a 2D, like black and white islands. And every time you would click on the island, you could do some tasks. And if you do those tasks, you would win some NFTS. And then God knows what’s in the NFTS. But it was really cool.

28:22 They were one of the first to do that. And so that was a really good idea. We’re like, let’s, let’s have an experience. How do we make it 10 times better? But this is really cool, like having a fun experience.

28:30 Not just if you like our tweet, we’ll give you air jobs. It’s not it’s, it’s not interesting, it’s not emotionally connecting. The other project was Portal Corn, so they understood, I think when Elon Musk took over Twitter, he, he gave Twitter’s API access to people’s API. And so they were one of the 1st or the 1st to build to link Twitter actions to potential edge OPS to a point system. So every time somebody would talk about them on Twitter, they would win points and then obviously they would want more and more and more points. So they would just spam people.

29:07 So we, we iterate on the idea. So we, we don’t want people just to spam people. We, we gave points for quality content. So we had to understand the, the, the mission, but this is really cool idea. So we link Twitter’s API to a point system linked to potential perks in the ecosystem. The other thing we did was we learned that from a project called Manta Manta Network.

29:26 So it’s a project listed on Binance. It’s a really cool project. Their their Co founder invested in us too. And they had a system called called called gotcha. It was a system invented by the Japanese where it’s like a card, a card game.

29:42 So you would have five different cards and if you win one of each card, you could win a really special card. And then this really special card could give you a really big perks in your project. And it was people like nuts with this idea. So what we did was we took we did the whole experience and then we added what portals did and what Manta did together. So you would win points and those points would give you cards instead of instead of air drops. And so it went crazy, 15,000,000 tweets 6 weeks and at some point we had 500 videos per day.

30:15 That community was just building viral videos every single day. It was. It was. Inside and the API would detect if they had done that and give them points and rewards for that. The quality, the quality content side had to be manual because the AI was not sophisticated by then.

30:34 So we were just, we were just checking every single day. This is so cool. And every time we liked it, people would win more points. And then the gamification also just took it over the top and people trying to collect those five cards. We did it all.

30:47 So it was like all these things coming together. What makes a viral moment? You never really know. It’s like a bunch of things all happening at the same moment, right? The other thing we did was inspired by Web 2. So you know, Alex Formosi, we just talked about him. So, so he did a, he did a book launch last year that became the biggest book launch in Internet history. And one of the ways he he blew up his campaign was with an affiliate system that consisted of two parts. One part is, hey, if you invite 10 friends with your affiliate link, you would win an extra chapter in the book. If you’re in the top ten, then you would win a one-on-one with me.

31:21 So we also took that along and we told people, hey, if you invite 10 friends to join the, the air job experience, we called it Lingo islands, you would win, you could win more points, more cards, etcetera. And we made it very easy for them. So you all you had to do was copy paste an invite link and we had buttons on Twitter, on, on, on Telegram, on e-mail and you just had to send it to your friends. And then whenever they would click, they would, they would see the, the banners solid stick. And the other thing was we had the top ten also where we gave people crazy amounts of perks.

31:56 As you know, we have many celebrities that invested in us too, which is important for the distribution side. So you could have access to our celebrity network for investor network if you are in the top 10. So we added that too in the in the whole experience. And that two-part makes a difference because if you just had the top ten, it doesn’t get people engaged on the low end. But if you make it easy to gauge on the low end, you kind of create momentum with them to a certain extent.

32:19 Brian Rose: And then they buy into it. They’re invested in you. And then part of them wants to be like, alright, let me see if I can hit top 10.

32:27 Hassam Rawat: 100% and we were a lot about democratisation because what you see in most edge of campaigns is that big influencers they get, they erect most of the of the edge OPS because they, they have bigger audiences. So we really wanted to reward people that were aligned with our vision and that were creating quality content and making efforts. So which is why even if you had a very small account, if you had 100 followers, if you really believed in what we’re doing and putting effort into creating really cool content to educate people about the vision, you could potentially win big edge OPS with, with, by winning the cards. So that also was was important.

33:05 Brian Rose: Now, based on the back of this, this amazing experience and launch, are you going to replicate this in the future? Are you going to tweak it? How often do you do these big ones, you know, these big campaigns?

33:17 Hassam Rawat: Well, we have our TG coming soon and that’s going to be, that’s going to be something.

33:21 Brian Rose: You’ve done the same with you did some public sales or some pre public sales as well and you had similar campaigns for that?

33:28 Hassam Rawat: Yeah, the edge of campaign came just before the OK the public said that we did around six months ago. OK.

33:34 Brian Rose: All right. And T GS coming up soon and it’ll be something special for that as well, OK.

33:38 Hassam Rawat: Yeah, we you’ll see I.

33:39 Brian Rose: Can see in your eyes there’s something cool.

33:41 Hassam Rawat: Yeah, it’s gonna be cool all.

33:42 Right.

33:42 Brian Rose: So it’s what you just described with like two or three other iterations on top of. It.

33:47 Hassam Rawat: Let’s find out.

33:48 Brian Rose: You talked about your celebrity investors.

33:50 Brian Rose: Talk to me about the value of them. Also, you treat your celebrities different than a lot of people. And that’s another thing that makes lingo special because you don’t you don’t say, hey, I want you tweeting about this and I want you promoting the coin like you want things to be organic, you want them to be natural and you want them to be, I think long term focus. Can you talk about that?

34:17 Hassam Rawat: Sure, we we haven’t seen the Nike of crypto or the Red Bull of crypto yet. This using smartly leveraging celebrities that means something to the audience and linking that value with the brand. We haven’t seen this yet in in the cryptos. We’ve kind of saw it in 2021 with the the board 88 Yacht Club, but we haven’t really seen it at scale like like what a Nike would do.

34:42 And so since we tried to solve for the top three problems of the mainstream market, and once we solve them, we need a distribution that speaks to the everyday guy. And so which is why celebrities for us was important, but ambassadors that were not here to just tell you, hey, buy this. First of all, I think it’s cringe and people, they don’t really adhere to it. Secondly, it feels like a scam, like you’re trying to scam people to buy crypto. And so we pitched to to people that had influence, whether it’s football players from Real Madrid or from Bayern Munich or I think we have the biggest, we’re probably the second company with the biggest team of UFC fighters after Monster.

35:24 We have 100 UFC fighters who’s aligned with us and a. 100. And we don’t, first of all, we don’t, we didn’t pay anyone anything. We give them exposure to our tokens. That hit me out.

35:35 It’s locked for two years. Not even locked for two years. And so which celebrity? Some of them earn $2,000,000 a month in in in in salary. If you want to get them for a story, it’s probably around 200K, which celebrity would say, hey, there’s this project there. They’re not going to pay you anything. You’re going to be locked for two years, probably after the bull run.

35:57 And maybe if this work, if this works, it’s going to be it’s going to be worth something and and it’s going to change, change things. Are you in like who in their right mind would say yes? But we managed to do with 100 of them because they really like the vision, because a lot of them also they started from nothing. They, they, they built their, their career from their hard work and also talent. And it, it somehow the, the vision was really aligned with it.

36:24 It spoke to them. And so we’re very blessed now to have a great team of ambassadors ready to promote this vision. And you’ll see, you’ll never see them saying, Hey, buy this coin like never. They will speak and they have total freedom on what, what they like about the project. And they’ll have total freedom on what they want to speak about with their audience. Wow.

36:44 And they’ll just mention it occasionally. They’ll talk about something you’re doing. They’ll talk about, hey, I’m involved in this project or this is coming up soon and I really like what these guys are doing. These are the kind of ways that they’ll talk about lingo. And also give rewards, you know, hey, I just won this match.

36:58 I’ll sign it. I’ll give it to people. If you want to win it, maybe someone will win it in the in the community. I’ll give you an example. We were we were in Paris together at Lulu for Paris Blockchain week. And so we did the, the closing speech with Kingsy Komen from, from Bayern Munich.

37:16 And so Michael from, from Paris boxing, he was like, Hey, can can you bring King C? Really big fan of, of him. And apparently he’s a big investor in crypto. And I call him, I was like, hey, bro, like, can you come? This is the, the, the last speech.

37:30 And he was like, Hey, I’ll have, I’ll have a Champions League match the, the day before and I have training in the morning. So, so let’s come and see me in Munich. Well, I’ll fly in and then we’ll, we’ll, we’ll rehearse the speech on the plane. I’ll deliver the plane and then I’ll take a, a motorbike because of the traffic in Paris to go back to, to Munich. And he’s not paid to like, who does that, you know? And I think that speaks to to what we’re trying to accomplish.

37:58 Brian Rose: And you have a team that goes out and individually pitches these people.

38:02 Hassam Rawat: That’s impressive. We, it was mostly me at first, and then probably 85% of the ambassadors behind lingo was organic, was an ambassador signing and calling their friends like, hey, this is so cool. And you want, you want in, I can, I can hook you up with the, with the lingo team. And then when they hear the, what we’re trying to build, hey, hey, sure, this is so cool. Let’s, let’s do it. And I think referrals is much stronger than just trying to pitch agents or or businesses.

38:33 Brian Rose: Yeah, you said the Nike. I feel like in crypto right now, people are playing checkers, not chess. And like it’s just this hard sell. You know, Kardashian will tweet something out when she gets paid X amount of money and then she gets in trouble, of course, with the SEC. But it feels like if you look at what Nike did, you know, be like Mike and you look at all the way the subtle ways they built this brand.

38:53 You also mentioned Red Bull. Red Bull is so subtle in the way they build brands. They invest in content. They give you all these incredible entertaining events. And then the logo is just kind of there in the corner and and I break dance and a lot of these break dancers are Red Bull athletes. And it’s just incredible what they do. It’s so subtle and they’re such a massive company. They’re not really a beverage company. They’re really a media company or an experienced company. Maybe they’re a community like you And so, but in crypto, we haven’t seen that company yet, have we? No one seems to be thinking chess or 3D chess. Maybe you are.

39:29 But right now it feels like a lack of creativity, and it feels like people get bludgeoned over the head with influencers, right?

39:58 Hassam Rawat: We we have a few crypto small, you probably know most people in that are movers and and shakers in the space and and so do I. And what I found with was with most founders that were successful in in the space.

40:45 Do this. Probably more than half of them are short term oriented because it’s so easy. It’s so easy to launch a token on a big exchange and do some marketing and then just dump on retail and make money. And, and I think when you have that kind of power, just to say, hey, let’s not do that. Let’s build something solid long term. I think this can have a much bigger impact for the community, even financially as an entrepreneur than just, hey, let’s make money in two months.

41:18 You know, which is why when you look at 9 prices out of 10, they, they listen and they just sell and then they go away. So I think the financial incentives are like crypto in itself is so powerful that it allows the financial incentives to be yielding if you’re short term focused. And that’s why I think there’s amazing projects out there building really cool stuff. But there’s also, and I don’t think it will ever stop, also shorten people just being able to just rug because of the way this technology is built, which is it is what it is.

41:53 Brian Rose: Yeah, you say it’s easy, but then in in the end, it’s it’s a poor decision, isn’t it?

41:58 Because reputations go down and you’re not going to be able to do that more than once. And so it is easy because the liquidity in this business is so immediate. You know, I work on Wall Street for 15 years. You know, you might wait eight years for an IPO and then it has to be approved by the SEC. And it’s a very difficult thing to come liquid here. You can be liquid, you know, in the week if you want to be. And you’re right, it’s very tempting for certain people. And it might seem quote unquote easy, but it’s actually the worst thing you can do because your reputation goes down and maybe you have some money, but you can’t really show your face anywhere.

42:30 And unfortunately, I guess it happens, though it happens to a lot of people. I listen to this interview where you said to somebody when you originally signed maybe it was like your LLC agreement with like your Co founder you, you looked at them and said I’m doing this for eight years, eight years minimum, something like that. Talk to me about that realisation that to do anything well, it has to be a long term commitment because that, like you said, is almost the opposite of what we’re told in crypto or all the all the success stories that people see, especially in the current mean coin wave. You know that all it’s it’s quick, easy money. When we got into crypto in 21, I saw this amazing technology and it was super community centric and everybody could win and the power’s back to the community.

43:17 And I would tell people about it in the streets and they’d say, Oh yeah, that’s the way to get rich. And I’d be like, no, you’re missing the whole point. Used to drive me crazy. Talk to me about the power of that vision and why did you say that to your Co founder?

43:32 Hassam Rawat: There’s, there’s AVC that invested in US and we had a bunch of web VCs, but then this was this one was, it’s not a VC.

43:39 It’s a family office by, by a self-made billionaire that, that, that really understood Web 2 investing. And so he was like, you know, in crypto, it’s, it’s, it’s the other way around. Like in, in traditional investing, you have a seed round and then you have a Series A and it’s Frisbee and a Frisbee and then it goes down the line. You do and you exit. In crypto, it’s like you exit first you start with exiting and then there’s 22 scenarios.

44:04 Either you’re a scammer and you go partying in Dubai, or you’re serious. And then you have you, you understand that goodwill compounds more than money. And then you actually build something cool. And ideally you raise before you build something cool and then you ship it. And so there’s a saying that, that I, that I resonate with that says that if, if you can wait a year for something, you can make it big.

44:28 If you can wait 10 years, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll move mountains. If you can wait a lifetime, you’ll change the world. And so I think from entrepreneurs, and I’m blessed to have met entrepreneurs that were really successful in life and that made really great things happen while keeping their reputation. I saw that they spend at least 710 years on one thing and say no to which is the highest part because the more you level up, the more opportunities you have and the more you need to say no.

44:54 And they spend the hyper focus on one thing for for 710 years. And I’ve, I’ve I’ve seen that this is what what yielded the most all right, both in terms of finances, but impact and and good well.

45:08 Brian Rose: How often do you say no to things?

45:10 Hassam Rawat: I think every week, but the whole thing is to say not to really, really cool stuff where you have, as I said, when you leverage, you have connections, you have power, quote unquote, because you can you have access to celebrities, you can you have access to most people that that has that has resources and leveraging the space.

45:33 And it’s very easy to, to just create new businesses and, and, and make it work, but it’s, it’s counterproductive in my opinion, because then you’re spitting your attention into two different things with three or four and then your real baby doesn’t get fed. So it’s probably once a once a week.

45:52 Brian Rose: That’s the hardest part, isn’t it? I started London Real 13 years ago and about 2-3 years later tech was getting really big in London. And right here is this is this.

46:03 This is the Old Street roundabout. It’s actually known as the Silicone Roundabout because the big tech scene was right here where we were, and it’s right next to the City of London. And so fintech was really big. And so we started a second show and called it Silicone Rail. And I was interviewing all these tech people and I loved it.

46:18 It was really interesting. But then a year later I decided to shut it down and I was like, you got to pick one because there’s just too many things going on and neither one was going somewhere. And it broke my heart, but I had to shut it down and we just went all in on London Real. And then nine years later is when we probably got our first 100 million views and our first million subscribers, nine years. And if you had told me when we started, it would take nine years for that to happen. Of course I never would have started. But now that I look at it, it’s like, of course, of course it’s going to take that long.

46:51 And the longer you wait, probably the, the bigger it is, you know, or the more, more valuable it is delaying that reward because nothing is going to happen quickly. That’s why crypto is such a weird thing. Everyone’s like, when’s the tge, when’s investing? It’s like, well, you cannot make money overnight. That takes time. And in the equity markets, they give you time. But in the crypto markets, you know, like you said, you exit first.

47:15 I love that. And then you actually build the company. So it’s this weird dichotomy. And I feel like the real players play that long game, you know, even Bitcoin, whatever it is, has played this super long game and, and looks like that’s what you guys are doing as.

47:30 Hassam Rawat: Well, well, the curve is exponential, right?

47:32 It’s like, who? Because business is stuff. Whatever you do, all business is stuff. And The thing is you, you get excited about some new opportunity because you think it’s easy. And then you’re down the line, you’re like, oh, it’s hard.

47:44 Like, no, no shit. You know it’s hard. And then it gets hotter and hotter and harder. And then you see this other opportunity. You’re like, Hey, this is this guy’s making money with this.

47:55 Let’s let’s just jump, jump over there. And then you abandon all like your one year or two years of learning and connections and everything you’ve built to start again from scratch. And then you find out 01 year later, it’s hard this time. And then you go through that same cycle again and again again, but you just stick to it. After three 4-5 years, you understand the intricacies of, of, of the business. And then you could, I saw this, this podcast from Chris Williamson where he was saying for the, for, for years, he had very, very low views.

48:22 And all of a sudden boom, gets a break out. And then the next year and then things compound more and more. So if you’re at, if you’re at, have you seen this meme where this guy is digging and then there’s a diamond and then just before he gets a diamond, he just stops and, and tries to dig somewhere else. I think it’s the same thing. So, but it’s hard to do because it’s just sticking to it through thick and thin. And and in crypto it can get, it can get thick, as you know.

48:48 Brian Rose: Yeah, you have to have a North Star that you that you believe in and you’re unwavering in.

48:53 And in crypto it’s especially hard because the the market cycles are so brutal and have such a high amplitude. I mean, that bear market was brutal. You know, I still remember the FTX day. It was actually a token 2049 conference in London. We were all there and the news came out and you know, a little while later, I think Bitcoin bought about at 16,000.

49:13 I mean, it really tests your patience, this market. But if you can stick to that North Star and keep executing, I love this quote. If you never quit, you always win. I think that’s true. Now, part of me says, OK, you could do the wrong thing the rest of your life. But part of me also knows that if you just keep going and also be open to a pivot or an innovation without losing your North Star, I do think you always win. And I know so many people that got there but it but it’s really like chipping away.

49:41 Like chipping away. I was funny because like for 9 years I was searching for mainstream media recognition. I was like, look at what we’re doing. We have these amazing things. How come the BBC hasn’t done the story about us? How come we’re not featured in the magazine? A little that I know they probably saw new media as a threat, but they didn’t take it seriously. And then we got famous in 2020 and then infamous because we were on the front page of the BBC because they were trying to tell, you know, YouTube to take us down. But I finally got what I wanted.

50:07 But yeah, it took all that time and then it was like exponential. So I’d say to anybody out there, if you have that vision, stick to it. Ask yourself why that’s important to you as well. You know your vision here, you want to build something. You’re not just trying to make X amount of money.

50:23 I think if you have a vision that really is serving the community or serving humanity or creating something valuable, that’s something that I think is easier even to stick to more than anything. 100% I think you’re why is what drives you a lot, especially when the, when the market goes down in crypto and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s such a hard industry because one day you think you’re going to kill it the next day you’re, you’re a broker. The next day you’re a billionaire. It’s, it’s so and it’s the same for everyone in the space, you know, so it, it feels like, you know, when the market crashes, everyone is depressed today, probably everyone is so happy because Bitcoin, I think, barely hits 90 K. And so how do you, how do you stay focused on, on, on, on, on your, on your mission?

51:05 Hassam Rawat: And for us, it’s like, if, if there’s, there’s this technology that can be responsible for the biggest redistribution of wealth in history. And you have a chance to fight for people’s rights to have an awesome life, fighting for people’s right to enjoy cool things and not just for the top 1%. And it’s, it’s technically possible. I’m not saying it will happen, but it’s technically possible. In theory, it should happen if we do the right things. How awesome would that be if this happens, you know, and if it happens, it’s, it’s, it’s going to change lots of for a lot of people.

51:36 Brian Rose: So I think the Y is very important in what you do. I always tell people to write your obituary and or think about what will the obituary be written about you and it I’ve never read an obituary where it says, you know, or a gravestone that says here lies X who made a billion dollars. It’s always like, what did they contribute to the community? What did they build with their family? What did they do that added to humanity?

51:59 And so think about that, you know, that’s what you’ll be remembered for. Changed lives. Did you create something amazing that the world will look look to you for?

52:09 Hassam Rawat: That’s a good North Star. I was, I was thinking about the, the self end building that, that invested in us. So he used to work for a, for a big casino company in, in Scandinavia.

52:20 And then he had an idea of, of something that would disrupt the industry 20-30 years ago. And his boss said, no, we’re not interested. And then he was, OK, well, I’ll do it. And then he one of his Co found the Co founders of the company said, hey, I’ll invest in you. You have something there. And then he made became a self-made billionaire. And I was like, what’s the what’s the thing that changed your life the most?

52:41 And he was like talking about the obituary. He was like, I sat down one day and I thought about who I want to be in at my funeral. Who do I want there? And then the step one, Step 2 was what do I want these guys to say? And then once he did this, he told me his whole life direction changed.

53:01 He he lived for that North Star.

53:03 Brian Rose: It’s heavy, man, Super heavy.

53:05 Hassam Rawat: But I don’t have the. I didn’t have the balls yet to do that. That’s the next step.

53:11 Brian Rose: Maybe it’s, it’s interesting because 13 years ago I walk out of my job in banking and I started London Real and I was at a similar crossroads. You know, I had, I had pursued this notion that money would make me happy and I’d done everything my whole life. And I finally had it in the bank account and I looked around in my life and I was alone. I didn’t have family. I was trying to, drinking myself to death at night. And I was like, what are you doing? Like this is really, you’re not happy. And I took a meditation course and then like, and then six weeks later I quit my job.

53:42 And I think I was having that same realisation that wait a second, everything the world told me I was supposed to do, I did. And yet I knew it was meaningless. And then I started London Real and nobody was watching and nobody would even come on the show. And I didn’t know what the hell with this this was, but I was building friendships and connections and people were saying thank you And I was like, wow, this is this, something is good here. I better keep going. And it.

54:08 And again, I’m thinking like about my funeral now. Now there’s all these people that might might be there. And then they they would say, oh, Brian was a part of my story or a part of my life. Banker Brian. It would have been nobody there. Couple guys may be pissing on my grave. And so it’s a good question for people to ask themselves, you know, and that North Star is what brings followers and communities and UFC fighters to want to be a part of what you’re doing.

54:33 It’s so important, you know, start with. Why, Simon?

54:36 Hassam Rawat: Yeah, because they align with with your values. But it’s incredible. I just visited your office now and and I kind of kind of firm it a little bit like you, you had a you, you spoke with the people who really had a huge impact in the world and not only for what people say and for the business, but yourself.

54:52 I guess it’s a fulfilling intellectually and even maybe spiritually. I don’t know, like you met Jocko Willink, you were like Dan Pina, you Wim Hof and all these amazing guys that I’m not sure if you were in a mess in banker, you would have you would have had the chance to to meet. But you, that’s happened because you had the guts to say, hey, fuck this. I’ll just, I’ll just follow what my gut feeling says and I’ll see what happens.

55:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, People always said that was really brave of you.

55:17 For me, it was like just life or death. Like, if I had stayed there, I think I would have died. You know, for me, I had no choice but to leave because it was so making me so miserable. But yeah, I always joke that if the cameras were off, I would still do this because I get to sit next to these amazing minds, and they’ve changed who I am so much. I’m like a little part of every guest is inside of me and they’ve, they, they actually rub off on me. I have to be careful who I put in the chair because they literally changed my life.

55:45 And so that’s why it’s a crazy adventure. I want to ask you about community because, you know, you and your Co founder have experience in, in loyalty and loyalty programmes and thinking about this, you know, community. Hassam. It’s a word that gets thrown around too haphazardly because it can mean so many things and maybe it means so many things to so many protocols. You know, the Sheba community is probably very different from the Bitcoin community, is maybe very different than the Cardano community, is maybe very different than the CrossFit community. You know, what does that word mean to you? And then how do you think about your community and how do you think about how you fulfil it?

56:25 Because you can’t really control a community, and a community is almost the interactions that they have with each other, not even necessarily with the brand. It’s a very, very strange art. How do you think about that?

56:42 Hassam Rawat: Scientifically, when you look if if you can eliminate things that impact a vehicle and narrow narrow it down to one thing, AKA in this case it’s community, it can give you more of an indication of what jobs community is. And So what I mean by that is if you look at crypto in general, meme coins are nearly just community and some of them go to billions of dollars.

57:10 Dogecoin now is I think 45, 25 billion. It’s bigger than some most of the. Companies never moved in the bear market. It never moved its spot. It’s always like #8 yeah.

57:20 Crazy it’s insane. It’s billion dollar companies. What is it? It’s a picture of a dog. No, it’s a huge community that’s aligned and have a common vision. And and why I speak about mini coins is because is because it quantifies how strong just community is because they eliminate everything else, utility product, everything else, just community.

57:40 And so one of the things, or one of the things that I saw from, from, from neem communities is first of all, they, they have a sense of belonging. People, people sense that they they we, we just talked about, about learning, learning as being, I think at all time high in, in, in history. They, they, they get the sense of, of belonging. One of the other things is is common mission like they all most of them adhere to to one vision and all of us is making money crypto, to be frank, it’s how can we make money fast?

58:15 This is this is what it’s about. It’s fun. Also like meme quick means are really, really fun. You’ve seen like SPX 6900. Their narrative is we’ll flip the stock market like it’s their goal is to flip a multi trillion dollars. It’s it’s fun and so a lot of people say like meme coins don’t have any any utility.

58:34 I don’t agree. It’s it’s fun. You have a sense of belonging as Camarie.

59:40 And potentially you can, you can make it or not. And then you have your friends to, to, to rely on. So I think it’s, yeah, shared, shared, shared values. Now we all run on this mission. It’s, it’s fun.

59:51 You have a good time in our lingo community. We have a coffee hour every every week. And the agent that is no agent that we just chill. It’s just our community. You can go on a discord now and, and, and once a week we just show, hey, what’s up, how’s it going? And, and you’ll see the vibe inside. It’s it’s really something, but it’s not something I don’t think it’s something you can fake you, you need to, if you believe in, in what what you’re doing, you just get the message out there and then organically, it should attract people that align with this, with this vision or what you’re trying to achieve or not. But then you get feedback and then you just iterate on how what you’re doing.

1:00:29 Brian Rose: And that’s important for you, that feedback. That’s how you got to where you are today. It’s not the first time you said that today. It’s constantly iterating, listening, what’s working, what’s not working with your investors, with maybe your influencers, with your community and constantly changing. That’s something you guys do. You’ve seen that chart where it says 1% better every day. When you compound this after a year, you’re like 27 or some, some similar #27 times or 37 times better just for 1% better every day and so on.

1:00:59 Hassam Rawat: On one of the Lingo products, we work with a, an ex founder of a of a $1.4 billion company. So the guy built a Unicorn and he’s a product guy. He’s the smallest product LED guy I know. And he’s obsessed with speed of iteration. And I was like, why?

1:01:17 And he showed me like when we did Lingo Islands blew up 15,000,000 tweets. We were shipping one feature a week. We were very happy about this. We, we thought we were fast. This guy and his team, they ship one feature every 3 or 4 hours. So like 3 features a day.

1:01:33 Brian Rose: Wow. And if you think about it, if you ship a feature a week, you get 1% better. At the end of the year, you have 50 features that you that you’ve iterated on these guys. What is it like 1000?

1:01:48 Hassam Rawat: Yeah, 4 * 365 or something, Yeah.

1:01:51 Hassam Rawat: It’s like 20 years of work in one. That’s how you build a Unicorn. Right. You know, it’s just a different level and it’s not something unattainable. It’s not these, it’s not like these guys are hyper geniuses that can build billion dollar companies. It’s just they learn so fast and they iterate so fast that they can do 20 years of work in a year. And so if you have five years of this, it’s like 100 years of work and like on like 1 project.

1:02:15 Brian Rose: Right. So it’s just a mindset. It’s that mindset of fast iteration.

1:02:19 Hassam Rawat: 100% we we built the other Lingo products. It’s on Telegram, it’s called Droppy DROPE. In two, two months we had we already have 5 million users. We’re set to reach 10 million users in the next in the next three weeks, actually half a million people per day. And it’s just it’s reading, learning. It’s reading, speaking to, oh, you don’t like this or maybe I like this.

1:02:42 Let’s try it out. It’s for we tried it out. Oh, most of them we don’t like it. OK, let’s let’s step back. Oh, you guys like, how about we try this? Let’s boom, you try the other thing. It, it explodes.

1:02:50 OK, cool. How can we, how can we build on that? And it happens every single day. I think it’s one of the biggest learnings I’ve I’ve had in business. Wow.

1:02:57 Brian Rose: And in Telegram you get very fast feedback because you got a lot of users and you can get it in real time, mini apps and things like that. Faster than Twitter, probably. So it’s a beautiful place for for learning. What is next for you guys in the next three months, six months, 12 months? What do you want to do?

1:03:15 What do you want to do different? Obviously the Telegram strategy, maybe that’s newish. What do you see as opportunities? At the same time, it looks like we’re in maybe the biggest bull market of of all time, right? With a God candle happening yesterday that we just never seen before.

1:03:32 I don’t know if that makes your job be easier or harder in this case.

1:03:37 Hassam Rawat: It kind of both. It makes it makes it easier in the sense that you have a tailwind behind you. It makes it harder in a way where where it will probably attract a lot of scammers and this will probably attract all of the kind of worms which could ultimately affect projects in general. But absolutely it’s it’s it’s, it’s much better in in that case. But short term, what we’re trying to achieve is, is OTG and hopefully we, we, we try to make one of the most impactful launches of of the year.

1:04:14 So we’re working hard on executing that and.

1:04:16 Brian Rose: Then also, this is from a group of of guys and girls with a high bar, right? Because you’ve just come off of some crazy marketing campaigns, so you’re putting the bar even higher for.

1:04:25 Hassam Rawat: Your yeah, but we, we are lucky we have, we have our whole community behind us and it’s, it’s an amazing community. And so, yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna try and friends are some benchmark there also.

1:04:35 There’s no reason why we can’t do it. We’ve proven that. We’ve done this with our community building with many things we’ve done. So there’s no reason why we couldn’t actually one of the best launches of the year. At least we’ll try and then it will be a lot on on getting. Remember we talked about the emotional connection with, with the rewards.

1:04:58 It’s ideally in in in an awesome world a year down the line, there’s thousands of people every single day just winning stuff and and taking pictures. Hey, thank you lingo. That’s my new shoes. Thank you lingo. I’m on vacation. Thank you lingo.

1:05:10 You know, and then ultimately this fuels the bigger community that will fuel more, more audibly where that would fuel more rewards and, and up and up and up. So ultimately this is like medium term plan and long term plan. If everything goes well, God willing, the ideal scenario for the lingo community would be you driving around and there’s literal buildings that you’re seeing a billion dollar buildings that are generating profits just for one purpose, rewarding the community.

1:05:35 That would be the ultimate dream. So again, no idea whether this will happen or, but we’re working very hard to make it. Happen

1:05:42 Brian Rose: and the buildings will have like lingo on the top and as a lingo holder I can come in and hang out there.

1:05:49 Hassam Rawat: Or more. Or more stay there, live there, that kind of thing.

1:05:52 Brian Rose: I mean, look, if you know, if dog with hat can put their, you know, their logo on the sphere in Las Vegas for $1,000,000, you know, why can’t you guys have a billion dollar building, you know, on 5th Ave or here in South Kent? Why not? Why not right Where I already see these things happening. It’s like, how big can you dream? How important is a live token to what you guys are trying to do for your community and promise?

1:06:17 Is it really important to have that thing live on the block chain that everybody can can have and hold in order to do this whole, you know, rewards based system where you take your yields from your old assets and then put that back into the token?

1:06:30 Hassam Rawat: Yeah. How important is that? It’s, it’s hyper important, it’s the core of everything we’re doing because that’s how you, you, you can generate platform fees to acquire more and more and more assets. Like for example, if that’s in theory, we, we have a healthy market cover of 300 four, $100 million FTV and it’s trading at 1% on GNDTV.

1:06:48 To get technical, at the end of the year, you should be able to buy around twenty $30 million of of assets, but that’s tax, right? So if you do the same thing next year, assuming 0% growth is like 20,000,040 million, 60 million it, it goes on and on and on. And obviously, and then and then you have the flywheel because now your rewards doubles and triples, which allows you to attract an even bigger community, which allows you to stimulate your training volume even further and up and up. Right.

1:07:11 Brian Rose: And he’s one of those reward moments. It could be a viral moment with a picture or a video and those could really start popping. And one out of 100 of those is going to be a crazy headline, right? For some reason, it’ll be some person in some place with some cool lingo reward and everyone’s just going to go viral. Everyone like, did you see that? You know that 6 year old girl that now she’s at Disneyland and there’s that she’s high fiving Mickey Mouse And then what the hell is this lingo thing?

1:07:37 I’m guessing that’s what you guys are engineering. If you look at the, you’re smiling. If you look at the top 5 meme coins that launched this year, each of them had at least four or five examples of guys making it big, but it’s screenshots. But that’s the common denominator is each of these ones had examples of guys making 50K or 100K, but it’s screenshots of their piano. How? How better is it to have a live video? Like you’re really enjoying awesome rewards?

1:08:07 Hassam Rawat: Yeah, because then I also, it has emotion, it has all this individual components and it can really like log in the brain and all you need is a few of those to go viral and then boom, everyone knows.

1:08:20 Brian Rose: So that’s where this exponential, exponential can happen in many different ways in your community. And then it starts flywheeling and going, are you going to have to expand your team massively as this gets bigger and bigger and bigger? How do you run something like this, you know, and and how do you lead this team? That’s my question.

1:08:40 Hassam Rawat: That’s a, that’s a really good question too. Do you know that Red Bull does not create their, their drinks? They outsource it with a factory. And so they’re responsible for their community and their brand. And that’s what they do.

1:08:53 Like they’d rather do this really, really well versus trying, trying to also build the drinks and mixing ingredients. And so we, I, I, I kind of like this, this approach. I think it makes a lot of sense. Let’s, let’s, let’s double click on what we’re really good at. And by that it’s, it’s how can we make this community as, as, as awesome as possible?

1:09:13 How can we really reward as many people as possible? I guess the, the, in terms of staffing and team, the, the heavy lifting will probably come from on the other big way side. And for that, we’d rather partner with guys that have done that for, for decades. We, we’re just partnering now with one of the biggest private debt funds in Europe. We have an advisor from who we used to head a, a, a significant department at BlackRock, etcetera.

1:09:42 So on the RWA side, we’d rather work with people 100 times smaller than us with the right criteria and obviously have the community vote to, to what we, what we invest in. And then us and our side hyper focus on what what makes how can we make this community as as awesome as possible and how can we make the token as rewarding as possible?

1:09:59 Brian Rose: Wow again. That’s you say no again, right, You’re saying no, I don’t want to get involved in the weeds here. No, I don’t get involved weeds here. I just want to focus on the thing that really matters, which is the community and then the rewards. That’s what you want to do.

1:10:13 Do you do in real life meetups? Is that important or is that also hard because you’re people all over the world?

1:10:20 Hassam Rawat: Yeah, we do. We, we actually do four or five events every year. And now with the community, I can’t say much, but on the rewards platform, there’s going to be some really cool stuff that that will also link with with great events for for our community.

1:10:37 Brian Rose: OK. I want to ask you about America. So we’ve recently had an election in America. We have a new president. This president looks pretty pro crypto. He’s got his own D5 projects.

1:10:46 So he’ll have to put himself in gaol if he’s going to go after that. We’re talking about new SEC chairman. He’s already been shilling crypto the last few months. I used to joke that his appearance at Bitcoin Nashville, if you had asked him to do that, he would have charged $100 million probably to say never sell your Bitcoin and all this stuff. So it was amazing. What do they call that?

1:11:05 Hassam Rawat: Earned media is what they call it.

1:11:07 Brian Rose: But and he hasn’t even started office yet. How important is it for you to build an audience in America? Is that audience different than other places? Do you have to kind of, you know, tiptoe around potential regulations and is that a part of your strategy for the next couple of years?

1:11:24 Hassam Rawat: Yeah, we ensure that everywhere we go to, we are we work with tier one legal firms to make sure we have the right legal opinions.

1:11:32 And because again, goodwill compounds more than money and we’d rather be here in 20 years versus trying to cut corners. So this is what we do. But in terms of do we, do we target markets? I think what we, what, what we rather do is, is, is, is showcase the, the, the vision to the world. And Twitter and YouTube are two of the ways we do that. And then just organically let people, let people join in. If I’m not mistaken, I think Japan is our #1 market right now.

1:12:02 And it’s, this is completely organic. It’s, we didn’t, we didn’t say, hey, let’s, let’s target Japan. And around half of our, our community are from, are from Western Europe. However, what I saw with Trump is that he, he, he really put the finger on, on the, the, the, the fact that the system seems to be rigged for the everyday guy. And he won, I think thanks to that, that fight, right? So I think this resonates a lot with what we’re trying to build. And, and for what it’s worth, I think there’s similarities there in, in terms of in terms of vision. Like an anti establishment, anti status quo narrative. And it’s time for us to to to either reclaim what’s ours or find another way of solving this puzzle. They told you to do all these things. You did it like you did it for it doesn’t like it didn’t. Work.

1:12:54 It didn’t work right? And now we’re going to show you a different way. You’re you’re unhappy, you’re lonely, you’re still struggling. Even though they say the economy is great. We got to try a different way.

1:13:04 Brian Rose: You’re right. That is Trump’s message. And he got an overwhelming vote. You know, it was a popular majority, which nobody expected. He’s going in with his mandate and it is extremely anti establishment.

1:13:16 And I think he’s going to go in there and slash and burn in a way we’ve never seen before. Chop government, you know, spending and all these things that are happening. And and he’s a guy that doesn’t mind doing that. And now he has the remit. And I’ve heard people say this is probably one time in a in 100 years where you could actually potentially do that in a place like America.

1:13:34 I think the federal government of America is one of the largest employers in the world.

1:13:39 Hassam Rawat: Yeah, my, my good feeling is it’s going to unlock probably the one of the like the real greatest era of prosperity we’ve ever seen. And I think that’s also thanks to Elon heading the doge, the Department of Government efficiency. I’m not sure if you’ve seen his Live Today, but he just said like there’s, I think there’s 450 agencies on the, on the federal side. Like it’s nuts.

1:14:02 You know, there’s like if you, if you divided by the number of viewers, America has been there, it’s like 2-2 agencies a year. And, and imagine like what you can do with a, with a trillion dollar and imagine saving 345 trillion dollars and, and, and investing that into the right stuff, like kind of what he did with Twitter. It can potentially be huge.

1:14:21 Brian Rose: Massive, massive. And it’s really hard to touch that that system because politicians come every four years. When I ran to be Mayor of London, I kind of noticed it like you going for four years, but the stuff that you get done was actually done by two mayors ago. You know, so famously Boris Johnson was the mayor before he became Prime Minister and everybody knows the, the free bikes or the bikes you can rent as Boris bikes. But actually it was 2 mayors ago that actually put that in place. So it’s really hard to get rid of that establishment and now if they do it, they can save a couple trillion dollars dollars and and Elon knows because he comes up against those. Regulations and he’s going to sell the president. Yeah.

1:14:59 Hassam Rawat: You know, like the president has Salvador, he tried to do it successfully, but he’s he’s too small to be an example, you know, But if the US does it, what kind of what kind of message will that send to the rest of the world? The only thing I worry about is what they call the BLOB. There’s such a mass of wealth that that is going to be destroyed if that happens. And so trying to move that mass, there’s going to be pushback. And so I’m not really big in the conspiracy theories, but it’s like just the fact you’re trying to disintegrate this mass, it’s going to push back in ways and resist it because it’s kind of an inertia.

1:15:34 Brian Rose: And so I just, I’m just, I know it’s going to be a bumpy period, just like crypto is, like you said, you know, if you’re really going to completely disintermediate and and wealth transfer, there’s going to be powers that want to resist that. We’ve seen that with banking, etcetera. And maybe that’s why it’s taking so long to get, you know, Bitcoin ETF. But now that it’s happening, feels like there’s some momentum advice to people coming into this bull market advice, people that are listening to us and really maybe just started buying crypto or starting to look at different things. You’ve been through this a couple times. You know, what do you think people should do and not do and think about going into a market because this, this can create crazy euphoria, crazy emotions.

1:16:17 I, I have a crypto and D5 Academy and I always tell my students, I’m not worried about what you do when the times are bad. I’m worried about what you do when the times are good. I call it the waking up in Las Vegas with a tattoo and a husband or wife next to you that you got married at the Elvis drive through the night before. It’s like, what decisions did you make when everything was so good that were poor decisions? Any thoughts on that?

1:16:43 Hassam Rawat: Good question. First of all, NFA, not financial advice. I can just tell you what I’m doing and I’m again I’m hyper focused on lingo. So most of my time is going there, even though, again, like you’ve seen the backers that we have, like we know which a lot of times which tokens will pump, which will, who’s raising KOL rounds, etcetera, etcetera. But I, I never take positions because it’s, it’s a big distraction.

1:17:08 The only big position I’m taking is, and this, I think I give this, I told this to my, to my family also. It’s, it’s, it’s Bitcoin. It’s, it’s if you take 5 or if, if you want to take a little bit more risk, 10% of your net worth and put in a Bitcoin. Now is, is there’s a famous saying, never find the Fed. So the Fed’s printing money, Donald Trump won, China is going full region on, on, on printing on, on, on QE. And so it’s very lucky for the next 6 to 12 months that that money will flow to assets.

1:17:40 And within these assets there’s crypto. And within crypto, maybe half of it is Bitcoin. So for me, the risk reward makes sense because even if it’s 5% of your net worth in Bitcoin, assuming you lose half of it, which is I think, I think it’s hard to lose more than half of it now, but I might be wrong. But even if you lose 3/4 of it, OK, you lost 3% of your net worth. It’s not at the end of the world.

1:18:04 If you 20X or even 10X right in the next 3456 years, then you’ve made half of your net worth by risking 3%. And that kind of risk reward I haven’t seen in in the traditional market. So that’s, that’s one thing I’m doing. The other thing I’m doing, Oh, I’m not doing, but I’m seeing my, some of my team are, are really big into meme coins is we were just talking about meme coins. I think it’s a meme coin super cycle is gonna, is gonna happen. And, and there’s three narratives in, in this market that seems to be trending and, and staying there. It’s, it’s, it’s AI, it’s RWA that what we’re doing. And then it’s meme coins and it’s still at $50 billion, I think.

1:18:40 And and, and it could go to a trillion potentially. Just the meme coins. So just the meme coins and so having exposure to, to, to top meme coins and all top meme coins, but with money you’re willing to lose. This is so this is, I think, stuff you should consider us as as gambling, you know, like, like put money you’re you’re willing to lose. That won’t change your life at all. And then if you’re 20X on this, it’s it’s it’s happy days. Other than that you had fun in the discord communities and and made friends.

1:19:09 Brian Rose: Right, So there is some utility because you can have fun, you can make friends, you can learn and that’s what the mean coins are for. You’re the only CEO I’ve ever met from Mauritius. All right, and I’m and you’re a unique guy. I’m curious, what did you learn growing up in Mauritius? How is that different from growing up in Dubai, in London, in New York City, in a European capital, in Asia? What kind of values do you think it instilled in you? What do you think that you see differently in the world than maybe other people?

1:19:45 Hassam Rawat: Amazing question. Mauritius, there’s, there’s two things and it’s also tied to crypto and it’s, it’s, it’s not a popular, I won’t say something that that’s popular in the crypto space, but I think it’s true. So I’d rather just say it. There’s two things. One is what’s also not Mauritius is that it’s a very multicultural country where it’s split between Muslims and Hindus and and, and, and, and, and black Mauritians and white Mauritians and Chinese people. And we used to go.

1:20:14 International for, for public speaking conferences. And you’ll see like groups from Iceland, all blonde, blondes with blue eyes. You’ve seen groups from Nigeria, you’ve seen groups from and then you, you’ll see our group. There’s like a Chinese guy, a white guy, a black guy, a beige guy. It’s like, like, what is this?

1:20:28 You know, so we always grew up with without really seeing colour. And I think in the business world, it really, really helped because you can, you can have access to, to most people because you don’t have these, these suppositions on white people or so you just, you just say hi to people. And, and that ties to the second point is Mauritius for a while. And now I think it just changed because though we have a new, new Prime Minister that actually won yesterday. That’s AI think he’s a really interesting person, a really smart person.

1:21:00 He reads a book a day. So one of the smartest guys I’ve ever I’ve ever met. But before that, since I grew up, we, I saw that institutions as Mauritius was not very meritocratic. So you often had this culture where you needed to be good with people in their good books to make it work. And in a society like Dubai, for example, where it’s amazing, it’s if you do a good job, you get, you get the job. We had to, we had to learn how to be, how to vibe with people to even get a shot at at making something work. And when you meet Mauritians around the world, they always have great positions.

1:21:40 They always are in tough spots. And the reason why is because they develop the skill of just vibing with people before actually doing business. And it’s just you have to, you have no choice. And tying tying this down to the unpopular opinion, I think crypto, crypto is like business in the 90s. You think it’s transparent and permission less and everything, but it’s not.

1:22:02 It’s who you know, like who you know is extremely impactful in the crypto space. Unfortunately, I wish it was not not the case. One of my team, one of my team members, he told me he was in SAS before he was working with one of the biggest SAS companies in in Europe. And he was like, hey, like a typical like geek scientific guy. And he was like, Hey, I’m tired with when I was doing the interview, I’m tired with SAS companies. I want to go into crypto because it’s permission less and it’s next next level permission less after a month was like, do this. Like if you don’t know this guy, nothing is done. You don’t know this guy, nothing is done. And unfortunately, this is the reality of the situation now in crypto and hopefully it’s it’s going to evolve.

1:22:39 Brian Rose: Interesting.

1:22:40 That’s a cool observation. I think you’re right as well. You agree? Yeah, I do because the tech is transparent, but everything happens by by word of mouth, by introductions, and it happens so fast as well that that exacerbates it. I think, you know, like a deal will close in days or weeks. And if you don’t have the guy that knows the guy or you didn’t get the message, then it’s gone.

1:23:04 And because this happens at the speed of light. And so you’re right for something that’s so transparent and and you know, like you said, permissionless, it also is based on relationships more than anything. And also there’s so many ways to screw it up in this place, like if you, if you get short term greedy or you decide I’m going to focus on, you know, the profit over the right thing to do at any day, you can mess it up. So that means you got to be on point every day and just like do the right thing. And that means the relationships mature very fast and you get to know who’s who and who’s not.

1:23:38 Also, I think the way that you learn how to do business in in, in Mauritius is reflected in lingo. You know, the way that you treat your influencers. For you, it’s this, it’s this way where you know, long term, you know, it’s about building the relationship 1st and not about building the transaction first. It’s very interesting sometimes how companies reflect the values of the founders and sometimes in ways that they don’t even realise. Yeah, that’s really called observation. Yeah, until they look back later. Chris Mauritius, the.

1:24:07 Other thing I’m saying about your Mauritius observation is that probably by definition, everybody that came there is either an immigrant or their father or their grandmother was, which means you have this mindset of our families came here, we left everything behind and we had to make it work. And that means we’ll do whatever it takes and we’ll hustle and we’ll take jobs that we would have never taken back at home all in order to succeed. And I think that breeds an amazing hustling mentality and a, you know, never quit mentality and make it happen mentality.

1:24:41 Hassam Rawat: And that gets really powerful as well. It’s, it’s extremely powerful and especially that that connection with other people. I mean, for the last 10 years, we, we had a government that they did, to be fair, they did some really cool things. So the country has never developed that that fast. I think in in Russian history.

1:25:00 However, their political strategy was, in my opinion, I might be wrong, was a lot was very linked to divide and conquer. So they chose 11 demographic in the community and they made sure because it’s they have more in numbers versus the other community and, and, and they really favoured this community versus the others. And So what that created was a vibe where people felt oppressed and you couldn’t speak up and it freedom of expression was was hindered and the new government took took over yes, yesterday.

1:25:38 And I’ve never seen this in my life. The most of the 80% of the population that went out with their cars, like everyone, black people, brown people, beige people, white people in their cars hooting about freedom and they felt free. And this, this vibe is in indescribable. It’s, it’s really something strong. And I think it’s aligned with crypto also like knowing that you have this guy that you’ve never met in your life that has a picture of a monkey at the other side of the world, that you have the same mission because you you guys have the same picture of a dog with a hat. I think it’s beautiful.

1:26:13 Brian Rose: How important is freedom to you? Because it’s super important to us. And when I look at crypto and I look at Bitcoin, these are instruments of freedom. You know, owning a digital asset gives you freedom, whereas owning a Fiat currency in a bank that could be seized, it could be taxed, it could be inflated, it could be printed more. It doesn’t really mean you have your freedom.

1:26:33 It means someone else can control your freedom somehow. So that’s one of the reasons we love this space so much because it’s really strong with our core values. And I think it’s a really important quality. We saw maybe the last four years or six years, some of our freedoms being kind of dialled back and taken away. How important is that to you? Obviously Mauritius feels like they just made a big step towards freedom.

1:26:53 And do you think we’re going to win this fight for freedom? That’s my question.

1:26:58 Hassam Rawat: I don’t know, but I think it’s ingrained in us for in our DNA, like wars have been fought for freedom. I think it’s in every one of us and and now, like our ancestors had it really bad. You know, like the average guy today has better perks than the average emperor, like I think 200 years ago, 100 years ago, but it doesn’t feel like it yet for most people.

1:27:22 We talk about depression, loneliness, etcetera, and which is why for for for us at lingo that self. Actually, I think we live in an era, in an era where our ancestors did an awesome job solving the, the big stuff. And then there’s, there’s a world that’s that’s probably attainable where we can enjoy really, really cool stuff right now. And, and, and, and even when you think about money, people make money to be able to afford things they like and do things they like, which is ultimately freedom. So why not go straight to the chase, which is why we have such an obsession with rewards is, yeah, there’s the money part, but what if you can just cut that corner and just go straight to the world?

1:27:56 Not for everyone, but at least you have the, the opportunity to do so. So even like the average millennial in in in in Europe earns approximately I might be around 30 KA year. And so 1% of your net worth like $200 in in the meme corner, even in lingo where maybe you won’t win anything, you’ll make friends. But if you win, maybe you’ll buy this car for free. That kind of world without you risking and, and, and, and gambling is it’s quite interesting.

1:28:26 So, so I think it’s very aligned to what we’re trying to do is again, if this succeeds in a year, you’ll have thousands of people every single day feeling kind of free with small stuff, big stuff, at least putting smarts on people’s faces. I think it’s a world that’s attainable logically in in theory it’s possible to do, but let’s find out.

1:28:46 Brian Rose: I like that. So ultimately your mission is trying to make people happy, trying to make them enjoy their lives. And what we’ve been taught that we do that by raising GDP and giving people more income.

1:28:57 But that’s clearly not working. So why not cut out the middle man like you said, and just go to a place where they can have these amazing moments, connect with the community, these emotional highs. And that’s that’s what you guys are doing, giving them those dopamine spikes, giving them those once in a lifetime memories and putting them in touch with a bunch of other people that really enjoy doing the same with some upside as well. Promise of adventure and then some real world assets back in the whole thing up. Yeah, probably downsides too.

1:29:26 Hassam Rawat: This is crypto. That’s the adventure.

1:29:27 Brian Rose: Yeah. And then you need that a little bit. What do they call it?

1:29:30 Hassam Rawat: Variable reward, right? That’s why engage, people engage, and that’s why people go to Vegas and stuff, because you got to have some downside, otherwise it’s not interesting.

1:29:40 Brian Rose: What’s the easiest way for people to get involved in Lingo? Is it as simple as getting some tokens and then potentially qualifying for one of these experiences? Should they get in the Discord group, come to one of the coffee places, go to the website, go to follow you on Twitter?

1:29:55 What’s the best way to engage with you guys?

1:29:58 Hassam Rawat: On Twitter, you’ll find the big news, so it’s lingo coins with an S On Discord, you’ll find the everyday community, you’ll see the vibe, etcetera. And then ultimately, once we release the other token, very shortly after, there’s going to be a gamified product that we tried to under edge of campaign. We tried to build the best, the best edge of experience ever done in Web 3. Some people say we we achieved it, but I think the results show for themselves.

1:30:26 And now our mission is trying to build the best, the most again, rewarding product out there and the most fun also. So there’s a gamified a rewatch product that’s gonna be live very shortly after.

1:30:38 Brian Rose: The TG is so excited for that too. OK. And then what about telegrams? Is that a place where people should engage as well or can engage?

1:30:46 Hassam Rawat: Well, our new product Droppe is on Telegram, so you can just go on Telegram type DROPE and then you’ll you, you can play around. With it, you get sucked into the vortex. And you can win rewards too. Everyday the people win rewards everyday. There’s Nike shoes, there’s iPhone 16, there’s vacations, there’s a bunch of cool stuff.

1:31:04 Brian Rose: Is the future going to be on Telegram, do you think?

1:31:08 Hassam Rawat: I think it has a shot to be honest, because it again, it ties to freedom like Pavel, he used to he he was like the Zuckerberg of of Russia. And then he had ZKI think or something similar on the Facebook of, of, of Russia. Yeah. And then the government tried to censor him and he he went away. He stuck to his to his values.

1:31:29 And then he did again with Telegram, got arrested in Paris because he didn’t want to share data. And so he has a mindset where let’s let’s build things that make sense and, and preserve people’s freedoms and let people do stuff. Crypto come along, games come along. And so it’s it’s like what’s up on steroids? Because you can play games, invite friends, win crypto and you can do so many things.

1:31:51 Brian Rose: I think I think it has a good shot along with X. Yeah, native wallets as well. Telegram has that big stuff. I think X as well. You know, if Elon hadn’t bought that thing, I, I don’t even know what the state of online free speech would be. I think it would be a real issue. And you know, we were at the tip of that spear and in in 2020 and it doesn’t feel very nice.

1:32:11 So and then now with this, with this Trump victory, I feel like we’re right on the edge of maybe restoring freedoms to people. And people like you said, it’s in our DNA, like we want it. It’s so important. It’s maybe more important than all the the money in the world at some point knowing you can just do what the hell you want to do. And I agree, Telegram has that, X has that, but a lot of platforms don’t. And I think people don’t realise how much mainstream media and big tech is victims of censorship right now really by governments.

1:32:43 You know, we saw that with the Twitter Files. I was all that with you. Yeah, I know with us as well. It’s wild. So, you know, I was showing our our movie posters outside and there’s our latest movie called We Will Not Be Silenced. And I, I premiered it at the Film Festival in North Carolina, Myrtle Beach Film Festival.

1:33:00 And a guy who studies the censorship industrial complex. His name is Mike Benz. He’s been on Tucker Carlson. He’s a really smart guy. He came and he was in the audience and there was only one person I cared whose opinion of the thing. I mean, it was a Film Festival.

1:33:12 I wanted people to join the film, but I was watching Mike and, and in the beginning he was kind of laughing to himself and I was like, why is he laughing? Because you see us getting like censored and de platform and he’s like, Brian, I know what was happening behind the scenes. You didn’t know what was going on. But I know all of what was going on. I know the 70 year history of the government telling them the the newspapers not to print this and telling these people not to do this.

1:33:38 And that way we’ll allow you to keep doing business. He said all that came to pass right when you were doing your broadcast in April 2020. And it was wild to see someone explain to me what happened. All I knew is they took my video down and it made me angry. I agree.

1:33:52 And so it was wild to find out. Wow. And so I think it’s really important what you just said, you know, and you see something like Telegram and Paddle and even what he’s experiencing personally, this is something we all need to fight for. And I would say to anybody watching or listening, you got to own digital assets if you want to preserve your freedom. And there’s a lot of three letter organisations that say, don’t worry, in the future we’re going to give you a universal basic income.

1:34:17 You’re going to owe nothing. You’re going to be in a 15 minute city, everything’s going to be OK. But I don’t trust them. And so I think what you want is own some digital assets, take control of your freedom, make sure you have it. It’s each individual responsibility. And I think crypto is a way to get there. It’s got volatility definitely.

1:34:34 I think your non financial advice earlier was good, but get involved in this space. It’s also the future and it’s a great way to learn about money. Just owning crypto is a great way to learn about owning an asset and. What do you have to lose, right? What do you have to lose if you’re investing money you can afford to lose?

1:34:51 Hassam Rawat: Experience it, see how it feels like you, you, you go to most of the conferences and so do I. It feels like it’s the part of the world. Like when you bring, I’m pretty sure you, you, you might have brought some friends that are not in crypto in these conferences. And they’re like, at least when, when I do, they’re like, what are they talking about? This guy just talked to me.

1:35:10 I have no idea what he just said. And it feels like the power of the world, you know, but it’s, but it has the, a lot of the right values in freedom and transparency. And I used to have a, a, a

1:35:24 Colleague, he was the head of a, of a top 2 booking platform in, in Europe. And so very traditional corporate guy, very serious senior guy wanted to learn what crypto is. And so first conference, it was again, Paris deduction week two years ago. He calls me and he’s like, Hey, dude, I’m I this, this, this, this project that are doing some pretty cool things. And I asked him, like, what are your secrets?

1:35:50 And the guy’s telling it to me, like, what’s wrong? And I spoke to this other founder, and he he’s also sharing all his secrets to me. Like, welcome to Web 3, dude. It’s transparency. It’s just sharing.

1:35:59 He was shocked. Yeah. So I think it’s a pretty cool industry and it’s the future.

1:36:03 Brian Rose: Yeah, there’s something special about it. When we look, we went heavy into this about four years ago and I my first description was there’s so much love in this industry.

1:36:12 I know it sounds like a weird thing. You go to a Paris blockchain conference and you feel like love. Now, where does that come from? I think it comes from the transparency, the community. You know, like you said, you’ve quoted as saying, the tech, the tech is easy. A lot of the tech is transferable. But what intangibles can you can you build? Can you build those human relationships that actually create value in a company?

1:36:33 What what makes a brand, right? It’s a belief and knowing that your belief isn’t going to be compromised and it really stands for something. And so, yeah, there’s something special about this industry and most people don’t get it. It’s about collaboration. It’s not about competition.

1:36:45 It’s about creation and there’s something, there’s something beautiful about that. It’s also about asset ownership. And I always tell my friends, like my my 2 little boys, they’re 7:00 and 8:00 and they both own Bitcoin. I have a stepdaughter, she’s 20 and two years ago she got a hot wallet and she owns some crypto. And when I was 20, I I couldn’t own an asset. Like what was I going to do?

1:37:07 Maybe I couldn’t get a stock broker, an account, I couldn’t buy an apartment. The earliest asset I would ever own is when I’m 30 something years old, if I could buy like a one bedroom place in Manhattan with all my savings. And so I never really had a relationship with my money. And your schools don’t teach you about money. And so you’re these humans out there that’s not really part of the real world with crypto, you own assets.

1:37:28 Those assets sometimes have yield, sometimes they have upsides, sometimes they get rewards like yours lingo. And all of a sudden you’re really getting the financial education. And that’s so important, you know, not to mention being part of the community and being part of these organisations. When you own the tokens and the value of the organisation goes up, you win too. I always tell people you can buy as many packages on Amazon as you want, but you know you’re not going to make money if the value goes up. You can upload as many videos to YouTube as you want, but when the price of alphabet goes up, you’re not going to get any of it.

1:38:00 But if you own lingo tokens or you own something else and the value of the network goes up, you get part of that. So it’s it’s a place I hope everybody jumps into this. And it’s happening like whether people like you know, it’s happening. It’s the one of the fastest growing technological adoptions in history. And if this continues, it’s it’s trillions, trillions of dollars going to everyday people’s wallets.

1:38:25 And the only way you can benefit from that if it happens is it takes you 2 seconds on your Apple store or, or or play store and you download an exchange or or phantom wallet and, and, and you can earn some crypto like you don’t need to stockbroker like like 20 years ago. So what do you have to do? Is again. Yeah, learn it now. And now, you know, there’s a Bitcoin ETF, you know, and, and you’ve got BlackRock pushing this thing.

1:38:50 So maybe a year ago you could say, oh, well, now that there’s no going back, there’s no one that can argue that this isn’t going to be around for a long time. And so now is the time for everybody to jump in and Start learning. Start small and then learn, because this is going to be a part of our everyday life 10 years from now. I believe every minute of every day for every person’s life will involve a blockchain transaction 10 years from now. I think it’s going to be that ubiquitous. It’s it’s, it’s so powerful, like a friend of mine just launched an investor.

1:39:19 He’s one of the biggest investors in the game called of the grid. And it’s it’s now an Xbox and people people are owning or doing transactions on crypto without even knowing it because the whole technology is backing is backing the game. And again, it’s, I think BlackRock is saying in this industry could, could potentially just the tokenization of assets could do it could go to $16 trillion by 20-30. And and so again another non financial advice, RWA tokens like Lingo could be something you need to you could look into.

1:39:53 Definitely, man, definitely. Hassam. We’re pumped to be on this journey with you. I think you guys are doing something super cool, super unique. You guys are doing so many things from your influencer to your rewards to all the viral stuff. Sounds exciting with the token being generated soon and sounds like you got some huge plans coming forward so can’t wait to be a part of it.

1:40:14 Can’t wait to see what you guys do and can’t wait for you to change the space. So thank you for bringing us along for this journey.

1:40:20 Hassam Rawat: Well, Brian, thank you so much for your trust again and and your team and thanks for inviting me for my first live podcast in my life. So hopefully it’s not the last, but appreciate it.

1:40:28 Brian Rose: You crushed it, man. Thank you very much.

1:40:30 All right, man. Appreciate it.