Full transcript: Michael Hearne on London Real
2:47 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Michael Hearne, the entrepreneur, investor and documentary filmmaker. You are the founder and CEO of Decentral Publishing, where you help share the hidden story of crypto and decentralized finance. Your upcoming documentary series, Uncensored Crypto, brings together over 50 of the leading experts in the industry to take a deep dive into the technology at the heart of the crypto movement, helping solve many of the issues we face as a society today.
3:14 Over the course of nine episodes, of which I am featured in two, this documentary series examines the technological revolution taking place and explains how and why everybody can take advantage of this incredible moment in history. You have called cryptocurrency the biggest wealth building opportunity of our lifetime and believe that nothing can stop the inevitable rise of decentralized finance. Michael, welcome to London Real. Awesome, thanks Brian, appreciate it.
3:43 Much to be here. It’s great having you here. I’m so excited to speak with a fellow filmmaker and also go deep on this incredible series that you put together in record time. And look, let’s be honest, the world needs this information right now, and you’ve gone deep into this nine series episode again, I’m heavily featured throughout, and it’s been a real honor to be a part of this whole series. So thank you so much.
4:06 For anybody watching, now they can actually start watching this series immediately. If they go to londonreal.tv forward slash uncensored, they’ll go right to your landing page and they can start watching this thing, and you’ll be dropping episodes over the next few days and weeks, and I’m telling you it’s a great way to start getting an education in this space. So Michael, yeah, super excited to have you here. We got time to talk about everything, but maybe I start off and talk about, you know, how do you feel right now?
4:35 I mean, you’ve just basically done a huge dive into this industry, spoken to 50 people in this space. Probably you got the best seat in the house when it comes to crypto and DeFi education. You know, how are you feeling? What are some of the big moments that you had, the big realizations you had, and how do you feel right now that this thing’s about to drop on the world? It’s an incredible feeling.
5:00 I mean, to have gone from having the impulse and the idea, really, like realizing the significance of what’s happening in crypto to being here within less than eight months. It’s just, I mean, it’s been a wild ride. I feel very fulfilled right now. We’re getting a lot of traction out there, and that’s great. I mean, that’s what we want, right?
5:26 We want to spread the real story of what’s going on with crypto, kind of beyond, you know, the hype and the meme coins, which again I don’t hate on meme coins and DJs, they can play their way. But you know, I wanted to talk about some of the bigger concepts. So I mean, it’s been one of the greatest experiences of my life, Brian. So I’m feeling pretty good. Yeah, I think we first maybe spoke six months ago, and I knew of your former experience in making some excellent documentary films like Money Revealed and others.
5:56 And so, and also in the first five minutes, Michael, I knew I wanted to work with you, and I think I joked and said, Michael, this is the documentary I want to make. But yeah, I’m too busy, you know. I’m here doing the two live episodes a week. I’ve graduated over 500 students from our DeFi Academy, and we just announced London Real Ventures, so we’re actually taking, you know, ownership stakes and some really exciting upcoming metaverse plays and DeFi protocols.
6:20 So, quite frankly, even though we’ve made five feature-length documentaries in the past, you know, we don’t have the bandwidth to do this, and so I’m a little jealous of you. But I also know how much hard work it does. But I’ll say one final thing, Michael. This way of educating people through a documentary, it’s so important, and podcasts are important, vlogs are important, but there’s something about real storytelling, like you’re doing here, that I think adds another educational layer, and I’m super excited for all the London Real people and the DeFi Academy to kind of get this knowledge kind of through you and through this, this documentary series.
6:57 Yeah, I guess I might start by asking, you know, why nine episodes you know, why this much content, why 50 people? I think you spent like probably over 100 hours interviewing people. Did it just feel like you couldn’t do it any smaller, or why was it this big? Yeah, it definitely, I mean, it covers such a broad category of topics. You know, there’s so many layers to what’s going on.
7:28 No pun intended. And so, you know, nine episodes was kind of the model that I was taught by former partners of mine, Jeff and Patrick, from Money Revealed, State Revealed days. And so I wanted to stick with something that I knew and I understood, but it was actually hard for us to cut it down to just nine episodes, because we had so much great footage. I mean, I mean, you know, like there’s the metaverse, there’s DeFi, there’s dowels, there’s NFTs, there’s so many things that we wanted to dive into, and really with a goal being to, like, educate and inspire people both entrepreneurs and investors to get into the space.
8:13 Like, I just felt like we needed to really go deep into each of those areas without making it overwhelming, and to get those kind of really juicy 5 to 15 minute segments where it’s just punch, it’s in your face, you know, powerful content. We needed all that footage. So, yeah, I like that nine series, and each episode is how long, roughly? 90 to 120 minutes. That’s crazy.
8:44 So you just basically made nine movies, basically. It sure feels like it. That’s like super impressive, and you know, I want to talk about these episodes, but I also want to give people a little bit of a sneak peek, and so we’re going to play a short two-minute piece that kind of explores the opportunity that currently exists in the crypto and DeFi space. You know, it does start with me, so maybe I’m a little biased, but I think it’s a great piece. So we’re gonna play that right now, and for everybody, so enjoy.
9:15 This is a small piece of this upcoming documentary. And that was just a little taste of Michael Hearne’s handiwork here from this incredible new nine-part series coming out called Uncensored Crypto. Again, if you want to start watching this immediately, you can go to londonreal.tv forward slash uncensored for free and start watching this content, and he’s gonna start dropping episodes. Michael, I want to let people know the names of the nine episodes, because it gives people an idea of how deep you go and how broad you go, and then I’d love to talk about some of these issues.
11:25 So episode one is The Crypto Revolution. I think you really start off on a really broad basis. Episode two is Beyond Bitcoin, which is fascinating, because you’re going much deeper than kind of what most people know or used to know of crypto. Episode three is A New Internet, Web 3.0, which is a topic that we talk a lot about here on the show. Episode four is The Everything Revolution, which is very interesting to see how you pull all sorts of other pieces and issues and technology in.
11:53 Episode five, The Rise of DeFi, which I am featured in, where you go deep on the DeFi protocols. Episode six, The Sovereign Individual, which is again a very powerful moment to talk about how this all relates to freedom and human rights. Episode seven, Crypto Versus Fiat, something my students are asking me about every day, and we’re talking about now in the mainstream press. Episode eight, The Dark Side of Crypto. This is interesting, and I’m really glad you acknowledged it.
12:17 And then episode nine, Crypto Versus Climate, something that’s constantly coming up in the discussions. You know, strangely enough, Michael, with a lot of the layer one protocols I’m speaking to lately, you know, they talk about the climate issues and being carbon neutral very early in the conversation, whether it’s TRON or AVAX or a few of the others, Elrond. They’re all talking about that carbon neutral aspect. So yeah, yeah, that gives people a little taste of kind of, you know, what a lot of this content is starting on.
12:49 Where’s a good place to begin? Should we start at the beginning, or how do you start to talk about this film? Right, that’s the question, right? And definitely the question that we were asking in post-production. So we wanted people to start in the beginning.
13:06 We wanted episode one to give a little bit of history and some of the fundamentals, like, you know, what is a blockchain? What is Bitcoin? And talk about, you know, some of the broader categories, and really, you know, what that means is episode one is like the pre. It gives you a warm up for all the things that are to follow, but it’s kind of the micro condensed version, because you’ve only got, you know, two hours. You have to break it up somehow.
13:40 So, that’s what episode one is. So we started with, you know, Bitcoin being, you know, birthed around the financial crisis and, you know, 2008, 2009 time frame, and, you know, why that’s so significant, as, as you know, as we, and, you know, probably your viewers as well. But you know, I don’t think everybody knows. You know, just the way money is created is almost this like when you explain it to people, they scratch their head because they can’t like believe that’s how it works.
14:13 But I think that’s becoming more common knowledge, and so contrasting that to Bitcoin, and, you know, that’s where we started. Yeah, yeah. So from there, you know, we just built, broadened the universe, you know, more and more. And so we felt like we’d given people a pretty good, you know, full spectrum. Yeah, it’s important to talk about, and a lot of people don’t know it.
14:40 At first it was that Bitcoin was born, you know, in the 2008 financial crisis, and it was a part of, you know, this fictional character, or we think is real, of Satoshi Nakamoto, and the myth and the legend, but it’s not really written in the white paper, but it comes from a place of wow, our money system is broken, and right to have it in perspective is important as you go along. And then one of the things I’ve realized over the last six, eight months, Michael, is that talking to people who look at the world through Bitcoin is the way that they can kind of see how inflation works. It’s one of the reasons Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy decided that he wasn’t being a fit CEO by having cash on his balance sheet, and he thought, well, what should I have on my balance sheet, because my cash is basically growing at the rate of inflation, of 34 a year, if you look at where the stock market went up, and he said I’m actually not, you know, being fiduciary or responsible, responsible if I’m doing this.
15:39 They thought gold, and they found Bitcoin, and so, and I’ve also had Jeff Booth who wrote a whole book about inflation and deflation, and he says, when you price everything in the future in Bitcoin, the prices of everything goes down, but when you’re pricing those dollars, it goes up. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s an amazing way to see the world, and I’m glad you started there. Because you know, I don’t know if you’re finding this, Michael, but when you start talking to people about money so many people tune out.
16:08 I think it’s got to do with our education system that never acknowledged or even began to talk about money, and I think people just sometimes think they’re not smart enough, they get frustrated so you have to really start probably slow, and I guess that’s what you were doing with the first part of the series. Yeah, absolutely, and really kind of on a broad perspective, I guess one way to think of it is, you know, that you’ve heard the analogy, we’ve all heard it. You know, we’re in the early 90s with internet companies, that’s where we are with crypto companies whatever we call them these days.
16:48 That is, I mean, that’s true right, but I wanted people to understand, not necessarily like, oh, pick company X, big company Y, here’s your trading strategy You know, because that’s not my background, that’s not my expertise. I put people like that in front of the camera, so that’s included in the series. But what I wanted people to see is sort of the big picture of why this stuff is inevitable, because when you understand that the technology is so far superior than the existing solutions inside of the given area of our life, that it, well, the superior technology always wins in war, right?
17:32 Yeah, you know, bronze beats iron, maybe that’s vice versa. I don’t know, my history really should. Yeah, I mean, I always remind my students, especially when the markets are down, that this is, you know, a technological revolution It’s also a complete shift in human paradigm, and both of those factors are 10x to 100x to 1000x better than what the system has, so it’s only a matter of time before it gets adopted. The great comparison is the internet. You know, that was technology it was actually quite decentralized technology, yeah.
18:06 Lucky enough, and it created this revolution, but I was in the dot-com boom. I was in New York City. I was a CFO of a startup, and we saw it go up and go down, but I’ve had Andreas Antonopoulos on the show, and he said, he said, Brian, the year 2000 was the worst when it comes to asset value of technology, but it was one of the best years in technology, because that year more people started using Amazon, more people started using email. Yeah, so if you don’t look at the market cap and you just look at the adoption, it just continued to rocket.
18:37 So I always use that analogy with my students. But Bitcoin’s down, so what? This tech is still being developed, and it’s still moving forward. And again, it’s the fastest adoption of technology we’ve ever seen in our species. It’s growing, according to Ronald Paul, at like 113 year on year, which is literally exponential growth.
18:59 And exactly, it’s something we’re not used to. We don’t even know how to process it, so sometimes you have to take a step back and just say first principles. Okay. Yeah, we’re not crazy. Let’s just keep going.
19:11 Right, yeah, yeah, exactly. I still, like, when people, like, are crypto skeptical, I’m shocked. Like, I’m I’m just like, the deeper you look into this, I mean, there’s always the chance we’re human, maybe we have confirmation bias, but there’s a lot of us who see the light and, you know, passing a lot of logic tests, and most importantly, use cases out in the real world, in the wild, where, you know, it’s chaos. There’s eight billion people on this planet, and I think there’s maybe 200 million people involved in crypto, which is two to three percent.
19:49 It’s still quite small, so we still forget that most people don’t know what crypto is. They think it’s a way to make money quick, or they think it’s Bitcoin, or they think it’s a scam, or they think it’s a, you know, what drug dealers use, and it’s kind of these, right, all these old adages which just aren’t true. And we start to really see what’s happening. Talk to me about DeFi, because it’s a big part of this series. Episode five is the rise of DeFi.
20:14 You know, it’s why we’re here. We have a DeFi Academy. I’m teaching people all over the world. DeFi, why was this something that you locked onto that you decided to put an entire episode into DeFi, and like, what did you learn, even from someone who’s, you know, newish to the ecosystem? Yeah, yeah.
20:32 So I latched on to DeFi largely because I saw how broad the implications, how broad the reach would be. I looked for a long time, like at the lower end of poverty in America, you know, through my early entrepreneurial years, and so I, you know, I was living in poor areas, surrounded by poor people, you know, people who didn’t have you know, ID, because they weren’t in the country, you know, legally. you know, ex-convicts, you know, a lot of a lot of things, you know, and you would think like, okay, that sounds kind of sketchy, and there’s absolutely there, right, because poverty attracts crime.
21:21 It creates, and creates an environment where people get so desperate that they don’t feel like they can rise in the given system that they were born into, and they feel like their only option for upward mobility is, you know, selling drugs or, you know, robbing people, whatever the whatever the thing is. You know, check fraud, you know, fill in the blank. But there’s also like just good hard-working people there, who, you know, I think about our neighbors who were illegal immigrants from Mexico, and there were great people.
21:58 The guy worked his butt off, right, from like before the sun was up till after the sun came down, and then he came home and he was like a dad, so, you know, just salt of the earth people. And I saw what DeFi would be able to do for those people, and then I extrapolated from that, and I was, I zoomed out, and I was like, oh my gosh, you know, like, I’ve, I’ve been to poorer parts of the world, just a little bit, right, and even what I saw was just kind of shocking, and to kind of extrapolate that, okay, we’ve got all these people, they’re not all stupid, that’s not why they’re poor. You know, they’re not all lazy, that’s not what they’re for, like, there’s, there’s a, there’s a lot of variables, right, but one of the variables is they don’t have access to sophisticated banking and financial services, so they’re at a disadvantage.
22:51 And that plays out in, in both the Western world, as well as, you know, what we call, right, the developing world. So when I saw that, and I realized like, okay, I, I just kind of, I was like a flash. I mean, I think a lot of people have this, right, you probably did yourself, where were you just like, oh my gosh, like you realize in an instant that this is going to change the world, and for me, whenever I saw that it could have that positive impact, and then I think about the secondary effects about people who go from just subsisting and barely getting by, and they start to get imaginative, they start to get creative, they start to solve problems for people around them.
23:30 You get entrepreneurs, you get, you get property ownership. That something is sort of a Western phenomenon, right? So all of these things are kind of baked into DeFi, and I mean, I was in a spot where I just left the CEO position, turned the company around and exited, and I could have done anything, but I wanted to do something that was really impactful, you know, something really big. Kind of like, not, I wasn’t even saying legacy play, this, because that’s very me-centered.
23:58 I wanted to do something that was bigger than me, and I saw this, and I was like, man, I got to tell this story. And then I went out there and I discovered that we’re very early. We were so early in this that many of the things that I just had that vision for, and I know not just me but a lot of people, we’ve got to build the infrastructure and the stepping stones to get there, and that is the challenge and the opportunity. Right, yeah. Wow.
24:31 You said so much. Michael, and I know you’ve, you’ve spent a chunk of your life on that low end, you know, of the, of the poverty scale, and it brings a great perspective, because I’m always talking about those two billion people in the world that lack what I think is one of the last human rights that’s being violated on a daily basis, which is your right to financial freedom, and they don’t have basic access to, you know, any service, lending, borrowing, not to mention investing. And we talk about this two billion people, and immediately people focus on sub-Saharan Africa, or they focus on places in Asia, but they don’t realize that, you know, maybe five maybe to ten percent of people living in the U.S.A. are people that don’t have access to banking services because they, they don’t pass the KYC, they don’t pass the AML, maybe they don’t have a passport, maybe they don’t have a history, or a credit history, but they’re real people with real jobs, with real families and communities.
25:32 Many of them work very hard, and yet they’re getting exploited a lot of times by these high-fee services like Western Union. They have to go around and around to get basic financial services and payday loans and all this stuff, and exactly, which just disempowers them and doesn’t educate them, and like you said, it actually creates a class of people that are always in a panic, red zone moment, which means absolutely, how can you be creative? How can you give back to your community when you’re constantly in a panic state?
26:03 Imagine you as a human where you’re constantly on alert, you’re stressed out all the time. And the funny thing is, Michael, these are the same people that we give government checks to during times of crisis that actually hurt them more in the long run by eroding any savings they have left. So it’s this, it’s a terrible cycle, and I’m really glad you brought this up, because it’s not just, you know, these people around the world. It’s all of us. And yeah, and I’m also glad the fact you brought up that also, the system’s not ready.
26:35 Like, DeFi is amazing, but those people aren’t yet necessarily ready to plug into a MetaMask wallet and start getting yield on their USDT, because I struggle teaching Harvard grads and Google employees this stuff in my academy. So, again, we still have a ways to go, but you can see there’s a glimmer of hope, where people there’s not a gatekeeper anymore that tells people that they can have a relationship with their money. Yeah, and I’m really glad you brought that up, and I think it’s something we need to talk about more, and I’m glad you covered it in the DeFi episode.
27:11 You know, one of the other things you talk about, Michael, is this sovereign individual concept, this concept of freedom, which, you know, I didn’t see coming when we talked about this series six months ago. If you had told me there would be an episode on freedom and sovereignty, I would have maybe been surprised. Why was that important to tell that story? What did you learn? What do you see?
27:35 Yeah, absolutely. I see freedom. I mean, freedom is it sounds dramatic, freedom’s under attack, right? And it’s not like guys with guns gonna, you know, kick your door in and take it. It’s being done through bureaucracy, through mandates.
27:53 It’s being done through monetary policy, like you talked about, inflationary monetary policy. It’s being done through censorship and propaganda, and the, you know, the fake news. That’s probably a trigger word for some people. You know, it’s, it’s all being done, and honestly, like I said, I was in that place where I just left a position. I was really feeling introspective.
28:20 I literally locked myself in, in this office right here for 60 days to decide. I didn’t really take a lot of phone calls. I just worked. And so I was, I was in that position right where a lot of people were early last year, especially in America, where we just had the election fiasco, and like, everybody’s 100 percent convinced that they’re right. Right, everybody’s so convinced, and just like me, I’m no, I’m no different than anybody.
28:51 I’m no better. I, I have my confirmation bias, right? I, I want to believe what I want to believe. I like to go to the sources that tell me what I want to hear, right? So, but somewhere in the middle of that, there’s truth, right, and if we don’t have that truth, it’s really hard to make wise decisions and, you know, have full context.
29:13 So that’s part of it, but what, what I saw really with regards to freedom, right, is, you know, you see where there’s all these middlemen and gatekeepers who have to give you the thumbs up, right, when you talk about that the ex-convict, right, someone who got busted selling marijuana in their, you know, late teens, early twenties, got tried as an adult as a felon, gets out, has a hell of a time getting a job. You know, gets into a poverty cycle, you know, feels like they don’t have any upward mobility. The only thing they know and have been taught is to go back to that thing, and I got this repetitive cycle, right?
29:55 But I think I’m following the wrong tangents. Yeah, but well, you were talking about that, that concept of freedom, and again, last few years, I think we’ve all started to really value our freedom, and you start to see that, like you said, there’s, there’s information, there’s all sorts of ways of taking away some of your freedom, monetary policy, but then ultimately the money itself is one of those big things. I had Dan Held on the show a couple weeks ago, and he’s one of the early Bitcoin people, and he, he said, Brian, if you think about it, no other freedoms matter if you don’t have financial freedom.
30:31 He said, because you could have the freedom of speech, if you have this, but if you’re actually controlled by the money, then that’s the one that matters most. And it was, it was a pretty bold statement, and that, yeah, and I think he might have a point, and when you start to see cryptocurrency and DeFi, you start to see the flaws in the dollar and the monetary system, and all of that control. And, you know, yeah, look, when it comes to freedom, like I’ll briefly tell our story here.
31:00 I mean, I had been broadcasting For nine years on London Real, having conversations in this studio with over nearly a thousand people, long form, unedited, unscripted, uncensored. We put it all on YouTube and all the social platforms. I had a couple million subscribers, over 9,000 videos, and then one day last year, on April 6th of 2020, I was doing a stream that, strangely enough, was the second largest live stream in the world that day. We had 65,000 concurrent viewers.
31:29 The only, the biggest live stream was Trump that night doing his coronavirus briefing. That’s what beat us, and so clearly people really wanted this information, and 30 minutes after the episode, YouTube decided to ban it, delete it, and censor us, and that was, that was the first time that ever happened to me. I’ll be honest with you, Michael, I thought it was the weirdos and the crazy people that got censored. I didn’t think it was, you know, normal people.
31:56 And that shows you how I didn’t even understand the system. And so my immediate reaction was to re-upload the video and to do a vlog, and to start complaining and getting angry, and it started a long fight we had with all the social platforms. It started our fight for free speech. It started my my, honestly, inquisition into what it really means to have freedom of speech and to have the freedom to listen to someone else’s opinion. And so we had this whole journey in 2020.
32:28 We were banned and blocked by every platform: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Dropbox, PayPal. Yeah, literally the world was shutting us down. Wow. I was threatening to be de- platformed, which was my entire business, 95 percent of my business model, and quite honestly, Michael, my whole life was on YouTube. Like, my whole life was on there, and that was about to be deleted.
32:49 So we can talk about, you know, ownership of digital property and NFTs. That’ll come later, but it was just, and it was not my, it was the choice of someone else that had the power. Exactly. And so, exactly. Yeah.
33:01 At the time I didn’t know much about crypto and DeFi, and I didn’t even know if there was another option, so we tried to find a root in the old system. We actually did a crowdfunding piece. We found we created our own Digital Freedom Platform, and we found a way to live stream with the help of some of the people that did the Super Bowl the year before, and we found a way to push on, but it showed me that we really suffer from this lack of freedom of speech and media, and maybe how DeFi can help us.
33:31 So, yeah, I’m glad you brought that up, and I, I guess you start to see how maybe this new system can empower some of those freedom rights as well. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I mean, just to I won’t belabor the point much longer, but if you think about, you know, the Stasi. One of the things they did was shut down. I mean, they went in, they took people’s radios.
33:54 Why would they take people’s radios? It was like the secret service in East Germany after World War II, the Stasi, right? I think was leading up to World War II. They were, okay, yeah, yeah. So the precursor to the Nazis We probably should get that fact checked, but they went and they took the radios, because they only wanted them to be able to hear their messaging, right, so that’s a classic tactic of authoritarian dictators who are preparing to do something that could be very horrible, but it’s probably not going to be above the board, so you know, I’m sitting here, I’m having this kind of frustration like a lot of people, but I’m thinking, what in the world can a guy like me do?
34:34 I’m, you know, I’m a nobody. What could I do, and, you know, playing with crypto, and I start to look into the decentralized web, the dWeb, and Web3, right? Who you’re talking to, all of the, about. And way back in the day, when I was in the Marine Corps, you know, 20 plus years ago, I did some IT work, and I was familiar with networks, and so I kind of had this, you know, familiarity with things like Metcalfe’s law, but I hadn’t really tapped into that in a long time because I got into entrepreneurship and business and learned to do that instead.
35:09 But when I combined those two things and I saw what the DWeb was going to do, that it was going to take control out of the hands of Silicon Valley elites, and it was going to return it to the nobodies. Right, so, you know, I mean, think about it. You have 65,000 people watching your stream. You have a huge following, a big influencer, and they were ready to cancel you, and they don’t care. Right, what about everybody else?
35:37 What if you, you know, you’ve only got 100 followers? What, you know, what if it’s just your family and friends, and they silence you? Um, it’s a problem, and it can lead to really dark places, but cryptocurrency can actually solve that. And it’s technically not cryptocurrency. I use the word crypto because that’s what people know.
35:56 I, I want to introduce people to this world because it’s important. So, you know, realizing that crypto could do that again was another thing. I felt like it was just a story that had to be told. Right? It’s essential for, you know, us to remain free and avoid some of those horrible dystopian nightmares.
36:16 But if you also think about it from a purely economic standpoint, right, Metcalfe’s law, I’m going to butcher it, but it basically means that the more people are in the network, the value of that network grows exponentially, right? So right now Facebook, Amazon, Google, they are taking full advantage of Metcalfe’s law. Their shareholders are benefiting. The founders are benefiting, but the users, while they get to use the product, are not getting any economic benefit, right?
36:48 So I’m not saying that, you know, the Googles and the Facebooks of the tomorrow world shouldn’t, the projects, um, shouldn’t make some profit. That’s great, but in a world where you’ve got this, you know, deflation, deflationary technology, you know, where the government can’t afford deflation because there’s so much debt. You know, it’s… I lost my train of thought. Yeah, I know, I think you were, you were just talking about this shift from Web 2.0 to 3.0, and it’s something we talked about.
37:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, yeah, so it pushes back to the people, right? I mean, data is what, like, 20 trillion dollar set of assets out there, and it all goes into the hands of a few. Not only do they get the economic benefit, but they also get the control. So crypto offers to hand that back to people, but almost nobody knows.
37:42 Yeah, I always use Facebook as a great example. I mean, it’s a Web 2.0 phenomenon. It was a great piece of technology. That we found that we could reconnect with our friends from high school. We could realize we don’t need to talk to them every week.
37:55 You can upload your videos and photos and connect with friends and family, but the only person that gets rich is Mark Zuckerberg and the equity holders, and you give them all of your information, and it’s digital colonials, and they sell it back to you, and then sometimes they take it away from you, and that’s Web 2.0. Web 3.0 is where you can own part of the network. You can transfer that value peer-to-peer. You can own your information. And when you see crypto, you start to think, wow, maybe we could do this in all ways.
38:26 And if you look at Amazon, Google, Facebook, they all take, you know, 30 to 40 to 50 of the profits for themselves, and, you know, and in a Web 3.0 world, that doesn’t have to happen. So, right, it’s a great way to look at this whole shift. And also think about it from a freedom perspective. I know we have a clip that we’re going to play here as well that goes into the censorship, and if people want to watch or start watching this documentary series, they can go to that londonreal.tv forward slash uncensored and start watching it for free right now.
39:02 Uh, Michael, I’m gonna play this, uh, short clip uh talking a little about censorship, and then we’re gonna come back and go a little deeper on a couple of the And so I’m back with Michael. Uh, Michael, there’s probably too much to talk about today, so I’m just going to pick and choose some of the things that you went deep on. Obviously we’ve talked about DeFi, we’ve talked about freedom and censorship. Uh, talk to me about the metaverse, NFTs, because this is what’s getting everyone’s attention.
42:40 And I’ll tell you a really quick story. You know, I’ve got a 17- year-old daughter, and if you ever dealt with teenagers, uh, you know, there’s nothing easy about that situation, and I became the coolest dad in the world for about a week when I gave my daughter an NFT. Now Michael, I couldn’t, I could have given her a Porsche and I wouldn’t have been as cool, but when I sent her an NFT on her MetaMask wallet, by the way, that I set up for her after she was a guest on this show, and, uh, she now has crypto.
43:08 She now owns an asset at 17 years old. I’m sure you and I didn’t own assets when we were 17. And now she has the NFT, and, you know, so many people are captivated by these currently low-level pieces of art that are being expressed as NFTs. What did you discover about this phenomenon from you talking to the experts? How do you start having this conversation with people?
43:32 Yeah, so I start probably with the fact that the current use of NFTs is not where it all stops. Right? This is just what gets traction. So one of the cool things about the intersection of NFTs, gaming and the metaverse is that this is a really low-key way for people to engage with the world of crypto. It’s as much fun as anything.
43:59 And so, you know, this is a big onboarding ramp for Web3, and crypto is gaming. NFTs, though, they’re, I mean, they’re non-fungible tokens, right? So they’re one of the one. Anything that’s a one-of-one can be represented by an NFT or be an NFT. Um, NFTs and the metaverse.
44:21 Well, maybe let’s start with the big picture. What is the metaverse, as well? Right? So the metaverse, I think if you ask 10 people, you’ll get 10 different answers. Uh, to me, it’s the digital world where we go, and it gets more and more immersive as the technology comes.
44:39 But then I talked to Dan Mate, um, who’s a 75-year-old gentleman with more energy than you, and I put together, um, who is, he talks about the spatial web. Right? So the spatial web is this kind of merging of the physical and the digital world. So it’s almost like you took the metaverse and the real world, um, and you merge them together. But then, like, you know, say in the future when you want to research something, you’ll go into the metaverse library and you’ll pull a book down.
45:08 Maybe, you know, that’s kind of the things that he’s thinking of. What I found interesting is where the technology is today. Right, so Elon Musk makes the kind of analogy that we’re currently cyborgs. It’s just the interfaces, our eyeballs to our phone. It’s slow, and you know, so we’re trying to say the same thing about the metaverse.
45:28 Right? We’re working our way to a more and more digital experience in our lives, and so that’s the metaverse. It could be virtual reality, or augmented reality. It could be where, like, I’m walking around at a conference, we’ve both got the app on our phone, you know, we’re friends on the new social media platform that’s owned by everyone, and if I see a dot over here in my, you know, field of vision on my augmented reality glasses, it’s got your name, and I’m like, oh, Brian’s over there, I gotta go say hi.
46:02 Right, so that’s part of the metaverse, augmented reality. And then there’s this concept of the spatial web, and then Dan Mate shared a story about how they took an Amazon factory. They duplicated it in the digital world, so they made a carbon copy, but it’s digital, right, which is another trend inside of the metaverse. They applied artificial intelligence, and they improved, and they ran all these simulations inside this digital environment, and they increased efficiency by 40 in the factory.
46:38 They took the same concept with people in their training and put it into the digital world, and then ran simulations, and they took their training period from two days for a new employee down to 15 minutes for a new employee. So there’s all kinds of, you know, technology that’s in the space. In itself, I think that, you know, gaming and these fun art pieces are where it starts, but there are a lot of real-world applications in the business world and the entertainment world, like rewards programs, advertising.
47:15 Um, you know, there’s, that’s where you’re going to see some cool stuff happening, is with media and entertainment. Um, yeah, so it’s a big spot. Oh, and then it’s not just those things though, right? It’s also it could go into identity. Right, we touched on this earlier, part of the DeFi and the Web3 challenge, sort of one of the critical puzzle pieces that I don’t think anyone’s really solved is the problem of identity.
47:43 Right, identity is central to everything, because it ties you to your medical data, it ties you to your advertising data, it ties you to your financial data, and it’s a problem for people that we talked about earlier who may not have identity. And so it’s a critical piece for us to really unlock the full potential of this. Is the identity piece. Well, NFTs are one of one, and I think we’re both one of ones as well, right? So I could have an identity NFT that represents me in the digital world, and then that NFT I was talking to, you know, one of the projects I looked at has NFTs that can then own NFTs.
48:27 So you could have an NFT that controls these different segments of your data. Right, one that you wouldn’t mind renting out to an advertiser for discounts. Maybe you take your medical information and you can send it to any specialist and take it back without having to fill out a bunch of forms. Maybe you rent it to a medical research company, but it’s all tied to your identity. Right, and then you have your wallets outside of that.
48:55 So that’s a use case for NFTs. Mortgages, titles, um, all of those things. And there’s, there’s profound implications of having mortgages and titles on the blockchain, and the efficiencies that could be gained there, the disintermediation. So then entities are going to be huge. They’re going to be huge, and we’re just getting started.
49:16 Um, wow, those are some fantastic stories, Michael. You sound like a man who’s spoken with 50 different people over the past few months, right? Because, you know, I speak to a lot of people, but I haven’t heard these analogies, so it’s really eye-opening for me. You know, so many things to comment on there. I mean, you know, the metaverse took me a while to get my head around, and the truth is I’m still getting my head around.
49:39 Um, and again, one of my guests recently, Lyn Alden, who’s an OG, super smart lady in the space. She said, Brian, I’ll never fully understand Bitcoin, and so I think one of the big, big lessons to anybody listening to us or watching us now is that you don’t have to fully understand any of this stuff to use it. Um, do you know how the Hypertext Transfer Protocol works on a web browser? No, but you use it every day, so don’t be intimidated if you don’t know the whole story.
50:06 Is what I’d say to start. Um, you know, metaverse, you know, I had someone simply describe it as, you know, a WhatsApp group is a metaverse, because it’s a way where humans digitally communicate, or you could be in an Oculus where you’re inside a, you know, a digital, you know, 3D space and you’re working for Amazon. I mean, it could be all these different extremes, but they’re all metaverses. And I had a guest on my show who was one of the early investors of Axie Infinity.
50:32 His name is Yat Siu. He works for Animoca Brands, and I said, yeah, when I told my mom that there’s people in the Philippines that are making their living playing games, you know, she looks at me funny, because she’s 78 years old, and she says, something’s wrong with this world. And he said, Brian, he said, Brian, what are we doing right now? We wake up, we go to our computer, we interface, usually via video. At the end of the day, you put in eight hours, you do some tasks, and at the end of the month you get a check.
51:02 He said, how is that different than getting some tokens after you interact? Like, we’re all kind of playing a bit of a game in a metaverse, right? We are, especially with Zoom, like we’re all kind of logging into this digital world, giving some input, receiving some compensation in some form. You could argue a token maybe is more stable than a US dollar. Who knows?
51:22 Right? Once you can see that a game isn’t much different than a business or making a documentary film, these are all risk-reward kind of games that we play. You can start to see how we’re actually, we understand the metaverse more than we think. So absolutely, I think that’s a brilliant way you’re looking at it, and again, that NFT angle you said is really fascinating. Again, all it really means is a one-of-one.
51:47 The first iteration we’re seeing is, you know, JPEG files that are being sold: CryptoKitties, CryptoPunks, Bored Apes. Now Eminem has a Bored Ape. That’s no joke. Yeah, and we think, oh, it doesn’t make sense, it’s just a JPEG. But you know, the future iterations of these become very interesting, and when you can own your own data, it becomes even more interesting, and imagine, like you said, what if when you chose to use Facebook for the year, you could negotiate the price that you get based on your data?
52:18 What if you chose to reveal your medical data to these people, or your financial data, for these people, and you got to really, you know, control your information? What an incredible new world that would be. And so, you know, finally, it is the gateway drug for crypto right now. It used to be Bitcoin back in the day, it was the only thing that got people interested. Then it was stablecoins, because people could see, wow, I’m getting a really big yield compared to my bank.
52:39 But now NFTs, it’s pulling people in with the curiosity, the excitement, and it’s been a wonderful thing for the space. I don’t think anyone saw it coming 18 months ago. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, and it goes, it goes, like, it touches on another form of identity, right? Because we also have a social identity, right?
52:59 We do our hair a certain way, we dress a certain way, and we do that because it gives us an identity. And so people who don’t understand these things, like when I flex in the real world, when I wear my, you know, my Gucci or whatever, then I can maybe flex like 50 people if I’m in a room, you know, that’s how many people could probably see me at one time. But in the metaverse, like, you can flex the same way, but it’s to, like, anybody and everybody. And so, you know, it’s absurd that some people, maybe, maybe it’s absurd that some people pay thousands of dollars for a purse because it’s got a logo on it.
53:35 But, you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there’s that basic economic concept that what I give you, I value less than what I’m getting from you. So you know, it’s a fascinating way to look at, like you said, social identity. And if you look at our younger generation, again my daughter’s 17. You know, if you look at someone from the younger generation, their digital identity is, it’s very close to their real identity. You know, and yet, you know, when you and I were young, Michael, like, what we really wanted was a car, because a car gave us exposure to a community where we could then figure out our identity.
54:11 These days, like I said, I couldn’t give my daughter a car. She had no interest. She wants her digital identity, which again, sometimes is more important than your real identity, and then we see that play out with NFTs. And so you get, I had Justin Sun over here, who runs TRON, who, he said on the show, he’s like, Brian, I got more Ethereum than Vitalik. He said, of course I love Ethereum, and he buys, uh, ETH rock for a million dollars, and he sticks it on Twitter, and he just bought a 15 million dollar Bored Ape, and he buys pieces of modern art.
54:41 But you know, like you said, digitally with an NFT, now you can flex to millions. Um, and whereas before you had to do it in the room. If you had a piece of modern art, especially during lockdown, how many people would see it in your house? Like you said, 20, 50, a couple hundred. So it is kind of showing us maybe more of who we are as social beings.
55:04 Somehow, yeah, absolutely. I want to play a real quick clip from the series on metaverse, so we’re going to play that now. Again, if anybody wants to watch this series or start watching it now for free, go to londonreal.tv forward slash uncensored. Uh, it’s fantastic, and, uh, it goes so deep, so we’re gonna play this quick clip on metaverse, and So we’re back. Michael, just wanted to get, uh, yeah, just any final thoughts on metaverse before I move on to a couple more topics.
58:03 Yeah, you touched on it as well, the younger generation. Like anybody who thinks the metaverse sounds ridiculous just isn’t in touch with the younger generation. Like, my kids spend hours making their characters look, in, like, just a certain ways, part of the game itself. And then beyond that, though, like, these games and these kids are sophisticated, right? So now we homeschool.
58:27 So I, you know, I tend to think, like, we get a little bit of credit for this, but my son and I were watching his older brother’s basketball practice. He’s nine, almost ten, and we’re talking about a video game, because I want to show him I’m interested in what he’s interested in. And, you know, he was explaining to me that he’s got a business that operates inside of this video game, and it makes money. But the problem is, is there’s a lot of inflation, because anybody can increase the money supply, it will, and so it drives prices up.
59:03 And I’m, I like, I stopped. I was like, in my, da, am I dreaming? This is, is this real? Because this seems Very surreal right now, that my son just said that to me at nine years old, and I asked him some questions. It was very clear that he understood.
59:19 So now I think if we extrapolate that kind of thinking and realizing that these kids are a lot, I mean, they’ve got access to the world’s knowledge at their fingertips. We didn’t grow up with that. They got an advantage over us in that regards, but they’re not, they’re not simple, and they’re not dumb, and they are grasping these concepts. It’s a big part of their life. I see a future in which we’ve got worlds like Decentraland that have operating businesses inside of them that people pay to go visit those businesses.
59:52 And then from there I see us having a stock market inside of Decentraland that trades in those businesses that operate, because we’re going to see a replication of the real world in the digital world. And it may be silly, but I do think it’s actually important, because automation is going to replace a lot of current jobs. We’re going to have this transition. We need to find a new world, a new way to make money in a new world where things are just getting more and more automated, and you know, we got to figure things out.
1:00:24 So, you know, last thoughts on that. Those are fantastic. I mean, I’m blown away that your son, at nine or ten years old, probably has a better financial education than we had at 30, 35 after running businesses. So, um, that’s amazing, and what’s more interesting, I’d say, is that, you know, this whole concept of an open or closed metaverse, and obviously, you know, Facebook gave us the biggest piece of free press for the entire crypto industry when they renamed their company Meta.
1:00:53 So now people know, obviously Mark’s a very smart guy, and to actually make that shift in such a massive global company means that he knows where this is going. But yeah, clearly they’re a Web 2.0 phenomenon. They want to control this future metaverse, and we could talk about how dangerous that gets. I mean, I had a guest on recently that said, you know, when they change your news feed in Facebook, they could literally make people more angry or more sad based on your titles.
1:01:19 Now imagine you’re in a 360-degree metaverse, and there’s, hunt, you know, maybe there’s just horns honking in the background, not to mention whatever else. I mean, it’s not necessarily something you want a company to control, which is why my guests are constantly lobbying for an open metaverse, which means your son will be able to take the assets of that video game and move them to another video game, and move them to another video game, and that’s what makes the NFT exciting. Again, gaming companies have been these closed metaverses for a long time.
1:01:49 You know, there’s people that used to, I think, sell their gaming identities on eBay, and you could log in and get their, you know, their points and their shields and stuff. And so the future is where your son can transfer those assets and identity from game to game to reality, and, man, it’s, yeah, it’s so exciting, and the education factor, man, that’s it’s an important piece. Um, yeah, and then we all like gaming too. Humans like games, and I don’t consider myself a gamer, although I plugged myself into Axie Infinity a couple months ago and went through the experience, but we all love games, and I think the metaverse is teaching us that, as humans, that’s what we engage with, and it’s a great way to get us to learn.
1:02:27 So yeah, yeah, it’s a fantastic subject. Uh, look, I, I can’t go through every episode, but I got to ask you about a couple others. Again, if people want to watch this series, it’s londonreal.tv forward slash uncensored. We played a couple clips today, but it’s all going to be dropping in real time, so go start that now. Um, I guess I got to ask you a little bit about the dark side of crypto and just anything you learn from there, and then maybe wrap it up with some climate thoughts and then final thoughts from you.
1:02:53 Um, the dark side of crypto, that’s episode eight. You know, it sounds a little dark. Anything you want to tell us without spoiling it? Yeah, no. Um, we show people how to avoid the scams and the frauds that get perpetrated in crypto.
1:03:13 Um, I mean, it’s not that hard to really identify them. People just need, just, I mean, I use the metaphor of crossing the street, right? Closing your eyes, you know, and crossing the street’s pretty dangerous, but you know, if you just do a couple of peeks to each side, you know, it’s not that hard to spot. Um, and so we, we had our guests dive into that, because that’s just one of the big things that we wanted to make sure people understood. Um, anytime you’ve got a gold rush like this, you’re going to get people out there trying to scam you out of your money, and they’re going to look, like, the good guys until you, you know, dig a little deeper.
1:03:50 And then, you know, we talk about, you know, some of the fundamental research that you want to do on a project: understanding who’s behind the project, what their track record is, what their reputation is, if there’s VCs, are they good, reputable, you know, investors? And then, you know, value proposition, does it actually solve a real problem better than some other solution? So those basics, and then also looking, you know, at, uh, some of the stories of people who, um, you know, of rug pulls, for example, and other frauds like that.
1:04:21 Um, and then we, we took a look at, uh, the Silk Road. I actually interviewed Ross Ulbricht’s mom, and it was, it was amazing, and it was also one of the saddest, you know, it was these, the, the really only sad interview in the series, because you look at what happened to him. I mean, I have issues with the drug war in general. Personally, I don’t think it’s done any good. I think it’s created a lot of problems, and we’re seeing that play out right now, and not the least of which is fatherlessness.
1:04:59 Um, but, uh, that’s, that’s another conversation for another day. Um, yeah, I saw, I saw it. I saw that you interviewed his mom, and I think he was the one that was accused of being one of the Dread Pirate Roberts that ran the Silk Road, which used to allow you to take crypto and buy and sell a variety of things, um, including some you know, drugs that were illegal in some countries, but he’s now in federal prison for a long time. Right now, like 40 life sentences or something ungodly.
1:05:32 And if you actually, like, if you look at the other people who were accused of the same things, there’s a great disparity between the sentence that was given to him and what was given to the other people who were parties to the exact same thing. So he became the, the state goat, the fall guy. And one of the reasons I was willing to do this was because there are there are black markets, great markets, right now on the dark web where you can do horrible things to people, you know, everything from, from slavery.
1:06:01 Modern-day slavery is very real. Um, tens of millions of people, um, are slaves today, right now. Most people aren’t aware of that. Um, human trafficking, right, those kind of things that violate natural law. Right?
1:06:16 I don’t have the right to use violence to force you to do what I want. I don’t have the right to enslave another human. These aren’t really things that anybody should question, because they’re just self-evident. But, um, Silk Road didn’t have that. They were, they were buying.
1:06:37 There was, there was drugs, right? Mostly marijuana. There was some Molly on there, or whatever. I’m not sure exactly what Molly is. I think it’s, uh, there’s some psychedelics on there.
1:06:47 Yeah, yeah, that I might have heard about. It’s all things that are largely they’re largely like legal now, right? Um, and yeah, we’ve got this guy. Uh, anyway, so we wanted to give a little bit of a peek into the history, and also with this being like one of my, my, I think, reasons for doing this is to just to do good, right? And Ross is a really high-profile case in the, in the war against the drug war.
1:07:13 The war against the drug war. Um, and you know, showcasing that story and giving people an insight into you know, the black market history of crypto. And seeing that, you know, it’s not it’s not such a huge deal. I mean, there’s, there’s definitely bad things that have been done with both fiat currency and crypto, so we can’t, you know, eliminate those things. Um, but I wanted to, you know, hopefully get, get some, um, traction with, you know, getting his case re-examined.
1:07:49 Um, and then, you know, maybe, even maybe, this is, you know, very, very naive of me, that, you know, wouldn’t it be great if we could re-examine a lot of these non-violent drug offender cases? Yeah, yeah. I think it’s a real shame that he’s serving that sentence, for prison, uh, for for what he did. And again, it puts into light the whole war on drugs. We’ve had countless conversations on the show about how that’s just ruined lives.
1:08:16 And, you know, like you said, now, in, you know, if you look at it now, after they’ve changed laws, there’s still people serving life sentences for things that are currently legal today, and it makes you start asking a lot of questions. So I’m glad you highlighted that. It’s also important that you talked, you know, about some of the fraud that’s happening out there. And if you looked at, like, the 2017-18 ICO boom and bust, you look at a time where, you know, it was right for some people to take advantage, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes with bad intentions, but, you know, they raised a lot of money, sometimes for projects that didn’t happen.
1:08:50 These days, if you spend about 10 or 15 minutes, there’s actually quite a lot of information that you can use to do some due diligence. We call it the five T’s inside my academy. Within about 15 minutes, like you said, you can look both ways before you cross the street. It doesn’t mean you’re gonna miss, you know, the Lambo going 200 miles an hour, but you’re going to be fairly safe, because there’s a lot of information out there, and so, uh, I would say that people are safer than they think.
1:09:19 Also, you have to use common sense, and you also have to, you know, also use some basic risk management profiles and limit your exposure to this space, no matter how excited you are about it. You know, I’ve had Wall Street people here, like Anthony Scaramucci, who runs $10 billion to SkyBridge Capital, and he said, Brian, I’ve been sure about a lot of things in my career on Wall Street, and I was not always right. So what do I do? I always don’t put everything in it, you know, because I know I’m going to be wrong sometimes.
1:09:48 So exactly. It’s important to highlight in the space, especially now that there’s so many coins and protocols out there. I think CoinMarketCap has, like, something crazy, like, you know, 15,000 different protocols. Yeah, so it’s important to know that, and know the history, and again, all this links back into freedom, human rights, and you know, the world goes round and round. And again, the last point you made, I mean, HSBC and now I think RBS here in the UK have just paid another record hundreds of millions of fines for, you know, money laundering for illegal activities, and this happens all the time in the banking and fiat currency world, and yet previously, politicians and people who don’t want this new technology would like to point out it was the Silk Road and it was the crypto people.
1:10:35 The truth is, if you want to find out where money’s laundering, go to where the money is, which is in the banks. That’s right. Most of it’s happening. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely, or, you know, in this handy, you know, illegal black market called the drug trade, right, where we’ve, we’ve created this asset class that is kind of used for nefarious sins.
1:10:58 But yeah. And that, you know, and that’s a whole nother discussion that goes back to all sorts of things and cycles and people that are unbanked in poverty, and, you know, that’s probably another deeper discussion, but perhaps crypto will maybe give us another perspective on maybe what we’re doing to ourselves, kind of as a society, the same way that it’s given us a look at our own monetary policy. I would say, um, uh, look, like I said, Michael, there’s nine episodes here, each one of them is, you know, is, is quite long, you know, 90 to 100 plus minutes each.
1:11:34 You go deep on each one of these things. If people want to watch this, londonreal.tv forward slash uncensored. Um, tell me final thoughts or final perspectives that you got from this project, or that you want to leave people with, that maybe are new to this space or are still just trying to grasp some of the concepts that we’re talking about. You know, anything important that you want to tell them? Oh, man, so much, right?
1:12:01 But I would just say that, I mean, if you have concerns about the direction that the world is headed and you want the chance to be a part of solving them in a creative, non-destructive way, then you owe it to yourself to look at crypto through that lens. Right? It’s not just about the financial opportunity. It’s about the financial opportunity that comes by being able to serve and improve the lives of billions of people, and that’s the lens through which to view crypto.
1:12:38 Um, and if you dive into any one of these areas, you’ll see that it is focused on solving big problems that have major implications for our future. And I would say especially when you think about how artificial intelligence is being used today, right? It’s being used by politicians, advertisers, social platforms, people who make money, and by using artificial intelligence to learn what triggers you, what colors, what headlines, like you were saying, what images.
1:13:20 All of those things, that’s what AI is learning to do, and it’s doing it in a way that is, you know, well, they’re learning to turn us into puppets, to at least some degree, and it’s more effective with some than others, but when you think about the fact that you’ve got tech elites and authoritarian politicians who are controlling the artificial intelligence, and this being used to learn how to manipulate you, and I that’s when you realize the importance of owning your data and owning it in an encrypted format that the AI can only access with your permission. Right? So there there are some things like that that are playing out behind the scenes that, again, you don’t have to understand necessarily, and you don’t have to, you know, there’s a lot of ways to contribute to doing this, but it does take us all contributing, and it’s important that you keep up with what’s going on, even if you’re not putting, you know, a ton of money into this.
1:14:30 If you keep up and understand where we’re at today, over the next five years you’ll be prepared to take advantage of a lot of the opportunities that arise. And so even if it’s just really for entertainment value at this point, it’s a great thought experiment to look into crypto and ask yourself some of these really big questions. And then get out there and talk, crypto’s a lot, a lot about crypto is about the community, right? And that aspect of everyone should be able to present their ideas and the best idea should win.
1:15:04 Um, so yeah, get off the bench, get in the game. That’s my final thought. Yeah, really good points there. And I always tell people, you know, just start small. Start with 50 bucks, or you know, buy some Bitcoin, buy some Ethereum, start playing around.
1:15:19 You know, that’s a great way, the great way to understand an asset is to own a little bit of it. It’s not to listen to another podcast about it or read another book about it. It’s like you got to get in the arena, as Theodore Roosevelt once said. And again, you don’t have to sell the house and buy Bitcoin. Like, I don’t think anybody should do that, but you know, this is coming, and it will be the future, and you want to be a part of it early on, is what I would say.
1:15:44 And, you know, strangely enough, Michael, for the last 10 years I’ve had guests on London Real, and you know, at the end of these episodes we always ask, like, are we gonna make it, you know, as a species? And, you know, five years ago, you know, a lot of people would say, you know, what, unless we really get it together and we find a way to connect and start loving each other and make the right decisions? I don’t know. But with crypto, I see a lot of hope.
1:16:11 And, you know, Jeff Booth, which is a pretty, he’s a pretty mild-mannered Canadian guy, said Bitcoin might save humanity, and again, if you know Jeff, you realize it’s a bold statement for someone like that to make, because it potentially brings out the best in all of us. You know, an open blockchain means that maybe we can see everybody else’s behavior, and that means you’ve got to bring the best version of yourself every day to the world. Um, yeah, you know, there’s a lot of talk about privacy these days, and I think it’s important to have privacy, knowing your own reformation, but back when we were in a tribe of 50 or 100 people on the savannah, you know, you had to show up every day and do your job.
1:16:46 Now you might be grandma looking after the kids. You might be a hunter, you might be a gatherer, you might be a cook, you might be a kid, but you had to show up and deliver to that tribe every day, and it kind of made us the best versions of ourselves. You know, these days I feel like the blockchain somehow will, like you said, bring out the best in us, bring the best ideas to the top, and it actually could save humanity. I mean, it really could. Absolutely.
1:17:11 It’s absolutely. It’s the one glimmer of hope that I’ve really seen that I can latch on to in 10 years of talking to people. So absolutely. It’s not just about money. It’s not just about making money, or even making quick money.
1:17:26 There’s so much going on here. So I would say to anybody, take the first step, start learning. You’re not too old. I’ve got students in my academy that are 77 years old. My mom, in 78, just got her MetaMask wallet.
1:17:36 She’s got Ethereum, stablecoins. I sent her some Chainlink, because she gave birth to me, so you know. And she’s curious. She owns property. She owns real estate.
1:17:46 That’s how she survives in San Diego, like Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, he understands asset ownership. So again, crypto’s not just for the kids, it’s for everybody. And, um, you know, your series, what I love about what you’ve done, Michael, is it’s accessible to anybody, and it’s presented in a way where I think you can pull in everybody, from my 17-year-old daughter to my 70-year-old mother. And so yeah, I just want to say thank you.
1:18:11 It’s just an honor and a privilege to be part of your series. Um, I really like your work, Michael, because you bring a philosophy to it, and again, I had a famous guest on my show named Simon Sinek, and he has a book called Start With Why, and right, and his argument is, if you can define why you’re doing something, then people will buy into your why. And like you said, Michael, you spent some time where you basically locked yourself in a room for 60 days.
1:18:35 I said, what am I going to do next? It shows that this series is about making the world a better place, and it comes through in the content. So seriously, congratulations for all the hard work. I really encourage everybody to go watch it again, link below, londonreal.tv forward slash uncensored, plus you can see me. So I appreciate you featuring us in there as well, Michael, but amazing people, amazing content.
1:18:58 Um, and looking forward to the launch and seeing the impact it makes on everybody out there. Um, what’s next for you after this? Are you going to continue making great content? Absolutely. Yeah, so we’ll transition right out of the, um, world premiere into just continued publishing operations.
1:19:17 We got more docu-series coming down the road, you know, so we’ll continue to pump out great content. What I see myself doing is to continue to look for ways to level the playing field for the little guy, so, you know, for example, you know, that on Wall Street, that guy who’s executing the trade is supported by a team, right? They’ve got researchers and analysts, and it’s feeding up to someone who is making the trade decision. And so, you know, when Main Street goes out there and they, um, go to invest against these professional teams, they’re at a disadvantage.
1:19:56 So that’s another thing that can be made accessible through the community, right? So we want to provide that kind of same sort of support and information and info to our audience, and so we’ll continue to do that. I want to support great crypto projects and spur adoption and really just kind of use the momentum in the community that I’m able to build through this to just continue to, to do good things and do so in a in a profitable way. Yeah, good. I think there’s nothing wrong with that.
1:20:33 You know, two of my mottos in my DeFi Academy are, you know, help us create the decentralized financial infrastructure of the future, and get two billion people in the world, you know, proper banking services, and at the same time, create generational wealth for yourself. I think they go hand in hand. I’m a big fan of free market capitalism, of great ideas getting great rewards and pulling people in, and I love the ideas you’re talking about. I spent 15 years in finance and Wall Street, Chicago and London, so I’ve seen the whole side of banking, and, uh, you know, we need to decentralize it, and so, uh, that’s where we have our DeFi Academy.
1:21:10 That’s why I love projects like this, and so, uh, yeah, looking forward to the content you’re creating in the future, Michael. Really appreciate you making this, really love being a part of it. Would like to be a part of anything you’re doing in the future. It’s called Uncensored Crypto. It’s nine episodes.
1:21:23 You can start watching it for free, londonreal.tv forward slash uncensored. Uh, really check it out. Again, that’s a lot of work to be done in just a few months’ time, so congratulations, Michael, and look, looking forward to more of your projects in the future. Awesome, thank you, Brian, really appreciate it. All right, fantastic.
1:21:41 Thank you all for watching. We will see you next time on London Real. Take care.
