Teeka Tiwari - Why DeFi Is The Single Biggest Trend Since The Commercialisation Of The Internet

Full transcript: Teeka Tiwari on London Real

2:39 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose, my guest today. This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Tika Tiwari, the former Wall Street trader turned cryptocurrency and decentralized finance influencer and thought leader.

2:59 At age 16, you moved from England to New York City, which is $150 in your pocket. And two years later, you became the youngest employee at the Wall Street Investment Bank Lehman Brothers. Over the course of your career, you made millions upon millions of dollars and went on to launch a successful hedge fund. You have predicted the number one performing cryptocurrency in 2016, 2017, 18, 19, and 20, and having your own words, quote, help more people make more money from crypto than any other human being on the planet.

3:31 You are the editor of the Palm Beach Research Group and you recently joined the board of directors at DeFi Technologies, a company that makes it easier for people to gain access to DeFi protocols. I’m excited to talk today about DeFi, which you describe as, quote, the single biggest world-changing wealth-generating trend since the commercialization of the internet. Tika, welcome back to London Real. It’s a pleasure to be here, Brian. Thanks for having me.

3:58 Tika, I’m so excited. You’ve been here on London Real since 2019 talking about decentralized finance. It seems like the world is finally listening. The game is changing and it’s happening so fast, Tika. I wanna get your thoughts on it and also bring everybody up to speed who’s watching us that doesn’t really understand DeFi or decentralized finance.

4:18 Just a couple of data points to throw at you. My 17 year old daughter Gabby was here on Friday and we talked for over an hour about crypto and DeFi. And afterwards, Tika, we set her up with a hot wallet and she’s got ETH. And one of her first assignments is to transfer some ETH to grandma. My mom, 76 years old in San Diego, California, who two weeks ago, I was on the phone with her And she’s about Robert Kiyosaki’s age.

4:46 She’s got 50 apartment units that she lives off of in San Diego, talk about owning assets. And she’s asking me how to spell Ethereum, Tika. She’s literally listening to me and asking me questions about this. So I got three generations really coming up the curve on crypto assets, decentralized finance. And at the same time, I got hundreds of students around the world going through my DeFi Academy.

5:08 And it’s just been incredible for me to finally see what I feel like you’ve seen, Tika, for years. And again, you were buying ETH back when it was $7 and we’ll talk about your whole journey. For people that are just tuning in, how do you start to explain what’s happening in decentralized finance, why it’s important and why all of us kind of need to realize it’s happening? How do you have that conversation with people? I think the first thing is to really explain what decentralized finance means.

5:41 It’s a term that’s getting bandied around and people are using it as if they know what it means. And I think people might be a little embarrassed to ask, well, okay, what exactly does it mean? So I’ll take that embarrassment and I’ll explain what decentralized finance is. Right now in the world that we live in, in the world that you and I grew up in, we have centralized finance where you have these regulated middlemen intermediaries that manage our financial system.

6:09 So if I want to get a loan, I have to go to a bank. If you have an asset and you want to get a loan against it, you’ve got to go to a bank or some type of lending institution. So what decentralized finance is, is where instead of having a trusted intermediary like a bank, you have a piece of software. And I think that’s something a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their head around. How do I interact with a piece of software?

6:38 Well, normally you couldn’t because that software could be hacked or could be manipulated and moved around or controlled by a third party that you don’t wanna have controlling it. Decentralized finance couldn’t happen until we had the emergence of blockchain technology. And blockchain technology is this technology that underpins DeFi that allows you to have these self-automated computer programs that have all the logic they need in order to create that function of a bank.

7:14 So I’ll give you a prime example. Up until recently, you couldn’t get loans, at least easily, against your Ethereum. So let’s say you were a big whale in Ethereum, you’ve got thousands of Ethereum. You don’t want to sell it, but you want to make some money from it. So this is where decentralized finance applications first came about.

7:34 So you had programmers put together these programs that said, OK, you can lend your Ethereum to this platform, and then that platform will then lend the Ethereum out to other people and will charge an interest rate for that. And it will do it in this decentralized way. It will manage all the custody. You don’t have to worry about that. You’ll still maintain custody of your coins.

8:00 And all of a sudden, we had this lending market that was just really an idea in a couple of programs’ minds that was nothing, that’s now a $100 billion market that has absolutely no individual sitting in the middle other than the self-executing computer programs. So think about this. If there was a $100 billion lending market in the traditional space right now, the costs associated with that would be massive. And you’d need literally tens of thousands of employees in order to manage that. But with DeFi, you can do it with a handful of programmers or a community of programmers that are just keeping up the smart contract and adding new functionality to it.

8:46 So to give you an idea of how disruptive decentralized finance is, there is one of these protocols called Uniswap. And Uniswap allows you to take one token and swap it for another token. So similar to what we would do on Coinbase, we’re going to use some Bitcoin to buy some Ethereum, or we’re going to use some Ethereum to buy some 0x, for instance. Well, when you use a centralized broker, well, sometimes they don’t allow you to log on if it’s too busy, right?

9:21 We’ve had hours away even locked out of Coinbase. It’s slow, and it’s really expensive. Now, with Uniswap, you simply have control over your asset. You say, okay, I own XYZ coin, I want to own this other coin. Uniswap will let you know, well, here’s the transfer rate, here’s how much you get. You push a button, and it’s done. And it’s 70% cheaper, and it’s much faster and nobody can block you. There’s no exchange to say, oh, sorry, the doors are closed.

9:53 You can’t come in here. Or when we saw with Robinhood, oh, sorry, we don’t have enough capital to clear your trade. You can’t do anything. So the reason why DeFi will eat the centralized finance world is it’s faster and it’s cheaper and not just a little bit cheaper, a lot cheaper. Think about this, Coinbase is one of the largest centralized exchanges in the world for cryptocurrency.

10:20 It took over a half a billion dollars in capital and over 1200 employees to get them to where they are now. Uniswap, within the first six weeks of it operating as a protocol on the Ethereum network, was generating as much daily trade volume as Coinbase was, and it did it with 11 million dollars in capital and less than a dozen employees. You can’t beat that, right? Yeah. So many things you just said there, Tika, I think you’re making a reference to, I think it’s a Mark Andreessen quote or a Horowitz quote that said, software is going to eat the world, right? These were guys that were involved in the internet startup boom with Netscape and other software companies. And they said, software will eat the world, which kind of means that is that when you get the computers involved, it kills all the inefficiencies and makes better products for everybody.

11:12 Now you’re saying, look at that happen in real time with two examples, a centralized exchange, Coinbase, with a lot of people use and my students use, and then Uniswap. And we spoke months ago, Tika, and when you showed me this exact thing, the volume, and I always joke with my students, you got, like you said, 1,200 boys at Coinbase, and you got four guys and a dog or three ladies and a cat in Tel Aviv, or in Stockholm, or sometimes they’re anonymous, right? And they create this piece of software that either works or doesn’t.

11:43 There’s probably 20 other protocols we’ll never hear about because they didn’t work. But this one does, and then you see the volume and it’s verified on the blockchain. And one of my students asked me the other night, he said, Brian, when will you know there’s critical mass in this market? And I said, I already saw it. I saw it with Uniswap.

12:00 It was almost hands down because now you see this piece of software and all the barriers to entry are gone. When I worked on Wall Street and when Beboop worked on there, I was at Bankers Trust. We needed a balance sheet, right? We needed to be approved by the Fed. We needed at least 10 or 20,000 employees to get us that balance sheet.

12:18 We were one of 20 institutions, Tika, probably doing advanced derivatives, maybe less, that could even conceive of such a product. Now, you got people all over the world that are doing the same thing we were doing and who wins, it’s the end user that wins in the end, right? Yes, yes, it’s the end user that wins. And again, I want to make clear that none of this could have happened without that fundamental blockchain technology. And this brings me back to a lesson that I got from the early days of the internet.

12:49 In 1994, when I first got exposed to the internet, we had no idea of what the highest and best use case of the internet would be, we couldn’t conceptualize it. And I remember three years ago when people were talking about blockchain saying, oh, it’s interesting, but it has no use. People were saying the same thing in the early 90s about the internet. Well, of course it has no use yet. We haven’t figured out how to use it, but it has use. If you can have everybody all over the world talk together under the same language as TCP IP using this protocol, that has value. We’re not sure how that value is going to be expressed, but that has value. And so when I looked at blockchain technology in 2016, and I saw it, here was a way to exchange value. Here was a way to secure data and do it in a way that was cheap and in a way that didn’t rely on a third party. I knew that was a multi-trillion dollar idea. I didn’t know what the exact expression of it was going to be. And so the reason why I’m saying all of this is that we are now in that next stage, where we have real world changing business applications for this technology.

14:01 And when I say that decentralized finance will be the biggest wealth producing event since the commercialization of the internet, that’s not hype. You’ve got to think about the amount of inefficiency that resides within the financial sector. And as far as the financial sector has come with in terms of its adoption of technology, it’s still using technology from the 1960s and the 1970s. It’s still running on FORTRAN mainframes, on mainframes that literally are programmed in these ancient computer languages, FORTRAN, Pascal, COBOL. Those guys are dying that know how to to write in cobalt, right? They’re 60, 70 years old. But Wall Street, if it’s not broke, let’s not fix it. They’re the last area that hasn’t been completely and utterly disintermediated by technology, the way that retailers have, the way that Blockbuster was, the way that so many other businesses and services have been utterly shattered and blown apart by And it really couldn’t happen to a better group of guys than for the finance guy.

15:12 I mean, it’s funny you say if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. That’s this whole concept of the innovator’s dilemma. And so you don’t have to be, you know, conspiring or evil. It just means that if you’ve got a great business, you stick to the business. And the banking sector, I mean, Tika, you and I both spent 10, 15 years inside.

15:33 We know what it’s like. Once you’re in there, it’s this incredible money-making hopper where people that would normally work at Domino’s Pizza are making over a hundred grand, picking up the phone, talking to people. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little. No, no, no, that’s accurate. I’ve seen that.

15:48 I’ve absolutely seen it. Guys that have a very narrow skill set and a very, that anywhere else will be loading boxes in a truck for McDonald’s are making not a hundred grand. They’re making a million. Millions, I know. and they focused on the five year treasury and they’ve got three clients that are mutual funds.

16:08 They talk to them every day, they take them out to dinner in New York City once a year and they’re really good at the one thing. But if they weren’t there, like you said, they might be loading boxes and I noticed this when I was in the city and so they protected this business model. I think it was Utica that said the banking industry takes six to eight percent of GDP out of the market every year. We know it’s like over $9 trillion is what that centralized banking institution takes out.

16:36 And yet, no one has any idea it’s happening because it’s been invisible all of our lives, Tika. I made an analogy the other day when I was teaching in my academy. It’s like you were born in a zoo, but you’re really a wild animal. You used to have a relationship with finance back in the day when we were hunters and gatherers, you could see value. Now it’s like you were born in a zoo and you were told, well, the money, don’t worry about the money.

16:56 It’s handled by these people over here and you’re not smart enough and we’re gonna stick it in these things and you won’t see it one day and you don’t even know what we’re doing it and we’ll throw you a few scraps in your cage every now and then and you know you’re in there, you know something’s not right, Tika. You know you don’t really have access to it but you still are in this weird illusion and so I think it’s really important that people like you and me talk about this because this is a bigger disruption than what we saw the internet do and right now banking, what they’ve done, Tika, is with FinTech, they’ve plugged in tech solutions onto their antiquated way of doing things, right? So now you can get online access to do a Swift transfer that takes three days and takes huge 2% fees.

17:43 It hasn’t yet gone into the software, which is the real innovation. And they’re probably, and they’re resisting. It hasn’t. And that’s why they will, many of the very profitable businesses that banking enjoy right now, specifically in remittances will get disintermediated away. One area that I think is extremely exciting is we started to see several people in the DeFi space launch equity derivatives.

18:11 So they would have derivatives of Tesla or of Apple stock. And what’s great about that is that you can, using the blockchain, you can tie it one for one to actual shares. Now, the minute the global financial system saw that, they lost their mind. I don’t know if you saw this, but there was this global coordinated attack against Binance banning them from doing business in all these different areas because they were facilitating these trades. Think about it.

18:42 Once you move all these trades to the blockchain, well, you basically kill the stock loan business. So for those of you that don’t know, stock loan is when you have shares that your customers have had your custody on the behalf of your customers, and then you loan them out to short sellers, and you make a fortune on them. In the DeFi space, you’d be able to do the same thing, except you as the holder of the stock would get that money instead of the brokerage firm.

19:13 So the brokerage firms hate the idea of brokerage assets like stocks moving to the blockchain because you can’t go 140% net short anymore. You can only go short with the amount of shares that are out there. You see everything is completely transparent. You can’t hide trades, and they’re petrified of this future. But I will tell you here and now, somebody will create a way to do this, to have these equity derivatives and do it in a completely decentralized way that no government and no regulatory agency will be able to stop. And when they do that, mark my words, you will see that protocol be worth billions. And you will see more volume go through that protocol than you see go through the New York Stock Exchange. It’s coming. And if you don’t prepare yourself for that future, You’re just going to watch it emerge, and it’s another life-changing opportunity that you didn’t pull the trigger on. The beautiful thing that we have now as individuals is that we get the head start against all these institutions because their charters, for most of them, don’t even let them buy this stuff, not unless it’s in an equity wrapper. And that’s something that attracted me to DeFi Technologies, the company I’m working with. They’re taking these protocols, putting them into equity wrappers so institutions can buy them. But that’s a that process is still going on. So as individuals, we can get ahead and buy these protocols before all these institutions can come

20:46 In. And that’s an incredible money making opportunity right now. It’s a life changing opportunity for people that take the time to learn about decentralized finance, to learn about this space and get educated on the good projects versus the bad ones. Yeah, I think education is key. I think, you know, whether it’s intentional or not, our lack of education allows us to be exploited financially.

21:11 And we’ve kind of been grown up, I mean, you know, with Robert Kiyosaki when he comes here, he said, Brian, when I was a kid, in class, I said, when are we gonna learn about money? And he said, we don’t teach you about money. And you know, my boys, Caden and Damon are four and five, and I don’t think anyone’s teaching them about money either. So the education system hasn’t changed. And so my question to you, Tika, is how do people get educated?

21:34 I threw my daughter Gabby in on the deep end on Friday. That’s what I do with my students. I just get them on the centralized exchanges to get the fiat currency into crypto, and I haven’t tried doing these protocols even before they’re ready. Now Gabby was a little bit fumbling on her mobile, but now she’s got a hot wallet and some ETH that she’ll send to grandma. What do you think is the best way for people to embrace the protocol, be ahead of the curve, and potentially create wealth around this movement?

22:02 Well, I think the first step is to get comfortable with the technology. So go watch a bunch of videos on YouTube, how to set up a wallet, how to stake tokens, what is Uniswap, what is Aave, what is Compound, and go spend five or 10 hours, literally five or 10 hours watching free videos. There’s so much incredible information out there. Then get $100, $200, whatever the equivalent is in your local currency. Put it on, buy some ETH, put it on a MetaMask wallet and start messing around with all these different types of staking protocols that are out there.

22:41 And again, there are excellent step-by-step guides on the internet, step-by-step guides on YouTube and put 20 bucks in, put $10 in, but play around, get educated and do it with a small amount of money because you’re gonna make mistakes. You’re going to send money to the wrong address and you’re not going to be able to get it back. You’re going to send Bitcoin to an Ethereum address or Ethereum to a Bitcoin address. You’re going to make mistakes. So just make mistakes on small dollars and get educated.

23:09 I promise you that investment of time, 10, 15 hours will put you so far ahead of everyone. You’re automatically going to start knowing, oh, okay, this protocol is getting a lot of use. Okay, it’s just something I want to have a part of at least own a little bit of, or, wow, this protocol, they talk big, but there’s nothing really going on. And so you start getting into the community. It’s still early enough where you can get into the community and you can learn things directly from the community.

23:41 Of course, you’ve got to be careful. There are scammers and pump and dumpers and all that kind of stuff out there. So stick with the big protocols and start taking yourself up the learning curve. And I know you’ve been doing a lot of work educating people on how DeFi works as well. Yeah, and that’s exactly what we do.

24:00 We start small, like that’s a hundred bucks or 200 bucks. And Tika, you’re right. Invariably, my students make mistakes. I tried to send 10 ETH and I got the wrong address and I said, okay, you made a mistake, not 10 ETH, $10 worth of ETH. And they said, you made a mistake that cost you $10 or $20, better than it costing you $20,000.

24:18 So you’re learning all these things with some bumps and bruises. You burn your finger on the stove, but you still got your hand. And this week, my students are swapping, are lending their crypto on Aave. They’re on Uniswap, which it’s funny, Tika, to hear my students react from Coinbase to Uniswap because they go from this customer-centric experience with 1,200 employees and help desks, right? And maybe pop-up chats to a piece of software.

24:48 And I asked them, we kind of laugh about it, that the user experience is very different, right? One of them is super hand holding and there’s lots of human touch points. The other one is not, but the other one’s a piece of software and it can run like a Lambo if it needs to. And it’s a piece of software and it has that feel. But again, they’re lending, they’re doing liquidity pools, which at least get them up the curve.

25:12 And they’re making little mistakes here and there, but man, they learn so fast. And I would implore, like you said, everybody here, If you don’t have this now, take 100 bucks, get some ETH on a centralized exchange, that’ll take you a little bit to set up, you’ll understand that process, and start playing around. The community is amazing. You have to be careful, for sure. But not only is this the future, Tika, not only is this an incredible investment opportunity, I mean, this is your future reality, right?

25:40 As finance. You owe it to yourself to learn about this. If you’re sitting there thinking this is too difficult or this is just a fad. This will be your life every day, all day, within five to 10 years when you wanna buy insurance, when you wanna buy stocks, when you wanna get involved in the investment world, you’re gonna be interacting with a smart contract. It might have a prettier user interface and easier to use user interface, but you’re gonna be working with a smart contract.

26:12 And the reason why I can be so confident in that is that corporations and especially Wall Street, everything is about reducing costs. So if you can cut your costs by 70 or 80 or 90%, which you can do with certain applications of blockchain technology, you’re going to adopt it. So I talked about trade settlement before. There’s one side of Wall Street that never wants to see trade settlement go to the blockchain because they make so much money with keeping everything obscure.

26:44 There’s another side that absolutely wants to move everything to the blockchain because they spend $20 billion a year clearing trades. There must be at least a half a million people around the world that are employed just clearing trades, literally with a piece of paper like this saying, and they’re marking off trades. They’re still using paper and pencil. Oh, I remember so when I was a baggage trust in 93 I had direct lines to the mercantile exchange on the board of trade and we would trade thousands of your dollar Contracts on the Merc every day and at the end we would we would you know We would go through all of our trades and I remember asking the guy something about how much do you get for clearing?

27:27 And I remember he said something like oh, it’s like two or three bucks a contract and I remember thinking briefly I was too busy with my own P&L thinking and that’s a lot of money And so again, Tika, you have a great point. There’s a whole chunk of the banking industry that relies on this behind the scenes that no one sees, but it ends up taking a chunk out of your savings income, the world GDP, doesn’t it? And so these inefficiencies are going to help everybody and help volume and help liquidity. And it’s only a matter of time.

28:00 Correct. It is only a matter of time. And the reason why, again, I can confidently say that, which I couldn’t confidently say four years ago. I said, you know, there’s enormous risk here, but the opportunity is so vast, just you just take a small position. And listen, if it doesn’t work, it goes to zero, you don’t lose that much money. But because we’re so early, if it does work, you’re going to see monumental gains. And that’s absolutely been proven true. But we’re in a different phase now, Bitcoin. And I talk about Bitcoin because it is the underpinning asset of this entire ecosystem that kicked everything off. It is the linchpin asset. It’s the dollar, if you will, meaning the funding currency of everything, really Bitcoin and Ethereum. They are the premier funding assets. I guess the equivalent of in our world, it would be like US Treasuries. The capital markets are basically built of US Treasuries and the rehypothecation of US Treasuries.

29:01 So, the point I’m trying to make is that now Bitcoin is being widely accepted by the financial infrastructure. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency here in the United States last year gave the green light for banks to start actively custody cryptocurrency and actively working with cryptocurrency actors. like the pope coming down and giving you that holy benediction, you kiss the ring and you say, okay, you can work in this space. So once that happened, that opened the doorway for institutional adoption of Bitcoin. Well, if you have institutional adoption of Bitcoin, you have institutional adoption of crypto, that means the doorway is now open to the institutional adoption of decentralized finance protocols. So to me, it’s a done deal. You pull back the camera, you look at how the chain tracks are being built across the country with this destination of crypto and DeFi, and this big train loaded up with institutional money. You don’t have to have a degree from MIT like yourself. Yeah, I mean, Tico, we’ve talked about this before. And I remember I’ve, you know, Texted you a few times saying, you know, are we should be worried about regulation and you’re like Brian The big players are already involved. You can’t say no when JP Morgan’s clients want crypto You can’t say no when these things happen the momentum is already there and it’s it’s really in powerful insight from Yautica because Not a lot of people can tell me that with confidence. But when you say it, I’m like, man

30:44 And maybe you got a really good point, whereas sometimes the news media and maybe our governments want us to be scared, want us to think this is all gonna be stopped, but you don’t believe that, do you? No, I think we’ve crossed, I’ve said this before, we’ve crossed the Rubicon. If we were going to be stopped, if this wasn’t going to happen, then there’s no way on God’s green earth, Mass Mutual, PNC, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley would offer these products to their clients.

31:18 There’s just no way. It just would not happen. Right, right. That’s a powerful insight because these people somehow are all intimately involved with the Fed. You know, they all know each other.

31:33 We saw the bailout. It’s a revolving door between them. They work at the Fed and they go work at Goldman and they work at Goldman and they go work at the Fed go work at Treasury. I mean, that’s just the way that world works. You don’t think that the top guys at Goldman are calling Treasury and saying, hey, listen, we’re getting involved. Or they’re speaking to the guys over at the Fed, one of the governors, and say, listen, we’re making these moves. You don’t think they have those conversations? Maybe not over the phone. Maybe it’s over a coffee. But of course they do. They can’t. Do you think Goldman Sachs can get involved in Bitcoin without knowing that their ass isn’t legally covered, there’s no way, I mean, it would be naive to think that Goldman Sachs that makes billions and billions of dollars would take that kind of risk.

32:21 They wouldn’t. Yeah, they wouldn’t. And again, who did Trump appoint as the Treasury Secretary was ex-Goldman guy, right? The last administration. So, and again, we know that world and it is a revolving door.

32:32 I mean, just go, you know, look at the CVs. It’s from here to there. So that’s powerful. It’s interesting, Tika, because I tell my students, be careful of the narrative in the media. First of all, I think every piece of news is designed for two purposes.

32:47 First of all, to get your attention. The second of all, to transact. Usually those are both the wrong decisions at the time. But it’s also, it’s a different narrative and it’s trying to hijack you one way, right? So the government, sometimes it seems like it wants to scare people out of crypto, but then if you read between the lines like you’re doing, Tika, then you know the institutional money’s going in.

33:06 So you know they can’t stop that because then you’re literally stopping people’s bread from getting buttered and it means they can’t get the places in the Hamptons and it is a little bit of a boys and girls club in that sense. Yes, you’ve got to look at the economic incentives. If you really want to get far in life. Follow the money. You got to follow the money.

33:29 You’ve got to follow the money and the money is flooding into this space And not for ideological reasons, Brian, but because they see Coinbase made $2 billion in profit last quarter. Binance’s profit is bigger than Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank’s been around for more than a century. It’s literally the Bank of Germany, and they’re making more money. So I want to impress upon everybody watching today, as greedy as you think you may have been in your life, as greedy as you think somebody in your life has ever been, the greed of a Wall Street banker will eclipse anything you can possibly imagine. Imagine yourself at the most rapacious, greediest you’ve ever been times it by 10, and you’re beginning to understand the greed of a typical banker. Tell me I’m wrong. No, you’re right, Tika. And, you know, again, It’s not like they necessarily attract the worst people in the world, but they stick you in an environment where, I remember when I first started on Wall Street, Tika, people called a million dollars a buck.

34:43 They probably did this back in your day. And how much money you make today, I’m up two bucks. I’d be like, you mean two million dollars? And they’re like, yeah, but it’s only two bucks. So soon, a large amount of money becomes a small amount of money.

34:55 And then one guy making 10 million over here. One guy’s making 20 million and it’s not enough, right, Tika? It’s not enough and the bank’s looking to what’s the new market where we can make more money and higher margins and how can we do it? So you you you get in this environment where as but Fox said to Gordon get go how much is enough How many boats can you water ski behind and Gordon goes back and said it’s it’s a it’s a game a zero-sum game Somebody wins somebody loses and you start to see the mentality of Wall Street, right?

35:22 This is where we grew up fortunately or unfortunately, but now we understand it, right? And so Attica makes a great point here and this is really important when JP Morgan’s institutional Investors are buying it’s not like there’s some dude out in the Midwest who’s running, you know Billions of dollars in a teacher’s pension fund suddenly believes in the blockchain It’s because he sees an asset that’s going up and he doesn’t want to be left behind. I want some of that That’s what he says, right?

35:52 I remember we had someone call up Bankers Trust in the 90s and they literally called up a salesperson and said I want to buy some derivatives and everybody laughed on the floor because we all knew you mean a swap or an option or do you want this or that and I Said I just want some derivatives and everybody laughed But we shouldn’t have laughed because it’s the same type of mentality, right? People want to get in on it It doesn’t mean there’s also not people that understand this tech But it’s an asset class that’s growing and the world wants to be a part of it and you can’t stop that train Correct. Yeah, it’s the train has left the station. And if you’re sitting there saying, well, that train shouldn’t exist, and that train shouldn’t be on these tracks, and these tracks shouldn’t exist, and this shouldn’t happen, and this isn’t real. Well, you’re going to get run over by that train, and you’re going to find out just how real it really is. Yeah. All right, Tika, I want to do a little bit of a flashback to old days at some point and talk about you recommending to buy ETH at $7.

36:49 I also wanna get your take on some of these new protocols that are out there. But before we do that, you mentioned something interesting about banks and then also government regulation. I thought we’d just finish this up as we speak. I got a text message from NatWest here, which is NatWest National Westminster Bank here in Britain so people don’t know. It’s probably one of the top three retail banks here.

37:10 And they said, we’re concerned about your money and in order to protect you, We’re not gonna allow you to use your credit or debit card on Binance any longer. And I thought, wow, I’ve been a customer for 20 years and I’ve never ever seen them so concerned about my money. When I call them up to ask about the fees they charge every year, both in my business and my personal, they never seem to give me good explanations. They’re constantly putting my account on hold because of fraud that doesn’t exist to protect themselves.

37:38 And I got that text message, first time they texted me, Tika. And I thought to myself, okay, what’s going on here? They obviously don’t want me in crypto. And then I thought, I would ask you, so how are the banks reacting? And then what’s your read on how the government’s reacting?

37:58 This infrastructure bill went through. Some people say it was good. Some people say it was bad. Thoughts on regulation. And then I wanna go back to the good old days.

38:08 Regulation is going to be patchy and hand fisted. If we look at this infrastructure bill that you’re talking about, there was a clause in there that said that anybody that acts as a broker has to provide 1099s, which is a tax reporting form here in the United States. The problem is it didn’t give really good guidance as to who is a broker and it could be broadly interpreted. I think it was written that way specifically. If you look at American securities laws and tax laws, they are very broad, and then that gives the regulatory agency the ability to write interpretive letters about how to interpret it.

38:49 And, you know, looking at it from the regulator standpoint I understand why they do that because this technology is changing so quickly, they need the ability to have that that flexibility if they say it’s, it’s only accurate under these very specific circumstances. Well, guess what? You got some of the most brilliant people in the world. They’ll figure out a way around those circumstances, and now you’ve got a whole nother area that’s completely unregulated.

39:18 Now, that’s not a popular point of view, but I will tell you right now, if you wanna see this sector grow, it needs guardrails and it needs regulation. I don’t want somebody taking my pension fund money and banging it in and out of DeFi protocols without some type of regulatory guardrails up. Now, if I make that choice myself, That’s my choice, but I don’t want some institution running off with my pension fund money in an unregulated market doing things that I don’t know about, right?

39:50 Does that make sense? Yeah, and I’ve heard this from a bunch of intelligent people out there when a lot of the early adopters, the hodlers, the revolutionaries say, stop trying to regulate our market, it’s the future, leave it alone. But then people that have been around have said, You know what, let’s actually get regulated because this will make it even better and it’s going to happen sooner or later and it actually might get us adopted faster. It’s almost like the parent coming in and saying, guess what kids, let’s do it the right way and it’ll be even better.

40:23 And that’s more the way you see it. I do. I do see it that way. Now, will they get it wrong? Yes, they’ll get it wrong.

40:30 They’ll be hand-fisted, the pendulum will swing more one way and then the other. But the key thing here that we need to focus on is that the government is not incentivized to take a negative approach against crypto, and I’ll tell you where I got that insight. They’re looking to raise $28 billion in capital gains taxes from crypto. Well, you don’t get any money from a dead goose that lays the golden eggs, and nobody understands that more than a politician in terms of how to bleed us for tax money.

41:04 So the fact that they see this golden goose can lay $28 billion worth of eggs, well, they got to protect it, right? They might be a little bit too constrictive to begin with, and they’ll say, well, okay, all right, the money’s slowing down, let’s restrict a little bit. They want the money. It’s just follow, again, follow the economic incentives. Now, they’ve got to have guardrails up, I get it.

41:28 My call is that you’ll probably see Treasury come out with some interpretive guidelines makes it very clear who is a broker, who isn’t a broker. But the other side of this is it’s too early to start freaking out about this because it’s still got to go through the House, and that could take months. It could get killed in the House. It could get changed. We don’t know. My take is whether it gets approved in the House or not, at the end of the day, we’ll have interpretive letters to guide us as this industry grows. And if for no other reason than the economic incentive, then the federal government needs the goddamn money.

42:03 Yeah, I think it’s always important for everybody to take a step back and realize that what did Andrew Carnegie say? Financial motive must prevail. And the government sees this as a great way to get more money. And, you know, they’re not as greedy as the bankers, but the right one below, right? Always looking for revenue streams. So why would they kill the golden goose? And it’s important to always step back and realize what motivates each person and politicians, man, some extra cash to throw around is always what they want.

42:31 They always want more budget. So, you’re right. I guess it’s in everyone’s interest to find a way to make this work. And there will be bumps in the meantime. There’ll be text messages from your banks for a variety of reasons.

42:43 And we’ll see the innovator’s dilemma. The old school people will hold on in a death grip as long as they can, right, Tika? But the innovation will come. It will always come from another party. It’s just being ramped up.

42:56 Because you had FinTech using technology to try to beat the banks at their own game. And then it almost as if crypto and blockchain said, guess what? We’re playing a completely another game over here. And we set the rules and we set the speed. And these other guys are like, oh, wow, okay.

43:13 We won’t- You made a great point. All FinTech is, is old line Wall Street with a pretty face on it, with a user interface on it that you can access through your phone. But it’s the same stuff. It’s a PayPal, you know, is not a fintech, they’re a bank using all traditional banking applications with a face on it. That’s it.

43:35 Yeah. So how should we act as consumers, Tikka, when our banks are restricting us from using centralized exchanges, which, you know, I’ve had some guests on talk about is kind of the on-ramps and the off-ramps of being kind of in the crypto-verse. Because once you’re there, once I own Bitcoin or Ethereum, as Tikka said, you can go on Uniswap and you can swap in and out of it. And we’ll talk about the old days when I used to buy Tika’s coins and Uniswap wasn’t there.

44:01 So I had to go find them on these random exchanges. And it’s important to talk about that too. But like you said, there was this old school way of doing it as far as this on-ramping, this off-ramping. How should we respond to our banks, Tika? I mean, some people get angry.

44:17 Some people find different ways around it. What’s your reaction and how should we react? Don’t get angry, I remember one time I was in a library in 1997 and I was using the internet in the library and I got banned from the library because I dared to log into hotmail.com to check my email because it was not an approved email site to go on in the library. Think about that. Okay, and so this is kind of a similar thing you’re saying.

44:51 It’s a similar thing. So go to another exchange, open up a couple of different bank accounts and just work around it. I remember here, I live in Puerto Rico, when I moved here in January, 2018, there was not a bank on the island that would let me open up a bank account simply because I wrote about crypto. And then I was trading it because I wrote about it. They wouldn’t let me open up a bank account.

45:15 I had to open up a bank account with a tiny credit union in order to get a bank in Puerto Rico. Wow, just because they googled you and didn’t like it and wanted to stay as far away from you as possible. Correct. Isn’t that incredible? I mean, yeah, that’s a whole nother episode to talk about the persecution of early crypto adopters.

45:35 You could probably tell me a bunch of stories when it comes to that, right? This is a good time to maybe talk about a brief history of you. And when you, I kinda wanna talk about Tikka, about when you first saw Ethereum and it clicked. because at the end of this, I honestly wanna get your opinion on some of the up and comers. And again, you can say as much as you can.

45:56 I know you have a newsletter and et cetera, but there’s a bunch of companies that have recently gone from 30th on the market cap up into the teens. And a lot of people are curious, especially from your perspective, Tika, if they could be the next thing. And again, only say as much as you can because I know you have a newsletter. Ethereum, you went out on a limb many years ago and maybe you can tell me the whole story and said, this will be the next thing. I think you were buying at $7.

46:22 You also started getting deep into this whole ecosystem. And again, I remember buying the coins that you recommended and Uniswap didn’t exist. I had to go find these random exchanges just to buy the crypto assets. People don’t even realize these days how quick DeFi has actually progressed because now when I buy Tika’s recommendations, I go to Uniswap. Typically, now they’ve got their own lists and stuff as well.

46:47 But again, maybe, Tika, you could walk us through those early days and maybe what you saw on Ethereum and what you’re seeing now. Well, in 2016 is when I got involved in Bitcoin. I discovered the power behind Bitcoin in January. In the beginning of January 2016, when I first discovered Bitcoin in 2011, I just thought it was a scam and I hadn’t taken the time to learn about the underlying technology. 2016, in January, I attended an event, the Consumer Electronics Show, and Brock Pierce was speaking about Bitcoin. And he was the first person to ever explain what a blockchain was in a way that I could understand. There was a way to move information and value without a trusted third party. And he explained how the consensus mechanism worked, how 51% of the computers in the network had to agree and validate the transaction in order for it to go through. And he explained how each one of these computers has an identical copy of the ledger that has the record of who owns what. And so unless you could corrupt 51% of the computers in the network, there was no way to break the network.

48:00 And that was my head exploded. There’s a lot of people out there right now, Tika, whose heads are exploding on the back of your explanation there. Yeah. And sometimes Tika, it just takes the right person at the right moment to get it, to allow you to get it, right? It’s weird how that happens. It is strange how that happens. And I’ll always be grateful for Brock Pierce giving that chat in Las Vegas. It changed my life. So I flew down immediately to Florida, which is where my publisher is headquartered. And I sat down with all the partners and I looked at them. And you have to understand at the time, I was writing about conservative blue chip income producing stocks. And it was my core audience. It was 45 to 75 blue chip saving for retirement.

48:48 So I fly down to Florida and I say, I’m writing about Bitcoin. And that’s all I’m going to do. And they look at me like I have three heads. And they said, you’re not writing about it here. And I said, look, I’ve owned a newsletter business before. If you won’t let me write about it, I’ll just spin up my own company and all I’ll do is write about crypto.” And like, you can write about it. So they let me start writing about it. So as I start doing more due diligence and start writing about Bitcoin, I come across an industry analyst. I can’t remember her name right now, but she said to me that she was at a hackathon, a Bitcoin hackathon, on, but there was also this other protocol called Ethereum there.

49:34 And she told me that 70% to 80% of the Bitcoin developers had moved over and were working on Ethereum. And in that moment, I said, well, hold on a second. These guys are the smartest guys on the planet. If they’re now working on Ethereum and building on Ethereum, there’s something there. So I read the Ethereum white paper, I researched it, and I managed to get an interview with Vitalik Buterin when he was living in, I believe it was Zurich at the time, Zurich or Zuk.

50:05 And we did this interview over Skype and this kid melted my brain. Just his vision for the future. And what I realized is that he had created the dominant platform for blockchain development. the majority of blockchain development programs that were created using a blockchain were going to be built on Ethereum. And in that moment that I realized that, and I realized it immediately after talking to him, I wrote a report on it and I recommended it.

50:39 I think my recommended price was nine bucks, somewhere between seven and nine bucks. And in that report, I said that Ethereum is worth at least $350 a coin, which was a $30 billion market cap at that time, right? The whole market cap of the entire space, crypto space is maybe three or $4 billion. So here I was saying that this one coin was gonna be worth more than 10X of the entire marketplace right now. It’s the equivalent of coming in and saying, oh, global market cap of equities is 100 trillion and this is gonna be worth $900 trillion, right?

51:16 I mean, it’s just nuts, but that was the, but that’s what my research had suggested. And within a year, it had gone four X higher than my $350 target, it had gone to $1,400. And of course, it became a massive wealth builder for my readers and for myself. Wow, I’d never heard you tell me that story. And I didn’t know you had had that sit down with Vitalik, but now it starts to make sense because when your brain clicks and clicks hard, you can go all in on certain parts of the space when you finally get it.

51:51 But it’s hard to get it, and it’s easier to get it when you talk to the players involved behind the scenes, because you can see it in their eyes, and you’re like, oh, are you here? The hackers are doing this, and you start to piece it together, and this is before there were YouTube videos about it. I mean, this is before there were big conferences, and you were out there networking, talking to the people. Talk to me about this relationship between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

52:15 It feels like a tale from the Bible, Tika. It’s this weird, you know, Cain and Abel, brother and sister, favored by the parent, not. You’ve got the Bitcoin, which all the smart people that I talk to, including you, say this is the gold standard, the US Treasury, the dollar, if you will. But it’s not smart enough to have the protocols and the building, so we need it as the store of value and as almost the gold standard, but it can’t get us to the next level, which is what ETH is doing.

52:45 And then we’re all thinking what’s gonna be the next ETH, Maybe it’s Cardano or Solano, which I’ll get your thoughts on there. But tell me about this really weird relationship between these two, because you’ve watched ETH go from seven or nine, and I don’t know what Bitcoin would have been at the time, in the thousands, maybe? Well, $400. $400, okay. And now you’ve seen it creep up, and now you’ve heard people talking about this concept of the Flippening, where ETH becomes worth more than Bitcoin.

53:11 A Bloomberg analyst yesterday said if Bitcoin caught up to Ethereum’s growth, it would be at $100,000. and we get all these people saying weird things, what’s Tikka’s call? First of all, this weird relationship, how does that play out over 10 years? Well, comparing the two is saying, it’s like comparing an Apple with a car. They’re different.

53:37 An Apple can never be a car, and a car can never be an Apple. I mean, they are just radically different, or think of it as two different pieces of software. It’s like confusing a messaging piece of software and a word processing piece of software. When people say, oh, Bitcoin rival Ethereum is moving ahead, they don’t know how dumb they sound. That’s like saying, oh, my instant messenger is gonna put Google office out of business.

54:06 I mean, no, they do two totally different things. So again, to me, the highest and best use of Bitcoin, least two days has been a store of value. It’s a peerless asset. There’ll only ever be 21 million. It’s the strongest blockchain in the world. With current technology, it is impossible to hack.

54:28 And so I love that it’s slow. I love that it’s ponderous. It’s still faster than gold, and gold’s worth $12 trillion now. It’s far more usable than gold. So in terms of the ultimate value of Bitcoin, Bitcoin has to at least get to a 10 or 12 trillion dollar market cap to match gold. Now, along the way, which means what price, by the way, roughly. So that’s going to be at least a half a million dollars. OK, so yeah, half a million dollars gets you to about a 10 trillion dollar market cap. And that’s my target for Bitcoin, my five year target for Bitcoin is five hundred thousand dollars.

55:10 Okay. That’s where I think we’ll be. So but that’s just the first step. Bitcoin is so much more than just that. But this is the, it’s like the internet, the first iteration of the internet, people were putting up pictures of their cats and using email. And that version of the internet was around for years before that next version of the internet came. So if we’re looking at Bitcoin, no, right now you can’t build on it. It is too slow and it is too expensive.

55:37 But in the future, there will be second layer solutions, so meaning solutions that will allow you to build on Bitcoin, that will allow you to operate at speed and with a much lower cost. But we’re not here yet. My point is, even if that never happens, there’s still a fortune to be made in Bitcoin. Now Ethereum is something completely different. Ethereum is a platform, it’s an operating system that other people can build programs on.

56:03 Just like Android, or just like iOS, that’s the way you have to think of it, except this is a global platform that’s agnostic to whoever wants to build on it. There’s no third-party gatekeeper saying, you can’t build, you can’t build, or we have to take a cut, like Apple does or like Google does. So I think you will see more and more projects migrate to Ethereum. And again, that developer lead that they have, there’s maybe 10x more developers on Ethereum than Ethereum’s closest rival. So I don’t know how you dislodge that. People tried to do that for 30 years to dislodge Microsoft, but they couldn’t. They had millions of developers, and those developers didn’t want to develop on anything else. They wanted to develop on Microsoft, on MS-DOS. So when people talk about Cardano, they talk about Solana, they talk about all these other projects. We own some of them as trades, and they’ve done incredibly well for us, but will they dislodge Ethereum? Yeah, it’s doubtful. It’s really, really doubtful.

57:12 Because it’s just so ingrained in the ecosystem. So much work has been done around it that it’s hard to knock it. Well, the moat is so big. Think of it this way. If you’ve got a million users and you’ve got your or your or your technology is running and it hasn’t been broken and your smart contracts haven’t been hacked and they work and you’ve got millions of people using it. It’s like uprooting an entire city and moving it to another part of the country. I mean can you do it? Yeah, you can do it. But the opportunity cost and the risk, the enterprise risk, it’s just off the charts. So the longer projects stay on Ethereum and the bigger they get, the stickier Ethereum becomes. And it becomes like this black hole that just sucks in resources. And it might not be the best solution. It might not be the fastest. It might not be the cheapest, but mass attracts more mass.

58:16 Understand that and understand that it’s not the best, the technologically best solution that wins, the technologically best solution that makes you the most money over the long term. It’s not, it’s the one that has the most amount of devs on it and the most amount of users. I love your comparison with Microsoft because I mean, you know, all respect to the creators, the user experience, it’s not that great, you know, but it’s on every office computer. I forget sometimes, because we’re all on Macs here, but whenever I go to some old school office, I’m like, what are you using?

58:52 And look at Outlook, and it’s just kind of clunky, isn’t it? And yet, it’s dominant, and it probably won’t be replaced for a while, and that’s in the software world, right? So, that’s a great, let me get, what is your five-year price prediction for Ethereum, or can you share that, or give us a range? I can, it’s going to sound insane, but I think Ethereum will go to $40,000 over the next five years. Okay.

59:19 And that’s insane because it was $730 on Jan 1st of this year, I think. Right. And it’s insane, why do you say it’s insane? Why do you say that, Tika? Because it’s at $4 trillion, which is what the market cap would be, would make it bigger than Apple and would make it bigger than Amazon.

59:36 It would make it bigger than any publicly traded stock now out there. And I think most people cannot get their head around that, that how a piece of software in cyberspace that nobody owns, and nobody has direct control over, could that that much value could aggregate around it. Okay, and that’s five-year price prediction. Yeah, that’s my five-year price prediction. Okay, cool.

59:58 All right, these are really interesting. Can I ask you about a few of the coins? Again, you can give me short answers or pass if you don’t need to, but you mentioned a few, Cardano. And we got Hoskinson here in about three weeks. They just hit some milestones, I think, this last month.

1:00:14 It got a pop. Some people say this could be the Ethereum of the future, the one that’s already thought about the problems that Ethereum is running into right now, the gas fees and why they’re going to 2.0 and the London hard fork. And they say that Hoskinson is looking, you know, 20 moves ahead. But of course, like you said, Tikka, it’s opportunity cost and it hasn’t been proven. They haven’t done anything yet that I know of, right?

1:00:39 He hasn’t shipped anything. Charles doesn’t ship anything. He’s had five years and a gazillion dollars to build something that ships and that can be used. And it’s not here. So by time he’s ready, let’s say it’s another year, another two years.

1:00:55 Do you know how long two years in this space? It’s like 10 years anywhere else. Ethereum is gonna be light years ahead. They’re gonna have moved to staking. Things are gonna be cheaper.

1:01:05 People are going to be building on it. Where do you think all the venture capital money is flowing into right now? It’s not flowing into Cardano projects. You’ve got to be an idiot to cut a $400 million check to a Cardano project right now. No, that money’s all going to F projects. Why?

1:01:22 Because the users are there, the devs are there, the use case is there, and the money, The money, what did you guys say, Dan Pitt? The money is there. Right, and we can’t forget that. And again, it’s a difference in philosophies. I’m sure you met Charles over the years and you obviously met with Vitalik and they both have admitted, they have different philosophies.

1:01:43 Vitalik’s philosophy, I think, is ship it, let the market bulletproof it. And Charles’ mentality is write 1,400 white papers on it, get everyone’s opinion, and then scope it out, right? Am I being wrong here? I’ve got a lot of people- That has been the problem that I’ve had with Cardano all along. We took a position in it early. We’re up a lot on it because we wanted just to cover our basis just in case.

1:02:06 But I would say my one criticism of many of these projects, not just Charles, he’s not the only one guilty of this, is you have these brilliant men and women that are trying to make the perfect solution. And that’s not the way the world works. You create a minimum viable product, you kick it in the marketplace, it breaks, you fix it, and you iterate and go. You iterate and go. Show me a successful consumer product or piece of technology that didn’t follow, that ended up becoming the dominant technology that didn’t follow that approach.

1:02:40 Give me one. Give me one that’s now dominant. Yeah. You’re right, Tika. I mean, any tech professional knows it’s all about MVP.

1:02:48 It’s all about get it on the market and then first of all, see if anyone cares and then iterate and make it better. Yeah, and that’s the mentality here. It’s a mentality in the Valley. And I can’t think of a product. If anybody can stick it in the comments and tell us a product that was scoped out for 10 years.

1:03:06 But that being said, it did hit number three in total market cap a couple of days ago on the pop. So it’s worth watching. No, it’s worth watching. It’s a good trade. People are covering their bets.

1:03:17 You’ve got people that made a ton of money in Ath, and they say, okay, there’s an asymmetric bet here. What if we’re wrong and Cardano takes over the world? I don’t think they will, but I made the same bet with my readers. I said, look, we’ve got to have a little bit of money here just in case. And just on a speculation, it’s been a huge winner for us.

1:03:36 And so as the market continues to go up, Cardano will go up, but will Cardano be a long-term core holding for us over a Palm Beach confidential, probably not. It’s probably something that will take profits on as the whole market moves up unless something radically different happens. But do you know how difficult it’s going to be to dislodge the moat that Ethereum has? You walk me through how somebody breaks apart that moat. I mean, I’m all ears.

1:04:11 I want somebody to blow up this thesis. I want somebody to say, oh, okay, here’s how they’re gonna do it. All I hear is, well, F sucks, it’s slow, it’s expensive. It’s been slow and expensive for the last five years and it’s still the dominant network in this space. You got anything else other than it’s slow and it sucks?

1:04:34 Is it gonna get fast and cheap in the next three months or not really? Is it gonna be a year or is it ever gonna happen? It’s gonna be a year or two. I can’t see how it’s not a year or two. Listen, I’m happy to be wrong about this, Brian, but Vitalik and his crew follow the same playbook that every successful software company does.

1:04:58 They over promise and under deliver, but they keep hyping the market. I mean, Elon Musk has been doing it for 20 years. Apple. Apple has been doing it for 40 years. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, all recall has been doing it for 35 years.

1:05:14 They will do it. They all do it. So I think we’re going to see that again. All right. Really good calls.

1:05:22 A couple more while we’re at it. Vine for third place is, uh, you know, Binance, you know, the Binance network, which obviously gets kind of tainted with the Binance centralized exchange that’s obviously in the news and getting banned in Malaysia and here in the UK and the CEO in America quit. But that’s actually quite different than the buying and smart chain, which has a lot of liquidity. It’s got a decent market cap. Is that gonna be significant going forward?

1:05:50 It will be significant going forward. I can talk about it because we own it at $1.88. Wow, okay. $1.88, it’s been as high as 700 bucks. I think it’s trading around 400 right now.

1:06:02 Okay, all right. And so it’s still going to be an alternative. It’s still, it’s got speed, but it doesn’t have the market share. It’s got a lot of market share. It’s taking some market share away from Ethereum.

1:06:20 I would say if there’s any chain that is a legitimate threat to F, it’s finance smart chain. Even though it doesn’t have the same level of decentralization at all. If you think Binance Smart Chain is decentralized, you, my friend, you need to do some work. So it’s controlled by a few players as opposed to- Yeah, by, yeah, correct. It’s nowhere near as decentralized as Ethereum.

1:06:48 And what it’s acting as right now, it’s kind of an overflow for people to push trades through because it’s way, way cheaper. So I don’t know that it will take over from ETH, but it’s certainly been helping the entire network relieve network congestion. It’s a lot faster and a lot cheaper. And in terms of value, it offers infinitely more value than Cardano does right now, and it’s being used infinitely more than Cardano. So to me, we still own it.

1:07:21 We’re gonna, and we’re up huge on it, but I think it has much more upside ahead. Okay, couple more. Solana just popped in the last couple days up 50, 60%. A couple of my buddies in New York have been talking it up for weeks. Thoughts on Solana?

1:07:37 You know, I’m not educated on Solana. It is a coin that’s in the news that I probably should do some more work on, but I’m not in a position to deliver a comment on it that’s at least an educated comment on it. Okay, I appreciate that. Chainlink and a lot of London realers got some chainlink on the back of your recommendation years ago. The future of Link, it’s come a long way.

1:08:02 Just thoughts on where it might be going. Yeah, I think Chainlink’s got a lot more upside to it. What they’ve done is they have made themselves an integral part of the DeFi space. DeFi can’t happen without oracles. So oracles are trusted sources of information that smart contracts can use in order to carry out certain transactions.

1:08:28 And so Chainlink has figured out a way to aggregate Oracle data in a decentralized way that can’t be tampered with. So that’s incredibly valuable. So I’ll give you a prime example. Let’s say you have a betting feature of a smart contract in DeFi and you and I bet on something stupid. Like I think on July 5th, 2024, the weather in London will be 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

1:08:59 And you say, no, it’s going to be 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Well, we can actually create a bet around that. We can bet one Bitcoin each, put it in a smart contract and the smart contract can pull in a meteorological data from an Oracle source via chain link. So we know that neither one of us are able to manipulate that data. And on that day, it figures out what the temperature was and then it pays out whoever won.

1:09:23 And they just signed a weather deal, I thought, with somebody where they’ve got more weather data or they’re incorporating more weather data. Some call them the Google of the blockchain. Am I getting that right when they say that? And what do they mean by that? I don’t know if I’d call them the Google of the blockchain.

1:09:38 I don’t know what would be the best way to characterize them. But I will say this, DeFi couldn’t have happened without them because you need trusted sources of information. So they are, when they call them link, I mean, they are the key link to this entire ecosystem. Now it doesn’t mean they can’t be disintermediated, this is software after all, but it goes back to that issue of, if I’ve got a trusted source of information and I’ve got billions of dollars of transactions that are being used around it, do I really wanna mess with it to save a few pennies going someplace else or maybe something’s a little bit faster?

1:10:16 Not really, when you’ve got a robust solution, you stick with it. Understood, and people have been talking about these predictive markets. It’s something we’ve never really seen and it could open up all sorts of probably unlocked value from the universe or the world. When like you said, you can start, I mean, you and I would know it in finances like forward prices of all these instruments. Now you can get people to kind of put out a four dimensional matrix of data in the future and then realize that it might be worth quote unquote betting on it.

1:10:49 Maybe a guy that grows grain in the Midwest might be in the interest of swapping that with someone who’s a blah, blah, blah. Do you see a lot of future in these quote unquote predictive markets that might use all these weird data points in the future as financial markets? Yes, but that’s years away, five to 10 years away. Yes. Okay.

1:11:09 There’s a lot more low hanging fruit in front of us right now, whether it’s just trading, trade settlement, remittances, I mean, those are massive, massive, massive markets that have barely been touched. Okay, cool. Just a few more, and then I wanna hear about what you’ve been up to at DeFi Tech. Uniswap, you talked to me about it a long time ago. We saw it do some incredible things, was kind of built in the DeFi summer last year.

1:11:34 It’s continued to do well when it had, you know, other people trying to compete other swaps, whether, you know, sushi swap and pancake swap, but it broke into 10 market cap, I think in the last few days. Thoughts on Uniswap going forward? I love it. We own it. We haven’t sold any.

1:11:53 I think it’s one of the most important facilitators of trade in the world right now. And I think it’s undervalued and I love what the team is doing. Again, any one of these can be disintermediated with somebody who builds a better mousetrap, right? I wanna be very clear. We’re very early days.

1:12:16 But with the information I have in front of me now and today, I’m a big fan of the protocol and I think everybody should have some. I feel like Tika, we’re having one of those conversations like you used to see in the commercials in the 90s. When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen. And for people that aren’t old like me and Tika, there used to be these ads and E.F. Hutton was, I think they were an advisor, like a financial advisor.

1:12:39 A brokerage firm, yeah. They would have these ads where there’d be like, two guys having lunch at a crowded restaurant, and when one of them mentions EF Hutton, everyone goes quiet and they listen. And Tika, I feel like the whole internet’s listening to your calls now on these coins. Look, a couple more and I promise to move on. Polygon, exciting as a chain solution, but also they just announced a merger, $250 million.

1:13:05 I check with my guys in New York, this is probably the first proper MNA deal in crypto that I’ve seen, which is an impressive feat on its own. Your thoughts on Polygon and the merger? Well, I love the project. I’m a big fan of it. Again, that’s another one that I think if you don’t own, you should probably buy some.

1:13:25 Again, I’m not giving financial advice, I’m speaking generally. Yeah, I think the merger is great and it shows how much maturity is coming into this space. And it makes sense that you’ll see these kinds of things community mergers in this kind of acquisition of technology and complementary technology. And what’s great is it’s all being driven at the community level. So people have to vote on it.

1:13:52 Their tokens are essentially de facto shares, and they get to vote on this growth. I mean, it’s really remarkable. We will never see this again in our lifetimes, the birth of an alternate financial system, a parallel financial system. We are witnessing the transition from a centralized financial system to a decentralized financial system. That’s a trend that’s going to go on for a century, right, long after you and I have shuffled off this mortal coil.

1:14:20 And maybe, you know, our kids and our grandkids will really see what that world is actually going to look like. Imagine being there when those first railroad spikes were being driven into the ground and they were building what was essentially the first network. And we went from that network to then having digital networks and the internet. So yes, it’s incredibly exciting. And the good news is it’s still early enough where if you get in on the right protocols and are rational, you can make life-changing wealth.

1:14:55 It’s truly an incredible time to be alive and be in this space. Yeah, you can really be part of history. And I think that’s what so many people that are now on the inside are excited about this. And to watch that polygon merger happen, I mean, it’s, you know, $250 million. They had agreed on a coin swipe, a coin swap ratio, just like you would an equity price in a merger.

1:15:18 And my first thought was I called my guys in New York and I said, who did the M&A on it? Was it Goldman? And then I thought, of course it wasn’t. It was the communities in them. And then that made me think, like Tico, would there be a $250 million digital technology merger without an advisor anywhere in the world?

1:15:37 Probably not, and yet they just probably did one. And that in itself is almost incredible. Not to mention the layer two solutions they’re coming up with. Yeah, it’s an interesting world, and it’s happening in front of our eyes, right? Again, a couple last ones, stablecoins, you know, they’ve come a long way.

1:15:56 I had a whole conversation with my team, my academy day to night of how innovative a stable coin is and we need to step back and look at how beautiful it is even though it’s the most boring thing in the world. And I used to tell them, I like boring. I live in a boring neighborhood, my babysitter’s boring. I like boring because it’s predictable. I used to not like boring.

1:16:14 You know, the stable coin itself and is a pretty interesting invention and yet they still haven’t been tested. We see Visa and MasterCard talking about accepting them. What’s your thoughts on the USDTs and DCs and future of those? USDT Tether, I’m not a fan of, it’s just way too opaque. The thing is to remember about stablecoins, is they’re like money market funds.

1:16:39 And, you know, do they have all the assets they say they’re gonna have? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. Just use them as funding currencies. I wouldn’t place an enormous amount of money in them. And there is credit risk, you’re taking credit risk, I think it’s a good first step. The market needed it. Just like in the stock market, when we sell our stocks, we need a money market to go to. And that’s essentially the function that these stablecoins fulfill. Now, at some point, the United States is probably going to roll out a digital dollar. And when they do, that will become the de facto funding currency for the entire crypto space, and you won’t need to rely on stable coins. You’ll basically be depositing money electronically, directly with the Federal Reserve. But again, that’s probably a few years away before that happens. And that will maybe make those coins irrelevant? Those coins will have to change in order to be competitive. Those coins will have to, they’ll have to update. Okay. Yeah, I always tell my students just because it says USD in front of it, and it looks like a dollar, doesn’t mean I mean, it’s a dollar and there’s a reason you get a 4% plus yield on that.

1:17:51 Whereas your local bank will give you a half percent plus yield because there’s more risk. And we haven’t seen what happens on a Black Thursday when everything gaps lower and we get to see where is the collateral, et cetera, et cetera. So a good call. Lastly, I got to call you, I got to ask you. I mean, the damn Dogecoin is still up there in the top 10 market caps.

1:18:08 Some people laugh at it. It’s also a sign though of a community actually working. What do you see when you see Doge? I see a community actually working, creating value where they want to create value. Now, would I put my life savings in Dogecoin?

1:18:22 No, I recommended Doge originally back in 2016 when it was trading for a fraction of a penny. And it was just a fun thing to recommend and to own. And my readers made a lot of money on it. We sold and took profits on it a long, long time ago. I would just say, if you are first getting into this space and your first foray was in Doge, That’s great, but if you’re looking for enduring value, you should own some Bitcoin and some Ethereum.

1:18:51 Now maybe Doge will survive and literally be this funding currency moving forward. I don’t know if it will. I feel very confident about Bitcoin’s future and very confident about Ethereum’s future, but I can’t share that same level of confidence with Dogecoin, and so I would say, if you wanna play around with Doge, do it with small money, don’t do it with big money. Yeah, okay, really good thoughts and I appreciate that, Tika. Talk to me about DeFi technologies.

1:19:21 We spoke months ago and you said, Brian, I’m really excited about this company. And Tika, we know this isn’t something you normally do. You don’t normally work with companies in this space, but clearly this one made an impression on you. What are you guys trying to do at DeFi Tech? Well, to answer your question and just to back up for a second, I’ve never worked with any company outside of my publisher with my newsletters, because I’ve never found something that I’ve wanted to put my name and my credibility on the line for.

1:19:53 What I love about what DeFi.Tech is doing, and they trade here in the States, D-E-F-T-F is the symbol, about a buck, buck 20 a share. I’m an advisor to the company, I own shares in the company, so let me be very clear, anything I say about them will be biased, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be in bold with them. But I pulled back the camera and I realized that you’ve got a hundred to 200 million people in crypto, but you’ve got billions of people that invest in the stock market.

1:20:26 And those people will never ever open up a Coinbase account. They will never ever get a MetaMask wallet and start swapping on Uniswap in order to buy tokens. And then you’ve got all these institutional buyers that want to get in, but again, they’re not going to either their charters don’t allow them to do that, or they’re just not going to go through that rigmarole. And what I realized was, is there was this gap in the market for somebody to provide access to these protocols, like Cardano, like Bitcoin, like Ethereum, like Polkadot, but with an equity wrapper. So what does that mean? It means just like an exchange-traded product, you have an exchange traded product for gold, you’re not actually buying the gold, but you’re putting an equity wrapper on the gold that gives you the same amount of proportional ownership as if you owned the actual gold.

1:21:16 So defi.tech, which is the website, defi.tech, is doing that with decentralized finance protocols. And so they’re creating these exchange traded products that now allow institutions and individuals get pinpoint accuracy into the protocols they want through their brokerage firm. And what’s really exciting about that is right now they’ve been approved in certain markets in Europe, and they’re trying to get approved in Germany. And I believe they will. I can’t promise that, of course. I believe they will. So why is that important? It’s important because the German government has said that German funds can put up to 20% of their capital into cryptocurrencies.

1:22:00 That’s $365 billion. And the reason why that’s important and the reason why they will move that money into crypto is because of the gains. If they hold it for a year or more, the gains are tax-free. So you want to talk about a big carrot. Right now, you’ve got institutions all over the world looking at these massive gains in crypto. And so if you don’t get some crypto exposure, The guy next to you will and will steal your clients. So that’s why I believe Germany is going to be at the forefront of crypto adoption on the institutional level. And DeFi.Tech, it is my belief, will be there to provide products for them, dozens of different products for them.

1:22:43 And so I think you’ll see an enormous amount of growth in that product offering. And of course, assets under management. And I think DeFi.Tech has the opportunity to be one of the largest asset managers in the space. Now, can I guarantee that? No, is it a prediction? No, it’s what I believe and it’s why I got involved. At the end of the day, I’ve been successful in this space because I’ve helped democratize access to crypto assets. I’ve taught grandmothers, grandfathers, retired firefighters how to buy Bitcoin at 400, how to buy Ethereum, how to use a wallet. And I think that next step and that growth is bringing access to the stock buyer and specifically within the decentralized finance space. And that’s exactly what DeFi.Tech is doing.

1:23:34 I love it. And you guys are announcing all sorts of mergers and you guys are really going, it seems aggressively into the space. I love that German story. I mean, Unlocking that much capital and to give those institutions that you know That that tax treatment even to be clear on taxes is an amazing thing to do for those institutions I’m out imagine dumping that capital right into the market and you’re right Some people will never get the metamask account and that’s okay And I like it how you said if if that fund manager doesn’t get access to crypto Then the other one will and steal his clients and that’s the way Wall Street thinks and it’s always good to remind us of that I’ve had some interesting people on recently.

1:24:17 I wanted to maybe just kind of wrap up with getting your thoughts on some of the predictions in the market, and again, say as much as you want to. I had Michael Saylor on here, CEO of MicroStrategy, who Max Keiser, who’s been talking about Bitcoin for 10 years, said is the best pitch man for Bitcoin. So that’s quite a compliment for for Keiser. Michael Saylor at one point said, mortgage your house and buy Bitcoin. And he said, Brian, this is digital property.

1:24:44 It’s the best investment I can see for the next thousand years. He’s literally taking his whole public balance sheet and going all in and then going all in and then raising more debt and buying more. I mean, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit, but there’s quite a bit. No, he’s done all of that. Right, he’s done all of that.

1:25:00 He’s watched the stock price go up. He’s quite candidly said his brand awareness has gone up a hundred X. He’s a fellow MIT’er, was at a fraternity down the road from me. And he does have a new way of articulating Bitcoin in an industry that has all sorts of fascinating people like yourselves that articulated in a different way. What are your thoughts on what Michael’s doing from a public company and the concept of mortgage in your house to buy crypto, your thoughts?

1:25:25 I’m a big fan of Michael Saylor. He’s brought a whole new level of people into the market and he’s really elevated the dialogue in the market. I think he’s great for Bitcoin. We own MicroStrategy stock and we’re doing quite well on it. We continue to be bullish on it.

1:25:42 Would I be as aggressive as him in terms of leverage? No. Do I think you should borrow money against your house and buy Bitcoin? No, I don’t think so. And I’ll tell you why.

1:25:55 Very few people can sit through a 50, 60, or even 84% drop and be rational. And so let’s say you have a half a million dollar house and you borrow 400K and you buy Bitcoin, Let’s say it goes to a hundred K and then you go through a bear market and now Bitcoin’s 25 K. The danger is not so much will Bitcoin recover? Yes, Bitcoin will recover. The danger is that your mental state won’t recover and you’ll sell at 25 K and then you’ll watch Bitcoin go to a quarter of a million and you’re gonna wanna end your life.

1:26:32 So you have to know yourself. Is the strategy fundamentally flawed? No, I don’t think so because I think Bitcoin is going to continue to go up. In fact, there’s never been a four-year cycle where you lost money on Bitcoin. Those are great metrics.

1:26:47 And if you can borrow capital, low-interest capital at 30 years and then put the money away for 30 years and be disciplined, sure, it works. But how many of us have the discipline of you or of Michael that had that MIT steel-trap mind? You guys are a sample size of 30, right? So no, the rest of us, normal humans, don’t have that ability. That’s a really good call, Tikka.

1:27:15 I mean, really insightful. I mean, I’m watching with Solana Pop 60% in a couple days. I’m thinking, this is amazing, but there’s gonna be a trail of dead bodies behind this in the future. Because most people, I mean, we weren’t programmed as humans to be dealing with assets with that kind of volatility. Like where in the world before has your cow been worth a half a cow the next day?

1:27:40 Okay, unless it died, you know? Or things have reduced that much, like we’re not meant to it. And that’s why the biggest thing I teach in the academy is my fourth module and that’s about trading discipline. That’s about saying stop trading on your mobile phone at two in the morning. Stop checking the price of your coins on your mobile phone.

1:27:57 Let’s get into a monthly trading strategy. Let’s get down to 10 coins in our portfolio. let’s slow it down, right, and look to the long term. But Tika, like you said, the average person, or 99% of the American public out there, can’t even deal with that volatility. Now, they could say, but wait a second, I’m up from 40,000 to 100,000, I’m up 60,000 on my Bitcoin.

1:28:21 But even if that drops to 60,000 and they’re still in the money, Tika, they’re probably losing their brains, right? Because they already pre-spent the money, or they spend it in their mind, or whatever, And it just takes a lot of discipline to keep your head in that game, right? It does, which is why we’re not active traders. I mean, maybe at some point in the future, if I find the right approach, I’ll launch a trading newsletter, but we’ve made all our money by just buying and holding.

1:28:51 And I’ve said, look, Bitcoin is an incredible asset. Maybe we’d make more money if we sold it at 60 and bought it at 30. But, you know, what if we sold it at 60 and it went to 400,000? Right, there’s that risk in Bitcoin all the time that it can just have a parabolic move higher. So I say, take at least a five-year perspective and compare it to the S&P 500 or compare it to any asset.

1:29:19 If you take Bitcoin and you use four-year rolling periods and compare it to any asset on the world, it just demolishes the returns. It demolishes the returns. So I think that’s the best way that most people should play it. I think people have an overinflated point of view as to their ability to trade. And if that was true, everybody would be a trading billionaire and they’re not.

1:29:46 The way to make money in assets, you buy great assets and you hold them, you don’t sell them, that’s it. But it’s so simple that people think it’s too easy for it to actually work. Yeah, exactly. That’s also like, you know, make sure you work out every day, don’t eat the jelly donuts, keep toxic people out of your life, get sleep, meditate, all the other things that are simple that are nearly impossible for most people to do, right? So like you said, it sounds simple, but doing it’s a second thing.

1:30:15 Next personality I wanna talk about is Max Keiser, my old friend who in 2013 was in my old studio, Stikka with my kitchen. We were talking about Bitcoin. I just bought some at 85 pounds or dollars. And we actually were complaining about the lack of liquidity on the exchanges, which of course was fixed by the world of DeFi with the concept of a liquidity pool that could have never been created by Wall Street, right? Another amazing piece of technology.

1:30:40 And Max has turned into, and I think he would agree with this, a Bitcoin maximalist, strangely enough. And when I watched the Bitcoin conference in Florida, I don’t know if you were there or not, I saw a bunch of people that not only were pro Bitcoin, they were anti everything else. And Max is, I’m still trying to get him back on the show, but he keeps texting me, no shit coins, no shit coins. Bitcoin won, end of story, that’s it. Everything else doesn’t matter.

1:31:08 And I get a little frustrated with that point of view, and I’m curious, how do you have the conversation with Maximalists? I did have a version of this conversation with Michael Saylor, and strangely enough, Tika, when it got to stablecoins, Michael said, there’s a real use for stablecoins. He said it’s the currency that people are gonna use in their wallets, if you will, when they’re holding digital property as Bitcoin. And to me, that felt like a de facto endorsement of Ethereum somehow.

1:31:33 We didn’t go too deep on it, and I’m not putting you on the spot, Michael, but it was nice to see that an intelligent person could entertain the narrative. And yet, when I talk to Max, it’s one or the other. I’m also talking to a man who’s got probably more Bitcoin than God, and he’s been talking about it forever, so maybe he’s in a reality that is constantly promoting Bitcoin and defending it. So what are your thoughts on that? Well, you have to understand that maximalists don’t think in days or weeks or months, they think in decades and they really pull the camera back.

1:32:07 And if you’re looking at it through that lens, you can say there, you can build a case, at least in your mind, where Bitcoin eats the entire ecosystem. Just think about it this way. Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the planet, bar none. There’s nothing that comes anywhere near close to how secure Bitcoin is. You got governments and private institutions and private hackers try to beat up on Bitcoin every single day since it’s been born.

1:32:38 And it just makes it stronger. So if there is a way, and they really haven’t fully figured it out yet, but if there’s a way to put a second layer on it, smart contracts, and it’s the safest system in the world. And now you can make it the cheapest to operate on and the fastest to operate on. Boy, oh boy, that’s gonna be tough to beat. That’s gonna be tough to beat.

1:33:04 That could eat a lot of people’s lunch. Now, will it eat everybody’s lunch? No, but a lot of people. Ethereum’s lunch? Maybe, maybe, maybe.

1:33:15 But we’re talking about a possibility that’s 10 years away, 15 years away, perhaps 20 years away. And people get so caught up on something that might not even happen in their lifetime. And they miss all the low hanging fruit that’s in front of them. Because between now and then, there’s so much money to be made. And the best example I can think of is AOL.

1:33:40 You could have sat down in 1992 and said, You know, AOL, they’re helping newbies get on the internet. Yeah, they might have a good run, but they’ll be dead by 2002, 2003, when you have cable modems and everybody has high speed internet. And you would have been right, but you would have missed the best performance, one of the best performing stocks of that decade, a stock that made people billionaires, centimillionaires, Decca millionaires, and individual millionaires.

1:34:09 So much wealth was created by owning AOL during the period of the 1990s, and so the same will be true of Ethereum. Look, I think Ethereum is going to make it, but even if it doesn’t, the amount of money that has already been made in Ethereum and will be made in Ethereum move for the next five years, it’s going to be life changing. Okay. How do you talk to maximalists? Are you even allowed in the room, Tikka?

1:34:35 They allow you in there? Sure. I have plenty of my friends are maximalists and we have good conversations and I just don’t take the other side of it. I see their perspective. I understand their point of view and we need the maximalists.

1:34:50 I mean, they are the people that have been working so hard on building the Bitcoin network, whether the Bitcoin is up 600% or down 84%, they just keep working. have a vision of the future that they’re looking to make real. And think about how far Bitcoin has come. Bitcoin was the original shit coin. It was used to fund drug purchases that had maybe 20 nodes in the network. It had no decentralization to it at all. And it’s gone from that to being worth as much as a trillion dollars. And it’s done it faster than any other asset in history.

1:35:31 You’d be a fool to ignore that. Yeah. Lastly, what do you say to the people out there that are still in crypto denial? I don’t know where Warren Buffett is these days. I kind of know.

1:35:46 I don’t know if Peter Schiff is still in denial. I don’t know. But there’s still people out there that are still saying it’s a Chinese scam. It’s Russians. It’s all going to go to zero.

1:35:58 How do you talk to those people? And are there any left? Oh, sure. There’s plenty left. I would say this.

1:36:04 If it was going to go to zero, and that was a real concern in the early days, but if it was going to go to zero, it would have already gone to zero. It would have already happened. You think about the trials and tribulations that Bitcoin has been through, the chain splits. You think about the trials and tribulations that Ethereum has gone through, its own chain split. the amount of money that’s been lost in smart contracts, the amount of money that’s been lost on the hacking of exchanges, billions and billions of dollars.

1:36:37 There’s all the reasons in the world that both of those technologies shouldn’t have flourished, and yet they have. Amen to that. It’s easy to forget those events, Tika. I mean, the Mt. Goxes and the splits, the Bitcoin Cash and the Bitcoin and the Ethereum Classic.

1:36:57 I mean, it’s easy for especially new people in the market to not know that history and realize there’s been a rocky road, which is a beautiful thing, right? Anti-fragile is what we want from these networks. Correct. Tika, first of all, this is, I think, our best episode ever, so thank you. I really appreciate you here.

1:37:16 I guess I wanna finish up with mindset, maybe the mindset of money, maybe us all getting in touch with how we were raised to think about money, whether we’re worthy of understanding our money, even understanding how money relates to our life. I know it’s a real big picture thing to do, but it’s also something you’re good at. It’s one thing to talk about specific coins and assets and returns. But I mean, as you and I both know, Tika, most people, they can’t even get to the party.

1:37:49 I mean, they’re self-sabotaging with their money. They have a hard time getting their head around it. There’s the old thing that Kiyosaki says, poor people work for money, rich people make money work for them. They don’t even understand assets and owning things. How do you get people to start thinking about that conversation of them and their money?

1:38:11 It’s weird, it’s like the most carnal relationship of a human being, them to value. But it’s something I feel like we’ve been disconnected from, like we’ve been raised in the zoo and now we’re about to get reconnected and there’s a bunch of mistakes we can make or mindsets we don’t understand, you must have thought about this countless times and had countless conversations with people. What are some of the basics you try to educate them on when it comes to even having this conversation?

1:38:36 I spend a lot of time thinking about this as I’ve been on my own wealth journey. You know, I’ve been, I’ve grown up in very limited circumstances. I’ve developed wealth, lost wealth, developed wealth, lost wealth, was on that merry-go-round for many, many years before I developed lasting wealth. And now I’m a very wealthy man and the difference was all up here. So I will say the biggest mistake is to sit there and ask yourself, why am I not rich?

1:39:12 Why do I keep doing this? Why do I keep engaging these behaviors? Why am I a failure? Why can’t I get out of my own way? Stop that, immediately.

1:39:24 Your brain is an incredible machine. You ask it a question, it’s gonna give you a goddamn answer. Why am I failing? Oh, because you suck at life, man, and you’re fat. And people told you that you’re a loser and your dad doesn’t like you and your mom thinks you’re just super awkward.

1:39:42 That’s the brain. Ask your brain a negative question. It’ll find negative answers. So you gotta stop doing that. The second thing you do, Once you stop asking yourself why I don’t have something, the second thing you do is you take your piece of paper and your pen, literally, don’t do this with the phone, pen and paper, you write down, what do I want?

1:40:14 And you turn off your phone, you lock your door, you shut down your computer, and you sit there until you figure it out, and you write. What do I want? And then you’ll have a list. And then on the next page, why do I want it? You write it out.

1:40:34 You have to get clear on what you want and why you want. If you’re just going along saying, I want to be rich. Well, shoot, we all want to be rich, but it’s not enough to get you from where you are to where you want to go. And it’s not going to be enough to change your behavior. But once you get clear on what you want and why you want it, your behavior will automatically change.

1:40:58 It won’t be an effort. You’ll automatically know what to do. You’ll be asking your brain the right questions. Then you say, instead of, well, why don’t I have that? You say, how do I get that?

1:41:11 If I could create a plan to get that, what would that plan look like? Pick up your pen and write it down. So what I try to teach people that I mentor, and I mentor a few different people privately, and that’s just something I do because they’re my friends, is I get them to take control of their mental focus, of what they’re focusing on. You can’t hit a target that you can’t see or that you haven’t even written down. So this is critically important.

1:41:47 Everybody watching here, I need you to do this. I need you to say, okay, what do I want? Why do I want it? And then ask yourself, okay, how do I get it? And then the brain was like, I don’t know.

1:41:58 Wow, I’m sitting there on my couch, I don’t know. And then you say, okay, don’t beat yourself up. Say, all right, I get it. If you did know, what would be the first thing you would do? And then these questions, they start unlocking this incredible intelligence.

1:42:14 I don’t care what your IQ is. We all have this intelligence built within us, this incredible brain, this incredible machine that if we just ask it to do things for us and phrase our questions in the right way, it will automatically go to work for us. And the second piece, and this is just as important, maybe even more important, because you can do this piece and not do the other piece and still be successful. Surround yourself with successful people. Surround yourself with people that have the life you want and being around them will automatically change your actions and will automatically change your thinking, will automatically change the way you view yourself and will automatically get you on the path that you need to be.

1:42:59 Now you put these two together, this being intentional and being around the people that are living the life you wanna lead and it’s like nitroglycerin. It’ll change your life in ways that you can’t understand. It’s powerful stuff, Deke, I’m thinking long and deep about what you’re saying, you know, so many people out there, like you said, they just think I wanna be rich, you know, and like you said, everybody wants to be rich, but they don’t know why, right?

1:43:28 And they don’t even know what they want. And if they figured that out, then they could also realize that any wealth would help them do more of that, right? Because that’s what wealth can do, I mean, you know that from being on both sides of the coin, I mean, wealth allows you to do more and be more, right, Tika? It’s a magnifier. And yet some people have very weird relationships with money, like it’s bad or dirty, but I agree with you.

1:43:51 I feel like if people could get aligned on what they want and then see as wealth as a way of just getting more or doing more for more people, it makes the whole thing healthier somehow. And in a world of more information, Tika, it seems, and maybe I’m an old man talking about the kids on social media, but it seems like a lot of our TikToks and Instagram, they value that bling. And everyone sees, I want the bling, I want the bling. And they never have that conversation with themselves you talked about, where they write down, what do I want?

1:44:23 And then you see so many people that get it, right? You must know people in this crypto space, they get the money. And then they find a really convenient way of losing it or losing their brains. Because they never knew their why in the beginning, right? Right.

1:44:37 You can handle your goals. And if you didn’t have your wives figured out or what you really wanted written down, you can lose your mind and still feel like a failure. So it’s critically important. You must map your own life. If you don’t, somebody else will map out your life for you.

1:44:56 And you’ll just be a pawn in their game and them acquiring more wealth. Yeah, there’s that old saying, if you don’t follow your dreams, then somebody else will pay you to follow theirs. and it’s always something to think about. Tika, we could talk for hours, but next time we’ll do this, we’ll do this in person somehow. We’ll get you to the UK.

1:45:17 We’ll make sure we allow citizens to start coming in soon. Look, I really value all of your ideas. So many of the people on London Real and so many of my students in my academy have been listening to our conversations for years and they truly appreciate you being a pioneer in this space. And again, a lot of people don’t know how hard it was to be a pioneer back then. I mean, you know, when I ran for mayor of London, I got a lot of hate, but I’m sure it’s right up there with what Tikka got back in the day for going out on the line and throwing these coins out there and putting all these big ideas into a space where it’s easy to be critical of.

1:45:57 And yet history has proven you correct, Tikka. And so again, appreciate you going on the limb. So many of my viewers and students, you know, invested the way you chose. Of course, we always buy all your coins here too. And again, it seems like now you’re even more insightful about what’s going on.

1:46:17 It’s like you’re growing more powerful because you’re now a veteran in a market that there’s not many veterans, right? And you’ve been watching this space since Jan 16, Tika. That’s coming up on six years. I mean, that’s dog years, right? You’re like a 40 year veteran somehow.

1:46:33 If that’s what a dog year is. Any final thoughts for people to know, Tika? And also everyone’s also asking for new coin predictions. So it might have to get you back on at some point and talk about formally your picks for the next few years. But final thoughts?

1:46:50 No, I think that’s it. I think if you can play back to what we discussed here, I think there’s enough information in what we’ve talked about today, especially in the last 10 minutes where anybody watching here can absolutely transform their life. And it’s not going to be easy, but if I’m driven by more than anything, it’s, I know that once you fix your financial life is when you can really look within and really start changing who you are, adding more value, being of more value to the world, whether it’s giving more money or giving more of yourself, being more generative.

1:47:24 But I do believe that individuals, it’s incumbent upon them to get financially free. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that as long as you’re not hurting anybody or victimizing anybody and you’re adding value, there’s nothing wrong with that. And I would say, if you find your mind plagued with these types of guilt feelings around money, I’m going to give you the best advice I can ignore them. They might never go away, but you just can’t pay attention to them because they’re not working in your best interest at all.

1:47:54 Yeah. Really well said. Got to get that mind right. And it’s such a hard thing to do. Even when you know what to do Tika, I’m already checking my own brain process. I got some reprogramming to do on this side Tika again, thank you so much I mean you’ve been a good friend now for many many years and I know you’re off-camera as well. You’re an incredible, dude You’re a you know a friend of the family and you’ve gone on such an incredible growth journey And been really honest about it too if people want go watch the old Tika Tori episodes And he’ll tell you about hard times in London and growing up here and all sorts of other stuff that that’s created demand And so thanks and thank you for the contribution and I’m looking forward to what you’re gonna contribute to this space for the next five years.

1:48:35 It’s gonna be absolutely mind-blowing. So thank you so much. We appreciate you. You have a personal website now? I guess it’s- Yeah, it’s the tikatowari.com.

1:48:44 Okay, so tikatowari.com for you, dfi.tech to learn more about the company. It’s traded in the US, but it’s also on the Canadian exchange. It’s got two tickers. Okay. Yeah, dfi.neo in the Canadian exchange.

1:48:56 Cool. press releases, it’s exciting what you’re doing there. And of course, Palm Beach Research is your incredible newsletter that’s read by so many people around the world. So that’s what people should do if they want the research. And hopefully we’ll have you back on talking more about future and coins and all sorts of stuff.

1:49:12 So Tika, love you, man. I really appreciate the time. And again, thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Brian. It was a pleasure to be here.

1:49:19 All right, cool. Thank you so much for everybody. Again, like Tika said, it’s all in this episode. So just go in, get the messages, Get out there and get involved. We appreciate you all.

1:49:29 We’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care, bye.