Honest Money LIVE — Episode 005

Hey there, Mati Allin here, producer of Honest Money Live.

And I've got two incredible people to introduce here.

We have Bobby Gray.

He is the founder of TEXITcoin.

We already know me.

You're not introducing me.

I'm like a regular on this program.

He created the original Bitcoin coin.

The guy who's important.

It's his show.

There he is.

And Farouk.

He interviewed President Trump.

He was at the center of the NFT boom and a really big deal in crypto.

So it's all your fault.

You're the guy who took crypto off its trajectory as being real money and brought it into the world of non-fungible tokens.

Hey, like they say in twenty twenty one, blame Farouk.

So it's my fault.

OK, man.

Nice to meet you.

I'm Bobby.

We've never talked before.

These are my favorite kind of episodes because we know nothing about each other.

I got a couple bullet points and a blurb from from our man Hamid.

And he says that you're the man and you have to come on this program.

And we got to talk about honest money, crypto, digital collectibles, NFTs, the whole thing.

So let's take it away, man, and see where the conversation goes.

We're an hour early.

You weren't even expecting this program to start for like another hour.

You're like walking the dog.

You're getting ready for a shower.

And here we are.

I love it.

Yeah, yeah.

It was a time change, I think, in Europe, and the person in charge of scheduling was in the EU, and now I'm over here on the East Coast.

I was going to say, where are you at?

Are you in New York?

Are you in Miami?

I'm in Montreal right now.

I'm in Montreal.

Montreal.

Okay.

I had it all wrong.

No, no.

I'm around.

Are you normally Canadian, or are you just hanging out in Montreal to stay away from the madness of whatever's going on in the world?

No.

Actually, I've been in Canada for over twenty years.

Wow.

Okay.

I'm a little around now.

I'm a little around.

That's why I've got the blurred background.

I'm not home home.

But usually I got the whole setup when I'm at the house with the microphone and all that good stuff.

It's all pro.

I haven't been home since February or January.

I left my Texas home in January for some events in Europe.

I was in Hong Kong attending, I think, consensus or something.

Then the state of Texas drops a cease and desist on my ass.

And I said, well, I guess I'm not going back home for a while.

So I parked myself in Singapore.

And now I've been like slowly but surely moving my way closer to Eastern time zone.

I love that.

So it's been a journey.

It's been a journey.

I'm sure we'll get into some parts of that in just the next few moments.

But thank you very much, first of all, for sharing your time with us, sharing your audience with us.

We're trying to get a program out to get people excited about honest money.

I got into this game in two thousand and seven because of a Texas congressman named Ron Paul who lit a fire in my heart. and opened up my eyes to how the monetary system works.

And I could never go back.

After that, it was like I was hooked.

I started my own currency in two thousand and eight, the same year Satoshi started Bitcoin.

I started the American Open Currency Standard.

And, you know, it's been a journey from there.

Here we are, eighteen years later. and the world's not much happier healthier safer than it was back in two thousand and eight when this alternative currency thing really began uh but i'm still here i'm still doing my part and i'm trying to get people from all over you know the realms from the crypto from the freedom liberty from you know economics capitalism politics i'm trying to get great guests on this program to talk about honest money talk about whatever it is that's important to you And somewhere in that conversation, try to bring it back to what I care about, which is honest money.

So we'll let the conversation go anywhere and everywhere you want.

But I was hoping that you could tell me a little bit about your crypto journey.

It's hard to meet somebody in this space that's been around for a while.

You meet somebody, it's like, hey, man, how long you been in?

I got in in twenty twenty one with, you know, Wall Street bets and meme coins or I got in, you know, a couple of years after that.

So it's it's difficult to come across and engage with somebody that's been around longer than five minutes.

So tell me if you if you can real quick your journey and how you got into this wacky world of crypto.

Yeah, I mean, I'm going to probably disappoint you, but I've known about crypto for a minute and I got in a little later than you did.

That's for sure.

But twenty twelve, funny enough, I was twenty twelve, twenty thirteen.

I was in law school and I was hella bored and and I made a and I saw this Bitcoin thing and I made a wallet and I actually just made a wallet.

That's it.

I didn't buy anything.

And so that didn't happen.

Fast forward, so then I let it go for five years.

I started my first business in media when I was pretty young.

How'd you go from legal to media?

What's that like?

Yeah, well, so I've been doing social media since I'm fourteen years old.

I'm thirty-two now.

So I've been building blogs and I used to build large social media pages on Instagram and just sell ads on them since I was a kid just to make a little bread and butter. because I needed it.

And I got into law school because I have a Persian mom.

So, you know, if you're not a doctor, you're a lawyer.

If you're not a lawyer, you're a doctor.

And if you're neither, you end up on the street.

And so I got into law school, not because I wanted to, but maybe I didn't want to at some point.

I washed suits and I got all excited.

But I was still running my business.

It was doing media.

So I just like, after a few years in law school, after three and a half years actually doing double major law international relations, I dropped out because my business was booming.

And I was making good money versus students.

And I was like, people were depressed.

I was like, fuck that.

Pardon my French.

Get me out of here.

Avoid the unhappy and the unlucky.

Yeah.

So I was just a social media kid.

And everyone kept talking about crypto in the underground.

A lot of the Telegram OG days, like buying advertisement on Instagram pages, buying and selling Instagram pages in the gray area of Instagram.

Terms of services was happening on crypto rails, right?

Right.

And here comes Ethereum in twenty fifteen.

My homies are all like, yo, this E thing is good.

It's money, nana.

What do I do again?

I fade it.

Again.

So, in two weeks, I fade the Bitcoin trade.

Oh, for two.

Oh, for two, right?

And so, because at the time, I was ingrained mentality, Persian mindset of like, you need to own assets, hard things, homes.

Physical, tangible.

Exactly.

You got to hold on to it.

Old school.

You got to go to law school.

You got to buy a house.

You know, this is the mindset that was ingrained to me.

The traditional path.

Right.

Yeah.

Which is, by the way, not a bad path, but it's not the path I was meant to go.

It's tried and true.

It's worked for a couple thousand years, right?

You know?

It's only very recently that this world has gone way digital and way weird.

Exactly.

And all bets are off.

And Persians historically, like Iranian immigrants, have done pretty well doing that, right?

Across the world, whether it's America or in France or in Canada, whatever.

So anyways, so fast forward now to what we're talking about.

So I move for two.

And fast forward to like all of twenty twenty, I have a good friend of mine, Troy, who's early big corner, like I think his lowest print on Bitcoin is ten bucks.

And if you feel like they're like crypto, crypto, crypto, crypto, crypto and then COVID hits and then we're back to like just being stuck at home.

Crypto, crypto.

I was like, dude, this time around, I'm not going for three.

I'm like, I'm like, I'm not just I was obsessed, though.

I kept researching it, reading about it.

So I knew about crypto, but never had the cojones to get involved because I was told that it was bad.

And that's when I went in, man.

Who's spreading that message, by the way?

Who's out there in twenty twenty trying to convince you that crypto is either dark web or or black market?

Especially Canada.

I mean, Canada, they hate that stuff.

Right.

And to this day, I don't think Canada is very pro crypto as a country.

And so everyone around you, everyone's like, oh, this is for drugs or this is like everyone.

And they weren't wrong, to be honest.

I mean, crypto.

Right. set its roots down in silk road yeah and and it's not hard to understand why it's like hey wait a minute this money is kind of private and decentralized and peer-to-peer and like doesn't have to get an approval from a jp morgan banker for me to set up an account set me up Yeah.

So that was it.

And then that was the aha moment for me.

So I just my twenty twenty going to twenty twenty resolution was I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and just actually do this thing that I like.

I had I have a good gut feeling for social trends.

Like I was early to Tumblr, early to Instagram, early to Facebook, Twitter.

I was very early to social media and memes and memetics.

And that made sense to me.

And so I fell into the NFT rabbit hole. it was nfts that really got me to go all in i actually shut down my business when i found out what an nft was in february okay so wait wait you're buying nfts or you're promoting and talking about promoting them i was doing all of it i was like what's your what's your best play and what's your worst nft play When I got in, I got in early enough where I got in before the whole, you remember like board apes came out in like April and pop.

So I got in February.

So February, you were still buying punks like thirty, forty, fifty grand.

Right.

So I bought a punk then, but my best trade was that I was like day one board ape yacht club.

So like board ape yacht club, like my lowest board ape buy was like point two east.

It's like a thousand bucks.

And I sold one at the peak for half a million bucks.

Yeah, that was nice.

That was pretty good.

So I don't know what your take is, but I think NFTs really get a bad rap from that same group that wants you to believe that crypto is dark web and money laundering and like terror financing only.

It could be used for those things, and I'm sure it is.

But that's not the only thing you can do with it.

And it's great for other things as well.

But that same community doesn't understand NFTs.

And I go back to those people because that's my audience as well.

And I say, look, an NFT is a digital collectible.

It's like this generation's Beanie Baby or I collected micro machines.

People collect matchbox cards, baseball cards, like people collect stuff.

I don't know why one thing is hot and rare and another thing is like, you know, laughed at by other people.

But the idea of a digital collectible that's cryptographically provably scarce, like why do people get so weirded out about that concept?

Where's that?

Where does that fear, ignorance come from?

Is it just that same old school versus new school mentality, or is it something deeper?

Well, one, there is that, the old school, new school, just like when Bitcoin came, it was digital money, right?

Store of value, digital gold, and then ETH came as digital money.

So people got that.

So ETH is like digital art, digital this, digital that.

I'm pretty sure you spend more time staring at a screen than at a wall, right?

Right.

Digital art makes sense in that sense.

And then probably to look at it as well.

The way I got into it is because my mother always loved art.

So I was raised around art galleries.

And so when I saw NFTs as provenance of where the artist is and and you can pay the artist going to get money and his kids, kids, kids, kids will get like that revenue going forever and ever after.

I know that it's a real Picasso versus a fake one.

That's what got me into crypto, actually, because I didn't understand the digital coin gold thing.

But I understood NFTs for some reason.

I feel like NFTs was single largest onboarding event for crypto in history, in my opinion.

Because a lot of all the Instagram folk, all the old, like a lot of people understood it.

The folk like me, right?

That were that fade that were all for two came into that.

Finally caught it.

Exactly.

That trend.

It made sense.

It was like community.

What do you know on social?

Because you are doing it with Texas in this podcast.

You have a community.

Yeah.

NFTs were a community first.

Right?

Building a community around a coin is different.

Maybe only XRP and ADA managed to do that and the Bitcoin laser eyes.

But, like, it's hard, right?

But NFTs make sense.

The reason why it got hated is because, look, like anything else in crypto, it got over-speculated.

It boomed fast.

It became a mega-asset.

Rappers started, you know, rugging left and right.

Let's be honest, like, you know, they came in and, and, and in retrospect, you know, there's some people, even on my end, like, you know, I hosted all the biggest artists.

I don't regret anything.

Right.

Some of the great artists that really shifted, molded the NFT art scene.

And some of the other one, like, you know, maybe I didn't need to have Mike Tyson on my podcast.

You feel me?

Like, you know, or the Paris Hilton, et cetera.

But at the time you don't understand that.

It all made sense.

No, back then.

Yeah, of course.

It was the place to be.

So do you see that trend happening again?

I mean, or was that a one hit wonder thing?

Is that something that could help on board?

Because look, we're always looking for ways to get people interested in this conversation, whether it's through a digital collectible or a merchant consumer product or through a trading product or whatever it is.

We're trying to grow this community and get new people interested. engaged in crypto so whatever we can do to bring those people into the conversation we're interested in learning more about and talking about so was that nft thing a one and done or is there is there a renaissance um so seventeen right was defy right twenty seventeen Then, in the year of twenty-one, all the DeFi folks hated NFTs because they missed the boat, but it was NFTs.

But in the year of twenty-four, all the NFT folks hated memes, but it was meme coin mania.

And now, you're seeing maybe it's already in tokenized stocks.

So, I do not believe there will be another NFT around the year of twenty-one.

It's impossible.

That's so true.

The generations are coming three years apart, and they despise and they look down on Yeah, dude.

And the Bitcoiners hated the Ethereum heads when it came out.

And the DeFi stuff, right?

Because there's only Bitcoin.

But hey, if you were early DeFi, you're a billionaire.

So, yeah.

Then all of a sudden, Matty and I show up in like a time machine from like, and we're like, yo, remember using crypto as a currency?

And the whole community is like, what are you doing? doing you're like nine or ten trends behind the cycle here bro we moved on a decade or two ago from cryptocurrency yeah it's crazy yeah so in that sense like no there's there's not going to be another like mega speculative bubble for nfts but hey dude like it doesn't mean that certain nfts intent so my timeline for nfts went from crypto punks are gonna be worth a million dollars in two years to crypto cup punks are gonna be worth a million dollars in in fifteen twenty years when the whole world is agentic and digital and be like yo that was the original well that was right so that's what it's gonna be selective selective nfts and collections and ten fifteen twenty years from now people that are still avoiding it today know that the world is going more and more digital it's not like we're going less digital so so they have to see the trend is going in that direction agents everything everyone you probably have seventeen personalities it's you and your sixteen agents right and they're gonna need they're gonna need their own their own faces your own figures like everyone at my company has like six different agents running right so it's just like those agents are going to have to have an alter ego and a percentage.

So NFTs are just, it's always going to be around.

You're just not going to get the ten thousand X in five minutes anymore, you know?

Well, that's the question.

The question is, if you're working on the next trend, is there that much upside or does everybody feel like they already see the next thing coming and it's already, it's here and gone in like five minutes?

Yeah.

I don't know.

But we've made a business out of that.

We started back at the early days of Bitcoin.

We went around.

We tell people we're following the same path that crypto has carved.

And it wasn't easy for them to do that.

All these crypto pioneers, the guys, the great names that we don't even hear from anymore, the Rogers and the Charlies and those guys, they're long gone.

But...

They were the pioneers and the pilgrims that charted this path, that carved it out of nothing.

And now we're walking down this same path going, yo, you guys forgot about using crypto as money.

It's true.

Businesses downtown are paying credit card fees and we have decentralized money that works today.

We finally have all the tools for us to trade between...

Businesses on Main Street and consumers on Main Street like we we can do that now, but we just kind of gave up on it like fifteen years ago.

Fifteen years ago, twenty two thousand eleven two thousand twelve was when you could go out and see guys setting up card tables at farmers markets, trying to onboard people with like crypto wallets, giving out USB sticks or giving out printed paper wallets like your wallet.

Like we didn't even have apps back then.

It was few and far between.

So, you know, that was when people were were really energized and passionate about crypto as a currency.

But then we see DeFi show up and then we see NFTs and then we see meme coins.

So I'm I'm totally happy continuing down that path and be like, well, look, we found here DeFi.

Who didn't know that you guys would have discarded this beautiful gem?

I know.

Because people aren't really building with the latest tools all the things that was tried before.

And so when Texacoin makes payment options for small businesses and creates this network where you can spend crypto as money, and then it's making all these other projects and tools that are... uh using the latest and greatest ai and everything that that that gets me excited yeah well we're we're like eureka look what we just did we made it so that you can take like a like your tangent cold storage card and tap to pay on this thing and everyone's like dude we don't even need that anymore oh no you don't need that i love that don't need it it's like the hardest thing right now actually I don't know what you're talking about, but I was going to ask you about that same thing because we live in like this Texacoin bubble.

We did very well over the last two and a half years.

We got really big, really fast.

And we're like starting to like come out of this bubble now and look around and we're like, Crypto, where are you at?

We're putting ten thousand terminals on countertops across, you know, North Texas is where we're starting.

We got a solid community going in Phoenix.

We have a really cool program now going on with like nonprofits and I'm not even supposed to talk about where like we're using on chain services just to make things more trustworthy and transparent.

And it's like these are the things that people were talking about ten, fifteen years ago.

We're doing them today.

So now we venture out of this Texacoin bubble and we're like, hey, crypto, check out what we got!

And everyone's like, shrugging why i don't know that's that's what i'm like i didn't even show up at um you know at uh token in singapore were you in token yeah i was here i was like i live in singapore and i didn't show up at token singapore and it's like my theory is that when you could mine crypto You had a seat at the table.

So if I'm mining crypto, I'm getting crypto every day.

I'm going out there and I'm pumping it.

Not because I got a bag of coins that I'm going to sell tomorrow, like when it pops, but because I'm the recipient of a product that comes out of a network that grows in value as more people use it.

Yeah.

Right?

So basically, if I'm mining, I get coins every day.

If the network's growing, we got Metcalfe's Law kicking in that I learned all about from... from Matty, as more people use this thing, it becomes exponentially more valuable.

And so now the coins that I'm getting every day off the mine become more valuable.

Who's mining today?

Institutions.

You can't join Bitcoin mining today in any kind of meaningful way, unless you're showing up with A nuclear power plant worth of electricity.

Yeah, literally.

There's plants like the size of Tesla factories right now.

Well, that's what they're talking about.

They're like, oh, we're going to start a new mining facility because we just bought this, you know, five billion dollar coal fired plant.

Literally.

It's like back in the day, you could mine it at home.

You could participate at home.

You could contribute your energy and your compute resource to making the network healthier, more secure, more redundant, more reliable.

And you got a little reward for that.

That's gone now. that's gone and we saw it go in like two phases phase one was china took over you know i remember being at a big club network meeting do you remember big club back then so big club was an early mining mlm program right sick and i got a theory about mlm i don't know which side of the conversation you are with uh with mlm but They were growing so fast and trying to buy so much of these, you know, so many of these ASICs that the market for ASICs just just got completely crushed.

Like you couldn't get them anymore.

They were growing so fast they couldn't get the mining capacity because China was like, yo, Bitcoin went from a thousand to twenty thousand dollars.

Why would you sell?

Why would we sell you a miner when we can just keep a miner, set it up here, use our cheap electricity and get the Bitcoin for ourselves?

So these guys out there trying to get people into crypto mining painted themselves into this corner by driving the price up so far, so high, so fast.

My theory is that crypto retail adoption died when those MLM guys went away.

You know, everybody loves to hate on MLM, but they know how to have a conversation with normal people about an opportunity.

Hey, get into this opportunity.

Put some money down on the table and let's go.

And so, you know, they were out there doing it.

But that's when China said in like twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, we don't really want to sell ASICs anymore.

We don't want to sell mining equipment.

We want to build the mines here.

And we got to a point where almost ninety percent of all the mining hash power was in China.

Then China makes it illegal.

All that scatters all over the planet.

Mongolia, this country, a lot of it shows up in Texas.

And so now we have all these new miners in Texas.

It's still Chinese owned.

It's not like those guys were like, OK, just kidding.

Thanks.

They want their piece of the pie.

They got it.

And so and so if you don't have an incentive to participate and to help grow this, this this kind of like, you know, this by the people for the people system. then why bother?

And now the banks and the institutions and the governments of the world own all the mining output.

And so now it's almost a negative incentive.

I hate those guys.

Why would I help them be more successful?

If I'm gonna go out there and spread the word about crypto and the bankers are gonna get more rich, I mean, look at who the biggest holders of crypto are now.

The exchanges, the nations, the treasury companies.

So where's the upside now for the individual?

And when the upside for the individual disappears out of a decentralized product, it's not decentralized anymore.

That's not what it is.

Like we can call it a decentralized peer to peer currency.

But if it's for the benefit of the banks, it's not really that anymore.

That's my theory.

It's not a bad theory.

I mean, that's why people like to play the meme coin casino and NFTs and other coins because they see there's more upside in that or altcoins, etc.

They can get in, they can make a bet, and they can get out.

That's really why people do it, right?

Like, it's just because they think that they can get in early and...

Which I can't fault that.

I mean, come on, man.

Hey, dude, life is tough out there, man.

So people got to find a way to make it.

It's the gig economy or find the next meme coin that's going to go wild.

Yeah.

Like, those are your options today.

Well, I think there's a third option, which is instead of becoming a statistic of somebody who loses in crypto gambling and speculation, I still believe that the world is capable of switching to a system that is not inflated by a bunch of central bankers and everything.

And so to me, one of the most exciting things about what Bobby's built are these cold storage coins.

Have you seen those before?

No, what is that?

So I started making those in twenty seventeen.

So I don't know if you are aware, one of my claims to fame is In, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, My origin story, like, okay, so I made that in...

Yes.

I didn't get it in in.

Bitcoin was five bucks.

In I lost everything.

I left the US.

I set up shop in Asia.

My friend hits me up.

He's like, dude, if you're like flat out, why don't you start like a crypto or like a crypto investment fund or something like Litecoin?

And there's this new one coming out called like Ethereum or something.

I was like, look, I'm in, but I don't know anything about it.

My brain can't handle it.

So I didn't get in.

And then I'm watching and I'm like, okay, the biggest problem people have with crypto is they keep losing their keys.

They keep like forgetting their password, locking themselves out of their account.

And so why don't I make a product that's going to help people with that problem and give them a tangible, like physical thing that they can hold onto that's storing a digital asset.

So obviously the digital assets out there, you know, in the cloud, on the chain somewhere, But the information that you need to access it is right there in the palm of your hand.

So I see this as a bridge between two worlds.

We've got the physical world that mom and dad know.

And then we've got the digital world that's coming our way, you know, the brave new future.

And so I make this coin.

It's a bridge between those two worlds.

And I started selling them.

Started handing them out at conferences and they're all over the place.

And so it's still today a very powerful tool.

We started putting seed phrases on them instead of private keys, which I didn't even know that a seed phrase does what like a seed phrase does.

So I don't know.

Multi-chain.

Yeah.

I had no idea.

And part of what has gotten me excited about these coins that I've been handing out to people for many, many, many years now, and that's how I met Bobby, is I can just load it up with some crypto and hand it to someone.

They have a physical one-ounce coin, like a froke might get a kick out of the fact that I onboarded Jordan Peterson and Hawk Tua into crypto by handing them a cold storage coin.

So that's like the two most extreme.

Did you catch the Hawk Tua girl coin?

Oh, God.

I stayed away from that, but we were at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville, and she was there, and I was like, oh, you know, like, I'll give her this cryptocurrency.

What the hell?

I need one.

One coin is included free with your appearance on Honest Money Live.

Let's go.

The only meme coin that I ever bought into was Let's Go Brandon.

Remember Let's Go Brandon?

No.

Oh, let's go.

Brandon was some NASCAR driver.

Brandon Brown wins his first race.

He's terrible, right?

He's like last place every time.

And then all of a sudden he's in a NASCAR race.

Something goes wrong and he wins.

So the.

So the person interviewing him after, he's like just overjoyed.

They're like, you can hear the crowd chanting and the crowd chanting F Joe Biden, right?

And she goes, they're screaming, let's go, Brandon.

And it was one of those rare moments that you love where the matrix just reveals itself, where like everyone hears one thing and they tell you it's something different and you're like, That's not what it was at all.

And so anyway, that was the Let's Go Brandon movement that you saw show up on like hats and t-shirts.

So I ended up licensing Brandon Brown, the NASCAR driver.

I put some money in his pocket.

I'm like, yo, I wanna make an official Let's Go Brandon coin.

And he's like, all right, great, let's do it.

Hand over some cash, get the coin made, ready to take it to market.

And he comes back like the eleventh hour and he's like, dude, you can't say let's go Brandon.

I'm like, what do you mean?

He's like, I signed another deal with some meme coin guy.

He's gonna do let's go Brandon meme coins.

I'm like, yeah, but I have a license.

He's like, we just can't do it.

And I don't wanna get away from that anyway. so i'm like bro i never brought the product to market i was so i was so mad that i just canceled the whole deal i was like whatever but i bought the meme coin i'm like you know i don't know how i could have missed it so bad but it's absolutely worth those i got like seven trillion of these things and they're just not even digital dust I didn't even know that story.

If people are watching at home, we're willing to give away a free cold storage coin to people who are watching who live in the US and you can go to the website honest.money.

You set up your profile and we ship you a coin.

Yeah, it's free coin.

Go get one.

Look, it costs a couple dollars to make them.

It costs a couple bucks to ship them.

But we're trying to onboard people to crypto.

We're trying to tell people that crypto is the future of money.

If you don't get in now, you're going to get dragged into it later, kicking and screaming.

So you might as well get in early. make a couple bucks, learn a little bit along the way and have some fun, meet some new people, go to some conferences, you know, mess around with the future of money.

Like where's the downside?

Do it with a cold storage coin.

That way when you drop your phone in the toilet and you have to recover, you got a laser etched, you know, seed phrase right there.

You scan it one time and you're right back in business.

It couldn't get any easier than a free cold storage coin, honest.money.

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Please. learn about crypto if you're completely uh custodial we don't really think you're in crypto maddie's got a theory about that yeah yeah i mean uh it's not crypto if you don't hold your own keys and so you know coinbase and polymarket and everybody they're like getting people used to this idea that uh that that's crypto when a middleman holds it for you and i remember uh the whole point of bitcoin was to remove the middleman and so there's risk with holding with being your own bank and uh but but there's this huge benefit that we can you know take back our money and actually own things and not eat bugs so um there you go you will own nothing yeah no look um I think that there's not anything inherently wrong or bad or evil with custodial services.

You know, every one of them has closed my account.

Coinbase, Kraken, even Strike.

I want to like that Strike guy so bad.

Was he a token?

Jack.

What's his name?

Jack Mallers.

Strike.me is like the go-to for connecting crypto with the normal bank account.

The only problem with it is it's Bitcoin only.

So if you want to use it and you're like in USDC or USDT, you got to convert to Bitcoin, which costs you a little bit.

And then you send it over to there and then you got volatility you have to worry about or you convert out of it to like dollars.

And then all of a sudden, you know, you're paying a fee for that as well.

Even those guys who are like the most congruent pro-crypto, crypto is money guys on planet Earth, they shut my account too.

So I don't think that they're evil.

I just think that they are really concerned about their banking relationships.

They want to do everything they can and not like, you know, break money laundering and all that stuff, which is all good.

It's all good if you're holding my money.

I want you to do it right and do it good.

But it's not crypto.

You know, it's become something different.

What was the hot thing at Token?

What did you see was the main topic of conversation there?

Tokenized stocks, RWAs.

It's like stock tokens.

That's really the hot thing.

I mean, this is the cycles.

I was hoping you weren't going to say that.

Because that's what I've heard from everybody else.

So that's the one, right?

And I'm like...

That's the one, dude.

Like I said, it was DeFi, then NFTs, then memes, and now we're doing stock tokens.

Because you know why?

Because it's easy to understand to people.

You know how NFTs, I told you, were easy to understand?

Provenance, on-chain, tokenized stocks, trading, trading, trading, trading, trading, trading, a tokenized stock is a revolutionary thing that the whole industry needs to be excited about.

What is it that I'm missing in that conversation?

Because to me, it's a stock and we've already got stocks.

RWA's is a little bit different.

So we'll cover that one in a second.

But tell me about tokenized stocks because I keep hearing that the hit, the whole thing about token was tokenized stocks.

It's because from a very like, Like let's say I were to dumb it down at the lowest level and entry level dumb, dumb and down for the person that just is not in crypto is being able to trade these stocks, twenty four, seven, three, six, five, without having to go through your like interactive brokers from nine to four and not being able to execute that.

Now, I know that they're not always all stocks and some companies are coming out against that.

And it's a promise on the side.

But to the people, it's still very low hanging fruit.

It makes sense to the general person.

It's like, why can't I buy? my Nvidia stock on a Saturday.

If I feel like it's going to go up, Mark is going to open up on Monday and people are, are trading.

Like it makes sense to people.

Right.

So is it, is it maybe the difference?

Cause cause I know Bobby values utility greatly, but then there's this like other area of crypto speculation that's like narrative.

So would you say like, that's, can you explain that?

Me or Bobby?

Yeah.

I don't even know what he's talking about.

Narrative versus utility.

Yeah.

Well, because the thing is like utility token is like, OK, like very much so like the token has a bunch of different.

Actually, I'm not a firm believer that most tokens have utility for what it's worth.

Like, I think I like to take most of crypto for its face value.

As much as I love this industry, like I think we have to be honest with the industry we're in.

Like a lot of it is like there's nothing going on.

Right.

Yeah.

So it's tough.

Like the hardware.

Yeah, Vaporware, right?

Like a great utility token.

The best one lately has been Hyperliquid because like it buys itself back and then you can use the Perpdex, et cetera.

It's an incredible product, arguably the best product to have come out of crypto in the last, years or so, right?

So there's that, but the narrative tokens are great because like narrative, price follows narrative, right?

And the narrative around the perplexes is that you can now trade these coins, twenty-four seven or buy an anthropic IPO, pre IPO ahead of the IPO, November, fifteen, sixteen.

That's a great one for the underlying token, right?

So I think people just like to be able to have skin in the game and you know how we are.

We're all sophisticated investors, right? or want to feel like it.

And so like being able to buy some Google share, like I feel cool now, you know, like I'm buying stocks.

Like I never bought stocks until hyperliquid, right?

It's actually crypto only, but I don't know.

Can you trade tokenized stocks in a non-custodial wallet?

Or do you have to go through a particular exchange to get it?

I don't believe you can.

Nothing that I know of.

I think those tokenized stocks are only traded.

Can you trade them on DEX?

I think maybe on Solana you can trade them on DEX.

See, when I started looking at RWA's, I was like, hey, RWAs are really cool.

You still have that magic in the middle.

You've got a yacht.

You want to tokenize and turn it into a million little teeny tiny pieces of a yacht.

Great.

OK, that sounds cool.

Now, anybody sitting under a tree in West Africa can own a little teeny tiny nugget of a yacht.

Great.

Everyone's in the game that wants to be in the game.

But then I start looking into it and it's like, well, there are rules.

You can't transfer it without going through the exchange.

And you can only go to an accredited investor and this and this and this.

And you've got to build things into the smart contract to prevent transferability.

It's like, isn't the whole point of tokenization to make it decentralized so that you've got this contract?

I know, I think we've been cruising far away from that decentralization with crypto in twenty twenty six.

Right.

It's becoming If anything, more and more centralized.

I think it's come full circle.

That's kind of my argument.

My argument is the thing that we're the most excited about right now is tokenized stocks.

Yeah.

Which look, you can look at any any company that goes public, right?

You have like an eighty percent chance of losing money on an IPO.

That's the statistic, right?

And it's like, why?

Because the bankers have already made their money, the bankers, the legal teams, all those guys, the CPAs, the you know, the auditors, they've already gotten paid.

And so that company is trying to raise some capital.

And I remember being a part of a discussion when the Texas Stock Exchange was was talking about launching.

And it was like, you know, we're going to make it easier for small cap companies to go public on a regular exchange because they've run off to these crypto markets and did this DeFi ICO thing because it's so cost prohibitive to launch on a real exchange, on a real like, you know, Nasdaq or whatever.

And so.

The reality is the only companies that are doing that now are companies that are so big and have so much cash they don't need to do a raise anyway.

So the markets are underserving this community of growing businesses that actually need capital but can't afford the regulatory burden or the legal burden or whatever the costs are to actually go public.

And so what ends up happening is guys who don't need the money go public And then, you know, eighty percent of the time it doesn't work out well for the retail guy because we're sitting there after this thing's already bought and sold a thousand times.

That's what tokenized stocks could give us the ability to bypass.

But that's not it either.

And I think like the whole reason utility died in crypto is because of regulatory, you know, persecution.

And the government said, oh, it's a meme.

That's fine.

Oh, it has utility.

That's illegal.

I mean, the war on crypto didn't help it, right?

Like, you can't stake, you can't do this, you can't do a rep share, you can't do that, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So it kind of, you know, that kind of slowed it down.

Let's talk real quick about some of the interviews you've done because you've interviewed CZ, you've interviewed Donald Trump.

What kind of narrative and message are they giving you for the future of this industry?

Is it something to look forward to and get excited about or is it regulatory overload?

What would you say the main takeaways are from some of those high level interviews? yeah i mean obviously like interviewing such individuals is incredible right like that's something anyone in my position would dream of um and and i find it really awesome i think my first stance like when i first got to interview the president was like whoa like we went from being persecuted as an industry from the largest administration on earth the most powerful country in the world Like all my friends got lawsuits, right?

All the homies, like you got.

Mm hmm.

For the club, to the unit swap, to the open seas, to everyone.

Everyone got a Wells notice.

And most of them people didn't tweet about.

But every company, big company crypto kept getting attacked and bullied.

And law by enforcement doesn't work, right?

So we went from this to that, which is awesome, right?

I think what the president has done with the Korean administration, now the chair of the SEC and the chair of the CFTC, both, they're doing amazing things for us, for crypto.

And then you have the other side of the pie, which is like, well, now has crypto become too political?

And to institutionalize.

Anyways, like you've been talking about.

Institutionalated is the word you're looking for.

Institutionalated.

Yeah.

And so now the answer is also yes, right?

So we've gone from one end of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum.

It really is.

I mean, there are opposite ends because you got clarity stalled out. through the regular regulatory process.

And then you got the SEC on the other side, issuing these like party on Wayne, party on Garth, like memos every couple of weeks saying, yeah, go for it.

Yeah, no, that's good too.

Yep, we don't see any problem with this.

And so it's it's almost like they did a big fat switch.

Yeah.

So this is what happened.

So I would say like, you know, it's I always tend to lean bullish, like I'm a permabull, like I think the industry is only going to grow and we're on the second decade of the industry.

So it's going to get even bigger.

And it's way early.

I agree with that.

Right.

Like maybe the price of Bitcoin in that early, but like the industry as a whole, from a technology standpoint, and especially now with the cross of AI and blockchain tech, there's so much stuff to be excited about.

But a lot.

The agentic upside is going to continue to drive it even if retail adoption is sitting here being bored.

I mean, look at what happened to the U.S. dollar.

It comes out in nineteen thirteen.

It takes twenty years in an executive order for the U.S. dollar to gain traction.

And we didn't go from like physical money to zeros and ones.

We went from like gold and silver coins to a warehouse receipt that's backed up by gold and silver coins.

Like it wasn't like a like a monumental leap that that the marketplace had to engage in order to go from money A to money B.

And it still took twenty years of skepticism and misunderstanding and distrust.

So here we are, what, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years.

I mean, white paper came out in two thousand and eight first block mind in two thousand and nine.

But most of the world didn't hear about this until at least twenty thirteen.

Even later, man.

Like, for most of the world, like...

Unless you were living under a rock, you heard about crypto and an ICO.

Bitcoin, you heard about the ICO.

But I really think no one really got involved until the So we're seven to nine years in for most people.

Like meme coins are just really recent, like all that stuff.

It's brand new.

Now everyone's heard about it.

Now it's politicized AF.

And that's a shame, man.

I see that actually as a net negative.

It could be.

Because now you're sitting on one side of the aisle and you're saying, eh, if that guy's into it, I'm going to steer clear.

That's the problem now.

It's become partisan.

Yeah.

And you don't want that, right?

Because now it's like, oh, if you like crypto, then you're from that political side.

On that team.

No, dude.

And I totally understand that, too.

Right.

It was like whatever Biden said, I was I was on the other team.

Like it didn't even matter.

He says the earth is round.

I go, it's flat.

He goes to the moon.

I go, we surely didn't go to the moon.

If he says it, then it's got to be wrong.

And I'm not even a Trump guy.

I just got out of politics in two thousand and eight after I saw what they did to Ron Paul. and so you know i i could care less uh for the most part i don't want to see them destroy everything as we're doing now um but it is a shame that a politicized you know approach to crypto is is you know what's happening now but it's also driving the sec in a particular direction which today actually works pretty well for me that's the thing right we have like the cftc and the sec are doing really good things really good like even the clarity act didn't pass The SEC is like, fuck it, we're going to do our own thing.

And they've done it.

Well, I need them to send a memo to the state of Texas and ask the Texas State Security Board to stop picking on me.

I think the dream, you know, for people who are in crypto for the right reasons, you know, basically of having peer to peer cash and having decentralization and replacing middlemen, owning your own money. i think uh the dream is yeah like all this stuff is gonna get built on that's like crypto adjacent like yeah you know stocks and everything and then people get comfortable with it they they they think that they're using crypto it's not real crypto and then utility comes back into favor surprise uh people already have wallets and now they can participate in the more real and i don't see that as being dishonest or immoral i see that as being you know, creative and clever.

If you go to somebody right now and go, yo, you want to accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment?

They laugh at you today.

If you're like, yo, you want to check out this video game that gives you digital collectibles, NFTs as rewards for playing?

They're like, yeah, sure.

Okay, sign me up.

Next thing you know, they've got a wallet, they've got a cold storage coin and all that stuff.

And they're opening up themselves to this DeFi world, which is another thing that I think that has been kind of forgotten.

I keep asking people, I'm like, what's Web three?

What's Web three to you?

They're like, well.

We're on web four now.

And I'm like, well, great, but what is web three?

To me, the way it's been explained is we own our data.

We're decentralized.

Everybody owns their own zeros and ones, right?

And it's like, well, we'll still use Facebook and TikTok and Instagram.

They're not web three-ing it up.

Sorry, I lost my light here.

So we've got opportunities still to go back and finish these chapters that were started by the community. meet people where they where they are and yeah and i don't think that there's anything dishonest about that at all i think it's creative i think it's helpful and i think that it's going to be a powerful way of continuing to onboard people to this this wild world of exciting stuff There was one other thing I wanted to talk to you about, and I forgot it as my light was dying, but maybe we'll come back to it in just a moment.

Here's a question for Farouk.

If you were to create a clippable moment now, what predictions would you have for the broad crypto market?

Are you a Layla... halpern are you uh you know a michael saylor or a tom lee like just state state your uh some predictions you have yeah because if you hit it we get to play this back later and everyone no but listen like i think people are getting uh a little too doomer and too bearish on on crypto like we were october end of october twenty twenty six and everyone's almost like quitting again You know, we just had a long bear market, a pretty depressing one, and people are leaving.

I'm as bullish as ever for reasons that I've stated before.

So the cross of the intersection of AI and blockchain technology is incredible.

You know, the intersection now you have privacy as well, which is back in the mix.

Like you were talking about how Bitcoin is becoming too institutional and, you know, there's no custody.

But now you have, you know, I think everybody's starting to learn more about XMR and Zcash and Co., right?

And you have NIR, I didn't say AI, the Intex.

There's good...

And then you have RWA, which we talked about, and I know you're not a big fan of tokenized stocks, but RWA is like the Pokemon cards, like they're killing it, right?

On chain, et cetera.

So now you have, for the first time I feel, since crypto started, and I wasn't around early on, but I've done enough research, and my job is literally to host a podcast every day, five days a week, since five years.

So I think I've done my due diligence on the industry at like three thousand episodes deep, that for the first time, it feels like there is a lot of good product.

There's a lot of good things out there that are beyond just the meme coin or even just the store of value.

There's more than just Bitcoin now, right?

More than just Ethereum, more than just this and that.

So for the first time, it feels like crypto is in a place where it's on set to really explode and people are just for some reason not seeing it because... price follows narrative or narrative follows price and people just get excited when the price goes up.

But I'm like really bullish on the industry as a whole here.

I think we're, we're in.

I'm right there with you.

And I'm not bummed out about low prices because I think it's a buying opportunity for the people that can see that developing that brewing right now.

Like once the midterms are out of the way next week, get that out, you know, the anthropic IPO that people are waiting because it's way on the market.

And then it's just, you know, Thanksgiving into a Santa Claus rally, we love those, and then a strong QE, QE into May.

You know, Bitcoin, probably a hundred and twenty-five to fifty K by May would be nice, and then everyone's going to be happy again.

Like, people are too bearish.

Get bullish!

Well, we're doing our part here.

We don't plug Texacoin.

We don't make a big deal out of the stuff that we're working on on this program.

That's not what it's about.

But we do want people that are listening to know that we're working hard for that future.

You know, honest money isn't going to happen by itself.

It's not going to be brought in to you by the bankers like there's going to have to be good people like you and us that are working towards decentralized digital peer to peer currency and building the tools for it.

Stuff like, you know, the credit card terminals that accept crypto point of sale.

Stuff like the cold storage coins, stuff like apps and dabs that make it practical for people to use and to explore and to get started with it.

I mean, we need all of that stuff, even though we might be seventeen years, seventeen, eighteen years deep in this cryptocurrency, you know, financial technology.

We are way far away from where we should be and need to be as a civilization and using better money.

Like we know that the money we have now over the last hundred and thirteen years has gone down ninety five, ninety seven, ninety nine percent in value.

We know what's happened in crypto since it came out.

And so that whole narrative is yet to be really embraced by people who don't yet understand how money works.

And they're waking up.

Unfortunately, they're waking up because of terrible things happening in the markets.

But that's usually how it works.

Are you saying that the dollar has an inflation bug?

I'm saying that the dollar, you know, you think about when the dollar is going to die.

And it's like, how much more dead can you get?

We've lost all but one or two percent of our purchasing power.

Crazy man out there.

I was talking about this literally like two hours ago with my friends in Canada.

The dollar is literally worthless.

And people don't understand that it's by design.

Like, that's not by design for sure.

It's by design.

Like, like I was thinking about trying to find a way to tell that story.

Like when I was growing up, nineteen, twenty years old, I wanted to buy a Ferrari.

Three fifty five was my car.

No way.

That's that's my dream car.

That's the Nicolas Cage Ferrari, man.

I want to drive it through a building.

It's got to be red, but naturally aspirated six speed.

That's exactly gated.

You got to deal with it.

You got to learn how to drive it.

So it was one hundred and twenty five thousand bucks when I wanted one.

You go to try to buy a Ferrari that's a couple of years old today.

It's four or five, six hundred thousand dollars.

Did you know even now I just went to the Apple store because I want I want to get a screen protector for my new iPhone.

It's fifteen hundred bucks for an iPhone. iPhone, forget it.

I don't even know how much I pay.

I don't look anymore because it's so simple.

I work on this, so I need it.

But the screen protector to the cover, the Belkin thingy was sixty bucks.

For, like, this, like, protector thing.

Are we talking Canadian dollar?

Are we talking Euro dollar?

Sixty-five dollars Canadian, which is, like...

Fifty bucks.

Yeah, something like that, right?

Yeah.

And I was like, fifty bucks?

Like, you want to see, right?

For a screen protector?

I feel like when I was a kid, I was going around.

It's wild, man.

And I looked at the guy at the Apple store.

Obviously, I can afford it.

I don't care.

I need it.

I don't want to break my two thousand dollar phone.

You literally need it.

And I'm like, dude, what?

And he was laughing.

Because I don't remember last time I was there.

But the question is, like...

Can everybody afford a sixty five dollar screen protector?

So that's why I started talking to my friends about this, because in Canada, sixty five dollars to sixty five fucking dollars.

Right.

And so I tell my guy, my friends, I do like.

How do you afford this?

That's what I'm saying.

What does everyone do?

We'll make like twelve bucks an hour.

So it's like five hours, so it's almost a complete- You gotta work five hours for that screen protector.

That is a lot of time, and time is money.

But what happens, man, is the quality of life just gets lower, because you're not making enough money to cover it.

So you go, well, I won't buy the good screen protector.

I'll buy the cheap one.

You know, it's ten bucks.

That's the one I can afford.

Sixteen hours, the minimum wage in Quebec.

So we just we keep accepting this lower and lower and lower quality of life.

And it happens slow enough that we don't really notice it.

But if you stop and you look back ten years, you go.

Oh, man, what happened?

God forbid you look back twenty years.

You go, why are we all unhealthy?

Why are we all obese?

Why?

Like, why are we all sick?

Like what happened?

We blinked and all of a sudden our quality of life just kept going down slow enough that it doesn't piss you off.

It's like boiling frogs in a pot.

So.

We want people to start to open their eyes up and go, wait a minute.

Is there a better way?

Is inflation debt based fiat money our only option?

Or does the world have something else that's not gold and silver like mom really wants? but is usable, is fast, is secure, is cryptographically provable.

Like that's what we have today with cryptocurrency, but it's only a currency if people like you and I are willing to exchange it.

And that's what we're working hard to get to happen, whether it's with a Nectar Pay terminal or with a wallet or with a new app that's gonna teach you something, we're doing it.

That's what our team does.

We've got a great community out there, people that are excited for us to win.

And I think that we only can win.

I don't think that failure is even an option for us because it's like either we go back to the dark ages and we're all slaves or we have honest money.

These are the options.

Which team are you on?

Yeah, totally.

I agree.

Look, man, I really appreciate you being here today.

Thanks for taking a chance with us.

We're looking for other great guests like yourself that just want to have a real, open, uncensored, unscripted conversation about money.

So if you know anyone that wants to jump on our program and share it with the world, let's go.

Otherwise, thank you.

Any finishing thoughts, final parting ideas?

Not much, man.

Honestly, just like I think stay bullish, you know, and stay curious.

Stay positive, you know.

With gratitude, optimism is sustainable.

Maddy, take us away, man.

Yeah, I'd say like check out our other episodes.

We streamed with Ron Paul.

We streamed with Tiffany Fong and Patrick Byrne just went viral today for winning a court case and everything.

We had him on last week.

Subscribe to a list of VIPs that we've got on this program.

Very proud of ourselves.

Pat ourselves on the back.

We're doing something right.

It's a big deal.

So thanks for joining.

Thanks for being on and take care.

We'll see you again, man.

Thanks.