Help Me Understand Cryptocurrency Investing with Tai Zen

Okay, we are rolling. This is Brad Costanzo and I have got a very fun interview for you today. And by the way, if you do not know, this is an actual video interview as well. So if you click the link in the show notes, if you're listening this on a podcast app, you can go over to the site and watch the actual video of my guest and I today. I've got a very special guest. This is a very selfishly interesting topic for me and there's an. There's going to be a fun story behind this guest. I've got my friend Ty Zen on the show today and I want to read you. I want to take you back seven years into 2013, and I want to read you a couple of quick messages I got from Ty because I've known Ty now for about, I don't know, a decade or so.

And.

Ty, I'm reading here, this was May 8, 2013. Ty, who was in a mastermind group of mine, sends out a message that says, hey guys, my colleagues and I in the financial sector have always hoped for a technology or solution that will come along and level the playing field for the little guy. Stop all the nonsense that Ben Bernanke and the banksters are doing to our monetary system by disgustingly printing money at will. I strongly believe that bitcoin is the best solution so far. And they have a conference coming up in San Jose. He goes on to talk about the conference. He says that Satoshi Nakamoto guy who came up with this bitcoin solution should get a Nobel Prize in economics and peace for his work in resolving the problem with Wall street and the banks. Now that was May of 2013.

December of 2013, I get a Facebook message from him and it says, hey, Brad, here are some bitcoin videos I made for my friends if you're interested in learning more bitcoin without all the technical mumbo jumbo. My next Facebook message from him was June 2, 2027 years. There aren't too many things that I wish I could go back in time and slap myself in the face for not paying more attention when I did. This is one of those times. Ty's been a friend of mine for years. We really didn't talk for a while, but in that time, he really double down on cryptocurrency, trading, investing, bitcoin and all of the like. And I'm going to let him tell you more specifically about the results he had. Not only has he personally created a fortune for himself, but he created a training coaching academy for Other people who wanted to learn this way back then created a lot of millionaires out of it. And I personally have recently started to get back into this and try to understand what's going on in cryptocurrency and bitcoin. I put about $5,000 in the market back in maybe 20, 15 or 16. Watched it go up, watched it go down, ignored it, got back to work. And recently because of Ty's guidance personally with me, but also some of the stuff that I'm paying attention to in the overall macro economy, I think now is an incredible, incredibly important time for all of us to pay attention. I've invited Ty to the show to really give a real world, non hyped up straight talk primer for all my listeners who have heard about it but don't really know much. And then we're going to go into some of the more advanced things that he's seen in the market of why we should be paying attention. So Ty, that might be the longest introduction in my show's history, but it's, you know, I think the situation was warranted. But welcome to bacon wrapped business. It is so good to have you.

Hey, thanks for having me on here, Brad. You know, really, really, it's a great honor for me to be here on your show with you. You know.

There'S not too many people that I can say thank you to and say directly that helped me to become a multimillionaire and become financially free. And I would say that you are one of those people and I've been grateful for it because when I first came out of prison and I was, you know, for drugs when I first.

Came, we're get to that story.

Don't worry folks, I didn't know nothing. And I remember that one time that you sat down with me in Dallas when I first moved up there and I had nothing, you know, and you took the time and.

You explained to me what to do to get on my feet and move ahead in life financially and stuff. And I remember, you know, and then you let me into your mastermind and stuff and that dude, that was so huge, man. Like there's not only like a handful of people that I can say directly had a direct impact on me becoming financially free where I'm at today, you know, and you were definitely one of them.

So I can't tell you what that means for me just to hear that, like it's one of those things like, you know, you hope you're doing good stuff for people in the world and I just couldn't be more proud of you, because I remember when we sat down and, yeah, you were trying to figure it out. You were. You were kind of struggling. We'll talk about your backstory here in a second because it is. It is so important to really understand for you guys listening, you know, who Ty is and where he comes from.

But, yeah, no, I want to. I want to thank you for.

I just want your audience to know that, you know, not to take that lightly because.

You know, like, I would say this, like, you know, I grew up in the ghetto and everything, and then the project was really poor. And it was Tony Robbins who first changed my mind that, you know, when I read his Unlimited power book that said, hey, man, like, you know, if you change your mind, you can change your life. You know, and then it was rich dad, poor dad, who's. Who said that, hey, if you want to make money, you got to learn about money. But those guys were in books, you know, I never met none of those guys in real life. And to meet you, you in real life, you know, in Dallas, and for you to sit down and take the time to sit down with me, not rushing. You know how, like, you meet some people that are doing good, and when you sit down, you try to have a talk with them, you know, it's like they try to rush through it, you know, and get through, man, this guy's a broke ass. You know, let me just hurry up and get through this, you know, and just get it out of the way. But I don't know what you saw at that time, but, you know, I really appreciate the time that you spent sitting there with me and explaining to me what I needed to do, you know, and even connected with me with different resources and people to do that. And every time I've met you, I always remember, man, this guy. Every time I meet this guy, he's introducing me to new people that can help take me to the next level, you know? So, you know, I'm not saying that you're better than Tony Robbins or rich dad, poor dad, you know, you can.

Go ahead, say it. No kidding.

But I will say this. You did. You know, it's not just a matter of, you know, somebody telling you through a book or an audio cassette tape or something, but for someone to actually be successful and sit there in front of you when you're broke and they're sitting there across the table from you and explain this to you, and then, like I said, when you got into the mastermind, right, it just. It blew my mind. The level of people that you had in your mastermind, that was playing at that level. And I'd never, you know, I've never seen somebody talk about making, you know, $100,000 or a million dollars, much less to even do it in a month. That just blew my mind. And what that did was it just helped, you know, open my mind. Like, man, there's guys out there just, you know, like there's guys out there that just are just normal guys like myself that learn these skills and then was able to come up, you know. So I just want to say thank you to you for that, man.

Well, I want to say thank you. As I said, it means a lot. So you mentioned pro and you mentioned growing up in the ghetto. We're going to get into bitcoin and crypto. But I mean your story is so remarkable and every time you tell the more details, it's like, Jesus Christ. It is amazing where you're at, but it's a testament to you and your fortitude there. But take us back. Like you said, you grew up in the. Was it the ghettos of.

I was born in Vietnam, so everyone knows Vietnam. And after the war with the US.

I came from a really small fishing village. It was like maybe less than 3,000 people in there. And my dad, you know, he stole one, he hijacked. Him and his friends hijacked one of the communist patrol boats there. And we escaped Vietnam after the communists took over the southern part because we live way the end of the southern part of Vietnam. So it took them several years to come down that far. And we were just a small, you know, fishing village that is not a huge impact on the country's security. So they took come all get there several years later after the fall of Saigon. And so we left after they confiscated the communists confiscated all my parents property and they just confiscated everybody's lands and businesses and everything. Anyway, so we left and then on the ocean up there, we got into a gunfight and got hijacked by some Thai pirates. And so we ended up in a Malaysian refugee camp for like a little bit over a year. And then we were there. And then from there we got picked up by the, I guess the United nations and the Catholic services in New York City. So somehow or another we ended up with them. And then so we came to America, lived in Montgomery, Alabama. We got sponsored by a Luke Jackson Honda. Their family, I'm not sure if it's still there or not. They had a successful Honda motorcycle dealership business there. And then from there we moved to Olympia, Washington, and then that's where I learned how to speak English. And then we lived and worked for years in the farms, picking fruit and vegetables out in the farms in Salem, Oregon. Saved up some money, moved down.

Like migrant working, right?

Yeah, we were just migrants. We didn't come from a rich family. My family was not educated, you know, didn't have a high level education, you know, we came from a very small fishing village, you know. Yeah.

You know, just to give you an idea how backwards our fishing village was, you know, when the American Navy had their base there at my village, out of all the villages they chose to. It's called the. The Brown Water Navy, I think is the name of it. But they had their base there because it had the deepest ports, the deepest. The river ports. So they had the US Brown Navy base there. And then from there, you know, when we had fresh water pumps and things like that, that was a huge innovation technology for our village because, you know, we hadn't seen that before. So just, even just a fresh water, just a water pump or water filtration system.

That was huge for us back then, you know. So just to give your audience an idea of the background of my village. But then, so from Salem, Oregon, we saved us some money from picking fruit and vegetables in the farms of Salem, Oregon. And then we moved, relocated down to Fort Worth, Texas to work in the sweatshops. And Texas is one of the states in the southern part of the US and we were working in the sweatshops there. So I was sewing clothes, like, you know, stuff like this, you know, and we were, my brother and I, we were cranking out probably about 2,000 dresses for women each week. And we did that for several years, like from the time we were in the.

How older were you then?

We did that from the time we were in the fourth, fifth grade, all the way up throughout high school. Wow.

Yeah, sweatshops were real.

Yeah, yeah, sweatshops real. And when I tell people that they think it was in China or somewhere. No, it was in Fort Worth, Texas. So. Yeah.

And then I know fast forwarding, you grew up, you moved down to South Texas, and it's really rough neighborhood right in Port Arthur.

And we lived, you know, my dad tried to save some money. Well, we actually moved down to near Houston, but we got robbed. My dad bought a machine shop down there, a small machine shop, and our neighbors came and robbed us. After we finished a job and made a few thousand bucks, you know, they found out about it and came in and beat the Crap out of my dad and my little brother just to beat the hell out of all of us and robbed us in this because we lived in a trailer park at that time. And so my dad got scared and he took us down to a smaller village called Palacios in Texas. And we didn't do too well there. So we moved back to the Houston area around the Port Arthur, Beaumont area. And we had a machine shop down in the downtown Port Arthur. And my dad, and you know, my dad does not know, like, where the ghettos are at in America. You know, like anything with a paved road is better than the village that we came from in Vietnam. So he didn't realize that this was an entire black neighborhood and this was a drug neighborhood. And I saying that just as a black neighborhood, it's a bad neighborhood. I'm just saying this particular neighborhood that we lived in in downtown Port Arthur was drug infested. You know, they were selling crack, they were selling cocaine, heroin. They just everywhere. And my dad moved there because the property was cheap, you know, so he moved there so that we can reduce the cost of living and stuff, you know. So he bought it, you know, piece of land. It's just. It's straight ghetto. It was straight ghetto. If you guys are in hip hop, you know, that's where, you know, ugk and all them guys are from, you know. And so, you know, we live right, just a few blocks from what they call short Texas, where all the drug infested neighborhoods were. And there was just nothing but crackheads and crack dealers, you know, walking our neighborhood every day. I hung around the wrong people, got involved in drugs and ended up in prison and spent almost 14 years in prison in federal prison for drugs, right? And when I came out, wasn't it also.

I think I remember you talking about also it was more of a trumped up gun, firearms charge.

What happened was one of the guys, I had this white friend who he was really good friend of ours, right? And this was his third time getting arrested for drugs. So he was gonna go to a prison for life for a very long time. So he cooperated with the police to set up all the guys in the neighborhood. So he helped set me up and then a bunch of other white guys, Mexican guys, everything, you know, and so we all went to prison. And then he didn't, you know, or he only did a very small amount of time. It really sucks because when I went to trial, you know, I hadn't seen him since I got arrested. And then when I went to trial, he showed up at the trial, and I thought, oh, man, you know, like, you know, I thought he had forgotten about me, you know, and left me for dead. And this is like when I was 18 years old, then come to find out, you know, he didn't show up to trial to show support for me. Showed for trial because in case they needed him to testify against me.

You know. Yeah, it sucks, man. And I couldn't figure out, you know, at that time, I was not very street smart. I was not very, you know, I was still very naive, you know, and I didn't know what was going on. You know, I just saw him. I was like, man, you know, like, at least some. Somebody came here to show support for me, you know, and it really sucked, man, because I couldn't figure out why he wouldn't look at me.

You know? I couldn't figure out why he wouldn't look at me, you know, and it's like, you know, and you've been to. You've seen a US Courtroom before, you know, they have the chair back for the public, you know, and if you were, you know, if it's your trial and I wanted to show support for you, I would just come sit behind you, behind you and your attorneys, you know, which is. Would be about maybe.

You know, the. The. It would probably be, you know, the. The distance of like, 2 meters at most or. Right. So I can just come sit behind you just to show you that I'm here to support you. But he was sitting, like, the farthest distance away from me, and he would never look at me. And then. And then when.

Starting to give you clues of what was going on.

No, but then, you know, it's. You know, it's one of those things, like, you know, it is one of those things where you, you know, like you have a crush on a girl or something in high school, and then she has, you know, then one day you see that she's kissing the other guy, you know, and then you realize that, hey, you know, she really doesn't like you. You know, she likes the other guy. It's one of those moments in time where. Except this time, you know, it really hurts because you know that if that guy opens his mouth, you know, you could. I could go to prison for life.

Yeah, exactly.

But you got.

So you got sentenced to 14 years, is that right?

No, I got sentenced to 15 years and one month. And then with good time and everything, I got out, you know, like after. Like I was supposed to get out, like, after 13 years, but they kept Me there longer because at that time, I was not a US citizen yet at that time. So because of that, right, they, they, they tried to deport me, but they. Because Vietnam's a communist country and I came to America as a political refugee. So they came. Yeah. So I'm allowed to stay in the U.S. i'm a legal resident in the U.S. but they didn't, they said, you're not a citizen, so we're gonna try to deport you. Even though there's no treaty with Vietnam to take back prisoners. So because of that, you know, I did, all the Vietnamese people and all the Cubans were kept in detention. So the difference in detention and prison is that in prison you have prisoners rights. In detention you have no rights. So just if people ever want to know what the difference between the two is. So if that, that's why whenever, like they say, there's no. We don't put anybody in prison that's 18 years old. That's not true. They put you in detention when you're 15, 16, and then when you turn 18, then they move you over to the prison.

Right. How old were you when you got out?

I came in when I was 18. I got out in my mid-30s, around 34, 35.

What was the first thing you did when you got out for work?

My little sister told me, because I was teaching art in prison. She said that, hey, you can get like a job at the art galleries or something like that. Now, keep in mind, I went to prison at 18, so I never got a job. I only worked in the family machine business. So I don't know about how to get a job or nothing. So I figured, you know, let me just go down to the art district and, you know, I'm a pretty good artist. So I was teaching art in prison, so I said, hey, let me go and see if I can get a job in an art gallery, because I don't know where to go get a job at. So I didn't know. I was like really desperate for the job because what happened was when I finished my 13 years drug sentence, right, they kept me in prison for almost another year in detention for the ins, for immigration detention. And it was thanks to the Supreme Court, they ruled that, hey, man, if, you know, you cannot deport someone back to their country, you gotta let them out. You can't just keep them in prison, you know? Definitely, right? So the Immigration Customs and Enforcement ice, they, they said, hey, okay. So they were, they were, you know, because that Supreme Court ruling, they had to let The Cubans and the Vietnamese out.

So that's how I got released back in. They finally released me, but there was a condition. They had several stupid conditions that I had to go along with. One of them was how to get a job within 30 days or else they had the right to put it back into detention.

Wow.

Right.

And the challenge there is obvious. Like, hey, you've been. You served the past 13 years in prison. You know, you got to get a job. But, you know, society is notoriously hard on ex cons.

Yeah, exactly. So what happened was one of my cellmates, one of my cellie, he. I said, man, you know, I can't get out because I, you know, I need someone that can guarantee that I will have a job when I get out. So he said, let me see if I can help you. So he got one of his friends in the city of Austin who owned a pool hall, a Billard place cafe, right, that shoots pool and drinks coffee and stuff. And so he got that guy to notarize a statement saying that, okay, if Ty comes out, I guarantee that I will, you know, give him a job. And so because of that, I was able to get released. And then when I showed up at his place to start working, he said, hey, man, you know, things have changed since I signed that affidavit for you, you know, you know, I'm not doing as well, you know, and, you know, I can't help you, you know. And I said, you know, I'm a damn, you know, like, if I don't have a job within 30 days, you know, they can put me back in detention. And he said, man, you out here, man. Go hustle and make something happen, man. So my sister told me that, hey, they have a huge art gallery down in Austin, Texas. And so I went down there to the art district. And it's really funny because I went down to where the bus stops at in Austin. You can turn left on 6th street or you can turn right on 6th Street. And I didn't know that. And so I turned the wrong direction. Like, I went down. Like.

I went down. I turned right and I went down the art gallery district. And I started looking for jobs, and, you know, they didn't have any available. And so I got. I was like, man, I gotta let these guys know that I'm serious and that I'm not joking around and I really need this job. So what I did was I start offering them, you know, that, hey, man, I'll come work for you for a month for free, just to say that I'm employed. And then if you like me, after a month, just keep me and, you know, pay me for that month I spent there. But if I didn't bring you any value, then don't pay me, just let me know and I'll go get another job. And what I was doing is I was just trying to buy time so that I didn't. So I didn't have to go back to detention. I just wanted to say to Ice that, you know, my parole officers that I'm working so that they couldn't put me back.

It didn't matter how much money you made, it just.

Yeah, yeah. Because the agreement was I had to get a job. They never said how much I had to make.

Yeah.

So. And so there was. So I said that, and then I didn't get a job. And the next day I came down to the same bus stop and I turned left this time and instead the art district. I thought it was the art district, but it was the club district.

Yeah, it was all the clubs for the college kids to go have fun and dance and party and stuff. And so I went down there and I remember this one Samoan guy, this gang banger in Samoa in prison, who came from Samoa, and he was a gang banger out in la. And he said I used to train him in prison to work out and get big and strong and stuff, and we used to play football together and stuff in prison. And he said, hey, man, if you ever come to la, he goes, I like you, man. He goes, if you ever step foot into la, I will get you a job. I don't care what city you're in. He goes, I got connections over there. You ever step in into California, I will get you a job. You don't have to worry about that. I said, what kind of job are you going to get me? Because I'll get you a job as a bouncer at a club. You know, it doesn't pay much. It'll be a job to satisfy your parole obligations, you know. So I remember him saying that. And at that same time, I just happened to see like three bouncers at the Coyote Ugly. Yeah, the Coyote Ugly down in downtown Austin. That look, they were built just like the huge Samoan guy that I used to hang out with in prison. And that's what, that's what crossed my mind, maybe I should ask to be a bouncer.

Yeah.

So I walked up to them and just, man, I asked them, hey, man, you got a bouncing job for me? You know, and just for the people Outside the US that's listening to this. A bouncing job is a security guard job where you work at the front door and check everyone's IDs to make sure that they're older, they're over 21 years old before they can come into the bar or the club. And so what happened was they said, no, man, we just hired a guy last week. But if you walk across the street and go to that jazz club and tell him I sent you, they need to hire another security guard or a bouncer. I got my first job, man. Beautiful.

Now I want to. I want to fast forward a little bit. At one point, I remember when we met, I don't remember when we met if you were bouncing or even you at some point were working for a stock market trading training company.

Where you were both. Were you both trading and teaching or selling or what was the role there?

So the role there was while I was working as a club, as a mouncer, I was going to at night, during the day, I would try to go to school to learn how to trade stocks. That's always been. Ever since I read Rich Dad, Poor dad, you know, I realized I can either go the real estate route or the stock route. And the real estate route, I couldn't because in this, in the state of Texas, they would not allow anyone that's been to prison.

Someone, yeah, they wouldn't give them a real estate license or not like that. And a few real estate brokers even offered to pay for me to study and get my license and come work for them, but I couldn't. The state of Texas would not give someone with a felony record a real estate license. So because of that, I had to go into the stocks. So I said, well, screw it. I'll just go and focus on stocks. And that's what I did. I went and learned how to trade stocks at that time, school in Austin. And then, you know, one thing led to another. I started trading stocks for the first time in March of 2008. And so the market, the market crashed right afterwards. So it taught me a lot how to survive in a market crash. And then I just came up from there, started doing a little bit better, but it wasn't, you know, the profits were not consistent and I had very little money. So I would, you know, even when I made money, I wasn't enough for me to quit my job and retire or anything like that. And then at one point, that was in 2008, and then fast forward two years to 2010, and that's when I Got recruited by the school because, you know, I figured, you know, instead of hanging out with my knucklehead friends, I didn't want to make money and get ahead in life, you know, I was trying to, you know, catch up, you know, I was trying to speed up, you know, getting back on my feet. So I had free time and I wasn't working at the clubs as a security guard. I would go to the school and volunteer to help them clean up their computers, pour the coffee for the instructors. And, you know, I came from the old school, you know, kung fu days, you know, when you go to the dojo and you just help mop up and clean up and do whatever you can when you have no money to get, you know, kung fu lessons. Right, exactly. That's what my mentality was, you know, and, you know, from an Asian culture that's already instilled into us. So it was not a big deal for me, you know, so I would go there and while the stock trading instructor was teaching, you know, I would go there and make, you know, clean up the coffee machines, pour the coffee for him, you know, while he was lecturing something and, you know, and he needed to clean up the whiteboard or something, I'd go up there and volunteer, you know, and that was how I would do it. And then at the end of the day, when he needed to update the computers after class, I would stick out around after class and help them update all the computers and everything or install any new software computer, you know, I didn't. I didn't know how to use a computer back then, so I had to, you know, do this so I can learn how to use a computer. And so that, that's how I came up. And then one thing led to another. And then when they need to expand their team at the school and they need to hire more trading coaches. Right. I was the first one that they thought about since I was already volunteering for free there anyway for several years.

That's beautiful. And that's where you started to learn the ins and outs of trading. We're going to get into. We're going to get into, like we're about to translate into the whole crypto world and your discovery into that. But I want to just take a moment and just both for you and my listeners, just recognize.

What, you know, the story you just told and why I want you to go into that. Success leaves clues. And, you know.

You could have taken one route in life. You could have played the victim. You had a really hard life. You were not given anything. You had to work for things. You got set back. Like you said, you were trying to play. Play catch up. You got set back, like, 14 years from everybody else. And you had every reason in the world to hate the world, to hate people, to hate the system, to just get out there and say, screw it. I'm going to go, you know, do whatever. But you took your future into your own hands and you decided, look, I've got to catch up. I've got to learn things. You read some books. You read Tony Robbins and Rich dad, and you actually took the steps necessary. You took personal responsibility. I don't remember. I was watching your interview with. I forget the guy the other day.

He's a bitcoin meister.

Bitcoin meister, right. And at one of them. I don't remember if you said this or he said it, but I loved it was like, personal responsibility is the new.

Oh, shoot. Is the new counterculture.

Is the new counterculture. I loved that personal responsibility is the new counterculture because so few people do it. I've actually.

I've lived a really charmed life, especially in comparison. And I've never had to go through the fires that you've had to. So I. But I really respect people who have, because it's so easy to take the other way out. And you didn't. You said, I've got to do this. I got to figure it out. I got to learn. I got to prep, you know, I got to learn it, I got to do it, and I got to teach. And then you ended up teaching it, both in trading and crypto and everything you do in martial arts. And I just want to really acknowledge that. That's one of the things I respect so much about who you are. And even though I didn't know your entire story way back then, you know, when we sat down, it's probably like. I think I probably sensed it in you, and that's one of the reasons I agreed to do it, because there's nothing that, like, I like more than sitting down with somebody giving advice, and they either go take it, or they don't even take the advice, but they take the spirit of the advice and they run with it, which you did.

So I just want, as I said, I want to acknowledge that to you, to my listeners, to go like, shit, if I don't have something I want in life, am I sitting around waiting to go get it, or am I doing, like, what Ty did and just go, I gotta go figure this out. I'm gonna go Learn it, do it.

Just speaking on acknowledge. That's bitcoin meister's quote. He's the one who came up with that in the, in the crypto world, you know, that, you know, personal responsibility is the new counterculture. Yeah. You know, so we all say that in crypto.

You know, that was the first time I'd heard it. Yeah. And when he said that with you, I was like, damn, that was such a good quote.

So.

And thank you for introducing me to him. It's been, I've been following some of his stuff. So at what point now, for all my listeners who've been waiting with bated breath to say when you guys can talk about crypto, when did you discover, what year did you just first discover, like cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, etc. Was it right around 2011? 12, 13?

Yeah, it was 2000, October 2012, I went to go work at an energy brokerage firm in Dallas.

And it was. I went there because.

The job there, if you sell commercial electricity, you get residual income. And at that time in 2012, I had already suffered two heart attacks, one after I got out of prison, and then another one earlier that year in 2012. So I said, let me go work someplace where in case something happens to me, you know, my wife and kids would still get a residual income from my work there because I had a background in trading. So I can watch the natural gas markets and see how it's doing and then call up the commercial customers, the hotels and schools and, you know, businesses, and then sell them electricity. Okay. And then help them procure by their electricity use. Okay. And at that place, the CEO and the coo, the two co founders of the company, they were really straight, you know, legitimate entrepreneurs. And when I say straight, I'm not talking about sexual orientation. They are straight guys. So I don't want them to hear this.

You know, but they're really straight up businessmen, you know, very meticulous in what they do and very detailed and very custom oriented, you know, and they have very high integrity in what they were doing in their business. So I learned a lot from them about how to be an entrepreneur and, you know, things like that. But the one thing I didn't understand was that these guys are making like, you know, I estimate like over half a million dollars a year in just residual income from selling electricity instead of focusing on expanding that business. They were worried about the stupid bitcoin.

You know.

Yeah, you're like, what's this?

Yeah, there's some, some bs, you Know, magic Internet money, you know? And I'm like. And every day, that's all they're doing, is scrambling around trying to figure out how to get more bitcoins. And I'm like, why don't they focus on getting more commercial business customers to sell electricity to instead of focusing on this stupid magic Internet money? And I kept telling them it was bs, it was a scam, and that they were. And then one day, the CEO, he told me, he goes, why don't you go read the bitcoin white paper instead of talking out your butt and being a stupid idiot, right? Go talk about it first before you come tell me what it's about. And so in the back of my mind, I was thinking, like, you know what? I'm going to prove you wrong. I'm going to go read the damn bitcoin white paper and I'll prove to you that it's. That this is B.S. you know, I'm a trader, so you can't tell me about trading, you know, you know how to sell electricity. You don't know jack about trading, you know, so let me go figure it out. I'll bring back the evidence, you know. And so when I went to read it, I was reading the summary of the bitcoin white paper, which I highly recommend everyone, every one of your viewers, before you get into crypto, read the bitcoin white paper to see what the original author, the computer scientist, put in there, why he invented bitcoin. Just, if nothing else, just read the summary. You don't have to read all the math and all the computer stuff. Just read the summary of what he was trying to do. So I read that and I said, hey, you know what? If somebody invents this system, it'd be extremely valuable. If somebody could do this, it would be very valuable. And he says, here's the proof that it can be done. So he lists all the mathematical equations and everything. And, you know, unfortunately, I'm not one of those Asians that's good in math and science like all the other Asians, you know, I mean, always think all the Asians are good at math and science, but there's a small percentage minority that's not. They suck at it. Instead of being good at it. They suck, you know, and so I fit that, you know, I'm one of those. So everybody thinks that I'm good at math and science, and they don't realize that not every Asian is good in math and science. And then, you know, and so I sent it to my buddy Leon who at that time he was a high level engineer, a software engineer. And he is one of those real agents that's good in, you know, computer science, math, you know, science and all that stuff. So I sent it to him and told him, hey, go look at this white paper and list down all the reasons why this is a scam. So I can tell my boss at work because I believe they're getting scammed, man, because of this bit. And so a couple days later I call him up and I say, hey man, Leon, did you write down those bullet points of why bitcoin is a scam? And he was no, man, it's not a scam. Man went out and bought a bunch of it already.

And were you the one who introduced him to it originally?

Yeah, I was one who introduced him to it. And, and he bought it at that time for like I think 60 bucks.

Wow.

When bitcoins were like $60 and he bought, you know, and when I say a bunch of them, I'm not talking about hundreds of them, I'm talking about like one or two of them.

Oh yeah.

Because at the time there was no place to buy it. Yeah, not until the late 2012. There's no like, you know, there was a Mount Gox and stuff in Japan. But you know, who the hell is Mount Gox in Japan? Why would you send them money? And you know, so he had to buy it from a place called Bitinstant in New York from a guy named Charlie Shrimp. So that's why who we bought all our first bitcoins from. And then he told me to buy some as I do. I told you to look for why this is a scam and you're telling me to go buy it.

This is, this is where it's good to have friends that are expert experts in their arena that you can us. So I trust Leon, I've known him for many times, I mean for many years. And so when he told me, I tried to go buy it, you know, and here's how you had to go buy it in the US at that time. You had to go to a Walmart or you had to go to a some type of money Moneygram or Western Union. And then you had to wire the money to another place and then you sit and wait and hope that they send you the bitcoins.

So you, you had to run around and you're going to do like $200 or I forget what it was like $200 at a time. That's all you could buy.

So it was Insanely hard to get money.

And finally I said, man, screw this, I'm not going to buy it, you know, I was like, oh man, I can't be running around town just to buy a 60, $70 Bitcoin, you know. And so what happened was a few months later he said, hey man, there's an exchange called Coinbase, right? And he goes, you can buy it there. And I try to go on there and try to get, oh man, this is so confusing, man. And why don't you buy it for me? So he helped me buy my first bitcoins. So I introduced him to bitcoin and then he helped me buy my first bitcoins. So to this day were always like, you know who, what came from Chicken of the egg. He's like, hey, thanks to me you became a multimillionaire. And I was like, no, thanks to.

Me you became a multi millionaire. Exactly.

If I didn't tell you about the bitcoin white paper, you wouldn't have known, you know. So it's, it's a friendly back and forth here, you know.

Well, and as I mentioned in the, as I mentioned in the.

In the introduction and then it was May 2013, I went back through my forum, my Mastermind forum.

Logs, and that was the first time I saw you mention it. You like, check it out. And I remember thinking, so you know, my background is I was a financial advisor. I had a degree in investments and economics and in finance and I even did a little bit of postgraduate study at Wharton and I understood money to a degree. And I remember thinking, nah, this is, this is sounds good in theory. It'll be 10 years before anything ever really comes of that. Which is kind of interesting. This is almost 10 years later. Yeah, but.

But you stuck with it. And you stuck with it when there was a whole lot of like it, you know, a whole lot of uncertainty in the market, etc. You started making videos about it, you started studying it, applying your trader philosophy to it. And then at what point did you really start to understand.

The.

What do I want to say, the.

Real potential here? When did you start.

Messing around with it to go? And I'm taking this serious.

No, no, no, I took it seriously as soon as my buddy Leon told me that this is legit.

Okay, cool.

Because see, now you gotta understand why I went all in on it, right? Because I was trading stocks at that time and let's say I made a hundred dollars profit in stocks, right? It took about two weeks before I could use that money.

Yeah.

And I Was always at that time, I could only open up. It's a long story, but I was able to borrow $10,000. Right. And you needed $25,000 in the US order to day trade. The law in the US is that if you want to make as many trades as you want each week, you have to have 20 above $25,000 in your account, a minimum of 25,000 in your stock trading account. And I didn't have money. I had to go borrow money from people. And I can only borrow 10,000 at that time, 10,000. The broker, this is one broker that existed at that time allowed me to do this so that I can get around that, that 25,000 rule. He said, as long as you trade cash and don't borrow money from the broker, you can make as many trades as you want as long as it's cash.

Yeah.

He said it only applies that $25,000 pattern day trading rule. It applies to if you use margin, but if you use cash, that's your money. You can do as many trades as you want. And at that time, I was only trading 10 shares. I was only trading 10 shares. So that allowed me to make as many trades as I needed each week. So I was trying to practice. I wasn't trying to, you know, become a millionaire or go to the moon at that time. I was just trying to learn how to trade. Right. So that's. And then some weeks I would make a mistake and make, you know, when I increased my. From 10 shares to 20 to 50 to 100 shares. Right. Around 100 shares somewhere, sometimes I would miscalculate and forget and I would go over the 10,000 limit. So I use. So I would have to wait a whole week to use that money again. And I used to be frustrated because it always, you know, as a trader, it always seemed like when you cannot trade, that's when the big moves happen.

Yeah.

You know, and you're always like, man, if I had the money, I would have bought that and I would have made this gazillion dollars, you know, but the reality is, you know, so I learned what it was like to wait for my money to clear and settle so that I can use it. And then there are times when I took profits, right. I would have to wait like two weeks for the broker to clear the transaction. Like if I buy 100 shares from you and then I sold it to somebody else, I made the money. I have to wait for the broker to clear it, send the money to my bank account, wait for the bank to Clear it, and then I can use that money and that whole process. Back then in 2008, 2009, 2010, that took about two weeks. So I. And I kept saying to myself, man, imagine all the guys that have millions and billions of dollars and their money gets locked up for even a day. How much is that worth? So when I saw bitcoin and Leon sent me a fraction of a bitcoin to show me how it works, he would show me online, like he was sending back and forth, and we would send it back and forth to each other, right? And I remember the first time he sent it to me, I go, okay, so when does this clear and settle so that I can use it and send it to someone else or send it back to you? He was just wait a couple minutes.

A couple minutes.

And I said, a couple minutes? I said, how's that possible? Like, the banks in the stock market takes two weeks, and the minimum is three days. That's why they call it T plus three. So the trade or the transaction plus three more days before it clears, right? No, man. This is why this technology is so revolutionary, because it only takes 10 minutes to clear.

And I said, okay. And then before we even finish talking on the phone, the transaction clears. So I'm able to send the bitcoins back to him. He sends it back to me. I sent it back to him back and forth, and it was like this instant, and it cleared. So it was the first time that I saw a technology where the transaction is the settlement.

Well, how is that different even back then than, like, PayPal? Because, and I may be clear, whenever.

You and I send money through any traditional system, it looks. It's like, if I send you money to the bank through Chase bank, through bank of America, any kind of HSBC bank, it shows up in your account immediately when I wire it to you or send it to you. But in the background, in the back end, in the back office, they're still trying to clear it and takes three days.

Is that even true with, like, PayPal? Like, for instance, if I sent you. If I sent you $5,000 with a PayPal right now, you wouldn't be able to just go withdraw that and pay for stuff right now, would you?

No. What happens? No, no. But that's why whenever. If you notice, like, whenever people get their accounts frozen at PayPal, all the time you're in them. You know, you coach and consult Internet marketers. You hear them getting their accounts frozen all the time. That's because of that. Because PayPal doesn't want to be responsible if they. Somebody asks for a refund or there's a fraud or something. And once they clear and settle it, then that means that they can't take it back anymore. Right? And then some banks depend on the amount of volume that you do. The banks will let you just go ahead and use it because they know the likelihood of you doing fraud is very low with it. So if I say dollars right now, let's just say I send you $100 right now and you withdraw it right away, they'll go ahead. They're using their. What they're doing is they're loaning you the money to use it, but it still has to clear in the back office.

There's no way clear that fast. Yeah, okay. That's the reason why the stock market cannot operate 24 hours a day like the crypto market can, because they have to stop it and clear the transactions every day after the trades are done. They have to take time to clear and settle the transactions. And so when I saw bitcoin clearing and settling the transactions within a few minutes, I was like, dude, this is gonna revolutionize Wall Street. There's no way that Wall street is that stupid where they won't use this new clearing and settlement technology. Now, a lot of people get into bitcoin because of it being a new currency. I never believed that from the very beginning, and I still don't believe it till today. Okay? I never believe that they're going to take over the US Dollar or the euro for simple reasons. Okay? The US has the biggest money printer in the world. They have the most aircraft carriers in the world. They have the most fighter bomber. Fighter jets, bombers, you know, Stealth bombers, submarines in the world. Right. And China might outpace them by now. But, you know, last time I checked, they still have more aircraft carriers for sure, than anybody else. They're not building all this stuff and having all these big military bases around the world and let you come along with some cryptocurrency called bitcoin and take over their money printer and take away their power. We're doing that. You and I wouldn't do that if we own that money press like that. And nobody would.

Right? So. And that's. I'm putting a pin in this because I want. I want to talk about this, but I want to. Let's zoom out on a big macro level. The reasons that bitcoin is so, like, some of the big functional capabilities, obviously almost instantaneous. Because I want to get last. Because this is a big thing is its relationship to fiat, etc. And why some of the people who are so, you know, gung ho that it's gonna replace. Why that is probably misguided, but that's such an important topic. I want to circle back to it.

Those are the anarchists and the libertarians. They're the first. You got the cypherpunks that came into crypto first. Okay. And then next came the, the, the anarchists and then next came the libertarians and then came the traitors.

Yeah, exactly. And a lot of people talk if you don't know much about the way the money supply works. We have what's called a fiat currency. And I'm not talking to you, obviously, I'm talking to my listeners. Where it's backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. It's not backed by gold, et cetera. And a lot of people think that that means it's not backed by anything. But you and I have talked privately. It is backed by something. It's backed by lead and missiles and bullets and tanks. We have the ability and we often have gone to war or created.

Whatever. We've invaded countries who have tried to usurp the power of the petrodollar of the US having the world reserve currency. And the idea that, oh well, bitcoin is just going to take over and everybody is going to willingly, including the US government, say, ok, well yeah, let's just use bitcoin instead of greenbacks. That's not likely to happen, like we said in our lifetime. But what about the idea that because we're starting to see this more and more, there's one thing about just using the dollar in the US but because we're the world's reserve currency and the tie to the petrodollar makes every other company need it. But we're starting to see a lot of countries from China and Russia really specifically trying to depend less on the dollar, whether it's doing their own alliances or their own.

Digital currencies or something of this nature to where they can become less reliant on us. That's actually a really big thing because.

If we didn't have, I guess, the artificial demand for US dollars, we wouldn't be able to print money the way we are. And that really threatens the American empire. Right. And bitcoin in those cases, it could potentially like if a lot of other companies, countries decided, and correct me if I'm wrong on any of this, but if a lot of these other countries decide, yeah, you know what, maybe this does make more sense. If we all start switching to this, it will hurt the U.S. i don't know if that'll ever happen or if every country wants to keep its own.

I don't see that happening, man. I don't see that happen now. Now, you guys, you gotta understand, like, okay, there's two parts of me that you have to. Your audience needs to be aware of. There's a philosopher part of me, and then there's a suffer part of when it comes to crypto and bitcoin, what it can do and everything. And then there's the trader part of me, okay? So the trader part of me says different things than the philosopher part of me. The philosophy, you know, if I put on my philosophy hat, yes, I want crypto to succeed. I want it to be a worldwide currency. Yes. It levels the playing field for everyone in the world. It gives access, you know, gives everyone access to the financial markets and banking and things like that. Yes, from a philosophy perspective. But from a trader's perspective, right now, if. If I'm the US government and I have control of the money printer, of the biggest money printer in human history, I ain't letting nobody take control of that. And people say, yo, you can't stop the government, can't stop it yet. It can, because there's something that the government can do that bitcoin cannot do, is create laws.

Okay, and enforce those laws, right?

The bitcoin, there's nobody, you know, it's based on math and science. It's not based on, you know, country laws. You know, so if the US or any country just comes out and says, hey, man, you know, all these exchanges, right? You need this, this, this, and this before someone can buy bitcoin or something and just. Just make it difficult. Just make it difficult.

Well, and Russia, China and Russia have already done this recently. They've created bans in doing commerce with it. And I know this is one of the big things that a lot of people, myself included, like, well, what if the U.S. government, for instance, I live in the U.S. so that's the one I'm most concerned about. What if they decided to say, okay.

We're going to prohibit transactions and doing commerce in bitcoin, we're going to prohibit on ramping or even off ramping, which means in the crypto world, that means like, you know, buying crypto or selling crypto for US Dollars. I mean, they could do that. They could very easily do that, especially if stuff gets to be so problematic. One of the articles I read that I really liked, though, about the real risk of that happening. They said the crypto market by market cap is still so small compared to the rest of the assets and money supply from gold to et cetera, that by the time it gets on their radar, it's on their radar. But by the time it became even close to being a threat, it would be something like 10, 20, 50 times higher in value than it is right now. Right. So that the. Where we are right now is still so early in the entire.

Let's throw some numbers out there so that your audience has an idea of what you and I are talking about. So the entire crypto market, there's over 6,000 cryptocurrencies on the market right now. Right. And the granddaddy, or the biggest one obviously is bitcoin, because it was the first one. But if you combine all their market cap together, take the quantity of coins that's available on the market for each cryptocurrency and multiply it by the price of that coin, you come out with the market cap. And if you add all the market cap of all 6,000 plus coins together, it's only like somewhere around 350 billion.

Somewhere around there.

All combined.

Yeah. Yeah, all combined. Now if you just look in the news, right, and look at Apple's market cap, Apple just crossed a two trillion dollar market cap. Two trillion. So the entire market cap of crypto is not even. I don't know, I'm not one of those agents that's good at math, like I said. But take whatever billion is divided by 1,2 trillion. I think it's not even 20%. It's not even 20. Or it's not even 25% of Apple's market cap. Just 1s and P500 company.

Wow.

To put things in perspective, gold has a 10 trillion market cap, all the gold in the world, and if you think about it, you cannot transfer large sums of gold to the other side of the earth to someone easily. Like, you know, you can't transfer a million dollars of the gold to someone else. Like, I'm in Bangkok right now. You're in San Diego, America. Right. I cannot send you a million dollars worth of gold. Right. I cannot take that piece, an ounce of gold, and chop it up into 100 million pieces and use it for micro payments. There's no way for me to authenticate if the gold is real or not. There's no way. You know, I would have to be a scientist or some type of gold expert or jeweler, jewelry expert, to go and test to see that gold is real. Right. And then so. And then. So there's no way to authenticate is real or it's fake. Right. I mean, look at the Chinese reserves bank. They like, they just got busted with like 70 tons or something like that worth of fake gold.

Yeah, it was like tungsten or something like that.

Yeah, it was gold plated tungsten. Look at that. And these guys are the world experts. They're supposed to be in charge of holding reserves 70 tons of gold. And even they didn't even know that it was fake gold. So how's me and you going to know if something's fake gold or not? Whereas all cryptocurrencies, it's very easy to know if it's real or not. You just go onto the Internet and you check their network, and they have on their network, it's called a block explorer. You can easily check it and verify that's real or not. Or even better, you can download the software to your computer and it will verify if it's real or not right there. So everyone has access to it.

To the network. I think that what's important here besides the clearing and settlement technology, you can use it for a lot of things. You can use that clearing and settlement technology for a lot of things. But Satoshi Nakamoto chose to use it to create a currency, an Internet currency for the Internet, because they. People have been trying to do that for years, and he was the first one to come along and do it. Because the problem is this, is that on the Internet, you can copy and paste anything. So that's the first thing people always say. Well, if bitcoin is a digital currency, can't I just copy and paste it? No, you can't. If you look at how the math is done, right, and the way that it's done, you cannot do that mathematically. You cannot do it now, right? You. There's people that say, well, ty, somebody's gonna be able to figure out how to copy and paste a bitcoin sooner or later. No, they're not. If they did, they would have sold billions of dollars already.

Yeah.

Copy them. Yeah. And the people in the bitcoin community challenge the people.

Go ahead.

Go ahead and try and copy and paste and see what happens.

So now. So there's a. There's so many. I mentioned this to you offline. One of the things I like is how if every time that bitcoin doesn't die, it gets stronger, right? Every time somebody doesn't take it down, every time a government ban or hurdle or obstacle or even a market bubble. And then a crash doesn't just destroy it, it makes it strong because it makes people go, huh, maybe there is something to this. Like, it takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

Yeah, yeah. So I say this. You know, our team is one of the first ones to say this online, that, that it's not just bitcoin. I'm just gonna say the entire cryptocurrency market, right. Has built in immunity. And each trader and each investor and each institution, each company, each business that's each developer, each engineer that uses cryptocurrency or is working in it, whether you, you promote it, you talk about it, you educate people about it, you trade it, you invest into it, or you're writing the software for it, or you're auditing the software, it doesn't matter what you do. If you're involved in cryptocurrency, you become like one of those immune cells in your body.

Yeah.

Inside the immune system. Okay. And the entire crypto market has an active and live and natural. That's the key, natural immunity to, let's just call it bs. And to attacks and to viruses. What kind of viruses? Like to the governments that try to ban it, to hackers that try to hack it, to thieves and scammers, all these things that are trying to attack the network and the system to steal the cryptocurrencies. It learns from it. Yeah. I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. Right? So like, let's just say the stock market, for example, it crashed in 1987, it crashed in 2000, it crashed in 2008. And then the next one's coming. Sooner or later there's going to be another crash. Right. The difference between those crashes in the markets, in the traditional markets is that you have the government coming in and artificially fixing it in the free market, adjust and fix it for themselves. Like, you and I know a lot of those banks that should have went out of business. They should. We should have let them go out of business. Hey, you can't run a damn business correctly, right, and make a profit, then go out of business and let somebody else place. The governments and the taxpayers should not come in and save those companies that don't know how to. To run a business profitably. Same thing with the manufacturers. So we got a situation where governments and is artificially keeping them alive, whereas in the cryptocurrency market, it doesn't work like that. It's natural. And it's the first time in human history, where we have a free market determine what should succeed and go to the top and what shouldn't. So there's six. There's over 6,000 cryptocurrencies on the market right now. Last time I checked, it was like 6,788 or something like that, according to CoinMarketCap.com. okay, so now, and those are just.

For reference, there's bitcoin. And then is every single other one of those called an altcoin just for.

Yeah, yeah. So in the early days, there was only bitcoin and everyone. We only needed bitcoin. But then there's a lot of people that came along and said, hey, bitcoin cannot do this, Bitcoin cannot do that. So they invented a new cryptocurrency using the same code or the same bitcoin technology or something similar to it, right?

Yeah. Blockchain technology.

Yeah, yeah. So what happens is like, you know, when we were all riding horses and camels and bulls and goats and ponies and stuff, somebody came along and invented diesel engine. And now we have a mechanical form of transportation. So if you invent the diesel engine and you invent a four wheel car, don't be surprised if somebody comes along, invents a two wheel, you know, system, a car or a three wheel or a four wheel or a six wheel car. So don't. Yeah. As soon as, you know, humans are smart, they see one guy doing it, somebody else is gonna figure out how to do something similar to it. So don't think that you're gonna be the only one. Okay, perfect. Oh, that's what your audience needs to know. Is this okay? Because if I talk about the technology too much, it's gonna get them dizzy and they're gonna lose track of. I think that what's important for your audience to know is what is the value in cryptocurrencies and the value of the blockchain technology? I think that if they understand that, I think they can make better decisions on whether or not they want to jump into or stay out of that market. Okay, so bitcoin and all the cryptocurrencies are nothing but databases. Whenever you hear that, okay, so bitcoin is one cryptocurrency. It's the first and the biggest one at the moment. And then Ethereum is the second biggest one. And then you got bitcoin, cash, bitcoin, sv, you got, you got Tezos, you got Cardano, you got chain link, you got, you got, there's, there's over 6,000 of them, okay? No matter what the name is, it's nothing but a database. All of them are nothing but database. Here, can you get your brother? Yeah. Hey, don't touch my computer, please. All right? Hey, guys.

Can you guys take.

What.

Okay, guys, can you guys take him in there? Take them in there and close the door, please. So each coin is a database, and everyone knows what a database is. It's a place to store data. So what is so special about a cryptocurrency database? Well, the difference between a cryptocurrency database and the regular databases that everyone uses is that a cryptocurrency database, once you write the data into it, it cannot be changed, right? You can update it, but you can't change what's already written in there. So let's say if I write into the cryptocurrency database that I sent you $100, that. That data that I sent you a hundred dollars, well, no one can go in there and change it. So it's. It's. What's in the cryptocurrency world is called immutable. That means that no one can change it. You can update it, and you can say, hey, you know, you can send a. Send a second piece of data in there and say, hey, I want to make a correction to the first one. I actually only sent 80. I was supposed to send 80 to Brad, and then he sent me back 20. Yeah, you can do that, but you can't delete the first one where it says that I sent you $100, right? Now, where. Where is this useful? Where is this useful?

That was what I was going to. That was my next question.

Okay, so in Vietnam, I'll use my village as an example. When my uncle and my family left Vietnam, we had land that we owned there. And what happened was the communists came and took it over. And then 20 years later, they decided, hey, communism doesn't work, right? The communist party said, hey, man, we can't do this communist stuff because it's destroying our country and our nation because nobody wants to work or do anything. We need to create incentives. So they went to more a capitalistic system and then give everybody ownership of land. And they say, hey, look, we're give the businesses and the land back to everyone, and then we're just going to collect taxes. That's a lot easier. That incentivizes people to grow the country and develop it. So that's. Even though it's called communism in Vietnam, it's really a capitalistic society. It's even More capitalistic than even America even. Okay? They couldn't figure out. So the land that belonged to my family, somebody else came in and claimed it because we were in America at the time. So they came in and claimed it, and they took it. Now we come back. I come back to Vietnam. I can't claim that land because the government's like, okay, show me proof that you own that land. Yeah, show me proof that your grandmother owned that land. Well, we can't. But if we wrote the title and the land deeds and the documents that show that my grandparents own that land, if we put it into the blockchain database or the cryptocurrency database, then no one can erase it. There's no one can. Like, so you can make up whatever you want, but anyone can go in there and look at the data because it's a public database. Anyone can go there and say, hey, you know what? Ty's grandparents owned this land 50 years ago, before the war, and when the Communist party took over, they seized it, but this land still belongs to them, and it's never been changed since then. It's never been modified. So you can come in here, even when Ty is living in America and you claim that this is your land, the database still shows that this was never an official legal transfer of land ownership. So that's one place. Here's another place. Okay, Imagine all the people that were doctors, lawyers, and professionals in Vietnam that left Vietnam after the war, and they come to America, and then now America requires that, hey, you got to show us proof that you were a lawyer. You got to show us proof that you were a licensed doctor.

Well, imagine if the schools. Each university has their own cryptocurrency account, and when I finish graduating there as a doctor, right. That they. They write it into that data, into the blockchain. And now when I go to America, I can prove.

You can prove it.

Go, hey, that. That university. In the Saigon University Medical University, they own that cryptocurrency account, and they list Ty as one of their licensed doctors there.

That's great. Yeah. And there's. And that's. That's one of those. That's not even necessarily. That's not even a bitcoin use, Right? That's. That's a blockchain technology use. And that's where there's, like, 6,000 coins and 6,000 applications that allow things like this to happen.

Yeah. So you got to keep in mind that these databases can be used for a lot of things, but why is it being used as a Currency first. Well, that's the obvious one because it was created by a bunch of cypherpunks, anarchists and libertarians that don't want the government controlling our currency system. So you invent this new technology, right, and what do you use with it? Well.

When Charles Diesel, I think that was the guy's name that invented the first diesel mechanical combustion engine that converted energy into mechanical energy, he decided to use it for transportation purposes to build a vehicle to transport people from point A to point B. But that same engine could have been used to pump water.

Yeah, exactly.

That same engine could have been used to power a train or a locomotive. That same engine could be used to build an elevator to take people from the mining shafts, you know, half a mile down in the mine and take. Bring coal back up, or gold or silver or whatever, back up to the top. He just chose to use it to build a vehicle. The same thing here with Bitcoin. So there's many uses for this Bitcoin database or this cryptocurrency database. It's just that the guy that invented it said that, hey, yes, this can be used for a lot of purposes, for land ownership documents, for, you know, college degrees, recording college degrees, birth certificates, and all these documents that are important, death certificates. But I just want to give an example of a use case for this new technology. And in this particular instance, I'm going to use it to build a new currency system that cannot control by the government. That doesn't mean that the database can't be used for other things. It's just that right now, and because it's being used for a currency, it's a lot more controversial than saying, hey man, I just invented this new database that cannot be changed or modified. Right. It can be updated, but it cannot. You cannot go in there and rewrite history. Right. Gonna be as sexy and as appealing as an exotic as. If you say that it's gonna be a new currency that the governments can't control. You see what I'm saying?

Right? He came out and said, hey man, this is the newest technology to clear and settle financial transactions and stock transactions on the stock market or on Wall Street. It's not as sexy. It's not. And also, that's not the problem he was trying to solve in the first place.

Yeah, it just happened to solve it.

He was trying to solve a currency problem, and he, he, he was able to solve it by inventing a database that cannot be changed by anyone.

Yeah, okay. And there just happens to be now a ton of other potential uses in blockchain. That actually brings me to one of the other points that. So if you're not, if you're not having been studying crypto, if at all, or whatnot, you might not be familiar with this massive trend going on right now that in the industry they call it DeFi, which is just a acronym or short for decentralized finance. In the past couple months we've started to see really big run ups and really big like resurgence of some of these other coins, altcoins, pop or pump as they, you know, we call it here.

Explain defi for those who are unfamiliar and its role and what. And maybe kind of your take on it because we're starting to see some really stupidly incredible gains. But then they, you know, they pump and they dump and they come back down and there's. There's projects that look really sound and really cool, but then there's scams and then there's things that, you know, like yam and all this other stuff that are just a train wreck. But what do we need to know about DEFI to pay attention to so.

Well, one thing that people need to know about DEFI in cryptocurrencies. Okay. Is before I explain what that is, let me explain how it normally works in the traditional market so that people have an idea comparison. Okay, so let's just say that when Facebook stocks come out, do you and I have access to buy. No, no. That's what, you know, they have this good old boys club in Silicon Valley on Wall street where when Mark Zuckerberg need to raise half a million dollars, how come he got from Peter Thiel and not from me or you or from your.

Yeah, the inside. The founders and the Insiders and the VCs and the Angels get all the early upfront money. Then by the time they even hit the IPO market and then they go to the broad market, it's still, for the most part it's only the big institutional connected investors get it. By the time the average investor gets it, it's already.

Inflated up a thousand times already. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, to give you an idea, like Peter thiel who sold PayPal along with Elon Musk, he got like 150 million also from the sale of PayPal or something like that, and he 500,000 into Facebook and later on became like over $2 billion. Okay, so in the traditional financial markets, you and I don't have access to that. Even if we are millionaires, we still don't have access to it because we Got to know the right people to even put our money into it.

Yep.

So, for example, like, the Rock just bought the xfl, which is a sports league in America. And I want to join in with him because we think he's a huge, you know, talent, and then he's going to turn this sports organization around and become very profitable. And we believe that the NFL is also another popular sports organization in America that's worth, you know, billions of dollars. And we believe that, hey, the Rock just bought this for 15 or 25 million. I forget what the number was, but it's a very small amount. And you and I want to pitch in with him. We can't. Even if we have the money for, we can't because we're not the right people. He doesn't know us, so we can't go in there. So by the time it gets up, you know, a billion or something, then they might go public or whatever, and then we get into it, but by that time, it's only went up 50x or 100x 100 times. Right. So the public is not used to investing into something that goes up 10x20x. And in cryptocurrencies, they don't measure your gain in percentage, like used to measuring gains like 2% profit, 5% profit, 10% profit. In the cryptocurrency market, the gains are astronomical. So they measure in multiples. So 100% would be 1x, which means 1 times x means times. So a thousand percent profit would be 10x or 10 times. So it's measured in multiples. So when you hear people measure the gains or the profits and multiples, it seems like, oh, this is crazy. But it's not, because it happens in the stock market all the time. Except you and I don't have access to that.

And so I shared with one, with the audience, a concept called immutable, which means you cannot change something once it's written. You can't rewrite history. Okay. The second concept that gives cryptocurrencies value and the defi value is what's called permissionless.

So that's another characteristic or another huge value proposition to cryptocurrencies is that it's permissionless, meaning that you and I don't have to ask Mark Zuckerberg for permission to invest into Facebook. Imagine that, a world where we saw this guy named Mark Zuckerberg. He's growing his company faster than he can handle. He's hiring 100 new employees every month. And we said, you know what? I like this guy. I think he's got talent. I think he's got a future. I think he's got to be a big company someday. I'm just going to go ahead and give him money to invest in it. And he has to take it. He has to take it. He don't have a choice to deny us and say, hey Ty, you're Asian, I don't like you. Hey, Brad, you're from San Diego and you know what, you were originally from Texas and it's a Republican state. I don't like your political state, you know, so I'm not gonna let you have access to my company to buy in early in my company. Right. So in crypto and defi, it's the first time in human history where a project can exist and if you like it, you can invest into it regardless if they want you or not. Regardless if you're black, white, Hispanic, African, Asian, you know, you can be part of the KKK or you can be part of the, the Black Panthers, they don't care.

And you don't have to be accredited.

You don't have yet. So everything that like you, you already know, you and I, if you want to invest into Mark Zuckerberg stocks right when he in the early stages, before they became public, you and I have to show that we are an accredited investor. And what's an accredited investor? Just for those people that don't know it, you have to, you have to have a million net worth that does not include your house, your primary house, or your primary residence. Or you have to make US$200,000 a year and do that for two years in a row and have evidence that you're gonna do the same thing the third year before the government lets you have permission to give your money to Mark Zuckerberg to grow his Facebook company. Okay. Cryptocurrencies and defi is the first time in human history where you don't need any of that nonsense. You don't need anyone's permission. And even if they say you can't, it still can't stop you. Yeah. As long as you. Because it's all done with math and technology. So if this database, if this cryptocurrency database, for example, let's take Chain Link, for example, because you know, full disclosure.

You own some Chain Link. So just. And they didn't pay us to say this. Okay? So I just want to be clear on that. Let's say that we like it and we invest into that project. No one can stop us. Even the Chain Link founders. Let's say they don't like us. Right. They can't stop us. So it's permissionless. So it's the first time in human history where we don't have to submit any legal documents to prove the kyc, which means Know your Customer or Anti Money aml, which means Anti Money Laundering. We don't have to submit any kyc, any Know youw Customer or any Anti Money laundering documents to the project owners or the project founders in order for us to invest in their coin.

Right.

That's the beauty of it. Just think about that, man. For the first time in human history, the public has free access, just like Wall street does.

Right. As long as they. Because all they have to do is really. I don't know what it's called. Is it called just tokenizing there? It's, well, it's blockchain based, so it runs on tokens.

Yeah. So instead of having a stock, you own a token of their product of their network. Right. And the beauty about it is that you can trade it with anyone. If I buy their tokens and I trade it with you, I don't need to KYC you or AML you. I don't need to check to see.

And we don't have to go through a third party exchange. We can just trade.

No, exactly. That's another thing. You don't need a middleman. Like in America, if I want to buy or sell stocks, I need to go through TV Ameritrade, which is one of the biggest brokers in America, or go through a Charles Schwab, which is another big broker over there. Like if I want, if I want to buy 100 shares of Apple from you, I got to go through them. So we each got to give him the middleman a cut, which is the broker. Here in crypto, there is no middleman. If I want to sell to you, I just sell directly to you.

Right now. One of the things though that you know, there's always two edges to the sword. So the risky part is obviously that because there's not as much or any scrutiny from the SEC and regulatory guidelines. It is also.

Highly susceptible and common for pump, dump, manipulation, inside trading, all that. It's the Wild west with some of these. Right. So you have to be really careful with what you do.

Yes. Everything that you can imagine, you know, front running, dumping, pump and dumps, flash crashes, anything that you could possibly imagine can go wrong in the traditional markets. It's being done every day. Every day in the cryptocurrency market, on all the exchanges, even the Ones that claim that they're straight and everything. I see evidence of it.

Okay, so how do you protect yourself against that? How do you get into projects that you really like and believe without.

Just getting run over by hyper sophisticated investors who have, you know, okay, freewheeling.

So this is what you do. This is my strongest. You know, I'm not a licensed financial advisor in any country, so I'm just gonna say this is the strongest advice and recommendation that I would give to myself if I had to start out today. Okay. In the traditional markets, we rely on the governments to do the law enforcement and the due diligence, checking to make sure that the actors are acting right and the companies and the projects are acting right and following the law. In the world of cryptocurrencies, it's your personal responsibility back. Like Bitcoin Meister said on his show, you know, personal responsibilities. The new counterculture. Okay. You are personally responsible for it. So what are the things that you can do to protect yourself? Right. When you step into the crypto market, the first thing you need to do is protect yourself. Not worry about profits. You need to just protect yourself. And if you just survive, if you just survive, you are going to do okay, right? You don't have to be a rocket scientist. You just got to survive. This boom. It's moving so violently, so fast and so aggressive that if you just. The train is flying by like this. It's not moving by, it's flying by. If you can somehow latch onto that train for dear life. You know those. We call it the Indian train approach. You ever seen the search for Indian train on Google and go to images and see all the Indian trains, they got like a Indians stuck to the train on the side of the train, and they're holding on for dear life as the train goes by, right? And then when, before it slows down, you gotta hop off. That's how. Right now, right now. Later on it'll be a lot more stable and a lot more, you know, calmed down and a lot more mature. But right now we're still early. So you got to take the Indian train approach. You don't waste time trying to build the train tracks. You don't try to waste time built the trains or figuring out what train is good. Hey, it's going in. All of them are going in the same direction. You just got to grab one and hold on to it with dear life and not, you know, get run over by the train or get crushed or miss the train. Okay? And this is how you do it. This is how you do it. Number one. Number one, if that coin does not have a hardware wallet support, which means that if you cannot put it into a hardware wallet. Let me see, I have one around here somewhere. Oh, right, here it is here, for example, for your audience to see. So this little device, right, from Ledger, right? They got several. I highly recommend you just get the Ledger Nano X. It's a device like this. So it's got two buttons on here. There's two buttons on it. Let me click it. So you guys hear it right there. You gotta click these two buttons at the same time with two fingers. Once you send the cryptocurrencies into here, right. The only way that a hacker can steal it from you is if they sit here and click these two buttons at the same time. And if you put this in your safe at your house, how is a hacker from China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, or from another country, from Nigeria or Africa?

Well, now, if they know you, if they somehow get a hold of your seed phrase, they can however, right?

Yes, yes, yes.

So that's why you keep that really.

Secure in a safe. Like the odds. Here's the thing, guys, the eyes of somebody coming, a hacker coming to your house, break into your state, the seed words that control this, right? And your hardware wallet right here, this is called a hardware wallet. Okay? The odds of them doing that are so slim.

Yeah, exactly.

They're so slim. I mean, there's a lot more valuable things they can get from you. If they're gonna go get a visa, come into the US come to San Diego, look for you to see where you live, right? They'd be better off stealing, you know, one of your cards or something, it's a lot easier.

Okay, so if it does, if the coin, you said. Yeah, if the coin is not supported by the hardware wallet, because not all hardware wallets support all the coins.

Yeah, that they support like 6000 something currencies, they probably support about a few thousand of a thousand. So right off the bat, so there's 2,000, 6,000 plus currencies out there, you ain't gonna get, look at any of them, except for the ones that fit on this. Now we're going to narrow it down some more.

Okay?

Country that you live in, in the country that here's filtering number two to save your audience's butts, okay? If it's not listed on a major exchange, you don't mess with it.

You don't mess with it. It doesn't matter how many people tell you that this has a potential to go a thousand X, go to the moon, go to Mars, and go to Jupiter and beyond. It doesn't matter because if you lose the tokens, nothing matters. Your ass is broke.

What are like which. How many major exchanges would you consider?

So we get this question a lot. Okay. And just so your audience knows, they don't have to memorize everything I'm telling them here about the ledgers or all this stuff on our website@ww.cryptocurrency.market.

I'M gonna say it again. WW cryptocurrency.market faq. I think FAQ number three is where we list every exchange, every hardware wallet, every service that we use that we have transacted over a million dollars in. We don't listen on there unless we've done over a million dollars in transactions with them to know that it's safe before we recommend it to our viewers. Okay? And none of them paid us to put that listing there. None of them paid us. And we don't get. It's not a referral link. We don't make money from referrals or affiliates or none of that nonsense. We make our money from trading crypto. So you can. You can verify that by putting the mouse over the link. And you'll see that it's just the link name. There's no affiliate or ID number or any of that. If you go to any of the websites in crypto. Right. A lot of the other cryptocurrency influencers and traders, they'll have referral links for everything they put down. We want to show people that we are neutral. Okay. We're just listing what we use and that's it. We don't get paid by them or nothing. Okay. If we did, we would disclose it. Right. So use a hardware wallet. In America, the major exchanges are Gemini and Coinbase. So Coinbase has like over 30 million users. Okay. So if it's not listed on Coinbase or Gemini, I would not touch it.

Yep.

I would not touch it. Okay.

Okay, that's great. Because, I mean, I know right now, and this is just for you and I, because I love. Some of my listeners will understand this, some won't. Uniswap is the big thing right now. And it's where you can go on and trade and get all this stuff that, you know, really super early. Things that aren't listed on exchanges.

Yeah, yeah. But I would not touch that. If you're a beginner, listen to this and you're like. If you're listening to this and you're saying to yourself in your brain as you're driving or listening to this, and you say, what the hell these guys talking about? Or is this for real? Or is this. Am I really hearing this? You should not be touching anything that's outside. Two exchanges. Oh, Bittrex, I forgot to mention. Yeah, there's a Bittrex US and then there's a Bittrex Global. The reason why we want to only touch the coins that's listed on a major exchange in our country, in the country that you live in, is because you're relying on them and their engineers.

Them and their engineers. That coin is not a scam.

They're doing due diligence on it themselves.

Yes. So you're using them. So you're using filter, just like I don't. Let's say if I come to America for the first time, I don't know what banks to use. I say, hey, Brad, you live in America all your life. What are the top three banks that everyone uses? So I'm using as a filter. Right? So you're leveraging, you know, just like your clients that come and leverage you, you know, and I come into your mastermind, stuff like that, to leverage your knowledge and your experience to figure out how to grow my business and stuff. And, you know, your clients come to you to grow their business. It's the same thing. You're leveraging somebody that you trust that already knows how to do this to do it for you. So when you first come to crypto, like, oh, my God, there's like over 6,000 cryptos. Which one do I buy? Which one do I invest in? Well, the exchanges are only listing these. And remember, they're in the business of making money when you buy and sell a coin. So as popular as it is, if you don't hear listed on your exchange, on one of those American exchanges, you have to ask, why are they not listing this coin if it's so popular? Why don't they list it? There must be a reason.

Okay, and then some people can say this. Well, Ty, they'll probably list six months from now. And by then it's gonna go up 100x or it's gonna go up 500x. I want to catch that 500x move before it gets listed on Coinbase. And there's only 100x move left. Don't worry about that. Guys, if a coin. Let me say this again. If a coin truly has value in crypto, if it truly has the potential to go up 100x, don't worry about missing out on the first 10 or 20x. Don't worry about that. As long as you capture 10x or 20x out of that 100x, you're good to go.

Which is still, which is still an insane return compared to the stock market.

Yeah, so we don't like to take our risk. Like, okay, some people tell us all the time, hey, this is gonna go up 500x. Great. When it goes on the exchange, right. We'll get into it, we'll be happy just to make 10x from it. Okay, so. So there's no need to take that risk. When you're a beginner, you gotta protect your money. So by using a hardware wallet, we just eliminate a bunch of garbage coins. Because these engineers there that are providing security storage for those coins, they have to talk to that project, they have to talk to them. They have to look at the code, the software code to make sure there's no viruses, no bugs, there's nothing scammy or fishy about it before they build it so they can fit in here and in. Exchanges have to set up their software and everything to accommodate and be compatible with that coin. So you're letting a bunch of engineers do the due diligence for you because the government is not going to do it for you.

Right.

So it's knowledgeable about it, has to do it for you. And who else would, you know? Well, these engineers that work here, they did the due diligence for you already. The exchange already did the due diligence for you. So if you just do those two things, do not touch any coins. And let's say that you live in Africa somewhere and you say, hey, Todd, in Africa, we have access to all these exchanges that don't have access to. And they have, you know, a thousand coins listed, while the American exchanges only list 100 coins. Well, if I was in Africa and I don't have a lot of money and I don't want to lose my ass, then what I would do is I would look at the American exchanges to see what coins they list and I would only touch those coins.

Yep. Okay.

Let the American exchanges do the due diligence for you.

Okay, so that's, that's two filters, right. If it's not in a hardware wallet, if it's not listed on a major exchange, and ideally in a US Exchange, is there another filter?

Okay, another filter that I like to look at, right. To filter out all the garbage coins are. Who are the top blockchain engineers?

Okay, the top engineers.

And what projects Are they working on or what projects are they advising on? So I'm gonna give it. Okay. Okay. So, you know, I gotta. So this is new technology, new industry, new market. I gotta go back to the. Go back to the. We call that the traditional markets and use something that people already understand. Before I explain what in crypto, what I'm talking about, if you go back into the traditional stock market, in the technology market, you can pretty much trace all the technology companies in America, all the unicorns. Unicorns are companies that grow to be over a billion dollars. You can trace it all back to one company, to one company in Silicon Valley. And that one company is called, I think it's Fairchild Semiconductors. There was this company that when they first invented the semiconductors, right, in transistors in Silicon Valley, the boss, the owner of that company, the founder, I guess he was not a pleasant guy to work with. So all the guys that worked for him got upset with him or didn't get along, and they branched off and they opened up their own semiconductor companies. You know, one of them became intel.

Right? And then from the guys from there that, the talent that was created there, they went off and started their other companies, right? So there's all these semiconductor companies that branched off of that one company called a Fairchild Semiconductor. Okay? Now if I have my Silicon Valley history or my technology history wrong, right, Guys, don't jump on my ass about it, okay? I dropped out of high school, I was in prison for nearly 14 years, okay? So I try to remember these things, but there's this one semiconductor company I know for sure produced talent that went off and started like a bunch of other semiconductor companies. And there was like eight guys that left and go start off different companies, and then from there they created more talent that went off and branched off. And sooner or later you can trace Google back to them, you can trace Facebook, you can trace a lot of companies that are billion dollar companies today back to that one company. Okay, so how do we apply that in crypto, right? We can apply that in crypto by looking at who are the early developers in bitcoin, when nobody knew about it, when nobody knew what bitcoin was, how, what projects are they working on today, 10 years later, 11 years later, what projects are they working on? So we're investing into guys that saw this technology early on.

So how do we, like, how does a layman like myself, okay, what that is?

Okay, so you would go to Bitcoin.com, okay, or Bitcoin.org, any one of those. And you can look at it to see or you can just search for who the early guys are. Okay? Now here's the thing though. Those early guys, those guys are good engineers. Some of them only believe in bitcoin. So you have a problem there. So if you run into an engineer or a person in cryptocurrency that only believes in bitcoin, nothing else, because it was the first one, right? Those are called bitcoin maximalists. And those maximalist means fanboys, right? So you know how like the Chicago Bears got their fanboys, you know, on their team in Chicago, Illinois, Right. No matter what the Chicago Bears does, they haven't had a winning season in many years. They haven't won a Super bowl many years. But those fanboys are still fans of the Chicago Bears team. So it's the same thing in bitcoin. It doesn't matter what bitcoin does, right or wrong. These guys are still fanboys of it and they're called maximalists. Okay.

I, that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is the Ethereum project, which is the number two coin, the Ethereum project. Now that's very easy. You just search Ethereum co founders and there's only eight guys and I'll name a few of them just so that, to give you guys a head start, right? So obviously Vitalik Buterin is one of them. He was the one who wrote the white paper for.

The Ethereum product. Okay. He's a young kid at the time, he was like 19 or 20 years old. We interviewed him on our channel. We were the first, you know, we started the first bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading investing channel back then. And a lot of people say, Todd, you know, that's a bold claim. You know, like how, you know, like our lawyers, even our securities lawyers asked us, how can you make such a claim like that? And I said, well, look at it. You know, back then in 2013, there was nobody, no channels on the Internet, was talking about investing to altcoins or cryptocurrencies. We were the only ones. We even had our videos say why you should invest into Ethereum. Back when everyone called, you know, said that we were idiots, we were crazy, we were stupid, there's only bitcoin. Why would you look at Ethereum, right? So, and then we did that with like the first 12 like coins, ICOs that came onto the market, okay, first dozen or so. So that, that's why I can make that claim. However, our lawyers said we can't say that because in China made a, you know, two second video about investing crypto. So he, that's why we can't put that on a website. So I can only tell that, you know, we started the first bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading investment channel that we know of. Yeah. So I mean that's just American law, so I gotta stick with it.

But so when you, if you're looking for some of these people like Vitalik and you know, some of the other founders of like ETH and bitcoin, et cetera, and then you just have to dig and look for what these guys are working on, follow them on Twitter, et cetera. Or is there some other way?

Follow their Twitter, Follow their Twitter and see the projects that they are tweeting about. So for example, on Ethereum it would be Vitalik Buterin. Right. So he's the guy who wrote the white paper. And then other guy on that same project, there's eight guys. The second guy is Gavin Wood. Gavin Wood of Gavin York. Gavin Wood, I always get those two names confused. But he's a computer scientist, you know, it's Dr. Gavin Wood and he wrote the yellow paper and he wrote the first working version of the Ethereum code. So that dude is. There's nobody that argues that he's not a genius in blockchain engineering. Okay. So he's starting a project, he went off and branched off and started his own project called Polkadot.

And that's just, you had a huge run up to it, split. It did kind of like a similar look, kind of like a stock split like Tesla did, five for one or something like that, four for one. So they split. So that's another project that our team is invested into now.

That's one. Just let me hit because I'm a little familiar with Polkadot. But so at the moment for beginners, Polkadot's not listed on a major exchange, are they?

They are, they are listed on I think Kraken, which is a, also a US exchange.

Okay, cool.

It's, it's, it's accessible to US customers.

Gotcha. Okay, cool.

Right, so that, that's, you know, there's so many exchanges, guys, I can't mention them all, but it's, it's listed on our cryptocurrency market slash FAQ page. Okay. And so that's Gavin Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, he's doing the Cardano project right now. He branched off, he started his Cardano project. So that's another project that our team is heavily invested in. Okay, now these are the top talents in crypto. So now that we got the hardware wallet out of the way, which is the security, and then we got the, the, the exchange listing, which is the availability, the liquidity that we need in order to buy and sell it out of the way. Now we're looking at long term. Does this project have the best talent?

Okay, so we like to bet and invest into the projects that we believe have the best engineering talents. And that's what we want to do. So these guys, these are all the top. Nobody in crypto dares to argue whether these guys are the top engineers. So projects they work on, that's what we're investing in so that we can hold it for the long term.

Nice.

You know, our goal is to make, you know, 2050, 100x from these projects. And the only way that that's going to do that is if the project have long term talent. And so imagine if you're a software engineer, you're a junior developer or junior engineer, who do you want to go work for? You want to work for. The guys are veterans in the space or you want to go work for a new startup, Right?

Okay. And so, and then that just takes a little legwork. That's like, let's find out who the original founders were. Let's follow on Twitter, let's see what they're talking about, let's do some research, let's talk to people who know. And that's like you said, you got to do a little of your own due diligence. Some of the first two are really easy.

Yeah, yeah, so, so, so that, that one. And then you can go find some of the other guys. Those are the guys I know that's working on like major, major projects at this time. And also the. Okay, so that's three filters, right? The first one is wallet. The second one is the exchange listing. The third one is the guy that's running the talent pool. Okay. And also here's something else that nobody ever talks about, Brad. That's very important. You got to have connections, man. You know as well as I do, man, just, just anywhere in business, you got to have connections. And let's say that this team has, you know, there's always young guys that come up that are very brilliant and everything. So we're not going to negate that. We're not going to ignore that. But the problem is no matter how talented they are. Right. I like to remember what Nancy Pelosi says. I'm not a big fan of Nancy Pelosi. Okay, guys, if you guys follow my Twitter, you know that I'm a big fan of Nancy Pelosi, you know, and she runs your state. So I'm like.

Throw a few jabs at her in this right here. Okay? Feel free. When aoc, which is the youngest member of Congress to come into the US Congress, everybody's talking about, you know, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, which is known as aoc. So everybody's talking about her. She's young, she's vibrant, she's energetic. Everybody loves her and everything. You know, I don't. I'm not a big Democrat fan, you know, but I like what AOC is doing. I think she's hilarious. I just like watching her moves because it's funny. It's just. To me, it's just comical. Okay? But Nancy Pelosi said something when the media interviewed her and asked her, hey, what's up with all this stuff that, you know, AOC is getting all the attention, everything. And guess what? Nancy Pelosi said that you can get all the attention you want, but you still have to have allies in Congress. You still have to network with people. You still have to. You know, your laws are not just gonna get passed just because you're the youngest member or you're the hottest member or you're the most energetic. You still have to know people. And one thing that you got to remember in crypto is that's no different. No matter how good you are as an engineer, no matter how good your project is, if you don't have a network of people in crypto, right, you're not going to get very far. You're not going to get very far. And these, the founders of Ethereum, they have massive networks. They want to get listed on an exchange. They get listed, they. They can call up the CEO, the founder of that exchange directly and tell them, hey, man, I want my coin listed. And they're gonna get listed. If they want, you know, advertising, they want to do any kind of marketing, those exchanges are gonna help. And people are gonna. If they want to call up the. The biggest newspaper in crypto, which is CoinDesk and Cointelegraph, and say, hey, we want to do some articles about this, they're gonna get written up.

Yeah, that actually hits a fundamental principle that I talk a lot about on my show, with my clients, in my own life. It's this concept of access and influence, and it's one of the most critical things. It's like it's not only access to People, but it's like, do you have access to information? Do you have access to resources, to capital, to other networks? Do you have access? But then it's one thing to have access, it's a whole other thing to have influence. Right. Like, so aoc, she has access to Congress. But if nobody likes or I'm not saying that this is true or not, but if you don't have influence, access does not equal influence. You need both. And so just because you're in the blockchain, you may have access to people, like if you're a programmer, etc. But if you don't have the respect, if you don't have the rapport, etcetera, and the influence, you're not going to be able to pull the strings necessary to get things done.

Yeah, that's one thing that I learned from, you know, and I'll share this with your audience and my audience too, is that one of the things I learned about, you know, you're one of the best connectors I've ever met in my life. Every time I've met you at any conference, any meetup, you're always connecting me. Like I'm like being, you know, like I'm being hit with a water hose. You're like, hey, Ty, come talk to this person, come talk to that person and all this, you know. And so one thing that I learned from just being around you was when I first got into crypto, I realized I gotta pull off, you know, the bacon wrap approach and connect early guys that people don't know about.

Yeah.

You know, I want to talk to them now, not 10 years later when they're billionaires, which all these guys, they're all billionaires now. Right. So I, you know, so now the fact that we have videos of talking to Vitalik, we have videos talking to Charles Hoskinson, interviewing them for all these different projects that came out in crypto. So we became a point, we became influencers in the cryptocurrency market using some of the stuff that you're talking about, because we created contacts with these people early on. And that's like some of the best times to connect with people is when they're just starting out.

Absolutely. By the way. And that's one of the best parts about having this podcast is it gives me the opportunity to reach out and interview people and showcase them. And it's been one of my not so secret weapons of access and influence myself. And I know you've got your show, for instance, that allows you to, you know, you get your own YouTube channel, which allows you to kind of do the same thing if you wish.

People realize that, that I'm so busy nowadays, I don't have time to go and meet and connect with people in person.

You have four kids.

Yeah, I got four kids. And that just taking up all my time. And what happens by having this YouTube channel? Right? People know me. They go back through seven years of videos they've seen who all the people I've talked to and interviewed. And they know I have a. I can cut. I have direct contacts to them. Yeah, some people nowadays, you know, they bring me deals, they bring me, you know, new projects, they talk about, introduce me to new product simply because they've seen the people I have access to. And that. And then, and like you said, it's not just about knowing those people, it's being able to pick up the phone and calling them and they actually answer.

Bingo.

That's.

When I was young, right? I used to, you know, look at my phone, go, oh, you know, I know this person, this person, this person. But like you say in your programs, it's not just having a list of phone numbers, it's when you call them, do they actually respond?

Bingo.

No Bingo.

Okay, so recapping.

Yeah.

1. Hardware wallet. 2, major exchange. 3. Who are the top engineers? And like, what are they working on?

Was there four or was that.

The fourth thing is this. Do they have enough money to last? Because, you know, like, if you, you know, if you're in this for the long term, if you're here to make 100x, it's not gonna happen overnight, it's not gonna happen in one month. It's gonna take time. And do these engineering teams have enough money to last 10 years? Is 10 years the coins that we invest into today? We want to ask ourselves, Brett, is it going to be here 10 years from now?

Yeah. Well, and I remember having watched about a year ago, you did a great episode of your YouTube channel about eight reasons you're buying or you have bought a lot of Tezos, which is another coin for anybody not familiar with it. And one of the things you talked about it in there is that the, you know, capital wise, they're one of the most well funded companies in crypto.

Because they raise, think about this, they raise money at 232, $235 million they raise. And that's unheard of in Silicon Valley. That's unheard of. Like no one has ever talked about raising that much money. Right? They raised it at a time when Bitcoin was only like 3 or $4,000 and then it went to 20,000. So they had over a billion dollars to build their project. And the last time they did their audit, their, their, their, they had a legal audit of their books and everything of their finances, and they had over $500 million. I think it was $650 million. I think that that last 10 years.

They have enough money to last all the engineers lifetime and all of the founders lifetimes and my lifetime and your founder and still not run out of money.

Yeah. And they can pay for the best talent out there.

Yeah. So they have the money to bet to get the best talent out there. Okay, now let me, let me just list a couple of projects that I believe have over 500 or they have just a crapload of money, like over a hundred million dollars.

Before you, before you do. Is there a way to do some of the due diligence on that? Is there a way to find that out? How?

You can go to the website and you have to go backtrack when they raise the money and try to kind of like extrapolate and figure out, okay, how much money did they raise back then? $100 million. It was at, you know, bitcoin was a thousand dollars. Now bitcoins at 10,000. So they should have 10 times that amount of money. They raised it four years ago. What's their burn rate? How much do they burn each month? $50,000 a month, you know, or a million a month. That means every year they're burning 12 million. So they had a billion. They've been burning 12 million a year for the last, you know, four or five years. And, you know, you can do all that math, but I'm gonna save you a lot of trouble, you know what I'm saying? Like, like you and I always do, you know, we like to, you know, leverage other people's knowledge and experience. And here's something that I, you know, I remember off the top of my head so I can say it here so your audience don't have to go and do the research.

Okay, so tezos has over $500 million. Okay, tezos, right. Their symbols, xtz, which is x ray, tango, Zulu. Okay, the next one is.

Neo. Neo. Okay, Neo November, Echo, Oscar. That's how you spell it, Neo. They're a smart contract platform, similar to Ethereum from, from.

China. To compete with Ethereum, so they, they have over $500.

Million easily. Matter of fact, I would put them against Tezos. If which one had the most money, it'd be One of, okay, they raised so much money. It went up so much, they actually gave everybody's money back.

That's crazy, dude.

They raised so much. The money they raised, it grew so much that they said, you know what, we're gonna do all our investors a favor. We're just gonna give your money back.

Wow.

I mean, how many billions did they grow to? To where they can say, hey, look, we're just gonna give the money back to you guys now, you know, the SEC or anybody, it's really hard for them to go after these guys for anything because they gave all the investors money back with a profit.

So. So that's another project. Another project is Cardano.

Yep.

Now, I don't know. They have $500 million. Right. But their founders, I believe, is a billionaire. Charles Hoskinson, I believe he's a billionaire, you know.

Yep.

So he, you know, his company, iohk, is the company that was hired to build Cardano. You know, the last time I talked to him, I think a year or two ago, he had like over 300 engineers that he hired to work on the Cardano project. So how many cryptocurrency projects can claim they have 300 paid engineers working on it?

Probably very few.

Yeah, very, very, very few. There's very few. You know, you can cite that. Oh, you know, bitcoin has all these, you know, volunteer engineers working on it, or Ethereum has these volunteer engineers. No, no, no, no, no. How many paid engineers are working on this? Okay, that's. That's what I want to know. Okay, so those are three. Another one is now this one. I don't know if you guys can get into it. It's called filecoin. The only people that could get into it before were accredited investors. And I don't know, laws have changed since then, but they raised like 200 something million dollars back in 2017 when Bitcoin was only like 2, $3,000, $1,000, something like that. 3, $4,000. I don't remember the exact number, but it's gone up tremendously since then. Right. The bitcoin has. The filecoin has not been released yet. The token has not been released yet. So they're going to be released in like another month or two.

So watch for that.

Yeah, yeah, so keep an eye on that. But here's the thing, though. It's a.

It's not a sexy token. Okay? What it's designed to do, it's not sexy. It's very technical. It's very back end. You know, a server Stuff, So. But it's, it's one of those projects that have a ton of money. So if you have extra money and like you say, hey, Ty, I can sit around five years for this coin to go up, that's one of the coins that you might want to look at in the short term.

I don't know, because it was only available to accredited investors. So our team got into it, I got into it, you know, so I'm not sure exactly how when it gets listed if a regular person, retail investors can even get into it. Okay.

Yeah. In case you happen to be qualified as an accredited investor, you know. Now the one is.

Ethereum. Ethereum is another project that they raised a lot of money. They almost use it all up, but now the Ethereum prices are going up and things. So they have some. A decent amount of money and they have the biggest talent pool right now in crypto. Okay, what else? If you just search for a tweet. I tweeted this out, but I forgot. I tweeted out that these are the projects that I think that, you know, have the most money. Like the top 10 projects that have the most money in crypto. So I tweeted, yeah, there's a list of it somewhere on my Twitter.

Okay.

And my Twitter is at hey Tizen. At hey Tizen.

Yeah, I'll make sure that that's in the show notes. Okay. So are there any other filters besides those four?

Okay. Okay. I'm going to show you another easy, easy method to get into crypto. Okay. And this is for some people that say, hey, I got the money. I got a little bit of money. I don't mind throwing 10, 20,000 bucks or, you know, a small portion of my wealth into crypto and see what it does. I don't want to do any work. I don't want to do any work. Yep. Okay. So if you go to our website, if you just go to our website, we have. If you go to ww.cryptocurrency.market/start. Cryptocurrency.market/start. Okay. It shows you how to use our Typhoon portfolio manager. So Typhoon is the name of me and my business partner. You know me, I'm Ty. His last name is Leon Fu. So we just combine it. Typhoon. Okay. So on there we explain how to use a Typhoon portfolio manager. In the Typhoon portfolio Manager, we built two benchmark indexes. One is called the Typhoon 30 Cryptocurrency Market Index, and the other one is the Typhoon 30 Altcoin Market Index. So the way that it works is that we do all these filters that I'm telling you and a bunch of other filters that we have found. So we built this for us to use and our kids to use, okay? So we built it for us to use so we can measure the market. And what we do is we take 80% of our money and we put it into one of those two indexes. So my business partner, Leon Fu, he puts it into the Typhoon 30 cryptocurrency market index, and I take my 80% of my money and I put it into the Typhoon 30 altcoin market index. The difference between the two is that the altcoin market index does not include bitcoin. That's the only difference. Okay. He and I have different risk tolerance and so and different amounts of money in our portfolio. Okay. So because of that.

Our risk tolerance is slightly different. I'm more of a risk taker than he is, okay. So I'm willing to put all my money into altcoins, whereas he's not.

Gotcha.

He's willing to put, you know, a portion of his money into altcoins, but a large portion of it has to be in bitcoin. So that.

And I've been on here, I've been on this site, and I'm on there right now. Is there a way. So do you. Yeah.

How do you.

How do you basically use this? Do you just have to go out and then just buy. You can't buy the index every quarter.

So if you go to our methodology on our pages on our top in the menu, I think it's on the miscellaneous, it says.

Yeah, methodology that explains to you. Under resources, there's a tab at the top it says resources, and underneath it there's a methodology. That methodology explains how we came up with the math and the criteria, all the filters and the criteria that we use to filter all the coins to come up with the typhoon 30 index.

Okay, that's awesome. Now when you get in, though, this is not an index. This is not like an index fund you can buy. So, you know, correct me if I'm wrong here, you would have to go in and on ramp or buy all of these, let's say 30 coins in the approximate percentage proportion that you've listed on the page.

Yes. And that's why we have it listed as, like, for that quarter. That quarter, Each quarter. We rebalance the portfolio every quarter. And if you click on, like, the typhoon 30 cryptocurrency market index, and you go down to the bottom, the components tab, it shows you what the percentage of that coin is, for example, like right now. As of. Not right now, but as of when we rebalanced the portfolio on July 1, 2020, Bitcoin made up 62.83% of the entire portfolio. So let's say if I put 100,000, I'm going to use the 100,000 number just so the math is easy for me. So if I put 1000 into the cryptocurrency market, 62,000 of it would go into just Bitcoin. Then ethereum makes up 16% of the portfolio. So 16,000 would go into Ethereum. Now here's the thing, guys. Let's just say that you say, hey Ty, I'm not man. This cryptocurrency stuff is just really, it just seems really risky to me. It sounds really. I, you know, I don't want to touch too much stuff, you know. Well then what I would do is I would just get like into the top 15. Because the bulk. See the reason why we're taking.

Come from the top ones.

Yeah, they're going to come from the top ones. We believe that crypto is going to a multi trillion market cap, like gold. We believe that gold is 10 trillion and eventually it's going to hit the same market cap or greater than gold. If you think about it, gold is not divisible. Gold is not easy to transport. You cannot authenticate if it's real gold or not. And it's worth 10 trillion.

Right. And people say, well, you know, people always ask, well, what's backing crypto? Nothing. Right? Just like gold. What backs gold? Nothing. Yeah. Why, why does it need backing to have value. If a large number of people agree that it has value, it has value.

Everything, everything is fiat.

Yeah, everything is fiat. You know, it has value because a large community of people give it value. A block of gold and a kilogram of gold sitting out in the middle of the desert, right? It has no value until humans come along. And one human is not enough to give it value. It has to be two humans or more that agree that, okay, this, this block of gold here has this much value and then it starts to have value.

Okay, so, so if you want to keep it even, it's simpler that you know, find. Like let's let for instance the Typhoon Cryptocurrency index buy the top 15. Don't even worry, right? Especially right now. This is, we are recording this September 7, 2020.

Don't worry necessarily about, oh, should I buy this one today or next week or whatever. Put the Money in.

Yeah. You're not betting on one coin to go up a hundred X what you do when you take the index approach, you don't know which coins are which, who's a good developer, which one's a good team, which one has money. All you're betting on is that the entire markets gonna go up.

Yep, exactly.

And it's gonna go up. It's sitting at 350 billion market cap right now, but it's gonna go up higher.

Gotcha.

And that's what you're betting on. You're not betting on the fact that you know Ethereum is gonna do better than Ripple or Bitcoin. Cash is gonna be doing better than Litecoin or anything like that. You're betting that, hey, you know what, I don't fully understand what this market is about, but there's a lot of buzz, you know, for the last six, seven years and it's been getting bigger and bigger every year. And I'm betting that this market is going to get two or three times bigger than it is now. That's what you're betting on. Okay. And that's to me is the most, it's the safest and most conservative bet. But I want to include this in for the western audience, especially the ones in America. If you rebalance your portfolio every quarter, there's tax consequences. Now I'm not a licensed tax professional. Our tax attorneys and our accountants advise us on these things and we've learned a thing or few from them. Okay. That if you don't hold the coins for more than 12 months, it gets treated as short term capital gains.

Okay. So if that happens, you pay a higher tax rate. You pay the same rate as your day job rate, but you hold it for more than 12 months, then you pay a long term capital gains, which is about, you know, the highest is like 20% plus the Obamacare tax. Right. So let's just say 24%, the highest in America. Yep. Now, so let's say that 62% of my portfolio is bitcoin at the moment in this quarter. Let's just say next quarter comes and it drops to 60%. It's only a percent difference. So what I'm going to do is I'm not going to change that. I'm not gonna rebalance my portfolio. I'm not gonna sell my bitcoins to go buy, you know, buy some of the other coins. Right. It's only 2%. I would consider rebalancing it. If it's like over 5%. It is a big change. If it's just a small change, you know, screw it, I'm not gonna pay the taxes on. And then I'm just gonna keep it the same size, the same percentage of my portfolio. Gotcha.

Okay. And if you do this in a tax deferred account, which is a whole other story to worry about that.

Okay, so. So. So. Okay, I'm glad you brought that up. I'm glad you brought that up. So let me just throw this in there. I'm a squeeze this in there real quick. Just. I'm just going to give this. You guys to have to go research. But we already did the research on our teams, already done it, so I know it can be done. Okay. If you are close to retirement, somewhere around, like your late 40s, because, you know, in America, in a retirement, we can start withdrawing from our personal retirement at around 59 and a half from like our IRA, which is an independent retirement account or individual retirement account, or 401k. So this is what we have to do. If this is not financial advice, okay, guys, I'm letting you know I'm a political Vietnamese refugee that came to America, you know, came from refugee camps, came to America, live in the hood, in the ghetto, went to prison for 14 years, came out, didn't even finish high school, okay? I couldn't even finish high school. I'm not a licensed financial advisor in any country, in any state that I know of, in any planet, and neither do I play one online, okay? But I'm just telling you what I would do. If I was a US resident right now and I was in my 50s and I was near retirement account, right, and the stock market is up. What I would do is I would cash out my 401k, okay? Or a portion of it, right? Would pay the taxes on it and put it into a Roth ira, which is a tax. There's no taxes. I pay the tax. So let's say I take 100,000 out of my 401k or any type of retirement account I have right now, and I say, okay, I'm gonna pay taxes on this. Okay, well, I don't have a lot of money, so I'm gonna pay the taxes on that hundred thousand and then I'm gonna put it into a Roth ira, which is a individual retirement account, that I don't have to pay taxes when it grows to a million dollars. I'm gonna pay the taxes now, so I have to pay it later. And I'm betting, and I'll take that money while the stock Market's high. I'm a sell, take it, put into the crypto market while it's near the bottom, and then I'm gonna put it into a Roth ira and then I'm gonna invest it into a bitcoin trust.

A bitcoin trust? Ethereum trust. Now you what? I would, I would buy that. And I have to pay a massive premium. It's almost like getting raped. Okay. I'm just letting you guys know when you buy it, like, if Bitcoin's at 10,000, you have to pay like a 10 or 15% premium, a markup on it. So now you're paying 15,000 for that? No, no, no, no. 11,500 or 12,000 for that Bitcoin, however, when it grows in my Roth ira, it's all tax free. Yep. Okay. And some people say, oh, well, Ty, but if I'm 50 years old right now, what if I need that money earlier and I cannot wait to 59 years old? Well, you can't. There's. There's US laws where you can take it out for medical or for your primary residence to buy your home or for education. One of those. Medical education or home. And you got to check with your cpa, but we've been told that you can also withdraw from it. The only caveat is that you have to withdraw the same amount every year. Yeah, just check with your tax attorney, check with your accountants. That's what I would do that way. Where do you.

Real quick, where do you go to like a bitcoin or ethereum trust? Do you just Google this or is that. Is that a thing?

So the grayscale. Grayscale is one of the companies that provides these trust services. And they're like one of the first ones, and that's one of the ones that we use. The other one is go to a place called Kingdom Trust.

So I have an account there.

Okay. So one of the places to learn all this stuff is to figure out this, is to let the companies that do those businesses, types of businesses, let them do all the filtering for you and the due diligence for you. So Coinbase in Gemini Exchange, they also provide what's called custodian services or custody. So whenever you do an individual, any type of retirement account, you have to put money into that investment, and that investment has to be held by a third party company that is licensed to do that. So Coinbase and Gemini are two companies in America that are licensed or they are two exchanges that are licensed to do that. So you look at what companies what trust companies are affiliated with them that they do, they provide custody for so that you know that they are following the laws. So that's one way to do it.

Awesome.

Okay, I've got it.

I've actually got a. I don't know if you're familiar with a solo 401k. You ever familiar with that?

No, I'm not familiar with that.

I won't go into the details of it, but that's one of the things I've been looking at deploying because I've only been investing with my taxable assets so far. But that's actually this week. One of the big things I'm looking at is on ramping with my solo 401k. It's a self direct, it's like a self directed IRA, but I can invest in that. So I'm glad you're telling me this. I don't know if I'll need to do that with a sofa 401k, but that's absolutely one of the things I want to do.

Yeah. And so, so our team uses Kingdom Trust and I think that they have like eight, eight coins that they provide custody and that you can put into your retirement account. I know it's Bitcoin, Ethereum, I think Ripple is one of them. Bitcoin Cash and like.

Zcash, there's like eight of them that our team, when they did their team members, when they did their Roth ira, they put it into those top eight coins. Nice, nice, nice. And that's it. That's one of their long term portfolios.

And that's a way to get tax deferred so you don't have to leave the US like I did or like a lot of crypto people are doing.

That's killer.

We're coming up here close to the end of the interview today, but there's a couple other things I want to just definitely touch on. So yeah, for the majority of people, unless you have a trading background, investing, we've been talking much more about investing. You also though, like you're a trader, you're watching technical moves and you're watching short term and long term trend, macro and micro trends, et cetera. You also, I know you also, you have a lot of courses that you teach and like you mentioned, you, you know, I don't make a lot of money off the courses. The majority of my money is off the trading, etc.

Yeah. So there's a lot of traders online that they make money off the YouTube ads by making technical analysis videos every day. And there's different ways to make money in trading. One is that you just make videos and make ad money revenues. Okay, you can tell those are the ones that's doing that because they make a technical analysis or some type of analysis trading analysis videos every day. Every day they make their own money from ads. Okay, we don't do that. That's why you don't see us doing a ton of analysis videos. Plus, it's not scalable. Anybody that manages a seven, eight, nine figure portfolio, they know you don't have time to do that. And plus it's not scalable. That's not something, that's not how you manage a seven, eight, nine figure portfolio. So those, those guys, even if they are making money from, from cryptocurrency, trading, investing, you know, they're not managing a 7, 8, 9 figure portfolio because if they are, they wouldn't be wasting time doing that. Okay?

Exactly.

They make money from referral links. Affiliate links. Okay, so make a bunch of analysis videos. But they don't actually make money from the crypto trading. They make money from the affiliate or the referral links. And you can tell these are the ones that's doing that by looking at what they refer and looking at their links. Like if you see us refer people to Coinbase, all you see is coinbase.com youm don't see nothing else after the dot com. But if it's a referral link, you'll see like some weird, a bunch of weird numbers and ID numbers. That's what that's for. So that they can get paid for referrals. Okay, so we don't do that. Okay, the third one is where they, it's a paid promotion.

So they talk about crypto. They talk about crypto just like we do. Except they get paid by that crypto project to talk about it. So they chainlink. Because they got paid by chainlink to talk about.

And they don't have to, they don't have to disclose, do they? I know they should.

The ones outside the US they don't know that. Yeah, they don't know that, so they don't disclose it. So on the surface it looks like they're talking the same thing we are. And then they make the same kind of money we do, but they don't. Okay, and then there's another kind. Right, so. So they make money off of the promotions and you can. Because they're talking about all these different coins, but every video is a new coin. Oh yeah. And they usually get paid between 5 to $10,000 per video to do that, by the way, so that your audience knows. Oh, yeah, so. Oh, so. So here's the thing. We don't do that. If we do, we'll tell you. If you just ask us, hey, Ty, are you being paid by this coin? We'll tell you. Yeah, I mean, we have nothing to hide. Right? But we don't do that because it doesn't make us a lot of money.

Yeah.

You know the reason why we don't do it? Because it doesn't make that much money. You know, we're managing seven, eight, nine figure portfolios, man. We ain't got time to dick around.

With the drop in a bucket.

Yeah, yeah, I'm not knocking the guys doing that. I'm just telling your audience how you know which ones are making money from trading. Okay. And then the fourth one is the people that make money selling courses about trading, they actually don't make that much money from trading or investing themselves, but they sell the courses and that's where they make their money. And then I'm not knocking any of these guys, man. Everybody has to make a living for their family. You know, to me, it's just all about disclosure, you know, is, you know, so that you know who to follow. Okay. Now we have courses that we sell called the. We have a bootcamp that we sell that's $25,000 per person. That's to teach them live. But we don't, we don't have time to do that anymore because we're busy managing our portfolio. Right. We did that so that we can record it and sell the recording online. So we have the recording, which is called the cryptocurrency investing blueprint. That's our flagship program. And we sell that to people that are serious about trading crypto like you, if you're from the traditional markets and you want to get into this and you want to, you know, from people that actually do it for a living and not bunch of, you know, BS people, you know, that's what that course is for. And the other thing too is that we saw that the number one reason that people lose money is they lose their tokens, they lose their coins, they lose their tokens. Not from the crash. The market crashed 90%. So we put a huge emphasis on computer security in our courses.

Yep.

And then we, you know, since we were pioneers in this industry in trading investing crypto. Right. As your emails indicate, you know, that I sent to you from 2013, you know, when you're a pioneer, you got a lot of arrows stuck in your back.

Right? And we just wanted to say, hey, man, you know, we lost millions of dollars to figure this stuff out, right? And we said, hey, man, like, let's just record everything that we did. Some of the big mistakes that we did. If people can just avoid some of these big, you know, that put you out of business type mistakes, you know, that gets you go bankrupt and stuff. If people can just avoid that and survive, they'll go, okay, you'll be ahead. Yeah. So that's what we created that for. And the other. The other reason that we created this for the Typhoon portfolio manager that you just looked at, that we just talked about and of course, is that Leo and I, we have this firm belief that if you put money into the hands of people that don't know how to manage it, don't know how to grow it, don't know how to keep it, don't know how to protect it, and don't know how to make it more money from it, it's like throwing money in the trash, right? So we have no intentions of leaving money to our kids. Not large sums, you know, if I have $10 million, I ain't gonna leave crap to my kids. Maybe a few hundred bucks or a few thousand bucks to start their portfolio. What we're gonna them is the education that we got, the experience that we have to make money so they can learn it and software so they can manage the risk. So our education, our cryptocurrency investment blueprint is for our kids. That's what we built for our kids. Love that.

Okay. But we built it for our kids. I got four kids, you know, and I see. I used to work at the stock trading school. I saw what happened when you put money into the hands of kids and people that don't know what to do with it. It's gone. It's gone. It really is gone. There's no exception to that rule. You put money into someone that don't know what to do with it, it's gonna disappear. So we built this course to teach our kids so they have something in case, you know, I had three heart attacks already, something happens to me. The course is more important to my kids than the money that I leave them and the software, the Typhoon portfolio manager, so they can see the risk. The problem with trading and investing is that the risk is abstract. People can't see it. So no matter how much we tell our students, no matter how much I tell my friends, they just don't believe it. So we had to build something so they can see the risk visually so they can understand it. So that's what we're for. But we put it out there. But I would say that less than half a percent of our income comes from selling our cryptocurrency investing blueprint. The other 99% comes from our trading.

Right. And I've been through, like, I've been going through your training and I'm going to tell my fans and followers it's really, really good. I am not, I'm not being. Ty's not paying me to promote this. This is not an affiliate arrangement. But like, I highly recommend going through this stuff because it's, it's really, really comprehensive and it's like, step one, do this, step two, do this. And you've got stuff for both trade. Like people who want to learn technical analysis, people who just want to invest and then just people who just want to just learn the basics about how the heck do I get into this and not feel like a completely complete idiot? Because that's one of the problems. I know that's one of the problems I had going into it was like, I have a degree in finance and economics and investing and a career history in that, but I'm getting in, going, man, I don't know what I'm doing. Am I going to lose money? Am I going to throw this away? But you do a really good job of hand holding people through the fundamentals and not just get caught up in all the other crap. And in fact, you know, you brought up some of these YouTube guys, you know, like I. And I've got a handful of friends, this core group of guys hopefully will be listening to this that we've been going back and forth and a lot of them listen and they'll share some of the YouTube channels. And I watch various YouTube channels, just kind of keep track of what's going on. And oh my God, it's overwhelming because every. It's just so many things constantly. And whether it's technical analysis or talking about altcoins and tons of clickbait and hyperbole and all of this other stuff, it kind of makes you feel like, you know, fomo, like I'm gonna miss out if I don't get on this one. And I have to go, wait, stop. That's not the way investing works. Rule number one, here's.

The audience needs to know. It's really sexy to hear that a coin went up 100x but how much did your entire portfolio go up?

Right?

That's what's important is we don't ever lose sight and let one coin interfere with our entire portfolio. Okay? And the index approach that we're using is the best approach that we have found to manage a 7, 8, 9 figure portfolio. Well, that thing that everybody's talking about, you know, it's not gonna work when you get to a bigger portfolio and your audience needs to know the reason why, the reason why you can't trade in and out with a bigger portfolio is there's not enough liquidity. Yeah. And let's say that you put it, let's say that you put in.

I'm going to go on a limb and say this. If you put in 30, 40, $50,000 or more into crypto today.

In the third quarter or the fourth quarter of 2020, and your portfolio goes up 10x or 20x, you have over a million dollars. And guess what? How are you going to sell it?

How are you going to sell a million dollars worth of crypto? Whenever I talk to other crypto people, I want to know what, where they're at, like how big, like, you know, are they playing, you know, at the high school level, college level or pro level? Well, what level they get? And the easiest question I asked him is how do you unload a million dollars with the bitcoins? I'm not talking about point, just bitcoins.

Well, let me ask you from a, from an amateur, ignorant standpoint. So it's part of that, you know, so one of them is like, if I just decide to sell today, I don't know if the, if I try to sell a million dollars worth of bitcoin, would that affect the price depending.

Yes, it will. Yes it will. Because the market very big.

It's just like the market's trying to sell a million. If I sell a million dollars with the Apple, it's probably not going to budge.

Nobody's even going to notice that you sold a million dollars with the Apple. If you bought the S&P 500 Spider ETF, you sold a million dollars or bought a million dollars. The market is so big nobody even noticed you. If you, a million dollars with the bitcoin on, even on the biggest exchanges like Coinbase, right, right away there, it's gonna affect the price. Now is it, how much are gonna affect it? We don't know, but it's gonna be maybe 1%, 2%. Right. But if you could jump to, let's say number, number seven coin, like Ethereum Classic, right now on our typhoon index, you sell a million dollars with the Ethereum Classic, you probably just move the price 10, 20, 30%. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, so.

Money in right now, like I said, you put 30, 40, $50,000 in Brad, you really don't have a choice but to go with like the top 15, 20 biggest coins because of the most liquid coins.

Yeah, well. And you know that one of the things. This is a personal question. So this I have about that plus, you know, maybe a little bit more than that so far that I've on ramped in the past month or so.

It is primarily, I think I told you this before, is primarily the big two, Bitcoin and eth with a little bit in chainlink and Tezos. That is, that is my current holdings. And I have not been doing it methodically. I have not been following, you know, like the, the index, which I'm going to start switching to. I've just been trying to go, all right, let's just get money in there. Just so I'm in the game. And. But that is, I think I need to start.

If you have that money. He said, hey, Ty, I got four kids, I got two wives, you know, and I got two girlfriends and I got two jobs and I got all this and I only got two minutes a day. How do I take advantage of this crypto market without much? Okay, the only thing I would do is get a hardware wallet and I split my money into Bitcoin, Ethereum. And that's it. That's it. Because if you look at the indexes, the Typhoon 30 cryptocurrency market index, if Bitcoin is 62%, 62.8, let's just round up to 63% and Ethereum is 16%. 16, 6 plus 3 is 9. That is 79. That's 80%. That right there.

And then I got my other two smaller ones that are going to, you know, if they pop up more, I got a little bit of.

So if you say disclosure, if you're happy, you, you can take 80%. You can take advantage of 80% of the growth in the crypto market just by putting your money into Bitcoin and Ethereum. Just those two.

Exchange. That's it. Like I need more time to research this. I'm not really sure about this. I got 10,000 I want to put into crypto. Not sure about this. I would just take the 10,000, put 5,000 into Bitcoin, 5,000 to Ethereum and then go do your research.

Yep, I like it. Well, that makes me feel like I didn't mess up.

My entry.

So you're benefiting from the boom. And it still buys you time to go research other stuff, but like I said, especially. Okay, look, the people that are doctors, lawyers. If you're a licensed professional in a western country, you really. Especially if you're a licensed professional and you're making like over 120,000 a year, 150,000 a year. You really don't have time for this.

Yeah.

You don't have time to just to sit there and do all the research. Right. Go get I definitely don't bitcoin into Ethereum. And if you're making over 120, $30,000 a year, you should have no problem putting 20,000 into this. And if you don't, what's wrong? Like, why are you managing your money to a point where you don't have 20,000 to put into this?

Exactly.

What's going on here?

Yeah, spending it on fast, you know.

Oh, let me say one thing so I don't forget. This is so important. If everybody just does this, guys, you will save yourself millions of dollars.

I know where you're going. Go ahead.

Always test small first. Let's say that I got 10,000, I want to buy 5,000 Bitcoin, 5,000 Ethereum. This is what I'm do. I'm going to go get $50 or $100 worth of Bitcoin first and I'm gonna send it to this hardware wallet, okay. And buy it from the manufacturer. Don't buy it from Amazon. Don't buy from nobody. Just order from France from, from, from the manufacturer or the Trezor or the ledger. Order from the manufacturer, pay the extra shipping cost so you don't have to deal with it being hacked or anything like that. When you get it, buy your $100 from Coinbase or Gemini. Send $50 to this device, send it back to the exchange from the exchange. Send it back to this device, from this device and back to Exchange. Do that about 10 times. And when you understand how that whole process is done, then you buy the whole 5,000 with the bitcoins and then send it here. If you test small before you do a big transaction, you will be protected. Remember guys, the number one reason for people losing money in crypto is they lose the tokens. It's not because the market crashed 90% because they just lose the tokens because they sent it to the wrong place. Yours truly here lost a million dollars sending it to the wrong address. When she, when you send it to the wrong address, then that's it. So don't be a knucklehead. An idiot like me and lose. Sending transaction to the wrong address.

Okay, so that's a bad day right there.

Of all the other stupid stuff that we done. Okay. And don't keep your coins on the exchange because one of our team members lost like 2. Over 2 million keeping on the exchange. Because he got. The exchange got hacked and he lost it.

Let me. Let me ask a very specific personal question about that. So, for instance, Tezos. I've got Tezos. Tezos has staking rewards. Is that what it's called? Staking rewards?

So do. That is currently on Coinbase right now. Does it have to be on an exchange to earn that or can I move that here?

You can do it from the ledger. You can do it from here.

And I'll still make. And I'll still make it. It doesn't have to be connected more.

You'll make more.

All right, done. Cool. I wasn't sure about that. That was one of the first things I wanted to ask you and I almost forgot. So I'm glad you brought that up.

Yeah. The tezos pays about five and a half percent rewards a year. So if you. If you own 100 tezos right now and you stake it, which means that you're. You're volunteering your coins to help secure the entire Tezos network.

Yeah.

You're going to have 105.5 tokens.

Cool. So I don't. Yeah. Once I move that to my Trezor, I don't have to do anything to stake it.

You have to. You have to delegate it. You have to delegate it to someone. It's called. You have to volunteer it to someone. And that volunteering process is called delegation.

So that relatively easy to do.

Yeah, it's very easy. Like, we run a staking service. So if you grab our. If you grab our Tesla's address and it's going to ask you where do you want to delegate this to? And you just paste the address in. They cannot steal your coins. They cannot do anything. Okay. And. And then you just leave it there. And then that's it. And then ours. And then we show the network that you have given us permission to use your coins to stake it. We can't move your coins. We just have permission. Right. And then we go ahead and we stake it. We charge a 15% staking fee, which means that out of that 5.5 tokens that you receive, we keep 15% of it, you know, to run servers and our hardware and everything. Cool. So.

Yeah. So I'll follow up with you on that. When we get off the phone. And very simple.

I mean the average staking fee is somewhere between 6, 6, 7% to 20%. Yeah. I think Coinbase charges the highest which is like 20 or 25%.

Nice. Okay. Yeah.

Well cool.

So yeah, I'll make you. I'll make even more. That's beautiful.

Man. This has been the. I think this is you've officially. I think we may have clocked in the longest epistizzle of bacon wrapped business and it is not from. I mean because it was just hopefully people are taking mad notes and their hands are hurting. Right.

People just do those, those things I said, you know about hardware wallet. Don't keep your coins on exchange. Test a small transaction, you know, a bunch of times before you do a big transaction. Right. That right there is gonna save you so much money and just focus on like on the top, you know, 15, 20 coins. To me you're so if you just do those few items, you are so far ahead of the rest of the crowd. There are people that's been in crypto for five, six, seven years. I don't even know that stuff.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, as a listener to bacon wrap business you guys do now.

Yeah. We are still so early. Don't let anybody fool you. I told you the market cap of all 6,000 plus crypto is like 350 billion right now. And we're going to the trillions. If we just go to a trillion market cap. We just made 2x from here.

Yeah. From everything I've seen it looks inevitable.

So yeah. And in this bull market we estimate, we estimate conservatively that we're going to get to somewhere between 1.5 to 2 trillion in this bull market.

And you think this bull market will last what like maybe 12 to 18 months?

The bull markets usually last. Okay, so the way that the cycles work in crypto, the bear markets last like 2, 3 years but the bull markets only last like 6 to.

6 to.

It's like around 6, 8, 9, 10 months. It's not very long.

Because it goes up like this like a hockey stick up. It goes up very, very fast.

And are we even? We're not. Are we in a confirmed bull market yet? From a technical trading.

From a technical perspective, we're still near the bottom because. Okay, so it went all the way up to. If you look at the. Just the traditional market cap, the coinmarketcap.com data. Right.

You know what, let me just use the Typhoon 30 indexes. That's what we made it for. If you look at the Typhoon 30 Cryptocurrency Market Index, it went to a high. It's only at 100 points in July of 2017, right before the bull market started and it went to a high of 707 points. So let's just say from 100 to 700, right now we are sitting at 240 points. Oh wow. So we're near the bottom. We're not near the top. Nice. So we were still near the bottom. Okay, so if it goes to the top, to the all time highs, which is 700 points. 707 points. So we are going to do about a 2x just from here.

Beautiful.

Close to 2x. And if we go to a trillion dollar market cap, then we're gonna, you know, like in this, in this bull market cycle, I believe we're gonna crack a thousand points for the first time on the typhoon 30 cryptocurrency market index. And if we crack 1,000 points, that means that we're going to get about 3 or 4x out of it.

Beautiful. So historically that's better than a savings account.

Yeah, it's not guaranteed every time, Brad. So I want your audience to know that. But historically.

The reality performance has been significantly higher than the theoretical performance. Significantly. So if our index says that we gain 3.3x in theory, you know, on the index, in reality in most of our students portfolios it would gain like 5, 6, 7x or even more so. So I'm just saying that, that the index is a very, our typhoon 30 cryptocurrency market index is a very conservative number.

Okay, perfect. Well, I like that. And it's, it's going to be a fun ride. I'm already, I'm already on that train. I'm like one of those Indian guys.

Grabbing onto the, it's all onto it. And then, and then just, and just reality check here too. Let's say I put 10,000 in, 10,000 in and it goes up to 100,000. There's 90,000 of profit in there.

Pull that initial money out.

If you're able to pull out.

90,000 profit. If you're able to pull out 30,000, you're doing fantastic. Because there's a lot of unrealistic expectations in crypto and I just want people to be realistic of what our eyes might see. Our portfolio go from 10 to 100,000 during the peak of the bull market. But realistically what you're able to pull out probably about 30,000. And if you can do that, patch yourself in the back, you're one of the Best traders out there in crypto land.

Yep.

And if you happen to pull out like more than that, it's just luck. It's not really luck, you know. Now if you, and that's, that's for someone that is a first time in crypto. Like you've never traded, you never got any education. Someone like in your shoes, who, you know, you know anything about crypto, just got into it and you just investing into the top coins. That, that's, that's realistic.

Beautiful. Okay, so I am dedicated to learning what I can with this.

Help shed the light and yeah, I mean, this break, this brings us to the end of this amazing, amazing episode. But I mean, you can also be in the corner of a lot of people's, you know, if they go check out cryptocurrency market, that's the website. Right. And you have various courses available, whether you're an absolute total beginner or you're looking to do technical trading and the, you know, the way Tai does it. If, if there's one thing that I hope that any of my listeners have gotten from this, it's to understand how like, real you are. You're not blowing smoke, you're not promising these crazy, stupid, I mean, these returns like you said. Oh yeah, this bull market like 3 to 5x, that is an insane return compared to something like the stock market, especially in that time period. But there's a lot of people out there pitching get rich quick, get rich easy, all of this other crap and not being realistic about it. I love how you, you know, you know, you bring both the philosophical side to it, but also the trader side. You're not overly invested in that. This is just going to change the world in the next five to 10 years. But it is a way to change your life in the next five to 10 years. And I know that's one of the things you've done and I'm so, so stoked for you that you've done it. Like, it makes me so happy that we're sitting on the other side of the table where you're giving me advice on some stuff.

Dude, I am forever thankful, man. At a time when, you know, I, you know, first got out of prison and I moved to Dallas and that was some really hard times for me, man. You know, I just had my, you know, massive heart attack and you know, it's, you know, you try to get up on your feet and you get knocked down. You get up on your feet and you get up on your feet and get knocked down so many Times, you know, no matter how mentally tough you are, you know, man, that. That wears you out, man. And when I saw. It was like, you know, it's like going to the supercharger, a Tesla with your car and getting that supercharged real quick, you know, and then to, you know, when I got into that mastermind that you had, and I was thinking. And then I. I saw all those numbers that those guys are throwing around, like, it's just. This can't be, like, real, you know, like, these guys are making this kind of money, you know, in your mastermind, I'm thinking, like.

I even make 5% of what these guys are doing, but I can't be so stupid that I can't even make 5% what these guys are doing. Right, exactly. So that's. That. That was really, you know, just. Just to get that. That supercharged from you, you know? You know, to. To move forward and keep going and getting connected with the right people, you know, and then. And it wasn't just one time, man. That one time, that sit down. Was one time. But every time after that, when we met at a conference or any meetup or something, it was like, ongoing. It's like. And I was like. And it was up to the point. This is no bullshit, man. This is. It was getting to the point where it was, like, embarrassing to see you.

I'm serious. Because when I saw you at a meetup or something, like, you know, he's gonna know I haven't done much, you know, Like, I'm trying. I'm trying to learn how to use a computer. I'm trying to learn how to build a website. I'm trying to do all these things. I'm like, oh, shit, I'm gonna see Brad again. And, you know, connecting with other people again. And I'm like, like, I don't want to be that guy that doesn't do anything.

Well, I never thought that. I never thought that about you for sure.

I know. I know you didn't, but it was just like something inside. But it lit a fire under my butt to go and get stuff done, man. It really did, man, because I was like, I would see you at the events, and I was like, I'd go home. And I was like, man, you know, he. If I. If I fail, you know, I was like, dude, there's guys like Brad that's connecting with me, all these different people and show me what to do and stuff. There's no reason. I have no excuses, you know, and that's why, you know, I always Remember that, man, you know, so I'm man, dude, I'm grateful, man. You know, it's an honor for me to be here and give back to the things that you've done for me and I'm sure for countless other people that you've ran across in your life, man, there's not too many people I can run across, you know, in person, in person that I can say that about, man, you know, so, you know.

Well, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. That means a hell of a lot.

So.

Well, my man, I know you've got an. You got a day ahead of you. I've got a night ahead of me. We are about 14 hours apart, but I got lots of love for you, brother. And we'll be talking here crypto and fun.

Let me know, man. Questions, man, you know, so got lots of free time. So just let me know if I can help in any way or your viewers in any way. I'll be happy to, you know.

All right, brother. Well, for everybody listening to this epic, truly epic, epic sizzle. Because other podcasts have episodes, we have epic sizzles, as you can tell. I hope you took notes. I hope this has been eye opening for you. If it has, I want you to go check out the links in the show notes Cryptocurrency market. Follow Ty on Twitter Hey H e y T A I Z e n and check out his YouTube channel. There'll be links for absolutely everything. And send me an email if you're into crypto, if you like this, if you appreciate this or have other topics that you want me to cover, send me an email to ask bradakenwrappedbusiness.com I read every single email and I try to respond to all of them I can. And if you have a business challenge, if you're stuck, if you're plateaued, if something's just really not working and you'd like a second opinion, some other I's. I do have a private client group. I do occasionally work with people and see if there's a nut that we can crack together. So once more, do not hesitate to reach out to me@askbradaconrappedbusiness.com I hope you hit the subscribe button and tune in and leave a review on itunes. Ty, my brother, I will wish you a good day. I'm going to have a good night and we will talk soon.