Crypto Investing Advice, Trump Crypto Platform, & #MomTok Campaign Payouts

0:28This is the story of the one. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over 6 years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up guys? Welcome to Right About Now. It's our weekly business news here on September 20th, 2024. You know, third quarter's blowing by, folks. Fourth quarter's around the corner. I can hear it now. Black Friday. I guess we gotta get Halloween first.

1:12Halloween, then Black Friday, and all the holiday sales. They're coming. I know what's always you can count on, and that's Brianna Hall. Hi, guys. And, of course, my good friend, Chris Hansen. Well, that's good. Sometimes I want to talk with like a higher pitched voice. I hear my deep voice. I just kind of want to talk with that. I don't know. It doesn't seem to me. So, no, I got to have this radio voice. Deep. How are you guys today? Great. Great. Happy to be here. Happy to be here. Energy's high. I got my Vibe Science t-shirt on. You got to be the spark, baby. I need some spark today. We got to spark it up here on this show.

1:56If you hadn't listened to that, you got to see Chris and I talk about health and wellness. We're unlocking all kinds. We had a great episode this morning with our good friend, Dr. Joel Wusso. So we talk about all kinds of things, health and wellness, biohacking. Dr. Joel didn't want us to call it that, but that's kind of what it is. High vibes all the time. Check that out. Everywhere you listen. Just hit subscribe next to that one. That way you have these two shows right next to each other. You can't get enough Chris and I. Oh man, it's been a busy week. I felt like back in the vibe. We run a marketing agency here at Radical, believe it or not.

2:32You might forget that sometimes with all the podcasting, you have the podcast network. And then I was on a real client shoot for the first time in a while. I was like back in the saddle again. It's like, Hey, shooting some commercials, air quotes. Today's commercials are social media videos and stuff. So that was fun. How's your week been, Brianna? I was kind of jealous. The shoot sounded so fun. My week has been interesting. Unfortunately, my little guy had pneumonia, walking pneumonia. So we were kind of down and out most of the week working from home. But, you know, happy to be in the studio today and happy that he's on the mend.

3:11Yep. With four kids of my own, I know that drill. It's just, it's a kid in the house. It's just, it's a kid in the house. Yep. And you want them to be okay. So once you know they're okay, you're like, okay, is this just sickness? Okay. All right. But still, there's a kid in the house. Yep. So it is what it is, and the world shall go on. Chris, how's the week been? What's up? We're cruising, baby. Just dodging rainstorms down here. Oh, yeah. Trying to stay dry. Trying to stay dry. It's great, though. Yeah, we're moving. We're moving. I know the late breaking news here as we recorded this. The interest rates finally dropped.

3:53Yep. Yep. Fed goes big. Interest rates come down half a percent. Half a percent. Ah, just in time to try to get Kamala elected. Weird timing. Weird timing here. Yeah. I look. If Trump was in office right now and this happened for him, I would say the same thing. So let's get that out of the way. It just happens to be her. So do with that what you will. They've been waiting forever. And I guess the data is finally bad enough that they've got to go there. You got to go the 50 basis points. I think that was going to spark some stuff. I think some real estate start moving. For sure. Yeah, I think it'll get real estate moving.

4:39And it says, this is from NBC News. They had an article called Fed Goes Big with Interest Rate Cut in a Bid to Head Off an Economic Slowdown. So the Federal Reserve said Wednesday it was lowering its key interest rate by half a percent, an unusually aggressive move designed to cushion the economy from a further slowdown. Real interesting. I mean, I think you guys buy groceries. I buy groceries. They're expensive everywhere. The economy is definitely in, you know, they're trying to say it's cooling, but I don't know. What do you guys think? I don't know. I filled up my gas tank today and I keep, everybody keeps telling me, you know, gas is down, gas is down.

5:22I'm like, that's a$87 tab right there. Like every time, like I got to have that premium shit. And it's like, my gas is not going down. But supposedly everybody tells me gas is going down, but I don't know. Grocery's definitely hard. No. Chris, how much does it cost to fill up your gas tank? I paid over$5 for premium. So you're talking like$120. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's why it's funny. Like gas is down compared to what? Like three weeks ago by 15 cents. Maybe, you know, like we were paying like$2, what? Two,$3 a gallon. Yeah. In the last administration. I get inflation happens, but. When I left California two and a half months ago, I was paying almost$6 a gallon for gas.

6:11So that's crazy. I'm happy to be in South Carolina. So this article says the economy has continued to send mixed signals. The unemployment rate at 4.2 remains historically low, but it has inched up in four of the last five months, a trend that has often preceded other recessions. So what's your guys's take? Are we in a recession? Some may call it a silent recession. Yeah, I don't know. It's past my pay grade to know definitively. I'll just say some things feel slower. The vibe feels, amongst other business owners, feels a little so-so. I could be convinced that we're pretty damn close, but what do you think, Chris?

6:56I think we've been in it. Like you said, everyone I know that owns businesses is not having a great time right now. So, I mean, I think if you look at it prospectively compared to three years ago, there was a completely different energy spending was going nuts and now it's very quiet yeah it seems that way for sure i don't know if it's the election some of the negativity and all that stuff like there's there's a lot of factors that i feel like are like weighing into this at least sentiment i think sentiment is like the word here versus like the hardcore economic data i'd have to look at but like the sentiment sure feels like what you're saying chris just kind of yeah Yeah.

7:37That's my technical term. There's a lot going on, right? We've got like two, three wars going on across the world. I just feel like internationally, there's a lot more chaos than there was three, four years ago, right? I think everybody's kind of budgeting a little bit. It feels like we're strapped a little bit more than is comfortable. I think in terms of business, every business owner that I know and I'm in contact with is holding their cards just a little bit closer to the vest than I think they were in previous years. Yeah, for sure. Optimism seems few and far between. More scarce for sure.

8:17Yeah, scarce. That's the word I was looking for. And you can tell it in this sentiment, like I see it most with younger people that are people wanting to do startups, young entrepreneurs, people wanting to create. The energy isn't there right now. yeah and i don't know if it's because the money's not flowing or like you said there's just a general cloud of kind of melees right now yeah yeah but don't get me wrong on the flip side i did talk to a good friend of mine who's a mortgage guy this morning and even he said with that rate cut he's he's getting more calls people are moving if you go watch the reruns of this show i talked about When you stall real estate the way it has been with inflation and interest rates, that gets a lot of money doing a lot of different things.

9:06From refinance, stuff that has to do with real estate, but a lot of stuff that doesn't. And I think there's been a lot of pent-up people not selling, not buying, not refining, not doing things that pushes money into the market and gets flow of activity. I think that should help. I think it will. I'm kind of kicking myself because I closed escrow about 30 days ago at like 6.8%. So would it immediately, what would it be today? I think it's like, I don't want to get quoted here. Let me see if I can find the data. Is it more than a half a percentage point or would it be six? Yeah, it's half a percentage point.

9:46So it should be like 6.2. Yeah. I mean, that's not enough that you'd refi over though. If it went back down, it went like 4.8 or something. You dropped a couple of points there. Then you get into, it'd be worth it with closing costs and all that. But I'm happy. Yeah. All right, you guys. So Chris, you're our crypto guy here. So next article is coming at us from Fox Business. Trump set to launch his own crypto platform. Former President Donald Trump is set to launch a cryptocurrency project called World Liberty Financial on Monday with his two oldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump leading the initiative.

10:24Thoughts? I look at this like a celebrity cryptocurrency. Like a meme coin. Yeah. And there's hundreds of Trump-related meme coins already. I mean, there's Kamala coins. There's a million things. It's almost, I look at this, maybe it's a marketing play. You know, you have a lot of celebrities release a coin. It's good for building community. I can see this too from a campaign standpoint. You're pulling in kind of the younger crypto savvy people. You're appealing to them. I'm interested in it. I find it interesting it's non-transferable. but I need to look into it more. I'm kind of like, what's the goal of it?

11:01What backs up its value? So this is where my, I know like - Same as a dollar. You believe it. If you believe there's value, then there's value. Well, the US government sort of backs it too. I mean, so there's some stuff there. I mean, we can go down that rabbit hole. And I would say anyone listening that's investigating crypto, this is not the type of crypto you buy into, by the way. you buy into bitcoin ethereum the stuff that the massive banks and does have a back right when you have jp morgan and banks like this holding close to billions of dollars in this cryptocurrency that should be your signal that this isn't going anywhere right so i think at this point now your guy merrill lynch is probably going to start suggesting hey we've got this etf fund with some cryptocurrencies maybe you put 10 in there sure this is more of a novelty type thing in my opinion, but we'll see where it goes.

11:53For those listeners out there like myself that aren't invested in crypto, what would your guys' kind of business insider view on crypto be for people who have not yet invested in it? I think the coins and the specific currency that Chris named, like the original Bitcoin and Ethereum, those are so backed now by other entities, much larger than anything, anyone on this call or probably that we're talking about. Even if whatever percent we're in, Chris and I have done all right, but still, people that back it that are worth thousands of times more than we are, keep those, I think, from going to nowhere or nothing.

12:36So I'd have it as part of your portfolio, but I would have it like, here's how I treat my investments. High risk. I could live with it if it went away forever. that's usually about probably more for me than most people, like 20 % to 30%, high risk but high reward. And then 50 % in safe but still aggressive. Because, again, at my age, I consider myself still young. So safe but still aggressive, I think, depending on your age. And then that, it's tried and true. It's going to slow grow, but it's going to grow. I always have some in play that is risky. That's just because that's just my persona. But I think most advanced to medium advanced have Bitcoin, have it in their portfolio somewhere now.

13:30Yeah. That's my opinion. Yeah. My two cents, make it easy. Download Coinbase, put it on dollar cost averaging. So just you can set it on Coinbase to buy weekly, to buy monthly. I put mine, I purchase every week, I think$100 every week of Bitcoin and a few other ones. And I've set it for years. I think since like 2019, I've had it just doing that. So it's not even like you need to worry about trading. And I can tell you, if you would have done that. I need you to show me how to set that. Yeah, I'm like, okay, wait a minute. I don't even do that. I need to do that. I need to do that. Right. And of course, when I started this, I got it in 2017.

14:09it would be like$20 a week, right? I was dipping my toes in. I heard it in the news. I knew friends had made money on it. So I was like, okay. And like you said, a small amount of my income was going into it. As I've learned more, I've upped it a little, but still my best profitability has come from just dollar cost averaging, buying a little bit every week or every month and not even looking at it. Set it and forget it. Yeah. 20 bucks a month, if that's all you can do, do it right and do the big ones the bitcoin the ethereum it's i compare it to blue chip stock trade coca-cola the ford it's so ingrained now in our financial systems and being used internationally that that technology is not going to go anywhere so coinbase app hook it up to your bank account just set it up super simple you can even get a credit card now from a lot of these companies where I have a Visa crypto card, where I can literally, if I want, I can load it up with say$2 ,000 in Bitcoin and I can go anywhere Visa is accepted and swipe this credit card, like any other normal credit card, and it'll automatically deduct and convert just from my crypto account.

15:20So this is, and I'll tell you, I was at a random, like a Chipotle this week. It wasn't a Chipotle. It was like a local one, but even at the register, it said, Hey, we take crypto. Like this is something now normal businesses are regularly using. I mean, it's no more complicated than when you use Apple Pay on your phone. It's just as simple. I feel like I haven't seen that yet. The like you can pay with crypto. I haven't seen that yet. I haven't seen a lot of that, but I will. And you can set that up on Shopify. I mean, literally Shopify now you can set up, if you have an e-com store, you can say, oh, I'll accept Bitcoin or Ethereum.

15:53I'll give you the non-sophisticated answer too. We're going to download it live on the show. Yeah, live on the show. But I'll say this, non-sophisticated. Betting and gambling in the U.S. now is like billions and billions of dollars. ESPN bet, all this stuff. And I used to think that I bet on college football or I bet on crypto. I almost equate them, like the same amount of risk or whatever. Let's just say this. I would now take whatever you gamble on, football or college football, and put it on Bitcoin and you will win a lot more than you ever were going to make gambling. 100%. And it's still a gamble.

16:30So I want you to sort of kind of think about them mentally the same a little bit. But I would say if those worlds were equal like five years ago, it's a lot better chance that you're going to win on Bitcoin and that side than gambling on NFL and college football. 100%. This is not financial advice, but I truly believe that anything you put in crypto right now will be double what it's worth by next year this time. I could see that. It's usually on a four-year cycle. We're about, and anyone listening, we're entering the best time to get in. We're entering the bull run cycle here in the next nine months.

17:06I've been waiting three years for this. So create time to get in. If you're seeing it on the news, it's already too late. For sure. When CNN's talking about Bitcoin reaches new highs, that's when I'm pulling profits. because it's going to start coming down after that. Yep, definitely. Well, I have a quote here from Donald Trump. We're embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind. So it'll be interesting to see what happens. I sent$5 ,000 to Europe last night. It was there in four minutes. You know how difficult that would be to do? Yeah. I spent five grand in crypto last night.

17:44I sent it. It was there in four minutes to Europe. If I were to go to a bank, it would take five days, five business days. and probably cost me$100 in wire fees. When's your mail order bride coming? They said three weeks. Yeah, it should be cheap for me. Five minutes to send, three weeks to get here, baby. I hope she costs more than 5K. You're just ringing her for a month. It's one of those Elon robot wives.

18:15Yes. All right, this is interesting. Robolux blurs lines between gaming and commerce with Shopify integration. I know you're a mom of babies. I don't know Robolux. You don't know how to say Roblox. Ryan, this is yours. This is mine right here. The minute she said that, I'm like, oh. It's not Roblox? You will. It's Roblox. You're like, you're about a year away. Okay. Yeah. Roblox. Take it away then. Oh, yeah. The kids. Now, I will say this. There's a game. Let me just tell you. I would imagine their stock in like whatever company it is. I was actually going to look it up before this didn't have time.

18:51It's a game called Brawl Stars. This is all the rage for the kids. They spend more money on that than anything. It's an app on the phone. I want to find out who the developer is. They have to be making money because this is kind of like Fortnite, like part two. It's a totally different game than Fortnite. But it's my kids from eight to 15 play this game religiously. and so roblox has actually kind of taken a little bit of backseat eight-year-old nash usually is in roblox fair amount when he's playing he's more into brawl stars right now because it's on the mobile device and they don't have to get on but roblox is huge it's interesting with this integration with shopify i need to get on to kind of play around with it they've had a couple of these like metaverse things was the restaurants and stuff and i've gotten on them i'm like man this is hokey but hopefully this is a good integration if it is if it's really well integrated it's going to be interesting because you got all these kids playing with shopify linked to it you have all this money charged up like 17 t-shirts show up you know on the front porch the parents like what is this like what the hell yeah i think it's smart the integration within the platforms but i'll say i never would have believed the amount that the kids end up spending for all these just random things in the games i just someone smarter than me like i guess that shouldn't fooled me but i did not think i guess coming up in the gaming world the way i did is like you saved up forever to get the title itself so then the thought of spending more money like day one to get some outfit or something like just would have been maybe it would have worked then too like you just trying to get to the game title trying to get it for christmas or your birthday what title was that ryan nintendo 64 oh yeah no this is uh it might be before that he's way original original super mario brothers and mike tyson's punch out i was beating mike tyson by night one zero zero seven three seven three five nine six three that's the code to get to mike tyson on mike tyson's punch out i still know it wow go use it go get download it right now that's how well i'm telling you nobody knows that code that's how you get to mike straight to mike you don't have to beat glass joe or all those other bozos you get a you get straight to mike tyson little mac it's like he's running in the 2d his arms are going like this because he's running he's training for his boxing match it was so good that's the difference back then you just had like cheat codes.

21:28Now it's like$4.99. Oh, yeah. They won't give you those codes. There's none. And they had the Nintendo Magazine or like the Black Hat one that was like all the custom codes to get into certain parts of the game. I feel like it made kids smarter, though. Now it's like, oh, you just have to pay to get it. I actually had to play it to get good at it. Yeah, you had to be resourceful. Oh, yeah. You actually had to beat the game. Now you can just pay to skip levels. I will say that you watch my 15-year-old Clayton. What was what I call the first one that replaced Ball Stars? Fortnite. Dude is like Gold Star, like level 18 elite.

22:05I don't know what that is. Somebody's going to DM me and be like, they're in hundreds, dude. What are you talking about? Dude goes in there and wins like every other match. And he's got some gaming skills. Let's just say this. He does what he can do with the controller. I'm like, man, he's got some hand-eye coordination. He's good at basketball, too. It's pretty amazing. Like, hey. Just video games are just not my forte, you guys. I grew up on a 200-acre farm off the grid where they turn our electricity off because it was on a gas-powered generator. So we had, like, no electricity during the day.

22:40So I feel like it's not my forte. They weren't my forte either. Yeah. I definitely came up in the gaming at the very beginning of it with Nintendo. Were you, like, in the arcade? Yeah. Putt-putt arcade. on Wade Hampton here in Greenville. It's not around anymore. But, oh, yeah. Skate or die, baby. I destroyed that game. Paperboy? Oh, yeah. Nostalgic gaming here on Right About Now. All right. I want to kind of jump down here while we're talking about different platforms, and let's talk about TikTok. So this is coming at us from NBC News. TikTok says it's not spreading Chinese propaganda. the U.S.

23:24says there's a real risk. What is the truth? So, you know, everybody knows TikTok is in a legal battle over a potential ban in Washington, D.C. So in the court documents, the U.S. Department of Justice and intelligence officials state that they have no direct evidence of China using TikTok for propaganda, but do highlight a significant risk that it could happen. What are your guys' thoughts on TikTok? I'm going to talk about it through the lens of TikTok soccer in these platforms. I don't believe in censorship. I believe we have free speech and you can do these things. I believe that first and foremost.

24:01I do think that like, can we not just put like a, some kind of thing on here to where like a regulation where these companies, a filter or someone, a neutral third party that has like sort of the oversight of these platforms that are just so big they need an independent washover every now and then and because they're all technology it's all data it's all an algorithm so put a filter on it where China whatever that could be China coming in gets stopped and you have like a a group of non-biased people that are just making sure the technology is safe yep I is it that simple or am I am I simplifying it I know these are private businesses, and I think that's where it gets hairy, but I think we can all agree when some of these things get as big as they are.

25:00With great opportunity comes great responsibility. So you've benefited making hundreds of trillions of dollars in the U.S., so just deal with a little bit of regulation. Even if I'm an anti-government kind of guy, or not anti-all government, just most of it, because they don't know how to run a business. but i don't know is it just not that easy chris no it's a slippery slope i mean i've thought about this a lot because of the whole censorship with x or twitter back then right during like the 2020 times covid all that stuff so i'm like all right we've had committees but they've never been unbiased they've always seemed very very skewed right yeah and then like you said the private company thing.

25:44Now, do I think China could weaponize this? Absolutely. It's a weapon for people's minds now. We don't need missiles and guns and bullets. And I'll reference, there was a TED Talk, I believe, from Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter CEO, where he's talking about really the algorithms, the danger of these black box algorithms that are being weaponized. And they are, right? They're harnessing our attention. And whether that's ill-motivated or not, if I'm a business guy, it's my app. My goal is I want you on the app as long as possible, whether it's for nefarious reasons or not, probably not. But I do wonder, and we've all seen this, right?

26:21You can see when the algorithm is starting to push certain stuff your way. That's where I think the whole problem lies is how do we know that these algorithms aren't being subtly used to push certain things or certain beliefs? Now, to be fair, we can look at China all day, but I've seen our own government suppress us from information and freedom of speech. so it's like I can understand all this but this is a deeper bigger problem that we have that you could even say applies to all of our social media platforms not even specifically TikTok yeah absolutely I mean the algorithm is one of those things that it's kind of like a beast that's tricky to understand and how the algorithm can be different like if you know Ryan and I work together every single day but if you open up our algorithms they'll be completely different things on social media, even though we might share some religious views, some general values, some political views.

27:18And it's really interesting to see like that completely different narratives could come through for different people. I don't know. It's just like hard. I feel like back in the day when we had like the first beginnings of Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, it was really like you put something up and that's what everybody sees is that one thing. But now it's like they only see what the algorithm thinks that they want to see. Well, yeah. And that's why you might be on Instagram and all of a sudden you're getting showed a video from June, right? Where it's like, I don't even follow this guy. And this is three months old.

27:53And I think a perfect example is the election, right? Say there's a post and it's just some information about Trump from Fox. If I read the comments, I'm seeing a bunch of anti-Trump stuff. And I have to think this is being done on purpose because usually it's triggering people to create more engagement and divisiveness. That's where I kind of look at like, okay, how are these algorithms being programmed? You know, we're not like, like you said, we're not all seeing the same thing. So we used to say, and I know Twitter would say this, it's like the, the city center, what's the word, you know what I'm saying?

28:28Like, it was like a place to go for the news, right? to town square. Town square. Where now it's like there is no town square because it's all so customized by the algorithm that we don't even know what the majority of people's beliefs are because everything is so individualized. Oh, yeah. But I do think it's being weaponized. Yeah. Maybe I'll go at this, a different solution. Let's just limit how long we allow our kids to look at their devices. Yeah. Let's just all get off the phone a little bit more. Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. And then maybe we don't, it doesn't have the influence. That might be, you know, wishful thinking too, but it's practicality.

29:09Erase TikTok. The phone itself is pulling away from us in certain ways from, from our real lives. Like you said, if we all just took a step away from the phone. Yeah. And I think when you do that, you even go back to your phone and you're, you look at things a little differently. Oh yeah. I agree. Think about this, obviously a little different, but I'll use the analogy. at a certain point, you stop drinking because it's just too much. And so getting on your phone and get on these channels, it's like, yeah, it's a digital thing. It's not physical, but it is mentally the same thing as like drinking 15 tequila drinks to your head.

29:50So it's unhealthy, right? It's unhealthy mentally, like tequila drinks are unhealthy physically and mentally, but physically at first, but it sort of gives you, you at least get the reflex of, okay, I need to throw up now and just to be gross, but just call it what it is. This is like another kind of problem is that you don't know that you really, your brain is throwing up. But, and I think if we thought about that a little bit more and look, I'm guilty of it. I, some days I'm better than others. I think I'm a lot better than I was a few years ago. Cause I've been like, I'll go to the lake. I do things and I put my phone down.