The Wolf Of All Streets - From World Famous DJ To Crypto Trader | DJ Henry Fong

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

Henry Fong grew up in a small town in Florida and spent his younger years surfing and fishing until he stumbled upon a pair of turntables. Honing his artistic craft, Fong’s unique electronic style blew up worldwide, garnering a loyal fanbase anywhere he went. Once COVID-19 hit, Fong’s touring days were no more, which drove him to discover new hobbies including trading, real estate, and cryptocurrency investing. In this extraordinary episode, Fong shares how he turned himself into a multi-talented businessman in a matter of months, straight out of the music industry spotlight. In this episode Henry Fong explores: ・Becoming a Florida DJ ・Selling the Ethereum top ・NFTs as creative outlets ・Sampling music ・Owning a CryptoPunk ・The trick to exiting BitClout ・Electronic dance music ・Celebrities leaving LA ・The return of big crowds ・Learning technical analysis ・Getting into real estate --- Visit https://thewolfofallstreets.link/cosmos to learn about the Cosmos Hub and how the $ATOM can connect every blockchain. Cosmos is the port city connecting chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum to ensure your liquidity on any chain can be used anywhere. Find new staking opportunities, applications, or build your own parachain at https://thewolfofallstreets.link/cosmos --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co ーーー Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

This episode is brought to you by Cosmos. Stay tuned for more information on them later in this episode. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Typically, when a guest comes on, I share at least one passion with them, but usually it's just crypto. Today, I have the pleasure of having a guest on who is both a famous DJ and passionate crypto enthusiast.

We also share a love of surfing and have similar small town Florida roots, and I have the pleasure of having a guest on who is both a famous DJ and passionate crypto enthusiast. We also share a love of surfing and have similar small-town Florida roots, and I have a feeling quite a few other things. What few people know is that Henry is also a successful trader and a technical analyst and was ages ahead of the NFT explosion. It's my hope to understand how he found crypto, better understand how crypto will intersect with the music industry, and what he thinks of the markets today. Henry Fong, man, thank you so much for coming on today. Thanks for having me on, Scott, man. Pleasure to be here. And I think we're one of the few rare breeds of surfer, crypto, and DJ at the same time. So that's great. And to be honest, I've lost basically two of those. It's just crypto. I never surf anymore, but I certainly haven't DJed in years. But I can live through the glory of my past through you, I think. So once again, guys, before we get into the questions, this is the Wolf of Wall Street's

podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities from the words of Bitcoin, finance, art, sports, politics, music. Clearly, some of these people have all of those. This podcast is powered by Blockworks, the fastest growing media company in the digital asset space. You can check them out at blockworks.co and you can check out everything else I have going on at thewolfofallstreets.io. Now to get in today's episode, man. So listen, I touched on your background, but it's kind of crazy. You came from Jupiter, Florida, and you do all these things, music industry, trading, crypto. Tell me a little

bit about your background and how this all happened. Man, I'm from a pretty small town called Jupiter. Not really much going on there besides fishing and surfing, really. And so I lived out in, I guess we call it the sticks a little bit. It's a place called Jupiter Farms. I lived out there. And yeah, I just grew up doing stuff like that. And then eventually I developed this. I was watching, um, you remember those old MTV spring break videos and you see like a DJ cube, scribble, scribble, scribble. Yeah. Scribble. That's the one. And, um, I just would see these guys on TV DJ and I was like, Oh, that looks cool. I want to give it a shot. And then, uh, one year for Christmas, my mom got me some turntables, the really cheap Gemini ones, the OG Gemini ones. You had it. You probably had them too. Yeah. And then really bad

two channel mixer and just bought some hip hop vinyls. I think it was like, I was like some Dr. Dre, Nas vinyl kind of era stuff. And yeah, I just started mixing around and messing around. And I was in the middle of Jupiter, Florida, and there was nothing going on there. And I just kind of was like, I couldn't find any mentors. There was no one to go learn from or anything like that. So I just kind of shelved it and I put it away and I was like, all right, well, I gave it a shot. It's not happening. I was about 14, 15 maybe. And then I went off to college. And then in my later years in college, I kind of found this new genre, which at the time it wasn't even called EDM. We were just calling it, people were calling it like electro, I guess you could say.

It was still like house music, electro house, whatever you want to call it. And I just, just got like, dove into that world of this new electronic sound. And I was like, hang on a second. I have these turntables from when I was like 14 years old back at home. And I went back in my attic and my mom's house and they were in there and I brought them up. I brought them up to college with me. And I asked my friend, I was like, can you show me how to use these things? He's like, yeah. And then that's kind of how it all started, man.

And I just sat there in my garage for probably like two years straight, just practicing. So how'd you get into markets then? I mean, it seems like there's not that many people. I don't think they're into both markets and DJing, but I know you told me like you do TA, you love, you know, you love trading. So that actually happened around the same time. I think this was, I actually started trading around the 2008 financial crash, 2009, I think. And I had plans to kind of go to California. And my dad was like, Hey, I got a gift for you. Here's, he had some like terrible, like penny stock certificates and it was worth like $400 or something, $300. And he gave me these penny stock certificates. He's like, here, you can have these as gifts. He's like, you got to take them into the broker and you got to cash the certificate in. I was like, all right. So that was my, I took these

stock certificates, like back in the day they had the OG stock certificates. Yeah. That's how you bought stock. My dad, my dad actually did mergers and acquisitions. And he worked for the Pentagon and the Air Force and stuff too. And so after he was doing that stuff, he got into mergers and acquisitions through some of his finance contacts at the Pentagon. So he was kind of doing some lower level exchange. It's not really called a SPAC.

You could call it a reverse merger I guess he was doing some reverse merger stuff so he had these like penny stocks certificates and he just gave me these and I just cashed them in and I had like three four hundred dollars and I just started trading and then um I remember trading like my first thing in trading was I I got in at the bottom after the financial crash yeah and I remember Bank of America was like, it was like $3. And I was just buying these stocks, man. And I was just making really good returns. But if you zoom out, I wasn't aware of the type of volatility that I was trading.

So that's kind of how I got into the markets, man. And then from there on, I just kind of dabbled very recreationally as the years went on. And then I basically, when music started taking off for me, my, my passion for kind of finance and the markets just kind of took a backseat until about 2017 when crypto started happening again, or crypto started to become really mainstream. And then I, then I just got sucked straight back into it. And then I really, that's when I started to develop more appropriate like trading skills. And then leading up to this year

is when I really started to, I feel like, refine it and actually learn proper techniques, join trading groups, follow like other analysts and stuff like that. So that's a little bit of the journey there. What would you say is like your core strategy? Do you have particular indicators that you love? Are you like naked price action? I mean, how do you view a naked chart? What do you look for?

At this point, I think my favorite strategy is just the simple trend changes. And I've been following this group. Are you familiar with the chart guys? So Dan from the chart guys, he's phenomenal trader, man. And he just explains everything so simple. So I started watching his crypto videos in like 2017 and another good buddy of mine. He's a good DJ. His name's TJR. You kind of put me on to him, dude, you got to have TJR on here. He is a beast trader. Yeah. TJR was like a bit of a trader mentor to me and he helped me with this

methodology, but it's all about just basic trend changes, man. Like there's a lot of TA out there and you like, look at these charts with the, the, the trend lines and all this stuff in like 5,000 million indicators and stuff. And what I noticed a lot of the really good TA guys are using, they use EMA, RSI and simple trend changes. And that's kind of Dan's methodology that he preaches to everybody. So I kind of followed along with that and just being able to identify lower level timeframe changes, polar bearish on the five minute, and then you bounce to the 15 minute and then you keep zooming out. And then once the one hour trend starts changing and then the four hour trend,

you can take a step back and then you know, on your higher level timeframes, whether it's the weekly or whatever, that these trends are changing and maybe your higher low is being set and you can time your entries good. So I've been really trying to use that methodology to time my entries better based on where the higher lows are being set or exit when the lower highs are in and stuff like that. And it's just all about the most likely scenario. Like, for example, this last crypto dip, I really was able to put that into full effect, I feel like, for the first time ever after honing it in. And I just knew, like, if you looked at the Ethereum chart,

what was that? About three weeks ago when it topped out or so? Yeah, over 4,000. Yeah. 4,000. Me and my friends are looking at, we're like, we're like, dude, it's due for monthly consolidation, but no average trader is going to ever look at the monthly chart on Ethereum. You know what I'm saying? But if you looked at it, you, you could say, okay,

monthly consolidation is incoming for Ethereum at this point in time. Right. And so that was kind of a first exit signal. And then it starts, it starts losing the lower level timeframe changes. And you're like, okay, it's starting to top out here. And then me and my friends all looked at each other. We're like, guys, I think it's time to exit. So a lot of us close our Ethereum positions out, not completely, but about three or four of us, we were all in a group chat and we're like, yo, it's time to get out. And so it, that was the first time I was

able to really put this, put these kinds of things into practice appropriately. I think. What's interesting is that, yeah. And that monthly ended up with that like savage epic wick up and being one of the uglier candles, I think probably in the history of, in the history of charts. So in your mind, do you think that now this is a more bullish consolidation and correction, or do you think that now this is a more bullish consolidation and correction? Or do you think that we've entered a bear market after what you've seen and that you're looking for shorts instead of longs at the moment? I mean, this is my completely amateur opinion.

Of course, I just love having this conversation. I love talking about this stuff. But honestly, I think if you go back to the growth and tech names from the, the Biden names, the EVs, the stuff that was running hot last year up until the beginning of this year, that that's, if you look at those charts and you look at the monthly charts, I think that's a good example of what was going to happen with crypto. And me and me and my, me and my couple, my other trader friends,

we kind of look back and we kind of knew that. And Dan from the chart guys kept saying, he's like, he's like, look at the Neo monthly chart. So if you look at the Neo monthly chart, it's technically, um, it's almost a bull flag on the monthly. Yeah. It's huge run up. And then you have on the monthly, you have like three red candles down, but if you actually draw the Fibonacci retracement on the monthly, those wicks touch perfectly on the 0.5 fib level. So after, as long as those wicks are staying above that 0.5 fib level on those, on that monthly timeframe, the bull trend is kind of intact still. And there's not really need to worry. It's just about zooming out and stomaching that,

okay, it's going to go into monthly consolidation and monthly consolidation on lower level timeframes looks like a disaster, but in reality it's Bitcoin chart looks the same. If you pull fibs from, uh, you know, the 3,800 lows of March, 2020 up to like 65,000, the last three weekly candles have all held just above the 50% after wicking down below it's it's literally exactly the same thing. And I talk about it all the time, which is like, it's brutal and it's painful, but it's also normal, right?

So the 50% Dow level, I mean, you know, stock traders have been looking at that level since the beginning of pulling, you know, retracements as a common place for, you know, to get that consolidation. So that's awesome. But so listen, I know also, and I've seen you tweet about it and i kind of remember you were way ahead of the nft craze right i mean nfts absolutely exploded and i remember you being like uh those feels when you uh were talking about nfts and i got two hearts on the tweet six months ago or a year ago man i gotta say i gotta give credit to Blau, Justin Blau. Yeah, I've had him. Yeah. He's been a good friend of mine in the music industry this entire time, maybe since about

2011. And he kind of put me onto it in 2018. The problem is I didn't capitalize on it or participate to much of a degree, but I was completely aware of the space. I already knew how all the technology functioned. I knew kind of what was going to happen with it. I felt like, and then it exploded so quickly and it became oversaturated overnight. It kind of like, I took a step back and was like, okay, well, I didn't expect this. Now I got to, I have to approach this in a different way. Right. So that's kind of where

I'm late. You're, you're early and then you're like late and something happened in five minutes in between, but I'm curious. So, you know, having been in the music industry, I've taken my share of beatings for sure. Like, you know, not getting paid for things or things that just came out magically. My name wasn't on them. And, you know, the kind of classic situations. What kind of problems do you think that blockchain or NFT can solve in the music industry on behalf of creators? Man, I think this is one of the industries and why you're seeing guys like Blauf that are coming from music that are really becoming a voice in the communities because music is a great use case for

it. And you know, as a DJ and a musician too, how difficult it can be to get paid from your songs. You know what I mean? Stuff takes, the royalty accounting process in the music industry is the most outdated thing I've ever seen in my life. So I think the first use case that could start being implemented is imagine getting paid out of smart contracts and having your artists royalties and splits amongst your co-writers and everything on some sort of smart contract and the profits of the song getting dispersed in real time via the blockchain via smart contract. And I don't know how that's going to look with a streaming platform, but just that's the basic idea I see of what it could be used for there. And then secondly, I mean, NFTs in general, it's just giving artists another creative outlet to issue their art. You know what I mean?

It's like right now, it's like if I want to issue my music, okay, I could put it for free download, right? On SoundCloud. I can upload it to all the DSPs. I can go on Spotify, Apple Music, yada, yada, yada. I can sign with a major label. The major label can distribute it and do that stuff as well too. But this is like, okay, NFTs, I'm going straight to the blockchain, straight to entirely new community of collectors. And I can still monetize my art just in a

different way. And it's just really giving artists another option to just monetize their art. And I think it's incredible, man. Yeah. What I'm curious there is like, there's that trade-off. I'm obviously an NFT enthusiast. I'm very passionate about it, but there's that other side of you where it's just like, I want as many people as humanly possible to hear every single piece of art that I create. Right. So, and that's why it used to be, we saw the transitions, right? I mean, it used to be like,

you had to have a label and you would try to get paid. Then there was this huge transition in like the mid 2000s, 2010s where SoundCloud evolved and it was like, everything's free. I'm giving it all away for free and I'll monetize it later

once I'm famous and have built an audience. And now NFT seems to be bringing it back to like, I'm going to monetize it directly with these individuals. So like, do you ever feel like I would throw this on an NFT, but then nobody's going to hear it? Like Wu-Tang selling their one copy of their album. Yeah, that was crazy. Yeah, no, there is a sense of that. But at the same time, the monetization is probably going to make up for that in one way, shape or form. You know what I'm saying? So there's that aspect to it, but yeah, man, there's just, I think we're just, we're still in the early rounds of how this is actually going to be used. People are, it's,

it's been a little bit of a, like, like just a little bit of a gold rush, I guess you could say. And, and the first kind of couple of use cases are just being identified and figured out. I actually have a friend the other day, he was like posting on our, we have this like DJ group chat and we all just talk crypto and stocks because a lot of us, man, we all were just so out of work the last year. And we all just like made this huge group chat together. And we all started talking to one of my friends was like, yo yo i have this crypto punk from 2017. we're all like you have a crypto punk from 2017 bro he's like should i sell it and we were all just like bro i it there was a lot of mixed opinions on it and uh yes but i was like dude i would sell it yeah personally yeah i mean that's incredible and people don't realize that

that was happening in 2017 dude they don't right people think the nfts were like invented this year yeah no it's been in the making for a while and again i remember blau saying it in 2000 blau called it in 2018 i looked into it i read about it i was like oh this is amazing and then i just like all right then i just forgot about it for a little bit and then boom it's it's just back. And you're just like, what? Yeah. So what was that experience of having your basically like your entire lifestyle erased all at once? Because I've talked to a few people, I haven't had many people in music on the show who sort of experienced the like, absolute pause button on their entire career, besides Blau, who I've obviously had on. Man. Well, where do we start with that? That's, I mean, as you know, as you were a DJ before too,

you know, that touring makes up the substantial, a substantial amount of your income as, you know, a DJ or artist. And so I went into this thing and I was, you know, I was extremely reliant on touring as a source of income. You know, I had some investing stuff on the side and then you make your royalties to maybe some merch sales and, you know, some digital e-comm stuff, but it just goes out the window overnight and you're sitting there and you're like, okay, it's going to be the first thing is like, all right, it's going to be back maybe in, you know, three months. Right. And then nobody has the scope of what was going to happen with the pandemic or

anything. And then a couple of months set in and I was just like, man, I need to do something else. I need to strengthen other skills. And I just realized how blindsided I was and how a little bit of a one trick pony I was. So that's kind of, I used that time to dive into some business stuff, some tech startup stuff. I became an advisor on a crypto project. And then I really dove into started honing my trading and started trying to do it properly and more professional at that time. So yeah, that's what I just basically been doing. My time is just reinforcing these other skills, I think, that I didn't have going into the pandemic. So after I get out of this whole thing, I just feel like I'll be a better rounded business person.

Guys, this is so cool. For the first time in history, rather than a company or project So after I get out of this whole thing, I just feel like I'll be a better rounded business person. token has been absolutely on fire and solidified itself as a top 50 coin by market cap. And the Cosmos platform has so much in store. Now, if you don't know about them, Cosmos is effectively the port city connecting chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum to ensure your liquidity on any chain can be used anywhere. One of the things I'm most excited about is their new DEX, which is coming out, which will connect to any blockchain. So you can swap ETH, ERC20, BSC, or any other token with Atom plus this DEX. We'll have order books just like any centralized exchange. So it'll feel familiar trading just like you do anywhere that you've traded before. This is a first, it's never existed until now. You need to absolutely check them out at the wolfofallstreets.link slash Cosmos, C-O-S-Mm-o-s and see everything they have going on

and obviously like there's the basic financial lessons that everyone knows like have six months of an emergency fund or you know like diversify your revenue streams and all this stuff but when you're like in your 20s and you're touring and you're partying and you're just raging like i don't think much of that come i mean i'm in my. So like, I know that I didn't know that stuff 20 years ago, even though people told it to me, I didn't do it, you know? So do you think that a lot of DJs like, were like three months into it and were like, shit, I'm broke. Or was it like most? Yeah. I think that was a big thing. Luckily I had some real estate and I sold some real estate and that actually saved my life in this

whole year. And then after that, I realized, and then I think I tweeted about it one day and I was like, newer artists that are just having your first year. I was like, save your money. Don't be stupid with it. Buy real estate. Yeah. And it's going to appreciate value over the long haul. And you can turn it into, it's a, it's a cash flowing asset too, if you have a rental property. And I just think that was the most valuable thing that, uh, I was able to do. So that kind of saved it a little bit too, but I do think from a standpoint, um, the way what artists started doing shifted as well too, in the whole, in the whole space. So I saw a lot of my friends,

they started monetizing on Twitch. So they're doing these Twitch live streams and they're monetizing on Twitch, dude. And I have plenty of friends that made it through the entire year strictly off of Twitch. And I thought that was amazing. You were able to do that. Was that something that you considered? I did consider it at one time and I just, I'm just not that kind. And like streaming regularly is very, very, it sucks the life out of you a little bit.

I don't know how to describe it. Yeah, well, there's no, there's no crowd. There's no crowd. It's like the setup and the audio stuff and getting everything right. It's, it's, it's a huge effort. So I was like, I feel like I'm not gonna be able to stick to that. So then I was just like, I'm going to just focus on my, on my trading stuff. I think.

You also seem like i mean just from seeing you dj and the videos and stuff you seem very much a performer and like someone who draws off the energy of the crowd i mean yeah is that true absolutely man i don't know how you're supposed to get turnt looking at a camera i don't know just doesn't doesn't i you know i admire the guys who can do it but i can i know that i never would have been able to like get up for it and give a proper set by myself in a room. It would be fun to watch a guy like you more on the stream that has like those, that open format.

Right. Like, like cool cuts and scratches and stuff. I feel like that stuff would be really cool to watch on like a stream. I watched Jazzy Jeff, like he does like lunch sets and stuff. And so like, yeah, it's exactly right. Because I know he's gonna do something that's gonna make me go somewhere in the middle of it. But yeah, I guess if you're playing like a five minute song, and you're, you know, it's kind of hard to replicate that that live feel. But you just told me you're

sitting in a hotel room right now after your first festival back since COVID, right? How's that feel? Yeah, man, this is the first time back, I think since in the entire US. I mean, they had this, the festival was called Sunset Music Festival and I did one of the after parties last night and dude, the crowd was going off. It was, everything was completely,

it looked like completely capacity. Everybody was having a good time. Everything went smooth. And man, it was like living in a dream. Everybody's just, the whole music industry is like backstage guys from all over the us and we're all back there just talking we're like oh my god this is crazy man it's gonna be back it's been a brutal brutal year for it's it's crazy to like look at the last year and see you know you've heard people like these people on cnbc they use the term like k-shape recovery

it's like k-shape it's It's like K-shape. It's like music, industry, entertainment, definitely the bottom of the K. Yeah. Other things going to the top of the K. And it's really interesting to see that dispersion of different jobs and how the pandemic affected those different... Well, what do you make of the fact

that the entire global economy melted down, but stocks just went up? Dude, well, that's, in my opinion, that's, it's a simple explanation. When you like zoom out, I think as traders and everything, we're kind of caught up in a lot of the micro stuff day to day. But ultimately, I think all of these risk assets are just going up in value because of all the liquidity that's pumped into the system. I mean, I think that's the simplest way to explain it. Look at every risk asset, even collectibles, baseball cards, NFTs, stocks, equities, crypto, real estate. When all this money comes in the system like that, it goes into risk assets as

kind of a safe haven, I guess you could say. And I think that's kind of what you've been seeing the last year. So it's also important to kind of, I think, maybe keep an unbiased look on this stuff and say, okay, yes, crypto's great. These stocks are great. Real estate is great. But at the same time, it's directly correlated with the Fed's quantitative easing and all of the liquidity the Fed has put in the system over the last year as well, too. So I think you've got to realize, too, that eventually interest rates are going to have to rise. Eventually, the Fed's going to stop. They're going to start reducing their asset purchases on their balance sheet. And we need to kind of look out

in time and see how that's going to affect the prices of all these risk assets too. I mean, what would you think is going to happen when interest rates eventually rise with all these assets? Yeah. And there's also the whole, everybody's been sitting at home doing nothing. Everybody became a trader. Everybody became interested in markets. They're sending out stimulus checks. Well, what happens when all these people want to go on vacation again? Right. And I'm not saying that that's actually an accurate narrative or not, but there's a lot of talk that people are like, well, I made a whole bunch of money in the market when I had no idea what I was going to do, what I was doing. And now I have some extra cash and the world's opening up

again. Right. Dude, that's, I think that Dude, I think that's a good hypothesis. I think that people will cash out of certain things to take care of other things eventually. That was been the hardest, hardest lesson, I think too, for traders this entire time is when to take profits, man. Holy cow. I mean, I got to say the growth tech thing.

I was like, I'm more, I started off with some like fundamental research on these names too. And then I kind of dive into the technicals and I was in some of those names super, super early last year, like PLTR and all the EV stuff, all that stuff, man, this stuff is going three, four or five X on stocks, which is completely crazy. It looked like an all point. I mean, it looked like an alt season. It really did. It was crazy. And you get so caught up in that hype that you can't, I feel like as a trader, I couldn't zoom out and be like, okay, maybe it's time to take profits. But we have this funny in the group chat, we have this funny saying, and it's, if you're screenshotting your portfolio, it's time to take

profits. It's time to sell. And bro, if you did that this year, both times with crypto and stocks, you would have sold the top perfectly, I think. I've tweeted probably three times that my best top signals when I show my wife are balance. Dude. It's not even, like, it shouldn't even be considered like hey look how how much money we made this is like look how much money we're about to lose

but that's that contrarian mindset that you have to have as a trader and that's why the best traders they're all emotions off contrarian a little bit because when you're feeling good you should be selling obviously and vice versa but when you're actually living in the moment, especially, it's not like it was some boring market either. It was completely, it's been a completely hyped market. And so getting caught up in these daily things is just, it really, it really shuts off your ability to look at things in an unbiased way, I think. And that's the one thing I, after the growth tech sell off stuff, I was like, I am never, that's not

happening again. And then I was able to catch it with Ethereum off of learning off that mistake. I only caught it on Ethereum. It didn't sell all of my position or anything like that. I feel like I wouldn't, I mean, you know, there's, there's gotta be that long-term investor mindset too. Like just, I'm just, I don't know your thinking on it, but I was a bit caught off guard by the size of the drop. I am not surprised that there was the velocity and speed which happened, but it doesn't change my long-term thesis. And therefore, I'll just go ahead and suffer the pain. I still think Ethereum is a $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 asset one day. And like, I don't need the money today. Right. So that's, I think that's a good outlook to have

as well too, because, and that's what I noticed a lot of good traders that I look up to do. They have a long-term no touch position. That's like a huddle position. And then you actively trade another portion of your account. And so that's kind of what I've been trying to do as well too. So you're right. You have that no touch thing. So it's going to go up and down in value and you're just kind of block it out of your mind because you have that long-term outlook. And then you have your actively traded portion that you just kind of have fun with and you try to compound those gains and whatever. Yeah. So I'm curious now having experienced all of this and you touched on it a little bit before, like your 20 year old self, some 20 year old, like emerging DJ right now who's starting to get like their three to five thousand a show and feels like super rich. Right. They were getting three to five hundred. Now they're getting three to five thousand. I don't think another global pandemic is going to come shut everything down. But what would you tell them? Because it's so easy to get ahead of yourself and start to think like you're this God tier rich person

because you got 50k in the bank and your flights are paid for, right? Man, it's, yeah, it's crazy when it first starts happening like that. And you're just like, if I could look back on myself, I would have been like, okay, just don't bite off more than you can chew with your living expenses because music can be volatile, you know? And also too, I would have told myself I would have tried to invest in more real estate earlier. And that's that I feel like looking back on that, I wish I would have actually participated more in real estate because that's just been a crazy. I think that's just been one of the safest havens that I've seen in the last 10 years. Yeah. So talk about something I was dead wrong about a year ago. I thought the real estate, when COVID hit, I was like one of the biggest real estate bears out there. I wasn't saying

like sell your real estate or anything, but I just thought there was going to be a 2007, 2008 type event because I mean, just rationally, it seems like where, who would be moving, who would be buying real estate would crash and everything shut down. Nobody's going to offices and real estate just kept going up too. Dude, it was, I mean, you can never time the top on that stuff. And I don't think you were wrong with your thesis. Cause I think eventually you're, you are going to see a decline in prices. It's just like, okay, when is that going to happen? In, I kind of thought the same thing too, in 2020, I was like, oh my God, it's going to tank by the end of the year. And it didn't. And, and so, I mean, you can never call the tops on that kind of stuff. So. Yeah, I guess it's the classic markets can stay irrational longer than you can

stay solvent, right? You live in Cali, right? Yeah. I live in Cali. My friends in LA send me screenshots of the real estate market. And you even talk about listing a house and you have 10 offers over market before it's even hit the market. I mean, you can't even find anything, right? It was that way when I bought my house in 2016. There was like 20 people were, there was like 20 people bidding and they were all cash offers from like all these crazy business people overseas. And you're just like, what? So it's been crazy like that for years and years in LA. I mean, Florida has gotten extremely crazy.

A lot of people had moved there relocating the pandemic and my rental property there. I think the rent or whatever it was, it was like 2,500 or something on this. It's just like a basic townhome and the rent is now over $3,000 in a year. That's insane. Insane, dude. So you're just kind of seeing the shift of people relocate across. And it's going to be interesting to see how permanent those shifts are going to be in real estate, whether it's like people are going to stay in Phoenix, Austin, South Florida, Orlando, whatever it is. Do you think, are you seeing the trend? Like we hear kind of on the

news, it's like, everyone's leaving New York, everyone's leaving California, everyone's going to States with lower taxes. Are you seeing that trend living in California? Yeah. I mean, I had a lot of my personal friends, they moved, a lot of them moved to like Denver and a lot of them went back to Florida. And I don't know if they're coming back to be honest, but at the end of the day, you know, LA is kind of that, like everybody moved there for just to be in that, in the center of that, of the music industry, You know, it's the center of entertainment, center of the music industry. And you can just cross paths with people that you would never cross paths with, you know? And you can get in the room with amazing writers,

amazing singers. And sometimes just the magic of that cannot be replicated elsewhere. So it's going to be interesting to see if the trend kind of shifts back to LA eventually. But I mean, right now, I think people definitely don't like some of the business policies in California and some of the tax, especially the tax thing. I mean, I wouldn't cry if I never had to ever send another check to the FTB franchise.

But I think that's a big issue too, when the pandemic happens and then your income gets reduced, you're like, and then it gets reduced again with state income taxes. You're like, no, I'm out. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because a lot of people are saying, you know, the world will never, never go back to the same as far as like people going to offices because companies have learned that they can do the same with less overhead remotely and people are more efficient anyways when they're working at home.

But you just touch on something where you're at. It's like creativity. Yeah. It's a little harder to replicate, I think, like on a zoom call. So have you like, have you got, have you tried, like, have you tried like working with people in this context or are you still like you want to get in the studio? And yeah, I know a lot of people that, um, I I've collaborated online plenty of times and I know a lot of people that I've collaborated online plenty of times. And I know a lot of people that do these Zoom sessions, too. But I just think ultimately, at the end of the day, people prefer to get in the room together. And that's just how I feel like you make that magic happen in real life. You know, that's just where the real spark comes from. But I mean, look, there's plenty of collaborations that have probably come out and have been top hits that were created online. So there's no one way to do it, especially in music. But I just think just being in person, nothing's better than that. So yeah, I 100% agree.

So back to the NFT thing, I'm curious. So obviously you were early, like we said, and then it kind of just absolutely exploded. So do you think that it's a bubble like now obviously like every celebrity on the planet is doing some sort of nfd right and like i just don't know how much demand there can be do you think it's in a bubble and then where do you think it like settles in for guys like yourself who are like you want to do it but now you don't even know what to do with it because it's gone so crazy. I mean, you know, I got to be careful

what I say, cause there's people that really like these things. And if you say the wrong thing, sometimes they get, it can get misconstrued. I will be honest. And I will say, I do think NFT prices are, are over-exaggerated and are, and so it, it kind of just goes along with everything else man it's just one of those risk assets that increased in value and it's in a little bit of a it's just a different market so it's not like you can look at a chart right it's not like it's an equity it's not like it's it's bitcoin it's this new thing so kind of having a taking a step back and just judging on like what's happening with the prices in this sector, it's kind of like, it's kind of difficult to wrap your hands around, but I think it's going to level

off and kind of have a more stable area where the prices I think settle down. It's really interesting what you just said, because like when you trade markets, you're like, everybody knows if Bitcoin's down or like if the altcoin market cap is dropping, you really don't know if NFTs are crashing, right? Like you have no idea. There's really not even a way to look at the entire market and see if it's already like depressed or whatever. You can obviously look at individual assets

and say this sold for less or like somebody bought this punk for a ridiculous price and sold it for less, but there's really no way to gauge the underlying market. Maybe what I was thinking as well too, is maybe, you know, just say this crypto punk costs 55 Ethereum, right? Maybe it just stays pegged to 55 Ethereum and it's just correlated with the price of Ethereum and it just stays like that. And then it's going to end up being whatever the price of Ethereum is. And that could be another thing. But overall, I do think these prices are crazy.

And even the top NFT collectors themselves, like WhaleShark, WhaleShark Pro, he's even said it himself that he thinks there's only 1% of a lot of these projects, I think, will succeed in the long run. And he's said that publicly many times. And I kind of agree, in a sense. I think there's going to be a small percentage of the actual NFT projects that will carry value to collectors for the long, long haul. And, you know, I think that's going to be the CryptoPunks of the world, maybe. I think NBA Top Shots, that was obviously a cool project.

There's some other ones I can't think of off the top. Yeah. I think people's will maintain value. I think that things like that, I mean, but it's like any art scene, right? I mean, beauty's in the eye of the beholder. And so like, you know, a lot of people buy a lot of trash. I mean, it's just the way it's always been in art. Yeah. That's another, that's another thing about it. I mean, if you want to try to like peg prices to it, it's like, it is, it's completely based on what the, the eye of the beholder is in the NFT space. You know what I mean?

It's not like, it's not so supply and demand oriented, I think as maybe just like, and it doesn't have the same liquidity as other cryptos and stocks and stuff. Like the liquidity with NFTs is like completely different in the way you buy and sell it. So that's kind of a crazy thing to figure out too. Yeah, you just need like one person who thinks it's cool,

who's willing to pay more for it than you did. You're good to go. Even the ugliest house like eventually sells, you know, like there's somebody who thinks it's awesome. It's not like you can click a button and then you can you know yeah so but so then like also i mean there's still a lot of limitations i mean i did one nft project like uh i was surprised before the boom certainly and i took one track that i'd done years ago and we separated it into eight because it could only

be 30 seconds long because of the limitations of actually minting the NFT and the size. And so like it was like eight separate ones that if you had all eight, you could put together and get the whole song. But like that shows like how difficult it really is to use NFTs for music. Like you still can't like I'm not sure now, but I feel like you can't like have a five minute NFT. It's a full song. Oh, yeah. I didn't even actually think about that. I think though, you're onto something though with the songs and being part, because you could just actually list digital ownership for a piece of music in the form of an NFT, you know, whether it was a, you know, a guitar stem or something like you can put a price

on the digital ownership of this piece of music in a public decentralized free place. And that's very powerful. And that's another use case too. I was thinking like, you know, if I want to go make a record and I want to go sample something, right. The sample clearing process with these labels, this shit is a nightmare absolute nightmare and i was thinking i'm like okay if i was a big label i was like how could i how could i help the artist sign on this label monetize their stuff it's like well maybe you would make the sampling people be able to use certain samples from it if they were um willing to maybe easier and you could take maybe stems from classic songs and you could do some sort of like blockchain scenario where you

can license these via NFTs. And it's like, okay, I can buy this for this. And then that entitles me to get a certain use out of it. And I can conduct all these transactions without a third party. And I think that would be a cool use for it too is just figuring out music licensing and music sampling with um blockchain stuff sample clearance has to be the single worst process in music there's got to be a use case this though have you ever thought about a use case i mean i i've thought of it i mean we used to you used to have i can't remember tsunami was one of them there were there like all these sites where you could go like purchase cleared samples. But it was never like the bass from Heard It Through the Grapevine, right? It was just like a dude like me who sat in a room and like created 10 loops and, you know, threw them on there or whatever.

But so, you know, getting clear samples is one thing, but getting samples of, like you said, of originals. But like, why wouldn't someone want to monetize their catalog that way? You know what I mean? Like, it's never going to be Prince. It's never going to be Metallica or whatever, but like, there's, there's, there's thousands of artists out there. It'd be like, sure. You can take my drums. It's fine. It's 5,000, you know, and we'll all, all NFT 10 copies of like the drum loop from this song, each one for five grand dude there's got to be something here man but i i think that's a good idea and i think you're onto something with that right you're the one who said it um i know but you said oh mint 10 of the drum loop and i was

yeah yeah because i mean at the end of the day like you just i can't even even in my own like brief career working with producers, how many times I saw incredible tracks die on a sample clearance? Oh dude. That's because people don't understand is all of the good hip hop records from the nineties are sampled a hundred percent samples. And the, the best electronic music, I mean, arguably, so let's say Daft punk daft punk is completely sample driven and then the music industry got to a point where it's kind of it tightened down

so hard on this stuff because of monetizing on youtube and yada yada yada they want to you know so i feel like kind of stifling that sampling from records it kind kind of changed music a little bit. And I think you're not, you don't feel that a lot with a lot of the new records that come out, they're sampling stuff, but it's, they're sampling it in a different way. And they're sampling different eras of stuff. Now they're sampling the stuff you're hearing coming on the radio. They're sampling two thousands era now. And you don't quite get that same nostalgic feeling of those old old records from say the 50s 60s 70s 80s yeah you get a swing and everything is so heavily quantized and when so like and then this is like so out outside of the realm of what people in this podcast probably listen to

quantizing your drums basically like means locking them into a grid at the most basic level but you know that's in the 2000s people started everything had to be like exact and didn't have that live feel with sort of the swing of a live musician and what made all those rap records so special was that swing you know just they got they have soul because like everything's just a little syncopated or a little off and that's completely been lost for music because of that dude 100 i think you're spot on with that because you can, you can hear it on those drum samples on those old hip hop records. You know, some of the drums are, do have swing in them and stuff, but it just kind of not being able to use that era of samples and music and it being so difficult to navigate for music. It's just,

I think it killed some of the creativity with, especially in dance music, because dance music is even more historically was more sample driven than a lot of other genres too, besides hip hop. And so, I mean, dude, have you ever gone and just gone to that site?

It's called who sampled. Oh yeah. It's like my favorite, literally my favorite website in the whole world. I'm just like, go through some of the samples that like Daft Punk was using on their records and go through all of their first couple albums. And it's just crazy, man.

They're sampling like, you know, they're sampling disco stuff, jazz stuff, whatever it is. And just being able to use those same samples today and reusing those would be the biggest nightmare. Actually, I don't even know how they got that music out. Did they just do it out? Did they think so? I think I think early they did. And then probably they were like that one unicorn that could get the clearances because they were daft punk at least

for like the newer stuff but i mean yeah and what's crazy when you go on these sites is you you you know the like one key sample from a song like if you have a music history you'll be like oh that's like the jackson five but then you see there's like seven more samples that you didn't identify in the song. Like every hit, every snare is some sample that you had no idea. And it's just how clever, how clever those producers at that time were sampling because they were just making the most out of what they had with that stuff. And it gave the records a very specific feel. And it's hard to get that feel now.

Do you think that we'll see? Okay, so we've seen this sort of evolution of established artists using NFTs as another revenue stream. Do you think that we could somehow see like an emergence of NFT musicians who never had a career before, or who never get into live touring or who never do any of that but find some sort of like just maybe there's this niche here that could be just look at Euler Beats I don't know who Euler Beats is but Euler Beats has one of the top NFT collections that I've seen in the last year and I mean I don't know what he was doing before but I guarantee after this Euler Beats is going to to be doing other big stuff in music off of his NFT stuff. So is that what you're kind of saying? These artists

that are kind of blew up in NFTs can then take their things elsewhere in music as well too. And I think Euler Beats is a good example. Yeah, that actually is a perfect example. And then, so beyond NFTs, like we've seen proposed blockchain ticketing and blockchain, and it's part of NFTs, but like, say you have a show, right? And somebody buys your NFT, they get a backstage pass with their NFT or something. Like what other experiential things

do you think that we're gonna see come out of the blockchain? They're gonna improve like the experience for the fans, but also like more monetizable for an artist? Well, I think you nailed it right first. There's the ticketing, the ticketing aspect. So let's take away even the, like the benefits of being holders for certain things, but even just ticketing, digital ticketing is going to be all eventually blockchain, I think, because there's so many fake copies of tickets. And I think ticketing has ticketing and having that unique, just that unique address and that unique place

on the blockchain will eliminate a lot of like the, the deal with ticket fraud and all this stuff. So I think event ticketing as a whole will eventually be on blockchain technology. And then in terms of artists and stuff, I do um nfts and other things give artists an opportunity to give um certain collectors benefits and i think blau for example blau on one of his nfts that he sold he did um he allowed the top 10 collectors or whatever whatever it was to come to his party or something he was playing a party in vegas and they were able to attend. So it's giving collectors the value back and really providing like another experience with it too. And I see, are you familiar with BitClout? Yeah, of course. I stayed far away because of all the insane

controversy around it, but it's actually funded by some of the heavy hitters. We got to dissect this big cloud scenario too please have at it never talked about it on the show yeah oh my god okay so me and all me and all the uh my other dj friends we all kind of like found out about it uh pretty pretty early like maybe it was up for like two or three weeks or something i think this was the first week of april i think big cloud went on maybe mid-march or so. And I just heard people buzzing like, oh, it's decentralized social media and you have your coin and stuff. And so we're like, all right, fuck it. Let's go try it. And then one day in the group chat, I woke up and everyone's like, Henry, make your account. I was like, yo, why

you guys want me to get on this thing so bad? And they were all ready to front run my coin and hop in before I got on. Of got on buy your coin and tell us all the homies are like loading up on my own coin before i even buy it and then we were all just fucking around with each other you know just like buying and trading each other's coins but we were messing around with it and just kind of seeing how it worked and there's this unique bonding curve in the price on bitcloud and the bonding curve allows this like weird exponential, this weird exponential gains that I've never seen in any financial instrument.

And basically we were just screwing around on there and we low-key just started making consistent four or five extra turns on things. So the first week it went from screwing around with each other, buying each other's coins and stuff and just showing it to each other in the group and messing around to hang on a second. We can take this concept and we can start buying and trading Elon Musk and

yada, yada, yada. Yeah, of course. So then we started day trading on big cloud for like two weeks, man. And I remember there was about, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 of us that were doing it. And dude, we crushed it, man. And I remember there's about, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 of us that were doing it. And dude, we crushed it, man. We made insane gains day trading on BitCloud. And it didn't last very long because what happened with the user growth on BitCloud is it kind of hit this huge exponential growth for a couple of weeks. And then the user growth trickled off because a lot of the reserve profiles, a lot of the celebrities from the reserve profile didn't, didn't end up coming on the platform.

And then the speculators kind of backed out of BitCloud. And then, then you saw what people using BitCloud for what they were supposed to be using it for, which was kind of give coin holder benefits. And that's kind of where I was going with this is it maybe wasn't the best perfect launch of a decentralized social media, let's say, because it had, like, for example, you couldn't, I was listening to, are you familiar with Naval? Yeah, of course. So Naval, he said on his podcast publicly,

he's like, BitCloud is a great concept. He's like, but you can't get your money off. Yeah, I was just gonna ask, you made all this money, but where is it? So what we did with that is, dude, but you can't get your money off. Yeah, I was just going to ask. You made all this money, but where is it? So what we did with that is, dude, low-key, I think me and a bunch of the guys, we did like probably 25x day trading on there total.

And the only way you can cash it off is we were doing OTC in Discord. So you do OTC trades. And then someone makes another BitCloud account. You send the BitCloud at a discounted price which is uh i think big cloud was like 170 160 whatever it is and then you sell it for 100 and then you send it to the address and then they send you crypto and that's how you exit big cloud essentially but so big cloud itself i mean is factually true that you can't exit you have to like You have to hack it to get out. Exactly. There's no off ramp for it.

So Wild West. It's like Americans trading on foreign exchanges and doing like, and it sounds like the pre-uniswap days of like trading DeFi coins and stuff. Oh, man. But yeah, essentially, if there's no off ramp, it kind of decreases the legitimacy. But I think essentially, if there's no off ramp, it kind of decreases the legitimacy. But I think they had to not have that off ramp because then financially, I think it could have been potentially regulated. Yeah, security or something.

I have a feeling they purposely had to do that for whatever reason, but not having that off ramp kind of scared a lot of people from getting on the platform. So people were expecting the off ramp to be on there, to be able to convert the BitCloud back to Bitcoin and then send the Bitcoin back to an external address. And that never happened. And then you saw a mass load of people get off the site, I think, unfortunately. But the concept of BitCloud as a whole is, I mean, decentralized social media is bound to happen and it needs to happen. Agreed. And everything with Facebook and Twitter and all this stuff. And I think it was a good little experiment to see kind of what went wrong with BitCloud and what can be improved.

I mean, they're still improving it every day. And I do still think it has a chance. But there are guys on there that are giving awesome benefits to their coin holders. Like there's guys that are doing like business mentorship meetings to my top 10 coin holders and they go do zoom meetings with them and stuff like that. And I think that's, that's the type of use that people can really benefit in this creator, this creator coin economy thing. And that's, I think what it should be used for. And there's going to be a big influx influx of that over the next couple of years. That makes total sense.

So I'm curious now that the market has crashed, died, whatever, the crypto market, what do you see? And I'm not asking for price projections or anything, just like as a trader and a person who's been watching it for a while. And I know we're getting out of time anyway. So, you know, kind of final question, like, where do you see it going? Do you think we're going into 2018, like epic bear market, or do you think that, uh, much ado about nothing and eventually we'll trickle up?

Well, on the, on the lower level stuff right now, I mean, I just, I didn't check it for 24 hours cause I was so busy yesterday, but you looked and it just confirmed a four hour trend change. So it's kind of, kind of confirmed a higher low right here. And that's not a bad start for kind of forming a bottom. So we'll see if that four hour trend holds, but over the long run, it's kind of confirmed a higher low right here. And that's not a bad start for kind of forming a bottom. So we'll see if that four-hour trend holds. But over the long run, it's interesting to kind of zoom out and be like, all right, where are we? Are we still in the bull market? Where are we in the bull market?

And all these things. But the on-chain, a lot of the on-chain analytics and a lot of these on-chain analysts, a lot of the stuff is still bullish on the on-chain metric. Super bullish. But then you just have a God awful, terrible chart still from the technicals. The technicals are basically all around bullish besides this little trend change that just confirmed, but overall, or sorry, bearish. The technicals are very bearish still. And so it's hard to kind of zoom out and kind of have a grasp on where we are. Because if you sat through that 2017, 2018 thing, bro,

you're just like, oh, it's PTSD all over again. But ultimately, I think the safest thing to do right now is Bitcoin's kind of in this no trade zone. I know, you can, I think traders can be looking for trends to start confirming on the higher levels before FOMOing into stuff because dude, it can always go lower, but I've seen a lot of guys capitulate though over the last week and that's right. Yeah. And so giving up, yeah. Seeing that is kind of makes me feel like the bottom is kind of somewhere around here. I think so too. But I guess by the time this comes out, we'll probably be proving completely right or wrong. And it ain't coming out today. So yeah, dude, thank you so much for taking the time. Where

can everybody find you after this? Let's see. You can find me Henry Fong on Spotify, Henry Fong on Instagram and Henry Fong on Twitter. So are we going to hit Sebastian one day or something? Dude, let's do it. We got to go for a surf, man. Yeah. I'm out of water shape for sure. I'll get crushed out there. I know we were talking about hitting reef road on those like 20, 30, 40 foot days. I'll go on like the five foot day. I'm coming with that, man. Anything, dude, as long as you get wet, that's all that, all that matters. Couldn't agree more.

And people don't realize how sharky it is where you grew up, but like, you know, I, oh man, I remember a day at deer reef road where they were just jumping out of the water all around us. I mean, it's so sharky down there. I have a lot of my good friends. I have like three good friends that all been attacked. So I know plenty of people personally that have like battle wounds from sharks. Yeah, I actually got bit on the foot in South Beach.

But in South Beach, I was the first person bit by a shark in 35 years. But like the shark was like this big. And to be honest, they called it, we called it a shark bite. But the reality was I felt something and I kicked it and I think I kicked it in the tooth. I don't even know if it meant to bite me or if I just kicked it in the mouth.

But yes, technically I got shark bit. Just leave it as shark bite and you'll have a cooler story. That's right. It's a much better story. Now I'm telling the real story. But yeah, dude, thank you so much. I appreciate it. And I will speak very soon. Right on, man. Thank you for having me.