The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below. 

00:00:03:14 – 00:00:17:22

Richard Carthon: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current, your host here, Richard Carthon and today I got a very special guest, Rob Mcnealy with TUSC Network. He is working on all kinds of cool projects that we’re about to learn more about. So Rob, really appreciate you spending some time with us today. 

00:00:18:07 – 00:00:21:03

Rob Mcnealy: Well Richard, thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate your time. 

00:00:21:07 – 00:00:24:14

Richard Carthon: Of course. Well before we get started, how about you give us a little background on yourself?

00:00:26:25 – 00:01:03:15

Rob Mcnealy: Okay. I’m old. I’m old in tech terms and old in Blockchain years, but a serial entrepreneur, recovering corporate MBA, and an entrepreneur longtime. I’ve been a self-sufficient entrepreneur for I don’t know, 15 plus years. I’ve been an entrepreneur or some form for more than two decades. Got into Blockchain space about two and a half years ago with our TUSC project and we can go down a lot of rabbit holes on that, but we’ve created TUSC to get mass adoption and we’re doing that by focusing on certain markets that have a problem, a recognized problem with payments in the United States. 

00:01:03:21 – 00:01:16:14

Richard Carthon: That’s awesome and definitely looking to unpack that more, but tell us about your very first like introduction to the Crypto space. Like when you first hear about it and then from learning about it, what made you decide to eventually come back and build a company around it?

00:01:17:27 – 00:01:36:09

Rob Mcnealy: So I first heard about Bitcoin probably about 2011, 2012 and right at the beginning and I will say that I was dismissive of Cryptocurrency for a long time and mainly because of the people that were promoting it we’re all sketchy.

00:01:36:11 – 00:01:36:26

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:01:36:28 – 00:01:43:29

Rob Mcnealy: And you and I talked a little bit about this off the air, but I don’t take investment advice from people that aren’t really good investors.

00:01:44:01 – 00:01:44:16

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:01:44:18 – 00:02:20:15

Rob Mcnealy: And most the people that were really pushing Crypto especially early on like Bitcoin, were people that I knew for a fact literally lived in their mom’s basements and were not necessarily successful people. So if you look at the communities that really got on board, as you know Crypto, where a lot of anarchists and libertarian types and a lot of smart people are very financially successful. And they also, a lot of people early on would say things that were not true and this was a turnoff to me, but a lot of people were saying, “Well it’s anonymous” and when I first jumped in and looked at and I’m like, “This is not anonymous at all, it’s all open,” right?

00:02:20:21 – 00:02:21:06

Richard Carthon: Right. 

00:02:21:08 – 00:02:56:12

Rob Mcnealy: And so and a lot of people are pushing it to say avoid taxes. And I always thought, if you’re out there promoting something to avoid taxes, you’re just going to bring the weight of government down on you and that means it’s a lot of, a huge amount of regulatory risk. And so for those reasons, I stayed away from investing in it. I mean, I kept an eyeball on it and I thought the technology was interesting, but the communities around it earlier were sketchy. And you’ve been around the space for a while, a lot of the people around this community are sketchy, especially in the Bitcoin community. All those guys, even those OG’s all have crazy pasts.

00:02:56:14 – 00:02:56:29

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:02:57:01 – 00:03:23:03

Rob Mcnealy: And you know, you’ve got to keep a mental distance and watch what they’re doing because there’s a lot of sketchy stuff out there. So that kind of you know, kept me out for a long time and then probably 2016, 2017, I met some people at different meetups and conferences that I really liked and had some really deep conversations about them and about that time more altcoins were coming into the market.

00:03:23:05 – 00:03:23:20

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:03:23:22 – 00:04:12:23

Rob Mcnealy: And those communities were a little different and doing things differently, so I started seeing some of the other advantages of Blockchain technology and some of the Cryptocurrencies out there. And then in 2017, I started investing. Early 2017, start investing and then literally over Christmas of like 2017, we decided to put a project together and then we started our project TUSC. It was originally called OCC, it was an ERC 20 token and we began the project on New Year’s Day 2018 and then about a year, let’s see. So for a while, for a lot of reasons we rebranded, we didn’t like the original branding and then we decided to do our own Blockchain and then fast forward to last fall, we did our token swap in October.

00:04:12:25 – 00:04:13:10

Richard Carthon: Okay.

00:04:13:12 – 00:04:26:05

Rob Mcnealy: And then got on our Blockchain. We launched the Blockchain officially around Christmas and began trading on the first exchange on the new Blockchain right around New Year’s this year. 

00:04:26:07 – 00:04:43:24

Richard Carthon: Quite the transition man. And so you know, you get into this space, you learn more about it, you see the opportunity, especially on the Blockchain side of things and so you said you were directly trying to solve problems that are within the space. Can you explain a little bit of some of what these issues are and how TUSC is going about solving them? 

00:04:43:26 – 00:05:15:29

Rob Mcnealy: Sure. So one of the things that we all see out there is essentially with most projects, we see that most products that are out there are just speculative investments and what I mean by that is most of the Crypto products out there don’t actually have you know, people buying and selling things with their Crypto. There’s a lot of products that claim that they want to, a lot of projects that say they have potential to, but I’m not seeing a lot of strategy out of any of the major projects out there to actually land that or what we say “Close that last mile or Crypto adoption.

00:05:17:03 – 00:05:17:18

Richard Carthon: Right.  

00:05:17:20 – 00:05:43:05

Rob Mcnealy: And so what we kind of, we’ve identified a few problems before we launched our Blockchain. Now we spent a year kind of trying to figure out the hard parts, How do you govern it, How do you market it, How do you know, How are we going to get Crypto adoption with TUSC, right? So we spent a lot of time and we did a lot of research, a lot of analysis and talked to a lot of people before we ever started coding. So one of the things we said is I want to, I ask questions, this is how I work. 

00:05:43:07 – 00:05:43:22

Richard Carthon: Yes.

00:05:43:24 – 00:06:21:02

Rob Mcnealy: I’m not a developer, I’m an entrepreneur, so I always say, okay when I want to know the answer to something I ask the question. So one of the first questions I asked is Why hasn’t Crypto been adopted? Why hasn’t mass adoption happened? I mean, Bitcoin’s been around a long time, going on 12 years, but back then 10 years it’s like you know, you know, you look at a company like Venmo, right? Like within 10 years, they’re a multibillion dollar company with you know, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions going across their network, but you don’t see anybody doing that like Bitcoin for actual goods or services, right? It’s just all speculation. And so I said, “Why hasn’t mass adoption happened?” 

00:06:21:04 – 00:06:55:15

Rob Mcnealy: And so we came to a couple of conclusions with a lot of research and one of the things we looked at is we went down and looked at all the major projects and we looked at their team pages and then we started saying there was something missing from the teams. So if you look at the typical makeup of a Crypto team, they’re usually led and staffed heavily with developers, but they’re missing something, they’re missing things like salespeople, they’re missing marketing people, they’re missing you know, business development people and then we start looking and seeing that as a pattern from all these Crypto projects.

00:06:55:17 – 00:06:56:02

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:06:56:04 – 00:07:30:18

Rob Mcnealy: And you can deduce a couple of things from that Richard. You can go and say, Look if your organization doesn’t have people that do those functions: sales, business development, marketing in key positions in your project that tells me two things: One, your organization doesn’t value those functions, your organization doesn’t value those functions and Two, those functions are not likely being performed. And if you didn’t subsequently try to validate, you’ll find that that’s usually true in Crypto. 

00:07:32:07 – 00:07:32:22

Richard Carthon: Yeah. 

00:07:32:24 – 00:07:53:02

Rob Mcnealy: And so then we went and said, Okay we started looking at other things. Here’s another reason why we think mass adoption hasn’t happened, look at how most Crypto products are marketed. And if you look for most people in the West you know, and I’m saying the U.S., Europe and things, Crypto doesn’t solve any problems. 

00:07:53:07 – 00:08:17:29

Rob Mcnealy: If your grandma, she goes to you know, the store, her debit card works fine, her checkbook works fine. And if you look at how many influencer types and people try to market Crypto, they’re like literally hassling the barista at Starbucks, they’re hassling the Uber driver, they’re annoying their family at holiday event dinners and ultimately you’re just going to be annoying if you do that. 

00:08:18:01 – 00:08:18:16

Richard Carthon: A lot of friction.

00:08:19:22 – 00:08:23:13

Rob Mcnealy: Because a lot of friction, but Crypto doesn’t solve a problem for the barista at Starbucks.

00:08:23:15 – 00:08:24:00

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:08:24:02 – 00:08:29:06

Rob Mcnealy: Because the debit cards work. It doesn’t solve a problem with grandma. In fact, you’re going to create problems for them, it’s complicated.

00:08:29:08 – 00:08:29:23

Richard Carthon: Creating hurdles.

00:08:29:25 – 00:09:08:02

Rob Mcnealy: It’s stressful, a lot of learning curve, inertia, cost, time to do transactions, depending on if it’s a Proof of Work Blockchain or not. And so we said, Look if that if, One you’re not creating a real marketing strategy and you’re harassing people like that to get your adoption, you’re not gonna get adoption. So we said or we believe that if you’re going to mass adopt in the U.S., you have to start with people that have a recognized problem with payments. And you know, most people don’t, but there are several industries in the U.S. that do. They have a problem that they know is a payment problem that Crypto can solve. 

00:09:08:04 – 00:09:17:20

Rob Mcnealy: Here’s the problem Richard, most of those industries in the U.S. are distasteful to somebody and most people say like cannabis.

00:09:17:22 – 00:09:18:07

Richard Carthon: Yep.

00:09:18:09 – 00:09:57:09

Rob Mcnealy: You know, the cannabis industry has big payment problems. Pornography has a big payments problem. You know, you look at gambling has big payment problems. Pawn shops have big payment problems. Refugees and immigrants have payment problems, money problems. And one of the other industries that have big payment problems is the gun industry in the United States. So and all for very similar reasons, all those industries are considered red flag industries by the banking industry. They were all targets of Operation Choke Point back in 2012, 2013 where the government kind of decided to encourage banks to give those different industries a problem. 

00:09:57:11 – 00:10:25:27

Rob Mcnealy: And so right now, most of those industries can’t even use any third party payment option, they can’t use Square, PayPal or you know, Stripe or any of those different you know, Cash App, things like that. They can’t use any of those third party payment options. So then we said, “What are we going to look at?” You know, so we said to get mass adoption, you need to do marketing. And so with TUSC, we decided to build the functionality. This is another question, right? We decided to create this thing called a marketing partner. 

00:10:26:10 – 00:10:26:25

Richard Carthon: Okay.

00:10:26:27 – 00:10:43:14

Rob Mcnealy: So we said, “How do you grow a decentralized community project like a startup?” Another question. So it went down a rabbit hole trying to figure that out and it’s not easy. And we felt that One, you have to have sustainable funding for marketing operations ongoing built into your project. 

00:10:43:16 – 00:10:44:01

Richard Carthon: Yes.

00:10:44:03 – 00:11:43:05

Rob Mcnealy: So we created this marketing partner position within the TUSC Network, which is the marketing partner is a vendor that gets elected, nominated and elected to work on a contract to the TUSC network for a given period of time. Our current period is three years. So the idea is that the marketing partner gets elected by the community, by the Committee to grow TUSC like a startup, it gets a small sliver of the block rewards automatically to do it. Marketing partners have no say over governance, it can’t vote on anything, it does no decision making, its job is to kind of grow TUSC like a homeowner’s association might hire a management company to oversee maintenance of the grounds in your HOA. That’s what the marketing partner does from the marketing piece to TUSC. So there is always gonna be ongoing funding and marketing activities built in, it’s baked into the code. Those fees to pay the marketing partner to do that stuff come from block rewards and transaction fees. 

00:11:44:01 – 00:11:44:16

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:11:44:18 – 00:11:45:03

Rob Mcnealy: So that being said.

00:11:45:05 – 00:11:45:24

Richard Carthon: Can I ask you a question on that? 

00:11:46:06 – 00:11:47:02

Rob Mcnealy: Absolutely. 

00:11:47:04 – 00:12:54:01

Richard Carthon: How’s it been going so far because like One, that is brilliant. I really do see the importance of that and for everyone listening, especially if you have your own Crypto or Blockchain project, if you don’t know how important marketing and sales are like A. Let’s just address this just like Rob just did. Very important, then Two, marketing just like he said, there always should be some sort of budget or some sort of effort that is constantly going to put your project in front of new eyes and in front of your audience. And to know who that is and to make sure that you’re engaging with them because the only way that you can build true community is by One, making sure that somebody knows you exist then, Two, once they know you exist, trying to figure out what your product or your feature, whatever that is and then utilizing it and then Three, getting them to be so enamored and just enjoying what you are creating to share it with others, right? To build true patrons of your brand. And so to constantly have something going towards those efforts, I think is extremely, extremely cool. And so I mean I’m just interested in knowing like you know, how has that been going so far?

00:12:54:03 – 00:12:56:08

Rob Mcnealy: Well we’re still early.

00:12:56:10 – 00:12:56:25

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:12:56:27 – 00:13:16:07

Rob Mcnealy: COVID kind of sucks because it did slow some things down, so there’s a good reason for it. So we get a lot of crap you know, to be honest from people like, Why don’t you just kind of take Bitcoin and you know, go do what you’re gonna do? And I’m like, “Well, here’s the thing, who from Bitcoin is going to pay me to go to a conference to go do what I’m going to do?” “

00:13:16:09 – 00:13:16:24

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:13:16:26 – 00:14:03:18

Rob Mcnealy: Who’s gonna cover the costs of going to a conference? You know, you go to a Crypto conference or any kind of conference for a week, it’s gonna be five to 10 grand. That’s just to go. It doesn’t even cover the cost if you’re gonna have a booth and actually you know, participate. So yeah, absolutely I think it’s vital and it has to happen. So market segmentation, so once we decided that we’re gonna be a kind of a marketing focused Crypto project, we have to pick a market to go into and of all those distasteful markets, right?  That I just listed off, we decided to focus on the U.S., lawful U.S. regulated gun industry and this is kind of hard and controversial for a lot of people. And I respect that, that’s very political. It’s a very political issue, right?

00:14:04:21 – 00:14:05:06

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:14:05:08 – 00:14:15:02

Rob Mcnealy: But there’s a reason we decided to go there and because it’s so controversial in fact, all those industries I mentioned are controversial and political issues, just depending on which side of the aisle you tend to lean toward. 

00:14:15:07 – 00:14:15:22

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:14:15:24 – 00:14:58:13

Rob Mcnealy: But that’s also the reason they have a problem with payments is because of the politics involved. It’s not legal for most of them, well for some of those industries, but we decided to go into the gun industry and this is why and this is how we kind of came up with that is our first market. Step back, we’re taking the Amazon approach to mass adoption, okay? TUSC stands for the universal settlement coin. We’re looking to be the most widely adopted Cryptocurrency on the planet. Now I know all the maxis out there just choked on their soda when I said that, but I think we have a strategy to close that last mile of Crypto adoption and here’s why. We’re gonna go out to other markets, but we’re gonna take the Amazon approach. Like a lot of, you’re a young guy, right? But 25 years ago, Amazon was a bookstore.

00:14:58:29 – 00:14:59:14

Richard Carthon: Yep.

00:14:59:16 – 00:15:48:06

Rob Mcnealy: That’s it, they sold books. Bezos always planned to go to other markets, but he laser focused his market in one place that he thought had a huge market, had a lot of skews, over 400,000 books were available to be bought and sold, crossing many genres. There’s a great interview off post sometime they should listen to about Bezos. He had a plan back then, he knew exactly what he was going to do and he executed on that plan. We are doing that with TUSC as well. So Amazon got mass adoption or they were just you know, they got traction, they were disruptive, they got adoption for people buying and selling goods and services, primarily books first. They proved their model in one industry then they expanded. We’re going to do the same thing with TUSC, we’re focusing on industries first that have recognized problems, so which problem do you want to solve, right?

00:15:48:09 – 00:16:00:24

Rob Mcnealy: And the payments issue, those industries are all distasteful, who do you decide to work with? So of all those distasteful industries that I mentioned, only one is constitutionally protected in the United States, it’s the gun industry. 

00:16:01:05 – 00:16:01:20

Richard Carthon: Yep.

00:16:01:22 – 00:16:07:06

Rob Mcnealy: Here’s the other thing. The gun industry is a 50 billion dollar industry, it’s not a small market. 

00:16:07:15 – 00:16:08:00

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:16:08:02 – 00:16:46:01

Rob Mcnealy: It’s a 50 billion dollar industry that can’t use any third party payment option that’s constitutionally protected. So for instance, cannabis, everybody brings up cannabis. I don’t know why it’s with stoners and cannabis or stoners and Crypto, but everyone was like, “Do cannabis.” I’m like, here’s the problem with cannabis, cannabis is federally legal. If you’re seen, even as a decentralized project they can always come after you, right? But if you’re trying to create payments for something that’s federally illegal, especially like drugs you know, cannabis, you can be seen as money laundering for drug trafficking and that to me was a big regulatory risk. I’m not saying it’s gonna happen or has to happen, I’m saying you have to evaluate the risks.

00:16:46:03 – 00:16:46:18

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:16:46:20 – 00:17:30:11

Rob Mcnealy: And I think there’s a huge risk there. The thing is, guns are legal and constitutionally protected. So we said, “Let’s go to the gun industry.” So then we decided to go, before we even started coding, we went through this whole process that I just described, then we started talking to the gun industry. So we started having meetings with distributors, manufacturers, retailers and learned about their problems and validated that what we were thinking was correct. We just didn’t build something and hope they would come, we started talking to people and then we learned a few things. We learned that for instance, the gun industry, especially the custom gun industry has a big chargeback problem. And because they’re considered a red flag industry, they get no appeal on a chargeback and you know, custom guns can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

00:17:30:13 – 00:17:30:28

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:17:31:00 – 00:18:13:25

Rob Mcnealy: And take a year two years to build because that’s just part of the industry, but people get impatient. They don’t want to wait a year or two and they cancel it and get a chargeback and then the retailers who are the custom builders are stuck with this like goofy paint job that they can’t sell and they have to discount it and lose a bunch of money. And then on top of that, we found that the gun industry pays incredibly high fees if they can get a merchant account and then on top of that, they have to pay high monthly maintenance fees. So based on all the information that we learned and that we started talking to those people, they liked the idea of what we’re going to do a TUSC, then based on that information, we started coding and built out our Blockchain and that’s kind of how we are kind of focused on getting mass adoption. 

00:18:14:00 – 00:19:19:15

Richard Carthon: And I think that’s a really unique approach that you did and for everyone listening, just how y’all have gone about, One, identifying a problem. number one, right? And Entrepreneurship 101, Identify a problem, then Two, Before you go and address the problem, speak to your audience, understand like is this actually a problem that we can solve and then Three, Before you start building, understand how do you build this in a way that it’s going to be utilized because the whole build it and they will come thing, unless you have a lot of money a lot of time, good luck to you, but the fastest approach is to rather go and literally hear it from the people who would be spending the money using the parts in the first place and build it around them and then adapt it and continue to grow from there. So like you know, first kudos to you for like, the process and everything you just said it was so process and focused that if you know, I think that is pretty remarkable in the sense of you know, from entrepreneur, entrepreneur like that’s a great approach. Just everyone listening, like take some notes on this, this is I think, the right way to go about trying to solve an issue. 

00:19:19:19 – 00:20:21:24

Rob Mcnealy: Well, thank you. Yeah, it’s been a real big team effort, right? And you know, one thing to add you know, I’ve been an entrepreneur. I’m an entrepreneur in my day job, I own a company and so, and I’ve owned several companies along the way. And I’ve learned along the process of being an entrepreneur for a long time, is that I will never build a company again or in this case, a decentralized project without having a customer first. You find the customer first, solve their problem or build your company or build your project around solving their problem. And we did that, in fact, right now and we have a working product now and we’re going through building out infrastructure for the next 12 months and building liquidity over the next 12 months, probably mid to late 2021 we’re gonna make our big onboarding or our big push to onboard retailers. We do have a beta going on right now or we call it our “Pilot Program.” So we have four retailers involved right now and all those retailers that are in that pilot program we talked to before we ever started building and they’re excited about it. So, and it’s been really great because they’ve been giving us really really good feedback as well. 

00:20:21:26 – 00:20:49:03

Richard Carthon: That’s awesome man. We’ll definitely keep up the great work with that and looking forward to seeing how ya’ll continue to progress and filling out that roadmap because it sounds really impressive, but I mean man, you’ve been in this space for a while, there’s been so much that has happened in this just 2020 alone that we could spend hours just unpacking all of that, but what are some things in the immediate future that are in the Crypto and Blockchain space that you think people should be aware of and should be keeping top of mind? 

00:20:50:11 – 00:20:59:21

Rob Mcnealy: So that’s interesting, right? Because like right now, while we’re recording this you know, DeFi is you know, that’s the latest you know, thing that everyone is getting excited about, right? 

00:21:01:09 – 00:21:01:24

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:21:01:26 – 00:21:34:12

Rob Mcnealy: I’m skeptical about some of the DeFi stuff out there right now and I’m skeptical on a couple different levels. And so I would say, One, Be aware of it, but I’d also say be suspicious of it before you start throwing your money into some of these little, I would say, overly complicated schemes. It doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be some good products and projects that come out of it in the future, but right now, I’ll just tell you my honest opinion, right? It seems like some of these things remind me of the ICO boom right now.

00:21:34:14 – 00:21:34:29

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:21:35:01 – 00:21:50:10

Rob Mcnealy: Everything is like ICAO tokens and you know, anytime you start hearing like you can make a 1,000 percent interest and in just a couple of weeks or 1,000 percent growth in a couple of weeks, that always gets my spidey senses tingling. 

00:21:50:15 – 00:21:51:00

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:21:51:02 – 00:22:03:27

Rob Mcnealy: And let’s just be honest the thing is that’s what gets people talking, that’s where people get excited about Crypto. And I can tell you as a project, we get people giving us a hard time all the time, “Why isn’t this happening faster?” “Why aren’t you moving it?” Because we’re actually building something. 

00:22:04:00 – 00:22:04:15

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:22:04:17 – 00:22:24:00

Rob Mcnealy: Okay and there’s a lot of pieces to this and it takes a lot of time, especially because we’re not focused on doing a pump and dump, right? I mean, we’re not focused on trying to jack the price up and cash out, we could have done that years ago if we wanted to. We’re focused on trying to re-educate an entire industry on how to do finance and how to do payments in a new way. 

00:22:24:04 – 00:22:24:19

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:22:24:21 – 00:22:27:01

Rob Mcnealy: This is going to take years. I mean, I’m not going to hide it.

00:22:27:07 – 00:22:27:22

Richard Carthon: Gotta play the long game, which is smart.

00:22:27:24 – 00:22:37:18

Rob Mcnealy: But people are impatient. People are like, Oh, I just spent four bucks on this token, now it’s worth $1,000 in two weeks and that’s what they want. 

00:22:37:20 – 00:22:38:05

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:22:38:07 – 00:22:44:22

Rob Mcnealy: And unfortunately that’s also a big, that’s a very dangerous place to invest your money, that’s like a casino. 

00:22:44:24 – 00:22:45:09

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:22:45:11 – 00:23:02:11

Rob Mcnealy: And so I’m a little concerned about DeFi. I think there’s you know, I think what’s going to happen, you’re going to have a mini DeFi, IFCO boom kind of thing and people are going to be crazy and going nuts, you’re going to see a lot of products rise up and then not deliver, I think a lot of people are gonna lose a lot of money. 

00:23:02:13 – 00:23:02:28

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:23:03:00 – 00:23:36:28

Rob Mcnealy: That’s my honest opinion right now. Now I think after that, there may be a lot of things learned and then someone else will pick up that DeFi mantle and then probably build something really cool, but I think right now, I would be very leery about you know, jumping into some kind of staking pool or some kind of yield farming or something like that where you think you can just make incredible money. I think there’s gonna be a lot of bag holders that are going to lose money from this. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m more conservative as an investor though, so in general I’m very conservative, but that would be my opinion. I’m a little leery right now about what I’m seeing out there and people are going nuts over DeFi. 

00:23:37:00 – 00:23:37:15

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:23:37:17 – 00:23:50:20

Rob Mcnealy: So just be careful guys, just really do your own research. And guess what, if you’re making a thousand percent a month in like a month or two or even six months, something’s wrong cause that’s not how things work. That just doesn’t make sense. 

00:23:50:22 – 00:24:25:07

Richard Carthon: It’s not sustainable. And I mean, for your day traders, for the people that are super high risk, high reward and want to like go for that, you know, again just like Rob said, do your own research, do what you’re comfortable with, but I do think that is something, a good piece of advice to at least understand that space. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And it in the immediate, it might, like everything could be going up and ticking up, just like Rob said, but there’s always a pullback. No matter what’s going on, there’s never just a full on bull market and it goes to the moon and that’s it, that’s all she wrote. 

00:24:26:04 – 00:25:31:18

Richard Carthon: The excitement’s good, it’s bringing more awareness and it’s bringing the excitement piece back to the Crypto space and I’m enjoying that as well, but again, I’m not playing this for the quick game, right? I’m not doing this for the next one to two months, slash on to two, three years, I’m playing this for the next decade, for the next two decades, right? And when you’re playing that long game, and your understanding that, just understand the ebbs and flows that happen. If you look at the regular stock market, same thing, ebbs and flows, the ups and downs of what’s going on. And right now, I think is the prime opportunity, prime time to be educating yourself in this space because there’s just so much going on and there’s gonna be a lot of opportunities that you can get in early on that when you look back five, 10 years from now, you’re like, “Wow, I’m happy I got involved and I educated myself and when I finally decided to move forward, it paid these gigantic dividends because I was ready.” And I would just piggyback on with Rob’s statement of saying like, Hey just continue to educate yourself in these spaces because it will have you prepared for the opportunities that I personally think are coming pretty, pretty soon.

00:25:31:20 – 00:25:43:12

Rob Mcnealy: Well I mean, think of it like this, you look at all the big stocks right now that are booming, you’ve got Tesla and Amazon and some of these companies that are just going berserk, right? But when did they start? 

00:25:44:20 – 00:25:45:05

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:25:45:07 – 00:25:46:18

Rob Mcnealy: Amazon’s been around what, since 94? 

00:25:47:11 – 00:25:47:26

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:25:47:28 – 00:25:54:13

Rob Mcnealy: You know, 26 years. You know, Tesla came out in what, I think 04, is that right? Tesla started in 04, or 05 somewhere around that. 

00:25:55:03 – 00:25:55:18

Richard Carthon: I think so, 05.

00:25:55:20 – 00:26:15:19

Rob Mcnealy: You know, so we’re talking like 15 years. Okay, they sound sexy and great, but the fact is, it took them a long time to get where they are right now. And the thing is those organizations are still adding value in creating and they’re innovating and they’re doubling down and reinvesting into you know, building something. They have customers, they have revenue. 

00:26:15:21 – 00:26:16:06

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:26:16:08 – 00:26:43:13

Rob Mcnealy: They’re sustainable. So and I am not a TNA guy, right? If I have to call myself an investor, I’m more of a fundamentalist because I understand that better because I’m an entrepreneur. And I think being an entrepreneur, especially a serial entrepreneur in lots of industries over the last couple of decades and I am a recovering corporate MBA, whatever that’s worth, but what I tell people by the way, I’m also a certified welder. I went to welding school two years ago, so I spent a year and half into a welding program. 

00:26:43:15 – 00:26:44:00

Richard Carthon: Awesome.

00:26:44:02 – 00:26:46:04

Rob Mcnealy: So I’m an MBA welder running a Crypto project. So.

00:26:47:06 – 00:26:51:06

Richard Carthon: Awesome. So I gotta ask real quick it, I gotta insert this question, what’s the coolest thing you’ve built it to this point?

00:26:51:08 – 00:26:54:15

Rob Mcnealy: Oh, my mailbox. 

00:26:57:02 – 00:26:57:17

Richard Carthon: That’s so cool. Awesome man.

00:26:57:19 – 00:27:06:24

Rob Mcnealy: I did it for a hobby. I could make money as a welder right now too, it’s a crazy fallback. I got like a full welding shop in my garage now that I’ve built over the last couple of years. 

00:27:06:26 – 00:27:07:11

Richard Carthon: That’s awesome.

00:27:07:13 – 00:27:24:00

Rob Mcnealy: No, so I’m building a go-kart with my kids this week, but I built up my mailbox, it’s like this crazy 300 pound behemoth that’s bolted, it’s back lit. I got a plasma cable, CNC plasma cutter, so I cut out all my address and so I built weird stuff. So basically I got into welding because I like art.

00:27:24:03 – 00:27:24:18

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:27:24:20 – 00:27:28:15

Rob Mcnealy: Metal art and I like to make things. It’s totally a hobby, never wanted to do it for a living. 

00:27:28:17 – 00:27:29:02

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:27:29:04 – 00:27:33:00

Rob Mcnealy: Though people keep coming to my house now and asking me who did your metal work? And I’m like I did it.

00:27:33:12 – 00:27:33:27

Richard Carthon: Right. 

00:27:33:29 – 00:27:44:12

Rob Mcnealy: So it’s kind of interesting, but my point is though and I think this is good advice, I’ll give you some advice, always learn something new, always make yourself more valuable to other people. 

00:27:44:14 – 00:27:44:29

Richard Carthon: Yes.

00:27:45:04 – 00:28:02:23

Rob Mcnealy: Always learn something that you could sell. The more information and knowledge you have and it increases your ability to solve problems and on top of that, the more, you’ll never go hungry. I can tell you right now, I could go get a job as an entry level welder right now may 40 grand a year right now. 

00:28:03:10 – 00:28:03:25

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:28:03:27 – 00:28:53:07

Rob Mcnealy: I don’t want to, you know, but I could and that’s nice to know. And you know, I already own a company you know. So and I’m not making any money from Crypto right now, but you know, our Crypto project, but my focus is that you always should be reinvesting either your time or your energy into learning new things, becoming more valuable. And I think and I apply that to Crypto too. I’m really good at jumping into a new industry and taking a deep dive. By the time you know, from being an investor til sick you know, I was literally before I was only investing in Crypto for a couple of months before we decided to launch a project and then we did a token on Ethereum, which is easy, you know, relatively speaking. And then within six months, we decide to launch a whole new Blockchain and it’s hard by the way, especially if you don’t do an ICO.

00:28:53:09 – 00:29:11:23

Rob Mcnealy: We never sold tokens, never you know, sold coins, which is good because of the way we launched. We launched via faucets and we gave it away for free and we didn’t collect personal information. We’re not an illegal security under U.S. law, so we’re one of probably a couple dozen projects that can legally be traded on an American exchange now.

00:29:11:25 – 00:29:12:10

Richard Carthon: Wow.

00:29:12:12 – 00:29:13:10

Rob Mcnealy: Cause we didn’t do an ICO.

00:29:13:19 – 00:29:14:04

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:29:14:06 – 00:29:17:26

Rob Mcnealy: But it also makes it harder because you know, you don’t have all that ICO money to do all the fun stuff.

00:29:18:12 – 00:29:18:27

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:29:18:29 – 00:29:38:27

Rob Mcnealy: But I think I think ultimately, you know, it’s good to do your research. And I’m always learning and like I’m fascinated by the DeFi stuff we’re talking about, right? And I think you know, you really should pay attention to all these things and I love seeing the iteration, I love seeing what people are doing, but I’m also very leery about people that get rich quick.

00:29:38:29 – 00:29:39:14

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:29:39:16 – 00:30:15:12

Rob Mcnealy: Yes it’s exciting and yes you know when to get out and if you have the money to you know, basically lose it all. Yeah, there are opportunities when you see these little bubbles to make money off bubbles. Absolutely, but more often than not, the bubbles only work and only a couple of people get rich and everybody else is left holding the bags and they’re broke. And so you know, I was fortunate that I’m more of a fundamentalist when it comes to trading, so I always look for the long term value, like you know, like a business and I look at the risks in evaluating risks and look at what the opportunities are from a business perspective. 

00:30:15:24 – 00:30:56:29

Rob Mcnealy: You know, does this project have money coming in? I don’t care if it’s a business or a decentralized project is revenue coming in, right? Are there customers for this project? Does this project solve a problem or is there a real good product here that has a good shot at not only solving a problem, but having the ability to get market share in that space? A lot of the DeFi projects, products out there. I’ll call them products, right? They’re financial products, don’t make a lot of sense to me right now. You know, cause I think in terms of market size, so how many? And I always look at analogues, right? You know, if you look at likes and I’m not going to pick on any one product and I’m not anti any project. I’m just telling you this is how I see it outside of just high risk speculation, right?

00:30:57:15 – 00:31:40:17

Rob Mcnealy: If I said to you show me the analog and you know, legacy banking where I’m going to give you three you know, two thirds of the you know, I want to give you you know, I want to over collateralize you know, by 60 percent alone, you’re going to give me back. Okay, I don’t know any place where that does that in legacy finance. So I start thinking, Ok, one, who does that, right? Like why would you do that? So for instance you know, you give Eth you know and then you get a token back and then you can go sell that token and do something with it. Well here’s the problem, you know, the idea is that you don’t want to sell your underlying collateralized asset, but eventually what are you gonna do with the money you borrowed?

00:31:41:07 – 00:31:41:22

Richard Carthon: Yeah. 

00:31:41:24 – 00:32:26:00

Rob Mcnealy: So let’s think about that. What do you do with that? So if your Ethereum is super volatile, your collateral could get liquidated, right? If it goes down, well it sucks, you lost it, you didn’t want to lose it, but the other side is if it goes up dramatically and you spent your money, how do you get the money back to go buy your you know, your collateral back? And so this is the thing that doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like if you want the value of your collateralized assets, sell it and pay the taxes, but you know and I don’t know anywhere in that in the excuse me, in the real world in legacy finance, where there’s a lot of customers that have a lot of assets that they don’t want to sell and they want to cash out and then spend it just to spend it on groceries. 

00:32:26:02 – 00:32:26:17

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:32:26:19 – 00:32:40:14

Rob Mcnealy: I don’t see that. And so to me, what makes the most sense if you’re going to do that is you’re going to invest in something that’s even higher risk. So to me, Crypto already is pretty damn high risk, high reward, right? 

00:32:41:04 – 00:32:41:19

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:32:41:21 – 00:32:57:13

Rob Mcnealy: So where are you gonna invest the money you cashed out that is even higher reward? Which would make it even higher risk. So to me that’s a whole lot of gambling that I’m personally not comfortable with and I also don’t think there’s that many people in the world that are in that position. 

00:32:57:15 – 00:32:58:00

Richard Carthon: Yeah. 

00:32:58:02 – 00:33:27:26

Rob Mcnealy: So to me, I think the market’s small. Now, what I’m hoping is something interesting will come out of this. So for me, if you want to look at banking and DeFi, how do you figure out an automated way to underwrite loans for people that don’t have an asset to collateralize? That to me is really that’s the holy grail of DeFi. How do I give loans to people out there that don’t have security, that don’t have you know, who have collateral? Because that’s, the people that borrow money don’t have assets typically. 

00:33:27:29 – 00:33:28:14

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:33:28:16 – 00:33:34:15

Rob Mcnealy: And so to me, you’ve got to figure that out and that’s hard cause underwriting is hard. How do you automate and decentralize that? 

00:33:34:17 – 00:33:35:02

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:33:35:04 – 00:34:36:20

Rob Mcnealy: And so to me, that starts looking you know, that starts looking like Kiva and some of these crowdsourcing platforms and some of these microloan platforms, that looks more interesting to me. Now I think you know, there’s some interesting opportunities there I think to do it on a more decentralized level and I’m open to those and I’d like to see those, but right now you know, now the latest thing we’re hearing is all the yield farming. I have a lot of, I have a lot of concerns about that and really the only reason you can get, I mean if you just think of it fundamentally, how do you get massive upsides from yield farming from basically it’s arbitrage, right? You’re arbitraging on one platform against another. The only reason you’re getting that is because there’s a massive inefficiency somewhere and usually those inefficiencies have the tendency to change really quickly, especially when there’s a lot of attention on it. So I think right now you’re probably you had some people that saw a massive inefficiency made some crazy gains because they just spotted it early. A bunch of people are coming into the space right now and they’re going to be holding bags. That’s what I think is going to happen probably. 

00:34:36:25 – 00:35:04:03

Richard Carthon: Yeah. And thank you for taking time to break all that down. I definitely think there is, One, there’s a ton to unwrap with everything you just said and there are definitely the inefficiencies that you just laid out that I’ve been thinking about as well, as there’s a lot of loops that don’t completely close yet. And I think whoever gets stuck at the end of the loop right before it closes is gonna be holding a whole lot of stuff they don’t want to be and it’s gonna be real bad. 

00:35:04:28 – 00:35:05:21

Rob Mcnealy: Yeah.

00:35:05:23 – 00:35:35:26

Richard Carthon: So until they’re able to truly finish closing that loop, which we’re not there yet, it’s still very early. I would agree that this is exciting, it is something called to be fixed and to be figured out or whatever, but I don’t know that the answers are quite developed yet, so definitely something to keep in mind. And I definitely appreciate you spending some time unpacking that, but man Rob, you’ve dropped so much knowledge and given us a ton to think about. I really do appreciate your time, but what is a final thought you wanna leave with all of our listeners here today?

00:35:37:20 – 00:36:15:24

Rob Mcnealy: I could probably just reiterate a little bit that I’ve said, look you know, out there Crypto, it’s a fun awesome space, it’s a lot of energy, be careful. Again, I am still a big believer. I’m going to give you advice and I tell this to a lot of people, they get pissed at me, but I say look don’t invest in TUSC unless you already have an emergency fund saved up. We’re high risk because we’re early, don’t gamble on my project. I do not want you to invest in TUSC, unless you are already financially prepared and can handle the loss because you know what, I don’t want to be responsible for people losing money.

00:36:17:02 – 00:36:57:29

Rob Mcnealy: Okay, we never built TUSC to be an investment asset, we want people using it to buy stuff. Now people do invest in TUSC and so I’m never going to shell, but I always want to give people good financial advice and I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I’m always going to be consistent. All crypto assets are high risk investments right now and I don’t believe you should be investing in high risk investments, unless you have your financial, personal financial house in order first because you should have an emergency fund and some savings. And then if you’re all good there, then invest and I know a lot of people disagree with that, but I don’t want to tell people to go invest when they’re not ready. They don’t have the money to lose and then they lose a bunch of money and that makes me sick. It makes me heartsick to see that. 

00:36:58:11 – 00:36:58:26

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:36:58:28 – 00:37:23:27

Rob Mcnealy: So you know, I really like the Crypto space and I think the technology is amazing. It’s still going to be a lot of I think a lot of bubbles left to come before we get more established in this industry, so I just want people to make good, sound financial decisions and you know, I don’t want to be the guy that shows something that loses anybody’s money. I’m working my butt off and our team is working their butts off to really get adoption and that’s our focus going forward. 

00:37:24:09 – 00:37:24:24

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:37:24:26 – 00:37:43:12

Rob Mcnealy: But I want you to be safe with your money. Okay guys, don’t risk it on dumb gambling you know and carefully look at that and what you’re looking at. You know, if you’re gonna invest in Crypto, invest in projects that not only have a good product, but also have a good strategy and get people to use it.

00:37:43:16 – 00:37:44:01

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:37:44:03 – 00:37:57:01

Rob Mcnealy: For its intended purpose, not just from speculation. You know, I wouldn’t invest in Amazon if they didn’t have customers, I wouldn’t invest in Tesla if they didn’t have sales, you know, kind of thing or at least didn’t have sales dealerships going up around the country, right? 

00:37:57:14 – 00:37:57:29

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:37:58:01 – 00:38:21:29

Rob Mcnealy: So I view TUSC the same way. I mean, we’re at least focused on getting retailers on board and we already have retailers getting on board. And so I just wanted people to make good, sound advice. Don’t be silly with your money guys. You know, save your money, you know, then start investing. Get out of debt. You’ll be far better off if you got out of debt, saved an emergency fund and then sleep better at night and then you can make good decisions about investing in projects like TUSC and other projects that are out there. 

00:38:22:10 – 00:38:29:13

Rob Mcnealy: So I guess that would be my best final thought and I know some of the people in my community want me to like hype and I’m not going to hype and bullshit people. 

00:38:29:15 – 00:38:30:00

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:38:30:02 – 00:38:35:28

Rob Mcnealy: You know we’re gonna work our ass off to build a project, but make good financial decisions before you look at investing in any high risk Crypto product.

00:38:39:21 – 00:38:43:06

Richard Carthon: For sure and I definitely appreciate that final thought. Rob what are some ways that people can connect with you and learn more about what you got going on?

00:38:44:16 – 00:39:08:24

Rob Mcnealy: On a personal level, it’s just Rob McNealy everywhere. So you can follow me on Twitter, I spend a lot of time on Twitter all day long, so you can always reach out to me there. I do a little podcast about Crypto and small business and financial literacy at RobMcNealy.com. And then TUSC, which is my baby is the main website for TUSC is TUSC, T-U-S-C.Network. That’s T-U-C.Network. 

00:39:09:18 – 00:39:13:18

Richard Carthon: Awesome. Well, again Rob, really appreciate your time today. And for everyone listening, Stay Crypto Current.