"Crypto is about to get EXTREMELY INTERESTING" AI Expert Lou Kerner EXPLAINS!! Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 The vast majority of people actually incorrectly think that price is information. When price is just doing this, it's like the sun going up and down. And just because the price of something goes down, you know, doesn't mean that anything has fundamentally changed. [music] It just meant for whatever reason, the market swing from side to side, the narrative changed, people lost hope.

00:19 But you know if if you believed in something [music] and truly understood it and believed in it and the company executed and the price is way down and you left because the price is way down, [music] you made a big mistake. You thought price being down was information when it's you know it it is not information. [music] A giant crypto bull market is still ahead of us.

00:46 At least according to Crypto Monday's founder, Decentralized AI founder, and Coin Depot advisor Lou Kerner, who today takes the time to sit down and explain to me just how big of an opportunity is still ahead of us in crypto. People go, you know, who who else is going to come to Bitcoin? I could walk down the street and I bet multiple times 10 people, 20 people, I could walk on the street and none of them will own Bitcoin, let alone ETH or Salana or Doge.

01:18 Nobody owns it yet. They have these crazy numbers about the people [music] who own this stuff. And I I in my life's experience walking down the street asking random people, it's much closer to zero than 5% of the population owning this stuff. We talk big picture crypto strategy and current market trends for most of this interview. >> Where I've spent the majority of my time is the intersection of crypto and AI.

01:44 And to me, that's the future. Aentic Finance is coming like a freight train. The more assets that are managed by AI, I think the more assets that are going to be put into Bitcoin and and altcoins. >> And of course, we also touch on why Lou likes Coin Depot. You can deposit money tokens into Coin Depot and you can get secured loans allowing users to borrow crypto and stable [music] coins.

02:07 Super unique product. It's growing very fast. Strong revenue as I mentioned earlier and you know over 100,000 happy customers. So I think it's a it's a super helpful product for the ecosystem. >> A lot to get to. Let's get started. Hit that like button and settle in. Let's meet Lou. Welcome back everybody to Altcoin Daily. Today I am joined with the great Lou Kerner, founder of Crypto Mondays, a popular crypto meetup that's been going on for years, founder of Decentralized AI Alliance, and also an adviser to a crypto

02:43 company called Coin Depot, which we will be hearing more about. But we're going to talk big picture on today's interview and gain some perspective from a man who's been a part of crypto through multiple cycles. But Lou, before we jump into things, welcome to Altcoin Daily. How are you doing today? >> It's great to be on on Altcoin Daily. Thanks for having me, Aaron.

03:07 >> Yeah, great to have you. So, is that true? You've been in crypto multiple cycles. You know, briefly give us a little bit about, you know, where you started in crypto and then when you look at crypto today in 2026, what feels fundamentally different? Because I think it's different today, but I'm curious to hear from you. >> Sure. Well, you know, for me, um, uh, you I'd been a Wall Street analyst.

03:31 The second company I ran was called Bolt. It was the largest social network in the world before MySpace. So, I was thinking deeply about community more than 20 years ago. And, you know, I went down the crypto rabbit hole 1314. I joked deep enough that the Wall Street Journal wrote a story on Bitcoin, quoting me as Wall Street's Bitcoin expert. But while I looked at it, I didn't see it.

03:49 And I didn't see it until June 29th, 2017. And what I saw when I saw Bitcoin was for the first time in history, we have a tool to solve for the community instead of the man in the middle. Up until Bitcoin, the whole world had worked from some guy running everything. [clears throat] Whether it was a company, a country, a religion, whatever it was, some guy was running it and he was probably uh uh not treating people fairly.

04:12 That is the way humanity has worked up until Bitcoin. And so for me, Bitcoin is simply a community. And my uber bullishness on it has been that um more people are going to join the community every day for the rest of my life because you know I define a community as an ecosystem where when it works everyone gets more out of it than they give. And that's certainly true of everybody who's been in Bitcoin for any period of time.

04:38 And so you know for me this is all about community. And we could look across the altcoin um landscape and take a look at okay well you know what other communities are you know can you say you know that these are really viable communities where you know there everybody's getting more out of it than they're putting in and I think there are a growing number of those you know certainly I'm you know the the highlight of my nine years uh 247 crypto was when I went to my first Ethereum conference in Denver uh in 2019.

05:10 19 and I saw the Ethereum community for the first time and I was completely and totally blown away. It was the smartest group of people and the most ethos aligned group of people that I had ever met in my life. Um you know and I've had that you know and I've met you know many other you know wonderful communities uh across the ecosystem and and to me you know that's what this is about.

05:33 You know what's a where is a community that has this ecosystem where if they just continue to do what they're doing, everybody who's participating can win. >> Doge is another awesome community. >> Definitely. Definitely. And then like is thinking about this cycle because it does seem different. Do you feel like it's fundamentally different? >> Sure.

05:54 Well, you know, everybody's got a unique perspective. I live in New York. Um and while I travel the world, you I go to all the major conferences. We are in an RWA period. This is a a the narrative is you everything's going to be tokenized. All the banks are staffing up in anticipation that everything's going to be tokenized. And you know, I'm I'm a huge believer um you know, in tokenized securities, written more than 300 crypto blog posts.

06:20 My second most read one was titled Prepare Yourself for the Coming Security Token Tsunami. And that was written in June of 2018. So I am well prepared for uh you know for security tokens for you know to for tokenization you know to really be a thing. You know that said while there's all of this building of staffing and and you know you go to these uh conferences now and they're packed with you know trad people who moved over 5 minutes ago.

06:47 Um you know there's still not a lot of activity. So you know people are building ahead of the assumed activity and you know is it going to come this time? We've heard that it's coming previously and it has not come. But you know there is a tremendous amount of infrastructure that's in place including a lot of um you know inure [snorts] for ETFs you know and and and other ways for institutional and retail money to come into crypto in a much easier way than previously and that's massively different.

07:22 Definitely the infrastructure is getting built. Lou, I think there's a problem. I think you'll maybe relate to me when I say this. You've seen people come in and out of uh your your meetups for years. There are people probably watching right now who bought crypto during a previous cycle, lost money in some way, and simply walked away. So, why would someone who got burned trust crypto again?

07:51 because they're going to see that it's going up and up and and if they invested in the right tokens uh they'll see that in fact the price is much higher today uh than it was when they sold. And you know the one of the massive lessons that I've learned as an equity analyst was you know there's a tendency for the markets to swing between bubble and crash and bubble again.

08:10 And I came up with a word that I think perfectly describes that. I call that capitalism. That's what markets do. And um we all think that or the vast majority of people actually incorrectly think that price is information. When price is just doing this, it's like the sun going up and down. And just because the price of something goes down, you know, doesn't mean that anything is fundamentally changed.

08:35 It just meant for whatever reason, the market swing from side to side, the narrative changed, people lost hope. But you know if if you believed in something and truly understood it and believed in it and the company executed and the price is way down and you left because the price is way down. You made a big mistake. You thought price being down was information when it's you know it it is not information.

09:05 >> That's good perspective. I agree with that. People need to you know have an investing mindset. They need to change their mindset in that way. But Lou, you know, people remember FTX. Does the industry actually need to change to win those people back? >> You know, I think when things are going in an industry, there's tons of fingerpointing going around and blaming this and blaming that and it's FTX, you know.

09:29 And by the way, right, if they hadn't forced FTX into bankruptcy, SPF would be one of the wealthiest people in the world today based on the value of their portfolio. So again, they got screwed. Now again, I'm I'm not saying that he didn't do anything illegal. Didn't go did didn't deserve to go to jail. I'm not making any call one way or the other there.

09:48 But what I am saying is that if he had been able to hold on um you know what they called, you know, one of the biggest scams in history, everybody would have crushed it. I want to get your perspective on how people you know value alpha and you know value I guess like how they navigate crypto because you know this is you have big numbers at crypto Mondays.

10:09 I know that we have big numbers here in altcoin daily. It is important but people put you know basically all emphasis on the follower count the telegram members the ex engagement you know all of you know the number of influencers talking about a project. So my question is, are investors looking at the wrong signals? Have they historically been looking at the wrong signals when deciding whether a crypto project is actually real?

10:37 You know, there there are an infinite number of ways to skin a cat. Um, >> personally, I don't think that your Twitter followers are indicative of value creation, you know, directly. You know, it's very easy to buy Twitter followers, right? You can create bots in there and get a million Twitter followers very cheaply. Um, you know, what's important is engagement.

10:58 You know, do you have a community that is engaged? You know, I I ran I mentioned I ran Bolt, the largest social network in the world before MySpace. We peaked at 23 million kids in 2006. And you know my simple philosophy on on networks, social networks are any networks are you're either growing the community. You're either growing the engagement of your community or your community is dying.

11:26 You know, I was a massive bull on Facebook until Q417 results came out when their engagement went down for the first time and they said the reason their engagement went down was they decided to try and stop people from doing the number one thing people like doing on Facebook, read fake news. Interesting. >> Yeah. >> Interesting. So, and let's talk about um narrative versus hype hype because you know you work specifically with market narrative and community strategy.

11:54 So, clearly narrative matters. You know, narratives are a part of every cycle, but where does a strong narrative end and hype begin, do you think? Well, I think if you're executing on your narrative, that's, you know, then it's the narrative, then it's real. You know, I think one of the my favorite narratives, you know, over the last year and a half, where I've spent the majority of my time is the intersection of crypto and AI.

12:19 And to me, that's the future, right? AI is the biggest thing to happen in any of our lifetime. It's going to change humanity more than the internet did. And you know it's unimaginable that the you know that that the intersection of crypto and AI isn't going to be massive. Now the question is okay who's going to win from it. So you know that's the narrative.

12:38 Now within that narrative you can take a look who's executing who's growing a business around that not who's growing a Twitter following but who's growing their customer base who's growing their revenue base. Right? You can take a look at Venice right? Venice has done a crazy job of of growing um you know decentralized AI. I think it's awesome. Um, you know, near, I think, is is executing, you know, really well.

13:01 Built some of the most uh technologically, you know, advanced uh things at the intersection of of crypto and AI and, you know, in my view, crypto having decentralized AI alternatives so that the only we have other places to go other than Facebook or Google or Anthropic who don't have our best interests at heart, you know, I think that's critical uh uh for humanity.

13:27 >> Love it. Love it. So yeah, hugely important. Everybody or many people talk the talk, but you have to look who's actually walking the walk. And speaking of that, as mentioned earlier, you're an adviser for uh Coin Depot. You work closely with them today. First of all, for those who don't know, what is Coin Depot exactly? So uh you can deposit uh money tokens into Coin Depot and you can get secured loans uh at Cone Depot, you know, allowing users to borrow crypto and stable coins uh without a collateral account.

14:00 >> So it's a super unique product. It's growing very fast. You know, they've strong revenue as I mentioned earlier and you know over 100,000 happy customers. So I think it's a it's a super helpful product for the ecosystem. >> Cool. Cool. So yeah, it's financial services. It's the earn products we're we're kind of familiar with generally and what was it about Coin Depot that made you comfortable putting your name behind the project or maybe it reflects some of the changes we've been talking about throughout this

14:26 interview. >> Sure. Again, I think coming back to what I said earlier, right? You take a look at, you know, companies that have been around for a while and that are growing that are consistently growing their customers, growing their revenue. You know, it's very difficult to do that. You have to give people a really good product particularly in this market to have the kind of growth that Coin is having.

14:47 >> Mhm. And I kind of find that you know the crypto investor and retail participant is you know very diverse today. Back in the day it was you know somebody at their computer in the trenches every day. Now perhaps people uh there's groups of people looking for more passive ways to to get involved in crypto. So, um, there's another change. I don't think it's discussed enough that, you know, somebody who entered crypto at 25 10 years ago, now 35 today.

15:14 I'm 36 today. Um, >> not today, but yeah, thank you very [laughter] much. >> But people have careers today, businesses, family, maybe more capital than they had before. This is kind of, you know, a big picture question. Has the crypto investor simply grown up? And and do you agree with me that they're looking for maybe something different now? I actually to a large degree don't really even think that it started yet.

15:39 I I think we're such early days and you say things like, oh, you know, people have been burned or are they going to come back? You know, while there were a lot of people who did get burned, you know, a those people are they want to make money. If they think there's money to be made, they won't care that they were burned before. And you know, I think we'll look back, you know, at today in 20 years and go, "Oh my god, it was so early."

16:04 You know, everybody thinks they're late. Everybody thinks that they've missed the train. The my my favorite alltime uh crypto tweet is from 2011. Some guy tweeted, "I can't believe I sold all my Bitcoin at 6 cents. It's 80 cents now." >> Yeah, I remember that one. That guy's name was Greg. I think his picture gets posted all over. >> Yeah, that's been out there a lot.

16:24 You know, I'm I'm most wellknown. As I said, I was a Wall Street analyst and I ran the world's largest social network. And in late '09, somebody asked me to uh if I would was it would be interested in buying Facebook shares at $15 billion. And $15 billion, that's crazy. But, you know, I thought to myself, I'm the smartest guy in the world to actually know what this is worth.

16:44 I've been a Wall Street analyst. I've run a social network. I ran the numbers five minutes later. Oh my god, it's $50 billion. It's worth $50 billion. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. And so I wrote my first Wall Street style research report about in 10 years. And I had so many people reach out and tell me, but everybody, you know, who wants to own it already owns it.

17:02 You know, who who do you think's news? And I'm like, what are you talking about? It's not public. Nobody owns it. You know, people go, you know, who who else is going to come to Bitcoin? I could walk down the street and I bet multiple times, 10 people, 20 people, I can walk on the street and none of them will own Bitcoin, let alone ETH, Salana, or Doge.

17:22 Nobody owns it yet. They have these crazy numbers about the people who uh who own this stuff. And I I in my life's experience walking down the street asking random people, it's much closer to zero than 5% of the population owning this stuff. >> Totally. I mean, I talked to my own friends who know I'm, you know, 100% in crypto and they, you know, most of them don't even own it.

17:44 Don't even like think know it's a big deal or care about it. So, you know, I told >> and they and they probably don't think much of you for being in it. >> Yeah. Exactly. One once every four years maybe. But yeah, exactly. >> Yes. Exactly. [laughter] >> But and then just like thinking about the way that the industry is growing, you know, today we have Binance Earn platforms like Nexo, Coin Depot, of course, staking services, lending products, and increasingly sophisticated ways to use digital assets.

18:11 It's that's not going away. That's growing from what I see. Is this also a natural next step for the industry? >> Oh, sure. I mean, Agentic Finance is coming like a freight train. The massive, massive, massive financial trend of our lifetime is indexing because computers are smarter than people. Um, you know, when I went to business school, uh, 35 years ago, there was no index.

18:39 And I remember somebody from Wells Fargo coming in and talking to the class about the future of finance, indexing. We were all looking, what's indexing? Right? We'd never heard of it before. and and now more than half of all assets in the world are are are indexed and now we have you know but they're indexed like we can go and we can invest in the S&P 500 index but for us to create an index for us that we want my personal index now at Gent Finance can take what I want to do how I want to invest my money and invest it

19:13 smarter than ever could have been possible before and you know I think one of the One one of the great things that I think is coming um is, you know, if you add Bitcoin, there's something called the efficient frontier, you know, black shells, you know, that that that drives a lot of finance and and uh if you add Bitcoin to most portfolios, uh you get further out on the uh or further up the efficient frontier.

19:37 And so the more assets that are managed by uh by AI and this is coming I think the more assets that are going to be put into Bitcoin and and altcoins. >> That's interesting and you're totally right like indexing ETFs that's just the way of life that I grew up seeing natural thing but eventually or at a certain point they were new. Um do you think >> Yeah, exactly.

20:00 And ETFs right ETFs dramatically decrease the cost of investing. >> Totally. Do you think that people are looking for more passive crypto strategies today? Whether it's that or or something else. Is the next opportunity serving people who still believe in crypto but don't want crypto as their second job? >> Sure. Most people are are not good investors.

20:23 The vast majority when I say most people more than 99% you know now. So but you can have an edge. You can see things that other people don't. you can believe in something. Um you know again I go around giving this talk called 10 thoughts on community because to me this is all about community and you know I think my biggest insight into communities my belief that a community can grow highly correlate to what I call value delta.

20:49 So in other words a community makes something for community members a cost of X. A community member gets it and they value it Y. And the bigger the difference between X and Y the bigger the community can become. And that's why if you think about it, the biggest communities in the world are the things with the biggest value deltas. And we have a collective name for those things.

21:07 Aaron, you know what we call them? >> What >> we call those things religions, right? They produce a book for a quarter. And how much is salvation worth? And that's why they scaled to billions of people and lasted thousands of years. And so a lot of this is is faith in in a future, right? I believe in a, you know, in in a Doge future, you know, that that doesn't yet exist and a Bitcoin future that doesn't yet exist, but I have faith that we will get there.

21:36 >> Lou, I appreciate >> and I was just going to say and anybody who has, you know, been in the Bitcoin community certainly for any period of time has been overwhelmed by what the community has given back to them, you know, and not just money-wise, but, you know, freedom wise. >> Definitely. Definitely. I'm uh I'm a little religious when it comes to Bitcoin.

21:52 We know that meme with the guy holding up the Bitcoin standard book. Um, you know, >> well, I think it's important not for it not to be an orthodoxy, right? I I'm spend largely just spending my time going around going to kegs or any reason to think that this isn't going to happen and that, you know, you know that that more people are nobody leaves the Bitcoin community.

22:13 You know, I I've met thousands of people are in it. I can count the people have left on one hand. So once you're in, you're in and every day for the rest of my life, more people are going to be coming. And that doesn't mean the price goes up every day, week, month, or year. But I think it means it goes up a bunch every 10 years. >> Definitely. Definitely.

22:28 And I'm no fan of the the dogma aspect of when it comes to thinking like that. But uh anyways, Lou, I appreciate you uh coming on today. Just have a final question before we wrap things up. You've been dropping so much alpha. I encourage everybody to follow Lou. I'll I'll leave links to his stuff below. Also, Coin Depot, check them out. Um >> check out Coin Depot.

22:46 They're awesome. >> Hell yeah. Hell yeah. So, my final question is, what do you think the winning crypto companies of the next 5 years will have in common? >> I think they'll focus on providing utility to their community members. That's, you know, that that that's what I look at when when I invest is, you know, are the community members going to win?

23:10 Are they going to get more out of it than they're putting in? >> That's key. That's key. Yeah. Check out Home Depot. Check out Coin Depot. And uh Lou, any final thoughts for the altcoin daily audience? >> Um yeah, go start a crypto Mondays in your city if there isn't one already. There's 60 uh 60 of them out there. Crypto Monday Berlin, the 60th just started a couple weeks ago and uh 61st Crypto Monday Bahamas going to start at the end of the month.

23:37 Uh we'll be lot of major events. Crypto at token 2049. We've got a great uh Crypto Mondays coming and uh money 2020. Uh so you start one in uh in your city if there isn't one. >> Awesome. Thank you, Lou. >> And the business model for Crypto Mondays is, you know, the more you do for the community, the more the community takes it, multiplies it, and gives it back. >> That's a good community.