Scarce Assets E005: Mark Moss - The Game of Wealth

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That's why we're proud to introduce on RAMP Heritage, a suite of private client services dedicated to ensuring your Bitcoin legacy is preserved and passed on, embodying the true essence of wealth that goes beyond mere numbers. If you would like to learn more, please schedule a consultation as we prepare for the Bitcoin having and the next wave of global adoption of this nascent and growing asset class. We are having all annual maintenance fees for clients that secure their wealth before the next Bitcoin epoch. Really enjoyed the way that you really kind of put through the the claim that you made competing against that. It's not competing against technology, it's competing against value itself. That was good. Yeah, yeah, just a little reframing and it's been, it's been fun to see like Michael Saylor's been using that framing and and I didn't know that Jeff Booth was also using that that number that 900 trillion. So yeah, I I've. I've, I've been using that framing for years but I had come up with when I looked at store of value assets I I came up at a lower number but I included other things. So there's like 30 to 40 trillion in offshore bank accounts. So like you didn't have that on there. That's certainly a store of value like 30 to 40 trillion. But I came up with, I think I have to go back and look at the math, but it was like 700 trillion. It's sort of the number I came up with and I was like I just kind of looked at the baskets like we have 5% of the basket where where you kind of went thoughtfully through each one and what percentage we might be able to get of each 1. So it's a little bit more in depth. So it's pretty good. But ultimately I mean I've been a venture cap investor, you know now I have the fund right. So we're constantly looking at like trying to gauge future valuations and that's sort of how we D back into it like what are the markets were disrupting, how big are those total markets, what percentage can we acquire? So yeah, I've been using the framework, but I liked yours, the 900 trillion and like I said more thoughtfully, thinking about percentages as opposed to the total basket, I think obviously some baskets you get more of, right. So like offshore bank accounts, like why wouldn't you get all that right, like gold, why wouldn't we get all of that? Obviously real estate, you know, it's different. Most people in Bitcoin don't understand real estate at all. So they they grossly misrepresent that or misunderstand that. So smaller percentage there, right. But anyway, I liked it. And then the other thing that I put up on Twitter this morning that's getting a bunch of traction was when people ask me what price I'll sell my Bitcoin at, I realize they don't understand the game of money. At all. And and ultimately, it's the game of wealth a couple years ago. Well, we can, we can riff into this if you want. Sorry, let's go into the intro. Yeah, yeah. Let's be clear. Bitcoin is an international asset. We are spending like drunken sailors. Bitcoin is the only economic entity. Where the supply is unaffected by the demand. If you want to preserve your wealth, you have. To convert that. Currency into an asset that's scarce, desirable, portable, durable, and maintainable. Hello, my name is Andy Edstrom and I'm happy to welcome you to the fifth episode of Scarce Assets, a show that examines scarcity, the most fundamental driver of economics and markets, and the scarcest asset of all which is Bitcoin today. I'm delighted to be here with my Co host Jesse Myers and our guest, the multi talented Mark Moss. And I met Mark in person for the first time at a conference in 2018, and I think Mark had advanced farther in his Bitcoin journey than I had at that time. But Mark was friendly and gracious as always, and we had a great conversation over lunch. Fast forward to today, and Mark creates hours of great content every week in an effort to help people learn. He has a popular syndicated radio show on iHeartRadio called The Mark Moss Show. He has published a great book called the UN Communist Manifesto, and he has several successful businesses, many of which center around investing in education. One of the things I love about Mark is he has had success in multiple businesses and industries over multiple market cycles. And he also has a rare ability to understand and communicate both micro details of an investment and also very long cycles along decades and centuries. So I'm delighted he's here with us. And Mark, how are you? Man, Andy, that was good. I'm gonna rip that intro and use that in my bio from now on. Please do. Please do. Let's just point out to the crowd. I say it all the time. People try to call me out on Twitter like I'm embarrassed, but I talk all the time. In 2018, we met. That was a crypto event. It wasn't a Bitcoin event. It sure was. I was a crypto. I was a crypto bro at the time At that, at that point in 2018, I was writing a cryptocurrency research newsletter from 2016 to 2019. So for four years I was writing every month, you know, 2025 pages of research on different crypto projects, Dex's privacy coins, you know, whatever big write up on XRP, I say buy it, let's buy XRP. It's going to change the world. You know the way they can do this cross-border settlement. We bought it at 17 cents. We closed it at $3.25. We crushed it, but I spent four years down that and finally in 2019, after doing thousands of pages of research, I published going, Nope, this isn't it, and I'm just going full time Bitcoin. So people still call to try to call me out on Twitter. Oh look at this guy. He's a crypto guy. It's like I was. I'm not embarrassed of that because I I came to it through a place of education, not from like a Luddite who doesn't recognize there's like something going on there. So anyway, that was a crypto event. I remember we were sitting outside, I think at lunch at that table. I forget what event that was. But anyway, yeah, way back. It was this, I think it was the start engine something event and just as an indication of those times, right, It was. I think that organization is now gone. I mean it was basically it was crypto altcoin focused and yeah, as far as I know it's lost to the sands of time. I love your discussion though of EU. Turn back to Bitcoin, you're in good company here, you know. Guilty as Charged was an alt corner. Jesse has stories. About that as well as well, yeah. Andy and I have the same war wounds. I don't. I don't have any guilt over it at all, you know, I mean, first of all, I'm a free to maximalist. So like, everyone's free to go do whatever they want. Second of all, I'm a tech guy, right? I started my career on the Internet. I love. I love technology and so I don't, I don't have any guilt or shame with it. I just choose to focus on and build my house on the rock, not in the sand if you will. And so that's sort of the shift. So I mean, whatever, we're all recovering crypto addicts or whatever. But yeah, I don't, I don't come from a from from a shameful place. But yeah, that's the. Best. Yeah, I think we, I think Andy and I both don't have any, like, guilt or shame about it, but I certainly have regret. Regret that I didn't do the homework sooner, that I didn't like. Consider this crazy different perspective of like of this not being about tech but instead being about Austrian economics, which is not what I learned about in school. You know, it took me a while to consider that that was right, and I wish I'd done it sooner. Well, I think you know what and what Andy said the very gracious again intro that he gave me. He said that Mark has made money and across multiple markets and multiple time frames. Basically he was saying I'm old, but you know, I've invested in multiple cycles. And periods experience. The word is experienced. But I think in order to understand really the world, if really if we go really broad with it, certainly economics and certainly Bitcoin, you really have to have multiple disciplines. If you only come at it from 1 discipline, it's really hard to understand and and and just down a bigger scale even on a financial side. You mentioned like Austrian economics, which I love Austrian economics because it pulls in like human psychology, you know, human action as Mises would say. And I find a lot of the, the macro Bros who who I consider friends, they're so in depth in the weeds on the financial data that they missed the forest for the trees. And so they're so looking at. I mean, like, I don't want to call them out on the show, but the king of the euro dollar market will just say that, you know, and I talked to him and he's way smarter than I'll ever be in regards to that. But I I feel that he doesn't understand the human psychology and the human motivations and incentive structures. And like, he misses the bigger global picture of what's going on. And so it doesn't allow his conclusions to be formed the way that I see them anyway. So I I back to making money across multiple markets. I've thought of myself as this generalist. Last summer I took my family to Europe for a month. We went to Florence, which was awesome. And I realized, no, I'm a I'm a renaissance man. Not not a generous because those guys understood multiple disciplines. And so anyway, back to Bitcoin. I think you have to understand multiple disciplines. And back-to-back to crypto if you're just the tech bro. Or really most of crypto are just USD Bros, right? They're just trying to make more U.S. dollars. Some of them are, are they? They think they're tech Bros. But if you understand multiple disciplines, then you understand Bitcoin is is the thing. Yeah, agreed completely. So let's, you know, let's see if we can tease out a little bit more of of your experience across multiple industries here. I mean you mentioned that you were you, you ran a successful business, built a business earlier in the Internet days, you know when when the Internet essentially was becoming much more popular. And then also you built a real estate business and that was, you know, formative for you went through a bubble and a bust and all that good stuff. Are there any, when you think across those experiences other than, you know, reading widely and learning widely and being a Renaissance type of type of thinker investor. What are some of the other lessons that that you've come away with that you think might be helpful to folks that that are on the path? Yeah, sure. I mean that that's a big question. So it depends on what path they're on. So I would say a couple things. First of all, I got, I didn't choose the traditional path. You hear me talk a lot about parallel markets and part of that's just because I've had a very non traditional path to where I'm at today towards building wealth. And so right out of high school I started buying real estate. I started buying bank owned repos and fixing them and I I got 10 down from the bank. They were giving them away, fixed it and flipped it and I went on to fix and flip 100 properties. So I kind of just right away just hit the ground running and I remember being here in Southern California, not not in Silicon Valley, but not too far from that at in those late 90s. I remember I was already up and going, I was doing my real estate thing. My roommate at the time quit his job and became a day trader trading these crazy things called Internet stocks that nobody had heard of in the 90s. And it was like what? What the heck are these? And when we would talk about them, people would look at us like people looked at crypto guys from a couple years ago. So we are day trading these these crypto things. I'm sorry, these Internet things. One big take away from that. Well let me let me go forward and I'll come back to that. In 1999, one of my buddies had this idea to start this Internet business. And of course like I said Silicon Valley is not too far away. The Internet world's blowing up. Everyone that starts at dot com is getting rich. So we had this idea of starting a website where you could shop and you could earn rewards that can go to a charity of your choice which there's like 1000 of those today. But not 99 and there wasn't and there was no way to get on the Internet. And we literally, I had an office at the time and we literally had to set up our own rack, our own servers, 2 servers, RAID, 5 hot swappable hard drives. Because the Internet was decentralized, you had to run your own node if you wanted to get on the Internet. That's an on. Premise On premise. That was the only way. There was no Amazon, there was no cloud services, there was no Shopify whatever, right? So literally we had to set up our own node, our own database, to run our own servers. So that's that's an interesting parallel then, like if we went to the.com boom and bust in 2001. So at the bottom of the bust, after everybody looked stupid and ridiculous, I thought it would be a good idea to start a ecommerce business selling motocross stuff online. And I went to these companies. So I had to spend like 25 grand to build like the most basic like shopping cart because there was no again Shopify. And I went to these companies and I said, hey, I built this website, I want to sell your products on my website and they laughed at me and they told me nobody would ever buy anything online. And this was in 2001, right? But it was because everyone looked sillyafterthe.com bust. And I'm like, I I disagree. I spent the money, I built the website, whatever. I'm happy just to give you the money, whatever they said we don't even want our products being sold on the Internet. So when we, when we got to the crypto boom, you know, I'm like, hey, I've been here before. I've heard this one parallel from that is decentralization going to centralization. The Internet became very centralized obviously now with SSO logins for Google, Facebook, etcetera. And you know obviously Amazon, we can get into that. But another parallel, and I said this about a year ago that that shocked a lot of people and actually it was the consensus conference, which is the crypto conference. I've been going to that also since like 2017 and I I think maybe it was 2022. It was in Austin. I went and I mainly just went for being in Austin and having some meetings around that. And I was at one of the events and it was all Crypto Bros And I remember just thinking to my head and I was asking people what's the most important thing that you saw, what was the most groundbreaking thing you saw, etcetera. And I remember thinking in my head, and then I came out and publicly said this. I said within a couple of years, I think three years. Crypto is gone. Crypto as a category is gone. And the reason why is because when my roommate was trading Internet stocks, there's no such thing as Internet stocks anymore. Yeah, what? Are Internet interesting? They're just companies now. It's just Apple. It's just in it, right? And and what I meant is crypto as a category is just because it's like over here we have like blockchain video games. And over here we have like title and escrow on the blockchain. And over here we have like supply chain man. I'm like, so go to a supply chain management show, go to a real estate show, go to a go to a video game conference, right. And so I think crypto as a category is gone. So that's like some of this historical parallels. You see the way technology comes and goes. Technology always follows a very predictable cycle. There's diffusion of innovation and so that's kind of where I think crypto and Bitcoin sort of fit in from my own experience, having lived through this through multiple cycles, so. Anyway, I love that. I love that color. I love that that parallel. That's a bold. It's a bold call, but when you put the historical context on, it makes complete sense. And and and I'm. And I'm not saying for the crypto Bros, which I know they're not listening to this, and I'm not saying that company still won't try to use blockchain. I'm not saying that like, blockchain is just a database, right? Like they're going to try to do different types of database, sure. But what I'm saying is crypto as a category is just gone. Just like Internet as a category is gone. Imagine having a trade show today. An Internet trade show? Like, what would that even be? You know what I mean? It makes no sense. Agreed, agreed. Well, that's, that's really helpful context. What about as it relates to your entrepreneurial journey? I mean, you know, launching a business that's Internet based 20 years ago and now you know many of your businesses and activities, your educational activities are are all Internet based. Is there something that's different today, 20 years later, in a much more developed Internet ecosystem, or do the same rules kind of apply? Well, I like to say principles are few, Methods are many. So there's core principles of life. The ways that we apply those, the methods that we apply them. There's a million, right? So I think the core principles are the same. But you know, obviously, as I already said, right, like back then, I had to build my own server just to get on the Internet. Today we can just like spin one up. And so things have definitely gotten easier. I've said many times, I think, you know, making money today is easier than it's ever been in the history of the world for two main reasons. One, we literally have trillions of dollars just sloshing around the economy. Yeah. Trillions of dollars. And if we want to get into the macro side, we can. But obviously, like, people are like, Oh my gosh, like the market should have crashed two years ago, but they haven't. Yeah, because we put $12 trillion into the economy, right? That's still rushing. So it's like, man, all you have to do is just like put a net out and grab that number one, number two, the tools. So anybody with this, I can learn anything. I can meet anybody and I can do anything from this. People are like, you gotta go to college to build your network. Really. I've been at Michael Saylors house three times and I never went to college with him. I met him through this, right? So I mean, obviously us as well. So I think 1 the tools are there. It's never, never been easier because the tools that we have obviously at the point that the Internet's at as well and because of the amount of money that's sloshing around in the ecosystem at the same time. So while this is another another sort of point that obviously I think about a lot, but I, but I wrote this down on Friday. I was at this event and a macro guy was up there talking about the the the debt and the amount of currency and circulation and the inflation and all these things. And he said that they want to be in the government, They want inflation to inflate away their debt. Yeah, I had put something on. I got locked out of my Twitter account for five months, a hacker who got in and set my two FAS out for five months. I spent much time on Instagram, so now now I'm on Instagram quite a bit. I I put up a post on Instagram and I said unsuccessful. People think the game is rigged against them. Successful people realize the game is rigged and learn how to play. And So what We you and I, were all guilty of inflation, inflation, inflation. They're stealing our life, they're stealing our value and facing this theft, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Our purchasing power is going down, etcetera, yes, but the unsuccessful people seize that and think that's rigged against them. I can't get ahead. They're stealing my wealth. The successful people go, well, if they're doing it to inflate away their debt, that means they're also inflating away my debt. That's pretty good. Well, what does inflation do? Well, it makes things more expensive, like assets. So maybe I should buy assets and I should use debt. That'd be a pretty good idea. They'll push the value of my assets up and pay off my loans at the same time. I like that. And so those are some like realizations that I've sort of had lately. Interesting entering concept. If you wanna talk, I did. And just just one more piece real quick. A couple years ago I did a video on how to retire off of Bitcoin. Spoiler alert, it's using debt against it, right? So you hold scarce assets, you never sell them and use debt to leverage against it. Putting out a new report, it's almost done and it's it's a full report on why you don't sell assets. The goal is to get more assets, leveraging debt, debt for tax efficiency. And then I have a calculator so you can put in how much Bitcoin you have. And then I have like a rate of a projected rate of return. Jesse will like this. I'm just kind of coming out of left field thinking of like what a projected rate of return might be over the next 20 years and then how much debt you would have to leverage to pull out, how much money and spoiler alert on this, I'll stop and then we'll talk about it. But at like $100,000 of of Bitcoin, if you wait five years, you could keep it about a 10% debt leverage every single year, about 10% of debt per year to maintain. Well, with a a a rate of inflation, you can start about $100,000 a year free cash flow up to about 200,000 in a year 20. Without ever going above 10% leverage on your on your Bitcoin so. I'm keen to read that again, that report, Yeah, no, I'm, I'm definitely keen to read that, that report, Mark. And you know, one of my feelings about debt and leverage in Bitcoin is there's some kinds of debt that makes sense and there are others that don't because you got the risk of getting liquidated, getting rugged. But I'm optimistic that in the coming years, the debt market for Bitcoin is likely to to develop significantly. What do you think, Jesse? Yeah, I I I wrote a piece about this in 2021 called Asset DNA explaining the speculative attack. It was all about like highlighting how assets tend to exponentially increase in value over time in Fiat terms, in nominal terms. And obviously there's other forms of of assets that are really consumption. You know, where you're, you're destroying value by driving your car or you know, holding airline miles because they get diluted away. And you know, those things are it's the DNA of of these different asset types. Some appreciate in value, some decrease in value and dollars decrease in purchasing power over time in exponential, exponential fashion. Whereas Bitcoin, because of its increasing scarcity, increases exponentially over time in its purchasing power. And so that's the seed for the speculative attack for Bitcoin. If if you can borrow dollars today, wait for a sufficient amount of time for the asset DNA to manifest as a divergent in purchasing power between Bitcoin and dollars, and then sell a little bit of the Bitcoin to settle the debt that is now decreased in purchasing power in in in nominal dollar terms. That's the playbook that micro strategy has been using to to an extent and it's there for everyone to take. However, there's a lot of risk and volatility in managing that appropriately. Frankly, I've always been a little too afraid to touch it because I I don't want to be liquidated. So I just hold and and that's enough. But that opportunity is there for anybody who's willing to do it. Let's break that down a little bit, though. It's not as big, bad and scary as you might make it out to out to seem. So first I want to say, Jesse, you did a great job of the technical details of a speculative attack. That paper came out I think Was it Pierre wrote it or was it bitstein that? Wrote it but like 2014. Yeah, 2014 wrote that. Read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, right. He talks about good debt versus bad debt, right. So just go read that. It's very basic. Everyone can understand that. But let's talk about that for a second. So, Wall, you have Dave Ramsey. On one side of the table says don't use debt. Never use debt. Pay off your debt as fast as you can. On the other side, you have Robert Kiyosaki. All right, Robert Kiyosaki became a billionaire by using debt. Donald Trump became a billionaire by using debt. Grant Cardone became a billionaire by using debt. So you first of all, what game are we playing? I didn't make the rules. I'm just in the game playing. We are in a debt based monetary system. That means money is created through debt, not through savings. Now I get the Austrian School of Economics and I want that world. I'm I'm actively building towards that world, but that's not the world that we're in. So I'm playing the game that we're in. So people, when I was a kid, I remember you know, hearing all the time my parents might say like I wish I had a money tree. We do. We have a money tree. Literally, if I want $1,000,000 to buy an apartment building or a business, I just go to my money tree. That's the bank. They give me $1,000,000, I go buy like the money's there now, Magic. So. So money is created through debt issuance. That's the game. So the Dave Ramsey's of the world. But to the point that you're making, I want to talk about this risk to the point you're making. It's very risky. Debt is leverage. Leverage works two ways. It builds up faster, tear downs faster. I like to say that debt is like debt is like fire. I can use fire to warm my house and cook my food or it can burn my house down. Now Robert Kiyosaki, who is my mentor, he's now one of my good friends. He told me we were on a live stream on his show together and he said Dave Ramsey is right for most people because most people are too stupid to know how to use debt. So think about like a little kid, a 5 year old kid. Like you wouldn't let that kid play with fire because that they don't know how to handle fire. Like a 5 year old kid, they could light the house on fire, right? But hopefully as an adult you're mature enough and you're smart enough to know how to manage fire properly. So part of it is your skill set. I like to say that risk is not in the investment, it's in the investor. If I were to take you guys to Hawaii with me right now, we go to the North Shore pipeline waves are 30 feet and I'm like, hey, let's go swimming. At 30 foot waves, you guys would probably drowned. But yet there's hundreds of guys out there surfing every day and they're just having fun. The risk isn't in the wave, it's in the person in the water. That makes sense. So I think of a debt and leverage the same way the Kiyosaki, the Trump, the Cardone have done pretty well with it. The average person gets themselves in trouble because they're going on vacations and dinners with that. OK, so that's the first thing. Now let's talk more about this. So that's the first thing. So if I really want to build wealth, I have to use debt. As you said, micro strategy is using this platform or this strategy perfectly, but I want to go back to the the the risk specifically. So Andy said he's sort of afraid of it because he doesn't want to get rugged. So let's just think about this. Now use some general numbers here. If I buy Bitcoin today at whatever it's at 50,000, whatever it's at 60, whatever, 62,000. I have a block clock but I can't see it from where I'm. Saying it's moving quickly. It's moving mostly upward, mostly in One Direction. Let's just let's say I buy it at 50,000, OK? And it goes to 100,000, right? So now I'm sitting on $200,000 worth of Bitcoin and I'd like to go buy something else. I'd like to go buy a car. I need a new truck for my delivery business. I want productive assets, not unpressed. So I want a new delivery truck for my business to scale. I want a new apartment to rent or whatever it may be. So I have two options. Option one is I sell the Bitcoin. That's option one. If I sell the Bitcoin, I pay tax. I'm in California. I'm at the top, top tax bracket, so half of that goes to taxes. Half option one sell the Bitcoin. I no longer have the Bitcoin and half of my money goes to the government. Option two is I borrow 50% against the Bitcoin. That income is now tax free and I still have the Bitcoin to continue to go up in value. Now let's talk about the risk. So the risk is that I could get, Andy said get rugged, Jesse said. Maybe the leverage wipes you out. So what does that look like? So first of all, when I, when I think about risk management, the one rule that I learned early on is very generally, what's the worst that can happen and am I OK with that? So what's the worst that can happen? I lose all the Bitcoin. I can't cover the leverage. They rug me, they steal it, whatever. OK, Well, let's see. So if that were to happen, well, I still got the money out of it and I no longer have the Bitcoin. I'm actually no worse off than I would be if I would have just sold it in the first place. Now we can tweak the numbers a little bit. We can tweak the numbers a little bit and we can different tax brackets and we can get into the weeds on this for sure. But I'm, we're talking generally here, right? So if I sold the Bitcoin, gave half of it to taxes because I'm in California at the top tax bracket, or I borrowed 50% against it and I lost it, I kind of end up at about this, about the same place, more or less, except the difference is now I have the other asset. When you pitch it that way now, that seems pretty appealing. Now that's the worst that can happen. That's the worst. Now, how do we mitigate for this? So Andy said, if we get rugged, so I borrow with Unchained capital and I keep one of my keys, I don't get rugged. Yeah, Jesse said. I'm afraid of the leverage. If I get margin called, I can't cover. So in my calculation, I'm only borrowing 10% of my stack. What happens is when people borrow 50% of their stack and they can't cover the leverage, if I'm only borrowing against 10%, I should be able to meet any margin call that happens, because historically Bitcoin drawdowns have been getting less and less and less. We saw 95%, now we're down to 80%. Probably the next big drawdown will probably be 60%. So if I'm only leveraging a 10% of my stack, I should be able to cover any margin call that happens. Now again, maybe not. Maybe we have a 95%. Draw it out again and you're over leveraged. That's what happened to me in 2008. I sold multiple businesses. I built up 10s of millions of dollars of real estate in 2008. I got rugged, the central banks rugged me and I couldn't carry my property. I had levered them up. I had multiple 8 figures at about a 60% LTV, but in California real estate dropped 60% in one year and I couldn't cover, I couldn't meet the margin call and I lost it, right? So it happened to me. So again, the worst that can happen is I end up about the same if I would have sold the Bitcoin. Best case scenario if I'm only borrowing 10%, I should be able to meet that and so we sort of mitigate that. So anyway. Well, it's helpful to have that perspective, especially from someone who's lived, you know, lived through the massive margin call even in an asset class like real estate, which doesn't mark to market quite as frequently as as Bitcoin. I'd love to get your take your perspective on a couple of things. First of all, we're talking about borrowing against Bitcoin instead of selling it. I think you tweeted recently about about selling Bitcoin, or someone asked you about when you would sell your Bitcoin, which prompted an interesting response. I'm wondering if your answer is never or what the answer is, but I'd also like to talk about how much flow you see from real estate into Bitcoin, so tackle those however you'd like. Yeah, so I posted that on Twitter this morning and I said when people ask me, which they ask me all the time, and I'm sure you get asked all the time at the same time as is, at what price will you sell your Bitcoin? And what I said is when people ask me that, I just look at them and say, you have no idea the game that we're playing. You just don't like, you don't know that we're in a game. If you don't know you're playing a game, how are you going to win if you don't know the objective of the game? If I came over to your house with a stack of board games and I'm like, hey, let's play this game, you're like, OK, well, what is it? What's the objective? What are the rules? Who are the players? Right. Like things like that. So again, one, we're in a debt based monetary system. Most people don't understand that 2. The game is to acquire assets. The goal is to earn money and use the money to acquire assets. My goal is like, hopefully you're looking at your financial statements every month. Andy, you're you're a finance guy. You should, you know, you certainly know this. One of the three reports you should look at every month is your balance sheet. I call it your scorecard. What are my assets? The goal is for me throughout my life, for my assets to grow. Now, obviously there's higher goals than just gaining assets. But in the game of money, let's say my goal is to gain is to build my assets every month. I want my assets to be more, more, more, more, more, more, right? So when people say, what, at what price will you sell your Bitcoin? It's like the goal isn't to sell assets to get more dollars. The goal is to earn more dollars to buy more assets. So first of all, you don't even understand the game. That's number one. That's the broad game. Then we get into the intricacies of the game, which is dead tax efficiency, which we already went through. So I don't need to recap all that, but it's just like most people are so financially illiterate that they don't even understand the game that we're playing. I mean, if you've played Monopoly, you understand the game of Monopoly is to get as many assets as we possibly can. That's the game. That's how you win the game of Monopoly if you play the Game of Life. I used to play with my kids, The Game of life. Same deal. Robert Kiyasaki's game. Rich, Dad, I'm sorry. Cash flow, amazing game. If everyone will play that game one time per month, it will change your life. I'm not joking. So anyway, the game is to acquire assets and then there's ways that different strategy we can employ. Like I said, tax, efficiency, debt, etcetera. So anyway, that that was the kind of the point of the tweet. Most people don't understand. The goal is to gain assets. Now what type of assets do we want to gain? There's three main types of assets. I think about #1 are scarce assets. So in an highly inflationary environment like we're in today, inflation pushes most assets up, but it pushes scarce assets up even much faster. So if you look at, let's just real estate is basically a perfect proxy for for inflation. So if you look at, we've had about a 40% increase in the money supply in the last 3-4 years. US median real estate went up about 40%. Austin, the fastest growing city in the United States, went up about 40%. But in Austin, there's a lake called Lake Travis, and on the lake there's homes on the lake. On the water, there's only a couple of them and they went up by 200%. OK, That's the difference of scarce assets versus regular assets. So one we have scarce assets that could also be fine art, that could be collectibles, you know, old cars. Obviously Bitcoin fits into that category. My buddy down the street here has like 2 old Mustangs he bought for like 50-60 thousand each. They're both worth over $5 million today, right? Scarce assets. He had Shelby signed the glove box on one of them. It's a scarce asset. So we want scarce assets #2. We want energy intensive assets. These are assets that can't just be recreated, right? So gold fits into this like commodities fit into this, Cattle fits into this. Things that just can't be artificially inflated, Those are good. Obviously not as good as as as as scarce assets obviously. And then the third type of asset is neither scarce nor energy intensive and I might use some of those for more speculative purposes. So you might think of like equities would fit into that. I typically don't encourage anyone to play in that game because you ain't got no edge there unless you're a high frequency trader with billions of dollars. You have no edge there. Don't play with that game. But maybe, you know, P/E, VC funds, you know, I have the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund for example. I might put it into into that type of a category. So that's kind of how I think about it. So I think about earning my wealth, creating wealth by providing value to the market, earning dollars, earning money and then taking that money. And instead of investing, I think of it as saving. I save my wealth in real estate and Bitcoin and by by shifting that from investing into Bitcoin or investing into real estate and now thinking of just saving there, it gives me a long term perspective and then I don't get caught into this trap of when are you going to sell. I love that, yeah. The the framing of saving versus investing is one that a lot of people stumble over. I stumble over too. I mean, we were we were talking with Pierre and Morgan Rashard on our last episode about about exactly that. And I was trying to pin them down on well really what is saving versus versus investing. And I think that it's, I think it's important for people to think about for their own lives and make their, their allocations and their decisions based on. But, but some of these ideas are a little bit fuzzy, a little bit a little bit slippery. Yeah. Mark, I'm curious like in your time in Bitcoin, how has your perception of like saving in real estate versus saving in Bitcoin evolved and where is that at today? Yeah, so this is the next part about the money game. So if we play a game, some people are better at games than others. So if I've been playing this board game for five years and I've played 100 of opponents and then I play you for the first time, I have all kinds of tips, tricks, strategies that I know how to do in the game and you don't. And this is where unfortunately most of the world falls in and and a lot of bitcoiners fall into this trap. They don't understand the game and they haven't played the game enough to know the strategies in the game. The rich do. OK, so there's two main strategies that you can really speed up your wealth accumulation. Bitcoin. Michael Saylor understands this very well. One, we already talked about debt, but two, your single largest loss of wealth is taxes. So I need to figure that strategy out. And then three, so you know, we talk about in economics, we talk about the velocity of money. What's the velocity of money, Andy? Wow, I guess it depends on the the it's. Measuring how fast the dollar moves through the economy. Oh, you mean literally? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. So it's like if I gave you 20 bucks and then you gave it to Jesse and Jesse gave it to the car mechanic or whatever. So it's like measures, how many times does $1.00 get spent through the economy. I have a whole training on this. I'll, I'll give you the high level version, but I call it velocity of money. And how fast can I move $1.00 through multiple investments? You see, if I can invest $1.10 times, I'm going to build wealth faster than you, 10 times faster. Most people have never thought about this. So like, I'm just going to go buy my Bitcoin and I'm going to sit the 6.25 Bitcoin in there and I'm going to go huddle on a hill and I'll come back in 10 years. I'll be rich. OK, that's cool. I'll build wealth 10 times faster than you and my house will be bigger on the hill, right? And how? Because I can spend $1.00 multiple times. How do you do that? So let's talk about real estate, for example. We can we this is, there's multiple layers. Some people have figured out how to spend or invest $1.00 two times. Some people can figure how to do it three times. Some people can figure out 45678. The more times you can do it, obviously, the faster you can build your wealth, right. So let's think about this. So the first number one thing is I don't want to pay taxes. That's the number one thing because right now in California at the income bracket, I'm in half my wealth is gone. OK, So I'm at a major disadvantage right off the bat. So if I could keep 100% of my wealth, could I grow wealth faster? Of course. Big time. OK, so how could I do that? How could I pay no tax legally? Legally is the is the keyword there. One I could move to Puerto Rico. I did that. I moved in 2021. That was awesome by the way. I loved Puerto Rico. I would have stayed. It's just my girls are like teenagers and it's not a good place to raise teenage girls in my opinion. My wife loved it too Anyway, So one you can move to Puerto Rico, that's an option. Go hang out with David Bailey, Super cool dude. I like David, but we can just use real estate. So let me give you an example. Thanks to Donald Trump. He passed something called accelerated depreciation. Accelerated depreciation means I can buy an asset, I can take all the depreciation in one year. Now that's been going away, it was at 100%. Now it was at 80% last year, but I believe it's getting re renewed and it's going to go back to 100%. So for example in 2022 I made $1,000,000 of profit. So option one, I give 500,000 to the government and they use it for things that I don't approve of or and I I give 500 to them. They use it for things I don't want and I keep 500 left or I buy a million dollar piece of real estate and only put 200,000 down. I get $1,000,000 of write off. Now I have 800,000 in my bank and $1,000,000 property. That's cash flowing and building equity for me. And the thanks to inflation, they're paying it off for me. So now instead of 500, I have 800 and $1,000,000 property. So right off the bat, that's pretty good. You would say that's a better deal. People don't understand this about real estate. Oh, real estate's a scam. Bitcoin's going to go up faster than real estate. OK, cool. That's just that's just the first layer of the strategy. Actually, we'd even go one step further. I'm sure you guys have heard of like the infinite banking concept or be your own bank kind of a thing. So I can be my own bank so I can put money and tax advantage into. Maybe I'd use real estate first 'cause I can get out of the taxes. Now, I'm not your tax professional. You might have questions about that, like for example, but Mark, can't you only write that against a passive income? And I have to be a full time real estate professional? Yes, that's part of the thing. But there's a loophole that if I put it into an Airbnb property and I run the Airbnb property, at least I think one time in that tax year, I can take 100%. So again, you got to understand the freaking game here, man. So right off the bat, I'm I have 300,000 more cash in my bank and I have $1,000,000 asset going up now. I think real estate's up 50% in three years from now. Inflation is freaking raging. It ain't it ain't. Sure back down. So now in two years from now, I take $500,000 out of the property on debt again tax free. And then I go put it all into Bitcoin. So now I got the 800 plus the five, I put that into Bitcoin. I got 1.3 million in Bitcoin. Then if Bitcoin's been compounded at 200% annual growth rate, let's say it doesn't continue that, let's call it 50%. So now I got 1.8 million in Bitcoin in two years from now at 50 percent, 50% compound annual growth rate. Jesse, you're the number guy. Now I got 3, four $5,000,000 in in Bitcoin. I borrow 50% of that, again tax free $2,000,000 and I go put it in the next asset and I put in the next asset. And while you made $1,000,000 and you got stuck with 500, now I'm sitting on 4 or $5,000,000 And this is a very oversimplified strategy. It gets way more complex and there's multiple layers you can add to this. You asked specifically about real estate, but that's one of the key pieces. Yeah, I love that example. There's a few lessons there. One is, as you right rightly pointed out, debt is your friend in the system. In the game we're playing, number one. Number two, it pays to get into the details, get into the weeds on tax law, including and especially on real estate, 'cause I had the same conversation with, you know, clients and other people. Also, you know, usual disclaimer, none of this says financial advice, do your own homework. Check. Check all the facts, check marks, facts. But but yeah, there are lots and lots of tax loopholes in particular that favor real estate, and it always has been true. And I think it's still true. I think the other thing, and and I'm sure you guys have seen this and it's it's, it's changed a lot. I get like thousands of comments a week across my platform. So I I I see this a lot. But people have lost, like, the ability to understand there's nuance and everything. And they like, everybody thinks like black and white. It has to be this or that, right? They they, they've lost the nuance. They've lost that. They've lost the fact that there's like everything. There's no such thing as probabilities. There's certainties as probabilities and everything has a trade off. Everything's a trade off. So I'm not saying, and this is what most bitcoiners say, oh, real estate's a scam, buy Bitcoin. I'm not saying to buy real estate and don't buy Bitcoin. I'm saying buy both with the same dollar, that's what I'm saying. But own both for the same price, own more of both at the same time. And so it's a strategy to acquire more Bitcoin at the end of the day by leveraging other assets. Yeah, there's a there's a concept in them in like my MBA program of, you know, inventory turns, you know when you're running a business. So you're trying to make sure that you have not a ton of inventory on hand, but you're trying to turn that over a bunch of times. You're trying to sell a lot while keeping not a ton on your books, See. And you're applying the same concept of like how do you get more efficient about putting to work what you have your dollar, your dollar is your inventory here and to get more and more out of it by turning it more times I. Mean that's a that's a good way to look at it but I think it's more, I think it's more in line with the velocity of money. Right. They measure they they measure how many times a dollar moves through the economy. I'm measuring how many times I can get a dollar to move through an investment. But but inventory is a is a is one way to look at it. So inventory as I said I I sold e-commerce. I make you know maybe a average 30% profit margin. You know for example typically about a 90 day turn on that inventory. So that means I'm turning my inventory 4 * a year. So at 30% * 4 if I could turn it every month now I get 12 * 30%, right? Right. So I think that but but that kind of is more like a compounding turn versus I think the velocity is like how can how can $1.00 move through the economy 5 faster? Or how could $1.00 move through my investments faster? Mm hmm. Thanks for tuning in. If you're interested in exploring any of these topics further, or wanna learn more about how we can help you secure a new or existing Bitcoin allocation, get in touch with our team at on rampbitcoin.com. We look forward to supporting you on your Bitcoin journey. Yeah, I love that idea. I love that. So let's let's riff a little more on the velocity of money because we got a question from our friend Mark Hemby, and he's interested in accelerated inflation scenarios. I mean, we talked about hyper hyperinflation, but maybe we'd go there. What's? Twitter earlier. Oh, from Twitter early OK, got. It. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, sorry. Not not live. Yeah. I always try to you know pepper in one or two questions from from the Twitter crew. So yeah. So you know what are your thoughts on and you and if you want to tie tie this into larger, you know cycles of history, maybe that would be fruitful. But what are you preparing for in terms of the average inflation rate over the next decade or so you know and and how much velocity there's going to be in in Fiat money and how that affects your your strategies we've been talking about? As far as like what will the velocity of the money be in the, you know, in the future, next couple years, decade, whatever. I I I wouldn't say I necessarily keep that into my consideration that fits into like the overall inflation conversation, right, because obviously they're like measuring velocity to like manage inflation. So I wouldn't necessarily look at the the way the government measures the velocity of money as something that I'm really focused on. But in regards to inflation, even when inflation was like 8-9 percent a couple years ago, I was on YouTube saying that this will, this will be the lowest in some of the lowest inflation we'll see for the rest of the decade. So I'm a huge inflation bull. I think that inflation comes in waves. We've seen a a disinflationary pulse and now it looks like we bottomed and we're starting to see the inflation creep back up again. I saw on the Twitter post you put Andy, someone was a little salty and it's like Oh yeah, Mark's going to talk about cycles and this and that. But I think that's important to understand. Part of the cycle that we talked about is the I talked about all the time is, is the the pendulum swinging from centralization to decentralization. I've been talking about this for a couple years. I I think I broke it out for the first time in 2020 when we were still heading towards peak centralization. I think we're starting to see that. And I said peak centralization peaks at 2025 S like next year. But I think we're starting to see the pendulum swinging back. But specifically in regards to inflation because we're like globalism is dead. Globalization is is digressing at this point like the age of global cooperation and just in time supply chains that's over like that's done and and and it's all about restoring. What does restoring do? It pushes up inflation. So we have we have multiple factors going into this obviously. So the for my cycle thesis the guy on Twitter didn't want to hear me talk about again. I think it's I do. I want to hear. I want to hear at least a little. But I think it's an important framework. So if the world, if the world continues to move towards decentralization, which history tells us it is and I think it's pretty apparent for anyone paying attention that's a major inflationary push that OK, so that's that's one. Then we have that we're in at the end of this you know, sovereign debt cycle. So there's three cycles that I chart. One is this political revolution cycle which is centralization, decentralization 2 is the financial revolution cycle, it's an 80 year cycle. So we're at the end of that. And then the third one is the technological revolution cycle which is a 50 year cycle. So all three are converging right now or the hater online. Sorry I have to recap that for you. But if you, if you, if you take that into consideration, so one as the world decentralizes, that's a massively inflationary re onshoring, but not just re onshoring ships getting attacked in the Red Sea. Right. Less global cooperation, supply chains breaking down. So it's not just about re onshoring, everything gets more expensive that way, right? But then two, we're at the end of this debt cycle. And so at this end of the debt cycle, we're stuck printing massive amounts of money. So we know, per the Keynesian multiplier, that, as you know, the goal is to spend $0.50 of debt to get a dollar worth of growth. Right now, today, we're spending a dollar worth of debt, or I should say borrowing a dollar in debt to get $0.40 of growth. So it's a lot of diminishing returns, right? So eventually it gets less, less, less, less, less. I think this cycle ends in a whimper, not a bang like everybody thinks it is. And so the diminishing returns, we have $0.40 of growth, 30 cents, 20 cents, $0.10 and eventually there's no growth left. And so we're witnessing that and we're witnessing these weird anomalies like Japan entering a technical recession, but the Nikki index is hitting an all time high in Europe. The same thing. Europe's in a technical recession, but yet their markets are all time highs. And so that, you know, Lynn Alden's a champion of the sort of fiscal dominance theory, you know, not theory, but the the talking about that and I and I agree. So as we get deeper in debt, the law of dimension returns, we have to keep digging deeper, deeper, deeper. So that's massively inflationary and then we have the. Print more and more debt to service the deficits and then that is stimulative to the overall money supply and inflation and everything. Yeah. And and and then the third, the third piece is, is, is the demographics. I think it was mid 2000s. Harry Dent Junior wrote a book called The Demographic Cliff and Harry Dent Junior is the broken clock that has been calling for a 90% crash for a decade and he'll eventually be right. I've read five of his books because his research is amazing and I think his research is right. His conclusions have been wrong, but he was the first one that really brought this demographic problem to my to my forefront. Peter Zion talks about it a lot. I mean, there's been plenty of books written about it. Elon Musk says it's probably the largest risk that we have to our civilization right now. And so that's obviously massive deflation or inflationary as well. So anyway, I'm an inflation bull. I think we see massive inflation. I said earlier, I think real estate's up 50% in three years from now. I think part of what I was going to do in this report, I was telling you about how to retire of Bitcoin. I wanted to chart and Jesse, maybe you could do this 'cause you're smarter than me in this regard. This isn't my classical. Trend Jesse to work. That's good. That's what he's here. For I wanted to chart the rate of inflation. So if you look at like the Fred's M2 money chart, for example, and you and you draw trend lines. I've used it many times. Just draw a trend line up to 1971 and then from 1971 to like 2000, and then from 2000 to 2008 and then 2008 to 2020 and then 2020 up and you see the trend line. Yep. So then if you if you if you looked at those trend lines then measured the rates of inflation change, we might be able to project out where that inflation rate goes to, to answer this question. I I I haven't done that, but I, I was thinking along those lines. I had dinner with Brent Johnson, Mr. Santiago capital of Milkshake theory Guy a few weeks ago and we were talking about this and you know he thinks we'll see $100 trillion in debt before anything big happens to the dollar. And I I agree with that. So what does inflation look like as we get to $100 trillion in debt? I think we could map it out, I don't know. But I see massive inflation ahead of ahead of us, which again is bad for everybody, but if you can't beat them, join them. So I'm just going to take on a lot of fixed rate debt and I'm going to buy assets that go up with inflation. Yeah. That's right. I actually did that analysis in in 2020 of of taking M2 is in my opinion the best indicator of true inflation. Like forget about you know what what the government says M2 is what's actually happening. And I did that analysis of like it was like 5% kegger of money supply like a decade ago and then it ratcheted up. Of course I did it in 2020 And so that year it was like 17% you know because of the the COVID stimulus. But yeah, we we are seeing that ratcheting up of the the, the slope there which in my opinion is the, you know when you when you iron out what's actually happening, the net of it is growth of money supply directly translation into inflation. It may take some time, but that's what's actually driving it. Yeah, it's the Austrians, the Austrian definition of inflation, which I mean, as Michael Saylor points out and Austrians have pointed out forever, trying to measure inflation with a single number is like, ridiculous. Yeah, prices going up, what they call consumer price inflation is the is the result of inflation. It's the it's it's what what happens after inflation happens. It's the end of the chain and to to your other point of like you know that we may have bottomed in in inflation right now. We may be heading to another wave of it, which is just what happened in the 70s. And I like it feels like to me human psychology hasn't changed, markets haven't really changed, like the the economics hasn't hasn't changed. So it seems quite likely that we would have the same sort of pattern of behavior and bullwhip effect inflation that we had then happening now. Well, there's a lot that's changed. As a matter of fact, I made a video saying this time is different, which is the famous last words. But I think it is different and there's a lot that's changed and I think drawing well, I think it's important to draw parallels from history. Obviously I use history as my guide. I think we also have to realize the answers have changed. Albert Einstein was a professor and every year he would give out a test to his students at the at the college. And every year he was giving out the exact same test with the exact same questions. And one of his student aides came up and said, Einstein, I hate to bring this up, but are you aware this is the exact same test that you gave out the year before? And Einstein's, like, yeah, I did. And they said, well, why would you do that? Because the students have the answers and they can just give these students the answers. And he said because the answers have changed. You see as things change, as new information comes in, we have to understand that what we thought was the answer changes. So what do I mean that specifically I I believe and I've made the case in my videos breaking down the data in this. But the way that the central banks, not just the Fed, but all central banks, but specifically the Fed and all central banks, the way that they interact in the markets changed in 2008. It's the first time we saw QE, right. And and and not to dig too deep into that, I got a couple minutes left here not to dig too deep into that. But in 2008, just for some perspective here it was the first time we saw QE. OK, so that's a big deal. So when you're looking at the 70s or whatever, like we didn't, they didn't do that back then. So that's, that's, that's number one. Number two, we can see how it's changed since since then. So for example in 2008, in 2006, home building starts were down 26 percent, 26%. That's a crash. It took thirty months, 30 months, almost three years before the Fed intervened in the markets. Three years. Bear Stearns is widely accepted as the trigger point that caused the entire banking system to collapse. When Bear Stearns collapsed, it took seven months to get $100 billion approved in 2023. When the banks collapsed, how long did it take? 6. Days, yeah. Also, Hank Paulson had to get down on his knees and and beg for the money. Right. And that's another big piece and that's part of the reason why it took so long, right, because it had all these approval processes and things like that. There was 700 billion in TARP plus the plus another some extra stimulus. It was about I think a little over a trillion dollars at the end of stimulating in 2008. In 2020, how much was it between Fed between fiscal and monetary is about 11 trillion. From 1:00 to 11:00 you see how things change. But it's even more than that. In 2020, the Fed set up 13 SPVS 13. They were buying equities. That changed. It's different. We didn't do that before. We didn't do that in 2020. We didn't. And. And then now today, all these banks have swap lines. Countries, they all have swap lines. So back to getting on your knees and begging. They have credit cards like I give my kids credit cards. If you run into trouble, use the credit. You don't have to call me. Here's the money in advance. Now we have all these nations with swap lines. We have all these funny facilities that are set up. We we saw it with the BTFPI mean. So things are different, things are way different today. And so I think sure, yeah, use history for sure, but like to try to go, well, you know, this is what it's been like for so long. Yeah, but the answer's changed in my opinion. Yeah. Well, that's sage advice, Mark. This has been a phenomenal conversation. Really appreciate you coming on and doing it with us. I just want to ask you, before we wrap up here, any final thoughts, any what are the places that people can can continue to learn from you? Yeah, I mean I'm all, I'm all over just search Mark Moss. But I do a couple videos a week on YouTube breaking down mostly financial topics. You know mostly these these, these types of topics we're talking about right here. I think all my content is Bitcoin content, but I don't, it's not about Bitcoin all the time. It's more about why, Like why, right? So it's more of these types of financial topics, like stuff that we discussed here. I'm pretty active on Twitter now that I got my account back, so you can find me there at 1 Mark Moss. Or just go to my website, 1markmoss.com. Everything's linked there and I'll be putting up this. I don't know when you're going to air this thing, but probably by next week I'll have that Bitcoin How to retire a Bitcoin report and calculator up. Excellent. Well, yeah, go ahead. I look forward to digging into that. That's I think that's the Holy Grail for for all of us. And so getting smart and, you know, understanding the risks and being prudent about it is is going to be a big part of being a a successful bitcoiner over the next decade or two. Maybe I'll send, maybe I'll send it over to you for a little proofread before I publish it, just so you can help me out with it a little bit. Love to see it? Well, I look forward to seeing that report. I really love the content that you put out. Mark, thank you so much for sharing your skills and talents and experience and knowledge and on behalf of on RAMP that's been scarce assets.