TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #546: How Bitcoin Will Drain The Real Estate Market with Leon Wankum

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

Marty sits down with Leon Wankum to discuss how bitcoin will demonetize real estate. Leon's links: https://linktr.ee/leonwankum 0:00 - Intro 0:57 - Leon's background 5:13 - How did the real estate premium develop? 12:15 - Why bitcoin improves real estate 17:54 - Bitkey 18:49 - Higher quality, lower cost 23:52 - Why the macro environment may temper the next bull 26:51 - Bitcoin will threaten real estate business models 34:00 - When should a bitcoiner buy a house? 38:29 - Bitcoin will take over real estate's collateral function 44:52 - First movers and trend setters 54:22 - Bitcoin is easier 59:28 - Real estate will be drained like monarchs in the industrial revolution 1:06:17 - A unique shield against societal collapse 1:13:14 - Plugs Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/concierge/ Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

So if you work in real estate, my personal opinion is you need to get into Bitcoin, otherwise your business will most likely die. Bitcoin is going to absorb the monetary premium that sits in real estate today. That has some side effects that real estate investors need to deal with. Decrease that premium $300 trillion in real estate assets globally. Like if you had to ballpark it, like at the end of the day, when Bitcoin is fully monetized, real estate has been demonetized down to its utility value. Like how big do you think the overall real estate market is globally?

real estate should be between 5 to 10 and if you start to look at your real estate portfolio and you measure its wealth in bitcoin you start to understand that it's rapidly losing value against bitcoin bitcoin is growing right now at a kegger over 50 percent a year in purchasing power so even if you buy real estate on leverage bitcoin still performs better it's just something that i want to put out there and if you don't believe me just go through the numbers and calculate it yourself it's actually going to blow your mind you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven I believe that in

a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency Bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies Bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be leon long time coming welcome to the show thank you marty good to see you this is our second conversation we did one on the last trade earlier this year but haven't had you on tftc yet and as i was mentioning i've been re-watching your your talks at conferences baltic cutting badger in prague both from earlier this year i think it's important when you're working on the intersection of bitcoin and real estate we also have the luxury meeting in person earlier

this year at the bitcoin urbanism meetup here in uh here in the commons and i think the realm that you're playing in is is really interesting and is one of the starkest highlights of how bitcoin can really help people protect themselves from fiat decay particularly in the world of real estate so i guess jumping into it how did you figure this out yourself i know you've told this story but for anybody who hasn't heard it yeah on on this show why don't you give a little bit about your background and how you came to this thesis about the intersection of bitcoin in real estate? Yeah, for sure. So first of all, thank you for having me. I also believe it's important. I mean, if I wouldn't be here, Bitcoin would still do its thing and would still demonetize

real estate. But at least maybe I can give some guidance for Bitcoiners to be able to weather the storm that is coming in the fiat system. So how did I get to where I am today? I learned about Bitcoin in university. That was before I went to work in the real estate industry. And back in the day, students were using Bitcoin for, you know, various reasons. And it was just a thing that people did. And I watched some friends using Bitcoin to pay for goods and services on the internet. And I thought that was pretty cool. And then I started to look into the technology and I learned about the cypherpunks and i learned about austrian economics and i was studying philosophy and then financial economics at the time and i was at a keynesian based university

so learning about money being a store of value was actually something new because i thought of money as a medium of exchange as you do as a keynesian and then after leaving university I went into the real estate industry and that is a family business basically it's the business I grew up on I grew up on building sites I worked the summers on building sites since I'm 14 basically so the building environment is something that I grew up with or I grew up in and as I continued my journey in real estate I started to understand the the role of real estate as an inflation hedge and I also started to understand how broken the fiat system is because I thought it's actually pretty strange that we live in a digitalized world but we're using a physical

object like real estate to store value that has a very low frequency it's easy to destroy low liquidity and it's also inaccessible as a store of value right and then I looked at the market cap of real estate and I saw the market cap is over 300 trillion dollars and then I looked at the market cap of Bitcoin at the time it was I don't know what it was but it was definitely lower than today and even at a trillion dollars I thought wow if real estate is 300 times as large as Bitcoin and Bitcoin is a much superior store of value because it's a digital store of value and it's an engineered monetary technology which has one purpose not just only but it serves as independent money right and then I thought wow so here's here's the opportunity for Bitcoin the opportunity

of Bitcoin is not the gold market, it's actually the real estate market plus the gold market and other objects that I use to store value. And then I also went down a rabbit hole of how to integrate Bitcoin into real estate practices or the real estate business model, because I obviously think that Bitcoin is going to absorb the monetary premium that sits in real estate today. And that has some side effects that real estate investors need to deal with yeah i think maybe we start off building on that i definitely want to get into bitcoin eating into the monetary premium of real estate like how how much how big is the delta between the current monetary premium that exists within the asset that is real estate and where will real estate and bitcoin meet in

the middle. But before we get to that, like how did this monetary premium develop in the first place? It is, I believe, the largest store of value asset in the world. People are using it as a store of value all over the place. And when you consider the properties of real estate, which you alluded to earlier, but we can dig into more specifically here, it really doesn't feel like a good store of value when you consider the fact that it's illiquid, it comes with taxes, insurance, maintenance costs, it's susceptible to damage from storms, as we've seen here in the United States the last few weeks with these hurricanes. Why real estate as the go-to store of value for many people across the world over the last century?

Yeah, it's a very good question. Also, when you look into the history of real estate over different time periods in different societies, you basically see that it's a fairly new phenomenon that real estate is used as money, as a store of value in particular. Because historically speaking, it is true that real estate was always tied to wealth. So in Rome, for example, the senators had to own land. So you had to own land in order to be able to be a senator. Also in ancient Greece, to my knowledge, you had to own land in order to vote.

and also in different empires. Also the shogunate system in Japan. Feudal landlords basically took on the major roles within society. So real estate was always tied to wealth. But the way that real estate was evaluated was on its agricultural capacity, not its use as money. And that is something that we can link to 1971 when Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. would abandon the fixed link of the dollar and gold.

And at that point of time, the monetary supply started to increase drastically. And real estate, interestingly, follows the increase of the monetary supply since 1971 on average. So the CAGR, the compound annual growth rate for the M2 money supply in the U.S. is around 6.8%. And the increase in residential housing is about 5.7%. So there's a trend here. Housing follows the increase in the monetary supply. So now the question is why? Obviously, it is also because of scarcity.

So real estate is scarce. And a scarce asset helps to protect purchasing power from inflation because as new monetary units enter the market, existing monetary units lose purchasing power and people are forced to invest. And then the question is, why do people invest in real estate? There are other objects in the world, other assets in the world, like gold, for example, that are scarcer. And in my opinion, it is because of the role that real estate has in repaying debt. So real estate usually is bought with debt. Nobody or at least nobody who is rational within the fiat system would buy real estate 100% cash. People usually have about 20, 30 percent of their own equity and they take financing as well.

And banks create that money that they give out for mortgages and then they charge interest rate on it. So that's a business model, basically. So real estate has taken on a particular role in the fiat system because it allows banks to create new money, give that money out in credit lines for the purchase of real estate, and then people pay back their debt with the cash flow of the real estate. So there's a particular role of real estate within the inflation or a fiat system that has led to its use as the number one store value

or the number one inflation hedge. Yeah. And it's gotten to a point, at least here in the United States, I'm going to call it crisis, but as you mentioned earlier, it's not really an accessible store value for the layman. It's a big theme, particularly post-COVID,

is the inaccessibility, the lack of affordability of housing. millennials people our age are finding it hard to buy their first homes because they're laden with so much student loan debt they're not making as much money in the job market and the the feeling that the ability to own a home for our generation is fleeting at this point where people are becoming convinced that if they can't get a house right now they won't be able to as more people funnel their wealth into these houses, the people with wealth funnel it into homes and real estate.

Yeah, totally. I mean, well, it's difficult because you asked earlier, you were talking about the monetary premium that sits in real estate. And what is meant with the monetary premium is there's utility value in housing. You can live in it or you can rent it out. You can use it for production or you can use it for agricultural capacity. But today it's used as a store of value. So it's used as money.

So the money that's invested in real estate, not because of its utility value, but because it's a scarce asset that is used to hedge against inflation. That is the monetary premium that you alluded to. And it's difficult actually to say how high that monetary premium is. But I was looking into the cost of real estate prior to the fiat system. In the 1940s, the average price of a home in the U.S. was around $4,000, right? Today, it's about $530. So it's very difficult to say what percentage of that is the monetary premium because it is also more expensive to build real estate, obviously. Back in the day, most of the costs for real estate were not the land but the manufacturing costs and labor.

and today land has become increasingly expensive because of its scarcity. But to say exactly what is the percentage of the monetary premium that sits in real estate is difficult because construction costs have gone up with inflation as well. But if you look at the dynamics and you understand that the average price of a home

was around $4,000 in the 40s and today is over half a million dollars, you can pretty much understand to what extent homes have been inflated. Yeah, over 100x at this point, which is pretty insane. Yeah. And I guess this gets to the intersection. It seems like a big problem.

Like I said, many people, particularly millennials, Gen Z, see it as a problem that's running away from them that can never be solved. And you're pretty adamant and convinced that Bitcoin is a way to solve this problem, not only for the end consumer who is inevitably going to buy a house and leverage its utility to house themselves and do other things. Maybe they have land, they want to build a farm or something like that,

but also on the development side to make sure that you can actually build these things and do it in a way that's efficient from an economic perspective and allows you to prevent potential default considering the amount of time it takes from initial capital injection to construction and then eventually finding people to actually live in those homes or those retail commercial real estate properties.

No, for sure, for sure. I quickly maybe just elaborate on why I believe that Bitcoin can make housing affordable over time And then I'll go into details of how real estate developers can utilize Bitcoin to stay competitive and to continuously provide housing to the market. So if you think about it, number one, if you hold Bitcoin as an individual, things become cheaper because Bitcoin is scarcer than the monetary supply. That is quite simple, right? Things become cheaper over time if you hold Bitcoin. And secondly, because Bitcoin is a superior store of value, I can imagine that going forward, especially the generations that you talked about, millennials and generations that came after, they will naturally be inclined, I believe, to prefer using Bitcoin to store value because, you know, there are digital generations and it's more accessible. and that most likely will result in people preferring bitcoin to store value over real

estate which results in less demand for real estate and then thirdly and this is also something that will connect to your question as a real estate developer you have a problem so because of inflation yes the nominal value of real estate increases over time because of increasing demand but the construction costs go up as well so what you usually do as a landlord you increase rents to increase your profits because if construction maintenance costs go up you want to make up for that and you increase rents but by utilizing bitcoin as a store of value by incorporating bitcoin as a store of value within the real estate world real estate developers and landlords are less dependent on raising rents to counterbalance inflation and i think it's a pretty

good example of how bitcoin can benefit both the entrepreneur and the consumer at the same time And something that I believe is a sensible strategy is what you just mentioned is that, of course, you can use Bitcoin to build maintenance reserves if you own property already. And you can also refinance that property to buy Bitcoin. What I believe is actually a very good strategy is that for every new development project, a good idea is to include Bitcoin in the financing of the project. So let's say you want to finance a project and you take an additional loan amount and you buy Bitcoin immediately and you hold Bitcoin in the same entity that's going to construct a real estate project. Once the real estate project is finished after five years, Bitcoin will most likely have Bitcoin will most likely gone through a halving cycle. Right. Because we know, historically speaking, every four years, the amount of Bitcoin that's being distributed to whoever successfully orders and adds a block to the time chain halves. And with less supply and actually demand that stays the same, price goes up over time.

And because price goes up over time, demand goes up, which then creates this speculative bubble in the bull markets that we know. And this really helps the real estate developer to protect against downside risk. Because what often happens is, and I know I can share a personal story. So recently we finished a project after seven years, but we wanted to finish it after five years. So the problem is once we had the financing from the bank, we had a window, a building window of five years. But it took us a little bit longer. It also meant we needed more money because in that time frame, because of COVID, the cost for wood went up significantly, or like 40 percent. That meant the construction cost of that project went up.

So we had to go back to the bank. We had to ask for more money. we had to take out more money at higher interest rates and that cost us a lot basically but ideally if you would have bought bitcoin when we started the project after five years those bitcoin would have increased in purchasing power and we could have ideally lent against those bitcoin at a favorable interest rate that we would have maybe been able to fix at the beginning of that loan and we would have protected us against that downside because bitcoin increases in purchasing power over time as the monetary supply increases. And that would have allowed us to lend against that Bitcoin and then fund further construction. And so Bitcoin can really help you as a real

estate developer to protect yourself against downside risk and to build credit worthiness within your company, which is very, very important in the real estate business because it's so capital intense. Sup freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at Unchained. Unchained is here building the Bitcoin bank of the future. It starts with their vault product, a two or three collaborative custody vault, which allows you to hold two keys. Unchained holds one. On top of this, they're building incredible products. They're trading products. You want to buy and sell Bitcoin. You can do it through their trading desk. If you buy Bitcoin directly into cold storage, if you don't want to sell your Bitcoin, you can borrow against your Bitcoin with

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been a theme that people are trying to figure out how to crack the nut and get it across the finish line it seems like the narrative is definitely gaining momentum but up until this point in terms of being able to execute on this strategy it's it's very few people and um sort of not there yet but i imagine it's going to happen it just makes too much sense and that last thing you just said like once this becomes normalized whether when it comes to like bringing down costs we can get to like material cost and obviously the price of constructing these houses and these real estate development projects has gone up over time and not only that but the quality of the materials used to build

these projects has gone down so if the prices go up quality go down we can talk about how this strategy over time can get us back to a place where we're using more quality inputs to actually build more sustainable housing that that lasts for centuries instead of decades but particularly on the cost of capital side like once it's become normalized do you think that this will allow developers like yourselves and then consumers buying these houses to access lower cost of capital because you have this Bitcoin portion living within the entity, whether it's the entity that builds the project or the mortgage and loan that you take out to buy the end product ultimately.

Yeah, well put and good question because I believe so, yes. So as you mentioned, there are more and more real estate developers that understand the benefits of Bitcoin and also the superiority of Bitcoin as a store of value towards Bitcoin. So this is just something that is going to happen. So in my opinion, the speculation that is currently happening in real estate, it's going to move over to Bitcoin and Bitcoin will grow as a store of value much faster than real estate. and real estate will return to being a regular business where you provide a service to the market and you receive rent in return. And if you think about it, so there are two systems right now existing in parallel. So there's the fiat system, that's a system of inflation. And then there's Bitcoin, which is a disinflationary system, meaning there's less new supply. And the way

that technology works, technology is naturally deflationary, meaning things become cheaper over time and bitcoin is just able to basically work within the natural frame of the universe really or economics and the fiat system which is totally anti the natural state of of the universe of economics or of humanity works the other way around so what i'm trying to say is the following If I'm a real estate developer and I only work within the fiat system, I have an incentive basically to provide a service to the market that goes down in quality because if I want to increase my profit margin, I will use building materials that are of less quality. I will build something that is cheap because money loses value. Whereas with Bitcoin, because Bitcoin increases in purchasing power, I'm not really dependent on increasing my profit margin all the time. I can really rely on the increase in purchasing power of Bitcoin.

And that will allow us as a real estate developer and as an asset manager to benefit of the increase in purchasing power of Bitcoin and provide better and more quality housing to the market. But that will take time, though, because right now, I have to be honest, the market is very, very tough. So if I would be sitting here and if I would just say, you know, things are great and it's so easy to integrate Bitcoin into the existing business structure, I would be lying because things have become so expensive in the building environment that it's just very tough right now to just survive. In Europe, at least, that's the case. And it's also from what I hear from North America. So it's going to take time. I think it's going to take at least five years to a decade because first we have to acquire the Bitcoin and then the Bitcoin have to increase in purchasing power. So this is nothing that can happen within a few years.

But if you have a long-term vision, which you should have as a real estate developer, utilizing Bitcoin and benefiting from its increase in purchasing power should allow you to provide better products for the market, which would also mean that the consumer benefits. This rip was also brought to you by good friends at ZapRite. If you're a Bitcoiner and run a business or an independent contractor, you should be accepting Bitcoin as payment. If not you, then who? If we believe that fiat is systemically fragile and is a risk, the rails that that currency runs on are a risk as well. You need to begin accepting Bitcoin as soon as possible. Invest in the future of your business. Create a redundant rail by accepting Bitcoin as payment using ZapRite and reduce risk for your business. I've done this for my business here at TFTC. We use ZapRite. It allows you to easily create invoices, payment links, or connect e-commerce

stores, connect your wallets or custodial accounts, and be set up in minutes. We can also connect our bank accounts, our Stripe accounts, our Square accounts to accept fiat as well. The time is now, freaks. The fiat system is fragile. Invest in the infrastructure that de-risks the future. Invest in yourself. Bitcoin payments with ZapRite. Go to zaprite.com slash tftc to get forty dollars off their annual subscription zapwrite.com slash tftc forty dollars off and that's a that there was one thing you mentioned in your baltic honey badger um presentation that stuck out to me and it was sort of in passing uh and i think it you mentioned the context of bitcoin which is uh we think these four-year cycles repeat and it seems like

post halving we could be heading into another bull market but that could be tempered due to the macro environment it seems like right now the macro environment is getting a little shaky which could affect both real estate and bitcoin not only from the economic perspective well definitely from the economic perspective now also we have news out of china this week that they're going to begin uh taxing uh foreign investments a lot of which for chinese citizens that are getting money outside the the borders of china has gone into foreign real estate and i guess uh sort of putting you on the spot here but if we do have a deterioration in macro um fundamentals moving forward like it could negatively affect both the housing market and

maybe not negatively affect Bitcoin, but sort of dampen its potential upside in this bull market. What are your thoughts on that? Why did you say that specifically in Riga a couple months ago? Yeah. So the reason why I said that I believe this Bitcoin bull market might not be as great as we want it to be is because of what you mentioned, geopolitical risk and macro risk. I think at this point, the fiat system has reached a point where nation states need to be very careful how much money they inject into the system because of the risk that is involved with injecting new money into the system, predominantly inflation. So we can maybe liken this decade or we can compare this decade to the 70s. In the 70s, we had high inflation and interest rates were ramped up to 18%. So in 1981, the interest rates were about 19%, and that led to a crisis, a liquidity crisis.

So it's really difficult right now. On the one side, within the fiat system, you need to dampen inflation, but you need to provide liquidity to the system, because otherwise the system will basically die. And I don't really know what people are going to do, but they need to do it in a way that is sensible, because around 25% of the dollars in existence were funneled into the market during COVID, and we still deal with those problems. So I think people need to be aware of nation states needing to have, you know,

if we compare it with interest rates post-08, interest rates probably need to be above 3% to maintain inflation below, I'd say, you know, I'm not talking about CPI inflation, I'm talking about monetary supply increase between you know maybe like three to seven percent or something like that and and then also answering the first part of your question you are absolutely correct so if you work in real estate my personal opinion is you need to get into bitcoin otherwise your business will most likely die like it's just

that simple in my opinion because i can see what's happening around me people are going bankrupt left and right and things are going to get worse i think because bitcoin is just such an accessible store of value. And just think about conversations you have. Conversations I had two, three years ago, people would come up to me and say, you know, Leon, I saved some money and I want to buy real estate. What would you recommend me to do? I'd always say buy Bitcoin. I always said that. And people said, you know, you're totally nuts. I don't want to have a secure store of value. And now if I talk about millennials and people that are younger, I'd say 90% of them, They actually asked me, how can I buy Bitcoin? And because of that, I believe that the demand

for real estate will not be the same like it was since 2008. Because after 2008, interest rates were so low that it was very easy to get financing and buy real estate and the nominal value of real estate increased so drastically. But that is changing now because interest rates need to to stay, as I mentioned, above 3% or 2.5% to tamper inflation. And that makes real estate inaccessible. So if you work in real estate, just be aware there will be most likely less demand. And there's a new technology that is threatening your business model because your business model is dependent on people using the asset of real estate to store value. And because there's a better store where you know that business model is actually kind of broken so if you think about

it the real estate business model that existed since 1971 it just doesn't exist anymore how many people in your industry do you think realize this that is a good question um probably few very few um i wouldn't be able to say you know five percent ten percent but i'm gonna try and take a guess maybe yeah two three percent something like that i've got a bunch of friends in commercial real estate uh developers i don't really broach the subject with them they know i'm the bitcoin guy but i don't want to be too pushy they everybody likes to think that they know their domain and who am i to come in and say hey maybe you should be allocating to bitcoin um but and thinking about injecting it into your credit structures but

do you think the overall perception within real estate globally maybe you can only speak to the markets that you're in but is that oh no things are going to go back to the way they were i mean it's like fish and water we've had the market dynamics um act in such a way for for so long that many people have this, maybe not cognitive dissonance, but just expectation that we're going through cycles. And yes, there may be times when interest rates are high and it's hard to sell and hard to build, but things always go back to normal. Do you think that's where the state of mind is in commercial real estate and real estate development? Yeah, I think so. And I think you can liken the real estate market to the bond market um and the way that i mean it is in the bond market

you know the general idea is you know bonds or governments can't go bankrupt because they can print money that's like you know that's a general thesis um and in real estate there's a similar mindset people think you know the nominal value of real estate is gonna increase forever because nation states need to print money in order to cope with borrowing costs. But I think the intellectual fallacy that is happening here is, generally speaking, that's not wrong. Yes, the nominal value of real estate will continue to increase if new monetary supply is provided to the market. But then the thing is, what is the unit of account you're using, right? If you're Using the dollar as your unit of account, you are making a mistake.

I think you need to use Bitcoin as your unit of account because it's a scarcer asset and thus it serves as a better unit of account also because its issuance shadow is known. So how can somebody, sometimes I ask myself, I mean, it took me some years as well to make that mental switch. So I'm not criticizing anyone. But now after being down the Bitcoin rabbit hole for a few years, I ask myself sometimes, Why do people use a unit of account that's losing value and the supply is unknown rather than Bitcoin, which has a known supply and a fixed supply as well? And if you start to look at your real estate portfolio and you measure its wealth in Bitcoin, you start to understand that it's rapidly losing value against Bitcoin.

And it's losing value very drastically. When I made that switch and I started to look at our real estate portfolio in Bitcoin around four or five years ago, I basically freaked out because I realized, wow, we are losing a lot of purchasing power, a lot of capital, a lot of money, a lot of value here by not having Bitcoin integrated into our real estate portfolio. you and it's one thing to say Bitcoin is a superior store of value and it's another thing to say I want to utilize Bitcoin as a technology because making the step of saying Bitcoin is a superior store of value might be difficult if you worked in the real estate industry for a long time things worked out well you maybe became very wealthy you made good decisions and then you have a cognitive dissonance thinking that you will make good decisions going forward So one thing that's easy to do is use Bitcoin to build maintenance reserves and protect your cash flow from inflation.

That's like something that I can suggest everybody that is a landlord, everybody that owns property to do. That's the first step. But once you go down that rabbit hole, the Bitcoin rabbit hole, and you start to realize it's a better unit of account than the dollar, the idea of real estate is going up in value forever might switch into Bitcoin is going up in value forever and people usually think real estate is a good investment they might think real estate is a liability once they understand that Bitcoin increases

in purchasing power much faster yeah I mean that's like a big meme in the Bitcoin world which is like don't buy real estate by Bitcoin for all the reasons more liquid digital very scarce no maintenance costs no insurance no property taxes and that's always been the question in my mind as a millennial with a growing family i'd like to have like a forever house and i guess that's the question uh that many bitcoiners are asking it's like uh the big meme particularly

i think it's become more pronounced in the last year it's like don't don't buy rent but i would like to own a house eventually and i guess that's just like the calculus that i'm trying to pull out of you is is when does it makes when will it make sense to buy a house for a bitcoiner versus rent and um how should you be looking at your property again i think that's what people really need to understand is that this is somewhat of a consumable good like you you live in it you um have wear and tear you literally consume the materials that it's made of just by walking on them and opening and shutting doors leads to wear and tear it creates maintenance you're consuming those goods and um i don't know it's a question i think about a lot

is like because we were renting right now making the decision to forgo a massive down payment at high interest rates on what i deem to be a somewhat inflated asset in real estate particularly here in austin texas uh and looking forward i do want a house that i own and i live in for for decades with my family it's like yeah what factors go into that decision in your mind yeah um i'll answer that question shortly because i've been thinking about it as well um but i want to first talk about leverage just quickly because most real estate investors say okay bitcoin is interesting but i need a lot of capital which i don't have um and it's easier to buy real estate because i get a so I can buy real estate on leverage. They basically say real estate is a better investment

because of the leverage but mathematically speaking that's actually not true because if you think about the return on a real estate project on an annual base, the cap rate, I just say right now it's probably about the year-on-year increase that you can make on your your money is probably around 2.5% to 3%. So let's say you have 5x leverage because you usually use borrowed money to buy real estate. 3 times 5, that's 15% a year. Bitcoin is growing right now at a kegger. If we take the last four years, of course, it's changing. Also, in the future, it's going to dampen down as the market cap of Bitcoin increases. But right now, it's growing over 50% a year in purchasing power. So even if you buy real estate on leverage, Bitcoin still

performs better it's just something that i want to put out there and if you don't believe me just go through the numbers and calculate it yourself it's actually going to blow your mind how fast putting money and saving money in bitcoin is outperforming investing in real estate and then to answer your question so i've been thinking about it myself as well and i was thinking what is the utility value that housing has for me right now i'm thinking the opportunity cost of putting money in real estate is too high because i can put it into bitcoin and then i made the decision once my bitcoin stack is large enough that i can lend against it to then have equity that allows me to go to a bank and say look i have x amount of equity can

you also give me a loan and then i would buy a house so i would basically not sell my stack i would lend against my stack and take that money as equity go to a bank and say here is my equity x amount of money and please give me a loan as well and then i would i would buy a house so i would only buy a house if it does not endanger my stack that's how i personally look at it yeah and ideally you wouldn't even have to lend against your stack take that cash to the bank as equity you just take the bitcoin to the bank and say hey i've got this much bitcoin i'll do collateralize this this 30-year mortgage with some of this is that preferable or am i uh thinking yes yeah i was yeah you you are correct sorry it's actually true you're correct that that is that is preferable

and there are services that offer that already that offer that already and in the u.s i think mostly right um so that is even a better idea because then you don't have to deal you know with with different financial institutions whoever gives you favorable interest rates at this amount of time, I think a Bitcoin-backed mortgage has higher interest rates than a regular mortgage because there's not a lot of competition. But I think with time, competition is going to increase as well. And with more competition, hopefully, interest rates on Bitcoin-backed loans are going to go down a little bit as well. I don't know what your opinion is on that, but I hope at least that competition will drive down interest rates a bit over time. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense.

I mean, just think of we're down the hall from Unchained and their lending, that's just purely using bitcoin as collateral over collateralizing um a loan to get dollars the interest rate that they're um offering considering the the risk profile the credit product is i think obscene it's higher than it should be um people have to understand it's not unchained dictating that's people providing the dollars to the lending desks that really dictate that that um hurdle rate in terms of cost of capital that they need to give out to end consumers businesses um and when you consider the risk profile of the actual lending product it's bitcoin with a 40 ltv escrowed in a two or three multi-sig wallet that cannot be re-hypothecated like it nothing's risk-free but

it's as close to risk-free as you can get and so uh one would think that given the profile of the credit product the interest rate would be lower than the riskier credit product products like mortgages um simply not there yet because liquidity hasn't come to these deaths but i think it will eventually not only for bitcoin collateralized us dollar loans euro loans whatever it is but eventually these mortgage products as well which goes into the timing of all this and you alluded to it earlier once the strategy um is put into play it's probably going to take four to five years for it to be validated in the market because you need to go through a bitcoin cycle to basically prove out that this is long-term advantageous for a real estate developer or

somebody taking out a mortgage which gets to the question of timing like when you when you think there's a tipping point um of real estate developers mentioning oh we need to really hedge our our risk here with bitcoin um and conversely on the consumer side if i'm getting mortgage i want to make sure i have bitcoin in that as well um this is 5 10 15 year trend or you imagine there could be a scenario at some point in the medium term that that acts as a catalyst to to really rush people into this yeah um i mean it's difficult to say but if you look at real estate and bitcoin if you compare both assets so real estate is the number one store of value in the world and it's the number one type of collateral that's being used.

And you just explained why Bitcoin is actually a better type of collateral because it has less risk. So I believe that it's not just the store of value function that real estate is taking on but it's also the collateral function that Bitcoin will most likely take over. So that's why I call Bitcoin digital real estate because it does allow you to store value and it does allow you to use Bitcoin as collateral. Those are two functions that are fulfilled by real estate at this point. And Bitcoin is just a better digital option.

And the question is really how fast is Bitcoin going to grow in value because once Bitcoin grows in value significantly, lenders will basically realize that including Bitcoin into their credit product is beneficial for them because it allows them to grow their assets much faster right and also they'll understand bitcoins function as a store of value and they understand it's functioning better as a store of value than real estate and it needs a proven track record for that because even though real estate has only quote-unquote been used as a store of value since 1971 that is a longer time period than bitcoin is in existence and most financial institutions today. They follow what is called the historical school. So in the 19th century,

there was something called the Methodenstreit, and it was a fight between Austrian economists and German economists. And the Austrian economists believe there are certain guiding principles. For example, a principle that Copernicus, who was a monk, came up with in in 1517, and he said, there's the quantity theory of money, meaning if you increase the monetary supply, individual monetary units lose purchasing power. So the Austrians and Karl Menger, who published a book in 1871 called Principles of Economics, they basically said there are principles that can guide economic policies. And then the Germans, the historical school said, there are no first principles.

We need to look at statistics. we need to look at data and we can't evaluate things on principles we just need to look how things move in the market and that type of thinking is still the predominant thinking in the fiat world so what i'm trying to say is i believe we need i'd say maybe another 5 10 15 20 years of bitcoin having a track record for people to trust bitcoin because personally i trust bitcoin because i looked at the code. I understood how the technology works. I understood that Satoshi was able to combine different technological breakthroughs in cryptography and computer science in a way nobody was before. But that is something that somebody who went to, let's say, a more Keynesian

type of education and who was basing his thoughts in the historical German school of economics has problems with and they want data they want data they want statistics and they want a proven track record so i think it's going to take one to two decades but i think in one to two decades the whole world will know that bitcoin is a superior store of value to real estate and by judging by how fast people in the building environment around me that two years ago thought that bitcoin is not more than maybe a nice collectible or interesting speculation are already understanding that Bitcoin is a superior store of value to real estate, judging by that, I think things can change very quickly, but not as quickly as we like.

I'd say five to 10 years would already be quick. If you think of the lifespan of humanity, five to 10 years is nothing, you know? No, no. I mean, five to 10 years. I've been in Bitcoin for 11 years now. It feels like a flash. With this in mind, how big of an advantage do you think first movers with this particular strategy have over others? What type of head start does acting on this strategy today, as opposed to five years from now, provide real estate developers, lenders, people putting structured credit products together?

Oh, I think it's huge. And a good example, just look at MicroStrategy. So five years ago, six years ago, the market cap was hovering around a billion dollars. I don't know the market cap today. It should be somewhere between 30 to 50 billion dollars. I don't know. I didn't look into it. But judging by the stock price, I think, and the outstanding shares, it should be something around that.

So just think about it. Within like four years, Michael Saylor improved the financial health and the position of its company tremendously. So it's very important to act quickly, in my opinion, because Bitcoin is monetizing so fast. So processes prior to the Internet took much longer, right? So the industrialization of Germany came 30 years after the UK or 20 years after the UK. And also telephone lines took decades to be used globally. But the Internet changed that dynamic. So changes now happen very quickly and they happen globally all at the same time.

So I believe that is important to be able to act quickly. And that's why it is not important, in my opinion, to just buy Bitcoin with the rental income. You actually need to take on debt because the real estate business is a very debt-intense business anyway. So then the question is, what do you use the debt for? Do you use it to construct new properties or do you use it to buy Bitcoin? And within the last three years, we did not take on any new projects. Sure, we are finishing everything we started. But even though we had to use a lot of the capital that was allocated to Bitcoin for our construction projects because things got so expensive, we took the decision, focus on Bitcoin right now.

Because Bitcoin is monetizing so fast, you'll be very angry that you did not in 10 years. And I say that as somebody who did not act as I should when I first learned about Bitcoin because I dismissed it because of my ego. To be very honest with you, I was arrogant and now I know better. And if you learn about Bitcoin, I think it's worthwhile to act fast. Thank God you brought up MicroStrategy because they've accumulated now more than 1% of the total Bitcoin supply that will ever exist. And it seems pretty apparent that they've started a trend, particularly in public equities markets of companies leveraging capital markets to accumulate more Bitcoin, increase their sats per share. in that alone as a demand driver again one company accumulating one percent of the overall supply who knows if others will be able to do that moving forward that's the advantage micro strategy

provided itself by being a first mover with the corporate balance sheet balance sheet treasury strategy um i think that's going to pick up in public equities then you think of you know if this trend has a tipping point within real estate markets like how much bitcoin does that pull off the market you think about just these different demand drivers for bitcoin corporate treasuries for publicly traded companies credit structures in the real estate market obviously individuals saving bitcoin for for personal savings sovereign wealth funds getting into bitcoin like how much supply do you think this real estate strategy could pull off the market? And more importantly,

for an extended period of time, because if you're putting it in real estate credit structures, those are long duration credit products. And so you're pulling a lot of supply off the market for decades, in many cases. Oh, 100%. I believe that next to bitcoin being used in the equity market as you just described and next to southern wealth funds preferring bitcoin over foreign currencies or derivatives or bonds i think the next big wave of liquidity that's coming into bitcoin is from real estate and i judged it based on some statistics that i learned from from relay relay is a swiss swiss broker and they told me that in the last quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year over so it was between 50

to 70 percent of the otc volume of the over-the-counter volume came from real estate investors who had liquidity and they were reluctant to invest that into the real estate market because of higher interest rates so real estate basically became not as interesting anymore as an investment and then they gravitated towards Bitcoin because Bitcoin also serves as a store of value and the dynamics that are happening in real estate are similar to the dynamics happening in the world of Bitcoin because a real estate developer generally knows

that the fiat system is inflationary. So they understand if I incur debt in an inflationary fiat currency and I buy a scarce asset, real estate, that hedges that money against inflation, I can use that asset and the cash flow of that asset to pay back the debt over time that decreases in value while the property increases in value. And if you think about it, of course, Bitcoin has no cash flow. It doesn't need to because it's increasing in purchasing power year on year so fast.

But it has a very similar dynamic where if you take on debt in an inflationary fiat currency and you put it into Bitcoin, or you generally speaking take fiat currency which is a debt-based currency anyway and you put it into bitcoin you protect yourself against that inflation so that dynamic is very very similar and that's why i believe that real estate investors will naturally gravitate towards bitcoin and the reason they did not from let's say 2009 to 2021 was because of the low interest rate environment they had no reason to look into bitcoin because money was so cheap and real estate was going up in value so fast that they made a killing they made tons of money and they were not even paying attention to bitcoin but now as the pain increased and the real estate market

also felt the pain of the fiat system because of higher construction costs um they had to look into bitcoin right and i think like 70 or 50 of the otc volume going into bitcoin from real estate investors i think is a pretty good indicator of what we can expect that is that's a very good data point and if you think about it too like the timing of that rotation because that that was i don't want to call it miraculous but um for the longest time bitcoin is being described as this asset that only goes up in value um if we have easy monetary policy low interest rates qe a bunch of money printing which historically the first 13 12 13 years of bitcoin like was the case and bitcoin obviously did go up significantly in value but i think one of the incredible things

in the last two three years is the fact that interest rates went up to five and a half percent and bitcoin hit all-time highs with interest rates at that level and talking about this data point from rely out of switzerland like if you think about the real estate investors that funneled um their profits into bitcoin q4 last year q1 this year i mean if they did it around this time last year they're up more than 100 if they did at the beginning of the year they're still up 60 and that that small track record very short track record but those are numbers that stand out to these investors like holy crap i just doubled my money um by funneling it into bitcoin i just increased my money by 60 by funneling into bitcoin at the beginning of this

year and i have to imagine that creates somewhat of a viral effect of people in real estate like look what i did funneled the profits into bitcoin when it didn't make sense to allocate to real estate and i'm doing very well with that particular trade and they're definitely telling their buddies and thinking i want to do this again and so thinking about like timing tipping point like who knows we could be closer than people imagine if if you have virality like is it is it a big braggadocious industry like are do you think those developers are going yeah look what i did you're missing out yeah no i mean you it's correct yes it's an industry where people like to tell each other no i did a good investment you know the let's say people sit together at lunch or

having drinks after work and it's usually something that people do you know they tell you know if they made a good investment I guess so very true and there's also something that is happening with everyone that happened with myself so once you put your money into bitcoin and it increases in value so fast you have to make a decision what do I do now do I diversify quote-unquote out of bitcoin back into a fiat-based asset or do you understand that bitcoin is going to continue to increase in purchasing power and then suddenly you say oh wow i can sell other assets maybe as well to have more liquidity so these people that we are talking about i could imagine in the future that they also say you know what i'm not just taking profits i'm going to sell

some real estate because it's a better use of my capital to put it into bitcoin and that's going to create a bit of selling pressure obviously i don't know how many people are going to do that but that's going to happen on an individual level and as that happens people will understand and it's going to become part of culture to understand that it's easier to save in bitcoin than having to hassle to invest in in real estate because it's more tax efficient i mean it's depending on the jurisdiction i'm going to go through some jurisdictions in the u.s as far as i know if If you hold it longer than one year, it's not personal income tax, but it's capital gains tax. So in Germany, if you hold it longer than one year, selling Bitcoin is tax-free.

Taking a loan against your Bitcoin is tax-free. You obviously have to pay interest rates on the loan. But if you want to sell the Bitcoin or if you take a loan against it, it's tax-free. So it's also a tax-efficient asset. Its value cannot be captured so quickly because if you think about it, if the fiat system is going to continue its downward trajectory governments are faced with a problem how can we get more money and they have two ways i mean they have different ways but two dominant ways they can tax you or they can obviously they can print money but they can tax

you or they can basically confiscate your wealth and how are you going to confiscate bitcoin right you you can just leave a jurisdiction with your bitcoin it cannot be confiscated so easily and so there are some benefits of bitcoin next to it being such a good store of value meaning it's such a good way of protecting capital because it's just such a good asset that cannot be stolen and here right now in europe i mean i mean things are going a very negative way I don't know what's going to happen but I think people understand that they need to save their value in an asset that cannot be destroyed by a bomb I just have to say it as easily as that because I've talked with many people that came over to Germany mainly from Ukraine and there are two

type of individuals that I talked to so there are young individuals millennials and they mostly saved some of their capital in Bitcoin they just took their wealth with them the ones over 30 over 35, they usually own real estate. The real estate is now gone. So I think it's important to understand that the benefits of Bitcoin not only lie in its supply not easily being tampered with, and it's absolutely a scarcity, but also its mobility as a digital asset. It just is a pure store of value in a digital world. Yeah. And I think that, I mean, mean the geopolitical situation and individual because i've seen it um here in the states i know i know many individuals who were doing the airbnb game where they buy property and

rent it out airbnb and it just became too much of a hassle um and too much of a risk considering the cash flows producing particularly post-covid and they decided to liquidate their airbnb portfolios and just buy bitcoin and as you mentioned that's happening in other places and i think that's a trend that will continue especially as i mean you think of like the laws too like not only do you have this sort of consumable good it comes with maintenance cost tax but post-covid here in the u.s i'm not sure if it happened in europe but you had these eviction laws where you couldn't evict a tenant um and they could potentially just hold you hostage and stay in your property and not pay your rent and there was nothing you could do about it that's

extreme risk where you have all this capital outlaid and you're literally getting no cash flow because the government came out with a law during emergency times that said you can't evict your tenants and so you're sort of shit out of luck there and literally going to lose your money in your investment because the government just came in and said hey you can't kick these people out you can't make money essentially um and again going back to i know you touched on earlier you can't put um a stark number but like the decrease of that premium 300 trillion dollars in real estate assets globally like if you had to ballpark it like at the end of the day when bitcoin's fully monetized real estate has been demonetized down to its utility value like how big do you think

the overall real estate market is globally in today's dollars obviously we're going to print a bunch you have wittgenstein's ruler yeah if we were to try to calculate in today's dollars yeah i was about to say i mean the nominal value of real estate is most likely going to continue to increase because nation states need to create additional currency to cope with borrowing costs. But if we think about today's dollars and we just compare Bitcoin and real estate, I mean, real estate should be between 5% to 10% of what it is now, maybe 15% to 20%. And Bitcoin should be 300 to 600 times larger than it is today, in my opinion. So Bitcoin is a 300 to 600 trillion asset, because if you think about the money that also sits in

bonds, the money that sits in art, the money that sits in golds, I mean, the money that sits in equity will most likely continue to sit there because equity next to being used as a store value, they have an investment component. So I'm not going to talk about the money that sits in equities, but I personally believe that the money that sits in bonds, the money that sits in real estate, or most of the money that sits in real estate, 80%, the money that sits in art as well, and the money that sits in precious metals, that should really sit in Bitcoin. So I could say, you know,

real estate should be a 10 to 30 or 15 to 30 maximum 40, 50 trillion dollar asset because there is still, I mean, if people are wealthy and they want to acquire a house and they subjectively are willing to pay a premium because of its location, for example, you know, on the beach in Miami,

they will do that. So real estate will still be expensive in certain locations, but Bitcoin should be 300 to 600 trillion asset and real estate should be 15 to 30, maximum 40, 50 trillion asset. 40, 50 is a lot, right? But 15 to 30 sounds more reasonable in my opinion. If you talk about the utility value of real estate. This is going to be scary for a lot of people, particularly anybody in real estate listening to this but why should people want this to happen particularly real estate developers yeah first of all maybe what's going to happen now is very similar to what happened 150 years ago when the industrial revolution caused monarchs to basically lose their dominant position in society

because people were making money not with agriculture but with the different industries And so today, if you are a wealthy individual within the fiat system, just be aware that the paradigm shift that Bitcoin is bringing to the real estate industry is probably going to impoverish you similar to how the monarchs were impoverished 150 years ago in Europe through the Industrial Revolution. I think that's like a natural process, a natural process that will happen. and for the consumer because now we have to think we've talked quite a lot about the perspective of an investor or of a developer if we take the perspective of any consumer of an individual housing is going to become cheaper and housing is going to become more affordable because at this point of time housing is very very expensive and that drives up the cost of living and also because real estate is the number one store value and it's inaccessible a lot of people cannot take

credit and to not be able to take credit in an inflationary system is obviously not good because you need to be able to borrow to keep up with the rate of inflation so bitcoin is going to make housing more affordable but also by replacing real estate as the dominant type of collateral it can help individuals in this in the shift from a fiat onto a bitcoin based system to be able to take credit. On a Bitcoin-based system, taking credit is a different story because if you think about it, debt will actually increase in purchasing power over time. Because if you take on debt denominated in Bitcoin, it's going to increase in purchasing power over time. So you do not want to take debt if it's not necessary. But there will most likely be a transition phase that's going to

take decades. And in that transition phase, it is beneficial to be able to take credit. And Bitcoin allows you to do that because it's accessible and it can be utilized globally yeah when you think of the end state of this trend playing out too for the consumer may not be great for developers particularly if you're a bad developer but for the consumer at the end of the day like this is a cleansing mechanism for the market of people developing real estate and the ones that are survive are the ones that are providing the best product at the end of the day. And so going back to Bitcoin urbanism and how do we build a more beautiful, sustainable, long lasting physical environment, I think this is a natural catalyst for that where you're going to have this transition

and the monetary premium within real estate is going to be demonetized by Bitcoin over time. And then the developers that are still around on the other side of this transition are the ones who are actually providing the best service at the end of the day, building the best buildings, building the best commercial real estate properties that people actually feel comfortable parting ways with Bitcoin to acquire. Exactly. Because if you think about it, there was very little competition so far in real estate because it was easy to make money, to be honest, because there was so much liquidity going into the market that the nominal value of real estate increased so fast that you didn't have to be particularly intelligent to be successful in real estate. You're just basically riding a certain market trend.

And that market trend is reversing because now there's competition. That competition is Bitcoin. And that's tough competition. So as the speculation moves over from real estate into Bitcoin, it's important to utilize Bitcoin to survive that transition phase. This is fascinating. You always make me very bullish. It's like tempered bullishness with not dread, but oh my gosh, it's a massive problem that could cause a lot of negative externalities as we transition. But overall, I think it's equal parts exciting because you think about the potential if you're holding Bitcoin for its value to rise. Equal parts exciting and then equal parts almost dismaying because it's like, how many lives and businesses is this going to disrupt?

But I think anybody listening to this that's in real estate should take what you're saying to heart and really think about the credit structures, particularly in the incorporation of Bitcoin into your business flow very seriously. because if you think that you are a competent real estate developer and you want to survive this transition, like we said earlier, the earlier you start incorporating these strategies into your business, the higher the likelihood that you will survive in the long term. And while it may be a bit dismaying to think about the demonetization of the asset that you've built your business around, you do have a way to create a soft landing for yourself and your business if you take action.

Exactly. And that's very important because if you think about it, there are these cycles that happen all the time in human history. They are linked to various things, but you can link them to inflation, meaning that currencies usually inflate to a point where they collapse. That also means societal collapse. And for the first time in history, and I think that's pretty exciting we have an asset that can protect people and that's why it's important what you are doing and you tell people basically that this asset exists it can protect people and businesses from societal collapse so in the past societal collapse that followed inflation always meant people had to rely on foreign currencies or gold right but using gold as a store of various

difficult if it's illegal because for example in Germany when we had the hyperinflation in Weimar, in the Weimar Republic from 1919 until 1923, people were not allowed to hold gold and that basically meant there was no asset in the economy that protected people from inflation and from societal collapse and what happened after we know. So now for the first time in history the cycle that is repeating all the time can hopefully be broken by bitcoin because bitcoin can really allow people to protect themselves and it can also protect them from the lies of central bankers because central bankers usually use a crisis to their advantage by saying oh the crisis happened because of blah blah blah blah blah usually they pinpoint to an enemy on foreign soil you know that

that is responsible for the crisis, but now people actually see you are responsible for the crisis and they understand it because there's an asset that has a different dynamic with a capped supply and a non-issuing shadow

that is basically a theory that is proving itself to be a better monetary system than the existing fiat system and the inflationary system that we've lived through hundreds and thousands of years. So it's really an interesting point

for humanity. here yeah exciting time to be alive seriously if you're in real estate take leon's words to heart i've got friends that i'm definitely going to send this episode to that i'm thinking of that are in real estate and it is like a big jump bitcoin is scary and like to your point about the central bankers lying was hilarious literally yesterday and neil kashkari coming out saying that bitcoin is essentially worthless and this is the same man who four years ago went on 60 minutes and admitted that the federal reserve has infinite cash to uh to deploy into the market it's like what asset is really worthless here and something that is literally infinite or

something that is extremely scarce perfectly scarce 21 million um yeah interesting times thank you for all the work that you're doing i think the and you mentioned it in your prog speech it's been a tough couple years with the the bitcoin bear cycle and interest rates being high in real estate um and it's been a long slog uh but things are looking brighter on the other side yeah yeah no thank you also for yeah for giving me the platform to share my ideas and for your work and spreading the gospel of Bitcoin, so to say. And I'm looking forward to the bull market the last three years where a lot of work,

but I'm certain that things will pay off. I am as well. With that, is there any bold prediction or idea that you have in the realm of Bitcoin, real estate? I mean, I think your ideas in real estate are contrarian and many people will disagree with them, But like any ideas, we'll just throw it out there, for Bitcoin and real estate that you have, predictions that you have that you think most people would disagree with? Interestingly, that, yeah, I mean, people disagree with most of what I say within the realm of real estate, at least.

But I have no particular theory that I can come up with now. But I have to say that most of the things that I say, people usually disagree with, but not the Bitcoiners, of course. And I pay attention to the Bitcoiners because I view Bitcoiners as some of the smartest people that I've literally ever met. So I take the criticism, whether it's constructive or negative, from the Bitcoin circles very serious. Obviously, I take criticism also from the world of real estate serious because there are some individuals that are really good business men and women that have experience. but um yeah i mean i'm yeah but nothing in particular that comes to my mind no yeah i think i think the uh the real estate industry probably disagrees a lot of what you're saying but again cognitive dissonance is like no no my business is not in a systemically

weak position due to the demonetization of the asset that it's built on but um hopefully people wake up i think this conversation will help anybody out there in real estate unlock some some insights into how they can prepare for the demonetization that is already underway um so thank you again for all the work that you're doing where can people find out more about what you're building you're writing a book what can they expect that to come out? Hopefully Q1 or Q2 next year. I'm really taking my time with this. I'm having a team now actually that is helping me with putting together graphs, tables, and things like that. So I'm really taking the time to present this information in a digestible way. And if you want to follow my

process, I have a newsletter on leonvankum.substack.com where I share a monthly piece where I go deep into my thought process and i do share also um things that i read personally if people want to understand why i think the way that i think and you can find me on nostra at leon vancom and still on x of course as well uh what not of course but um i'm on x as well so yeah you can find my stuff there go check it out freaks we're going to link to all this in the show notes leon keep crushing it brother hopefully we can do it again at some point soon

thank you you too peace and love freaks okay