What Bitcoin Did - The End of Globalisation & The Rise of Bitcoin w/ Mark Moss

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Mark Moss is an entrepreneur, investor, and host of the Mark Moss Show and Market Disruptors. In this episode, we discuss why Bitcoin could 10x over the next five years as well as the political and financial cycles converging to drive massive change. We also get into the collapse of global institutions like the World Economic Forum, the role of AI and Bitcoin in reshaping money and power structures, why open-source AI could decentralise innovation, and how Bitcoin might become the default money for autonomous AI agents. Finally, we explore why stock market valuations may be more fragile than they appear and how Bitcoin offers a simpler, sounder alternative for long-term wealth preservation. FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles & https://primal.net/danny Mark Moss: https://x.com/1markmoss THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd CASA: https://casa.io/ LEDGER: https://www.ledger.com/ ANCHORWATCH: https://www.anchorwatch.com/

I think Bitcoin's going to 10x over the next five years. I think it'll be a million dollars. Other nations can get in. They just get in at a higher price or they lose their purchasing power. For people that see this change and think about the world happens for them and not to them. We're not victims. We just have to learn the new game. The game is rigged, but let me just learn how to play the game.

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Yeah, because that's what gives you meaning. That's what gives you meaning. Yeah. So society has trained these people to think that I should save, and one day I can do nothing, so most people think that's the path. And the reason why even like self-help and personal development, those genres get a lot of activity, but most people don't do anything with it because they're not actively trying to improve their life. They're just on this track, right?

So for me, it's like, what do I want my life to look like? If I want a billion dollars, what would I do? Where would I live? What would I do when I wake up? It's all about time freedom, right? But it's not about time freedom. It's about what do I want my life to look like? So for me, like, where do I want to wake up?

Who do I want to wake up with? Do I want to be married? Do I want to have a family? Do I not? Do I want to be single? Like, what would my day look like? Would I work out? Would I be in shape?

Would I be out of shape? Would I be sick? Like, would I do things that give me energy and allow me to use my creativity? Or do I just want to lounge and relax all day? Like, do I want a life of leisure? Or do I want excitement and challenge? Like, at the end of the day, would I be with friends? Like, what do I want my life to look like, right?

So then once I have that clear picture, then I can start to build towards that. Because to the point that you just said, why do billionaires still work? Work gives us meaning. So it's not what most people think they want, because they never thought through this, is they think they want freedom from work.

I think what they really want is they don't want to work for someone else. They want to work on something that's meaningful to them and they can pursue themselves rather than going into an office and working 9 to 5 for someone else and not really seeing the fruits of your labor. So why are those two things, why do they have to be separate? So why can't you work on things that give you meaning in your life and still work for someone else? Because I think you don't get time freedom then. You're at someone

else's whim of where you are and when you're there. So there's a book written, the entrepreneurial myth, the e-myth. Most entrepreneurs work more hours than they would at a normal job. I believe that for sure. So the time freedom is sort of a myth. What do you think? Because like if I think about what I would want my life to be, it would like to be fair, I say this over and over again, this is like a dream job for me. Like, it doesn't feel like a job. I just go to cool places and speak to my friends. Like, it's not a real job in the sense of like I'm not going somewhere at 9 to 5 every day. But if I was like looking at what my life would be, it would be doing something like this, my family in a very comfortable position and spending as much time as I want, which is basically

all the time that I'm not doing this with my family. Like, that's what I want. Right. So let's, let's break that down and isolate it, right? So what you're doing is something that you find fulfillment in and enjoyment so much that it's not like working. It's what you're what you would like to do for fun. Yeah. Great. So that's exactly what people are trying to get to. Now, what you might find interesting is not everybody wants what you're doing.

Of course, yeah. So a lot of people want, I want to have five kids and I want to grow up in a small town. And I want my kids to play Little League Soccer and club soccer. And like, I just want to do that. So for them, your lifestyle sounds terrible. Because I'm traveling too much. Yeah, I don't want to travel all around. I'd rather be a dentist.

Yeah. And just go to my office every day, have all the town as my clientele. raise soccer kids. So it's like, to you, you're doing what you want. That's not what everybody wants. Of course. Now what most people think they want is freedom, but most people don't want freedom because freedom is dangerous. I've been entrepreneur a long time. I've been broke a bunch of times. So most people want dependability or consistency. They want to have the family. They want that they want to know that their bills are going to get paid. So that's the opposite of freedom. Yeah, that's interesting. Because like that's been a shift since I've taken over the podcast and

and like is now new business, all that kind of stuff. Like, you get the additional pressure of like, are the bills going to, like, am I going to be able to invoice these sponsors every month and actually get this money? Like, what happens if that goes away? And you do, there is like a strange balance change where it's like, I'm now only relying on myself. I like that feeling. But I know not everyone likes that feeling.

Not everybody likes that feeling. And I have 12 employees. I have to worry about that they're going to get their bills paid. Yeah. And their kids are going to be able to go to school. Like, I got to worry about that. That's an extra weight. So I would just.

I think if you boiled it down, what I think most people would want is to be in a place where they're financially comfortable and can spend as much time with their family as they want. Like, that seems like a pretty common goal, I think. I would agree. Yeah. But for a lot of people, working 40 hours a week and making enough money to go spend the rest of your, a third of your life with your family is probably the best way to achieve that. Because most entrepreneurs work 24-7. Yeah. Yeah, but I think that's interesting because I totally agree that the vast majority of billionaires probably are still working ridiculous hours.

Like for me, my goal maybe will be different then. Like I would like to at some point work as few hours as possible while still like retaining whatever business. But I want to spend more time than a third of my time in my family. Like that doesn't seem like enough to me. I agree. And so that's what I help people do, which is, okay, great. So because you're able to now control your time, just because you're able to control it, doesn't mean that you can or do.

And so most people, as they make more money, get busier. Now I've got multiple houses I've got to take care of, all these cars that got to take care of. I'm traveling. Like that becomes even busier. Yeah. So then what we want to do is then we want to take all these things that we have to do with your job, my job, et cetera, and how do I create systems?

So all of those things work on autopilot for me. And so then I can get way more done in a fraction of the time. I have leverage, right? So that's the answer, and that's what I try to help people do. So one, figure out what is it I even want? Then how do we leverage systems so my business can grow faster without me being there so that then I can go spend more time with my family doing things? And then how do we keep more of our incomes?

We don't have to go make more money. We just keep more of it. And then how do we grow it even faster? So with a couple of small tweaks, you can grow your wealth three to 500 times faster. with just a couple tweaks without making any more money. And so now I have more time, more money, and it's growing faster. And I can go spend more time, more time, more money, more freedom. Yeah.

That's what everyone wants. That's what everybody wants. I don't think that's what everybody wants, but. It should be. In my opinion. It should be. Unfortunately, most people don't know what they want. Yeah.

They've never taken time to sit there and think about it. And unfortunately, most people aren't willing to put any more work in to, improve that. So this is something we talked about on our last podcast, and I made a statement that I knew Peter was just going to just love to dig into. I know exactly what you're going to say. You know, and the point of that statement, we don't know to repeat it, but the point of that statement was just that, repeat it just so people have context at least. Yeah. So I just said that being broke is sort of like being selfish. But I said it in context of a story. Yeah. And I was saying in con, so that is a very triggering statement. It's very triggering. And in isolation without any, without understanding the context

that was stated in, it's, it's very triggering. But the, but the concept is that we should all be as humans, try to be bringing value to the world. And bringing value to the world is, is solving problems. That's what it is. And back to this AI thing, well, not back to it, but in, in regards to AI, like, there's no world where AI takes all our jobs, because there's no future where humans don't have problems. I don't think there's a future ever where humans don't have problems, right? So as long as we're solving problems. So anyway, I should be learning to increase my skills so I can solve more problems. And in the example I was using, if I helped you move, you'd be like, oh, Mark was, he helped me, I'll help him.

It's like a favor, like an IOU. It's reciprocal. And so, but if I didn't, if I didn't want you to help me move, you say, give me an IOU that I could redeem later. But maybe I could give it to my camera guy, Maricio, and he could take the IOU. That's like what dollars are. Yeah. And so I said, in that sort of context, then you would go, if I stacked up a bunch of I'll use because I helped all my friends move for, a year, you go like, dang, Mark, look at all that work Mark did. He got all these IOUs of like favors.

He's, he's really busting his ass where you have one because you haven't helped anybody. Yeah, right. So in that context, I have all these IOUs because I've helped all these people. You have one IOU because you only helped one person. So in that context, you can go, man, Mark spends all this time helping people, Danny doesn't. And I said, but that's what dollars are. Yeah. And so in that context, you'd go, well, shoot, if I don't have very many dollars, I haven't brought a lot of value to the world. And it's triggering because hard work is not bringing value necessarily, right? Like, I could bust my ass 10 hours a day digging holes or building fences. And that is bringing value. But it's not the same as inventing a brand new personal computer

that gave computers to the whole world or a brand new microchip that allowed AI to be built. Or it's not the same. It's a different level of value. It's a smaller problem for less people. Yeah. And so I know it's triggering, but if we take the time to increase my skills and increase my creativity so I can go see bigger problems and solve bigger problems and bring more value to the world. You just make more money. And I say that back to the point you said, doesn't everybody want that? No, not everybody wants that. They want it. It's just whether they're willing to work to get it. But they're not willing to work. I say that you can have everything that you want. It's on the other side of work. Yeah, I think that's true. But I want to get back into something else we spoke about

on a previous podcast. Because I think this was one of the first ones we did. It was in Miami. It must be like three years ago. It was almost five years. ago. Holy shit. Okay. And you were talking about this kind of like pendulum between centralization and decentralization shifting. And I think probably basically since Trump came in, that's been more pronounced than ever. And it seems now pretty clear. Do you want to go through and explain that thesis? And then I want to get into tariffs and a few other things. It was actually 2021. So I guess that was about four years ago. So the thesis is there's these cycles. And there's a bunch of cycles. There's a your cycles, four-year having cycles, for your presidential cycles, eight-year, 16-year, all these

cycles. But I was looking at this big 250-year political revolution cycle. So we have like this 84-year regime change cycle. So about every 84 years, we get this regime change. And then three of those, three times 84 equals 252, and there's this big political revolution cycle where the world swings from centralization to decentralization. And we went through a bunch of examples. We don't need to go through it. They can go watch that old interview. But we can look back 250 years ago was the American Revolution and the French Revolution in two and fifty years before that was the Protestant Reformation. And both of those were where sort of this centralized governance was rejected.

And we created like a decentralized governance. So, you know, the United States rejected the monarchy and created a republic, right, a decentralized government. 50 independent states, it wasn't 50 at the time. And so at that time in 2021, that was really hard to say because I was like, hey, we're reached peak centralization and the world's going to start going back to decentralization. And of course, at that time, people like, what are you talking about, Mark? Like the world economic form and Klaus Schwab is like taking over the world. The whole world's bending down.

All these countries, including the U.S. are given their sovereignty to the WHO, the World Health Organization, the IMF and the BIS is bigger than they've ever been. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was. But I said, you know, you spent a lot of time at the top of that pendulum swing before it comes back down. And you mentioned Trump. But I actually, I used Trump as sort of the beginning of that pendulum shift. So when he got elected in 2016.

Okay. And it was the same time the UK was doing the Brexit. Yep. And so we had these things happening in the world that was showing the cracks of it. So those were a couple trigger points that I had seen. Now Trump coming back in is continuing that. And so I think, like I said, in 2021, it seemed strange to say that. Like I said, ClauSwob and the Wef, but just I think this week, ClauSwab resigned from the World Economic Forum.

I saw that. I don't really know what happened there. Do you know why he's resigned? Well, I haven't looked in. I think I just saw it yesterday before. I haven't had a chance to dig into that. But I did see that he was being accused of sexual misconduct and things like that. So I don't know what it has to do with.

But the whole thing is breaking apart. The whole, the Green New Deal is falling apart. I mean, the windmills are getting canceled on both sides of the pond here. The whole world is sort of waking up to all of these things. We have, you know, we had these EV mandates across the United States and across the world. All that's been being canceled. canceled. And so all this centralization that was getting built up is now swinging the other way. And of course, now with Donald Trump and the tariffs, right, so we can see not just, well,

I guess that's the continuing, the globalization, the globalism breaking apart. And now each country is now trying to sort of manage their own deal. Now, part of what Trump is trying to do is like bring the world order back together, but in a new world order, all la Bretton Woods or Plaza Accord. But at the same time, pushing China, and whoever wants to be with China out. There's a real sort of fragmentation happening. I also think one other thing that probably plays into this kind of pendulum shift is the freezing of the Russian treasuries.

That seemed like in hindsight, a massive error from the US side of point of view. Do you think this is a good thing that we're seeing this like fragmentation and de-globalization? So I talk about three cycles. So that is just the political revolution cycle. So that's, like I said, that 250 years is also like the lifespan of a democracy, lifespan of a, you know, whatever. So that's 250 years. But then we have this 80 year financial revolution cycle.

And then we have a 50 year technological revolution cycle. And the point was that all three of these, even on different time frames, 50, 80, and 250 are all converging at the same time. Yeah. And that's why it's so powerful. So now we get into Russia and their bank accounts being seized. And really that was the trigger point for the financial situation. system to start breaking apart.

I see, right? Certainly it leads into the political side. And so those things are converging to the point. But that really leads into like all of a sudden the world's like, hmm, can we trust this inside money? Wait a minute. Like we're using a system that's controlled by somebody else. And certainly we've seen all these other small nations get sanctioned, sanctions, and sanctions, but we're a superpower with nuclear weapons.

And so that was certainly a piece of that. But really, if you look at back to what I said, like a Bretton Woods agreement was about 80 years ago. And now the world is asking for a new, well, Trump is trying to usher in a new global order with the monetary system. And so about 80 years. And then, so that's the political and the financial, other one being the technological, which I assume AI is like the big driver of this. So, so what's interesting about the 50 year technological revolution cycle, the quantum wave cycle is like to call up is that they happen about every 50 years. We're on the sixth one. So with the Bitcoin having cycle, most people think that Bitcoin having cycle will continue.

continue because it's happened a few times in the past. This one has happened now six times over 300 years. And so the likelihood of a continuing is very high likely. But it's not just one technology. It's a cluster of technologies that come together to build new building blocks. So this is like we're seeing rumors that fusion might be kind of just around the corner. The AI. I think it's, so I'm calling it the era of decentralized revolution.

So like in the industrial revolution, it was mechanized. It was industrial revolution. mechanized machines the first time we had machines that could do the work of 5,000 men. And then we got in steel and we got electricity and then we got mass production automobiles. But then we got in 1971, we got the microprocessor. But it wasn't just microprocessor. It brought microprocessors, personal computers, and the Internet. Yep.

And so it's like this cluster that we built these new things that we didn't know about because it gave this new set of building blocks. Like, for example, in the mid-90s when the Internet was first coming out, we had these visions of like, we'll have these like virtual town halls and one day we'll probably buy stuff online right and those things came true but we didn't think that we'd have cars hooked to something called a cloud using something called social media to navigate us around traffic because we didn't have a cloud we didn't have social media right so there was a new building blocks and so what i see today is the decentralization the decentralizing revolution which is bitcoin but it's also AI and people would argue that AI is very centralizing because who controls the LLM, right? Who programmed it?

But it's also, I see it, you could argue it that way. I see it more decentralizing because now one person with a laptop and AI could do the work of hundreds of people or even thousands of people. It makes you so much more efficient. And the interesting thing on the AI side is when, like, I don't know when this would have been a couple years ago and chat GPT, like three was first blown out. That's the first time I'd really used AI. November 22. And then, so at that point, there was a lot of talk about like centralized AI having no mo and decentralized AI was going to take over. I don't really feel like we've seen that yet. But I think there's probably a future scenario where that does come true. Well, I think it already is, right? So really DeepSeek was sort of that moment, right? So Deep Seek,

Besant, the new Treasury Secretary, he was on, I think it was Tucker. And he said, the problem in the market is not a MAGA problem. It's not what Trump did with tariffs. He said it's a MAG7 problem. And he said, specifically, deepseek is what changed the market. And I did a couple of videos on this. So when Deepseek was an AI and LLM that was brought out by China, and it's an open source model. And they were able to program it for a fraction

of the money that Open AI. Also, what changed the market is that they were able to do it on like a fraction of the amount of chips. Do you believe that, though? Because they said they built that for like six million. Yeah, I think it was a lie like most stuff that comes out of China.

So they spent way more money. They didn't classify it the right way. But what changed is it's open source. Yeah. So we can get into the specifics of the numbers. I think that's less likely, less relevant for what we're talking about. But what it was, it was an open source model. And so what they showed is that we can have these open source models that can just train off of other models.

And so what it did was the monopoly companies like Open AI, like Google Gemini, all of a sudden sort of got their business models upended by open source models. And now since then, we've had at least another half a dozen open source models come out of China. Maybe we could even go back to Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg sort of through the first grenade and I would say because they opened their LLM as open source as well. And I think that was sort of like a FU to open AI, maybe. But anyway, so now we have these open source models that are coming out. And now we're getting them where you can just run them on your local computer. Yeah. So that starts to get away from the like who trained the LLM. We have all these models, all these competing models, open source models so we can see it, and ones that I can run locally.

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WBD. I also want to give a quick shout out to the Human Rights Foundation's Financial Freedom Report. This is their weekly newsletter that drops every Thursday and it covers how authoritarian regimes use money as a tool for control and how people are pushing back against that using privacy tools and of course Bitcoin. It's an amazing newsletter, it's Pure Signal and you can subscribe for free at Financial Freedom Report.org. Yeah and the interesting thing there will be like the conversions of Bitcoin and AI. Like this is obviously talked about quite a lot but if we do get to the point where AI is using multiple agents. We have like hundreds of thousands, millions of AI bots running and they need a way of communicating and paying each other. Like Bitcoin seems like

the obvious one. And a lot of people, I think, miss the fact that they think that Google or Open AI are going to dictate the payment mechanism. But I think there is a future scenario where the actual AI bots figure out what the best money is for them to use. And the likelihood is they then converge on Bitcoin. I would agree. I gave the closing keynote at Bitcoin Mina in December. And I sort of laid out this vision through like 2055 of Bitcoin. And I talked about the, the evolution of money. So even just today this morning, I saw people on Twitter talking about Bitcoin, the store of value, but it's not a medium exchange, et cetera. But there's an evolution to that. So it's, it's not a medium exchange today, but it will be because of Gresham's law and things like that.

But I talked about how I think it's AI agents that will actually push the medium exchange first. because us as humans, we don't really need, I mean, if you're in North Korea or Afghanistan. Yeah, it depends where you live. Yeah, it depends where you live, certainly. As most of us in the West developed world, for example, I'd rather buy my coffee with dollars, right, than Bitcoin. But AI agents need to do microtransactions, high-frequency micro-transactions right now. And we've already seen AI agents that have already gone. So for everyone who doesn't know what an AI agent is, think about this.

So, like, what the Internet changed was it brought technical workers from all over the world online. Going back to we talked about bringing value to the world. So all of a sudden I can go on to Upwork or Fiverr and I can hire a coder or a programmer, a UI developer, a bookkeeper, whatever, from Pakistan or Philippines or whatever. But those people, if I hire this person to go do, write an article for me and do SEO optimization for me, they're an agent. I've given this parameter. I've given the training and they go do that task autonomously. These AI agents are basically the same thing. So I programmed to do these things. Now, what we've already seen is AI agents that have gone out, come up with a business plan, found a domain name, and purchased

the domain name using Bitcoin Lightning to do that. Is this actually happened? It's already happened. Oh, that's cool. I didn't know that. That's actually happened already happened. So it's already taking place. Now, agents aren't smart enough to know what the best money is to the point that you've said. I do agree with you. It'll get there. But I think right now, Fiat won't work for this. Yeah. It won't work. So agents, one, can't have a wallet. They don't have K. Y, C or AML. Number two, you can't send Fiat in microtransactions. So this is already happening, and it's advancing really quickly. And if you think about how this model will change the world,

is something I spent a lot of time talking and thinking about. You have agents already, this is already happening. I have somebody that I hired on my team. All we do is just to explore and build this out. But you have these AI agents already who are now hiring other agents. So you have an AI agent that hires another agent, but what's the cost of hiring another agent? I don't know what the cost is, but there is a cost.

And that AI agent can't have, like, a bank account. No. So, but they would have to pay for their energy and their compute. So it makes sense that if I have to pay for my energy, I probably want money based on energy. Yep. But also, even, like, removed from that, they just can't have a bank account. So what else can you use? And there's obviously a million crypto shit coins out there.

But I think the, like, AI is getting pretty good. And I think it's going to quickly get to the point where it just converges on the best. money. That's obviously going to be Bitcoin. Yeah. I agree with that. And another thing that is changing AI and it really maybe goes back to the deep seek moment. I think it's a really important time. It will be looked at as an important time when we look backwards and percent already called it out. But it basically changed the way that we think about valuing companies, equities, stocks, but even the way that we think about stocks and equities in the United States. So for example, S&P 500 and the NASDAQ has been the benchmark. And most Americans,

are just indexing into that every two weeks their paycheck goes into that. You know, you have this index basket with the Mag 7 taking 30% of that and those go up, right? We think about the NASDAQ as representing like the tech stocks, and it's not just Americans. Foreign companies are in the NASDAQ

as well as invested into it as well. But what happened is all of a sudden with DeepSeek was, number one, all these assumptions that we had about these companies are we way off sides on that? So we thought Nvidia was going to continue to have demand for the, GPU, but if they can do it on 10th of the GPUs, then our forecast of demand is way off.

Yeah. Number one. Number two, you know, back to Google or Open AI, these monopoly AIs that we thought we're going to see this traction, now there's open source models. So all of a sudden, we're like way off sides on our valuations. But even more than that, we thought all the value is going to accrue in the United States and the NASDAQ. But what if China can develop some tech like this and now money starts going to China?

So now the index is off sides. So now we have no idea what these companies are worth, what their potential valuations will be. And then you have an asset like Bitcoin and gold that are both outside of the system. This is like a little bit of a tangent, but I'm interested in your perspective on this. Like when you look at the NASDAQ or, you know, the S&P and you see these companies with P ratios that are like absolutely ridiculous, do you think we're going to see those get crushed with the monetization of Bitcoin? I do. Yeah. Yeah, first of all, the P.E. ratios. So people think that stocks and equities have this intrinsic value, they call it. As an Austrian economist, you would say there is no such thing as intrinsic value. It's all subjective. And I believe even that is. So intrinsic value for them is cash flows and profits and things like that. But the P.E. ratio is subjective? Why was Tesla 150 when other Mag 7 stocks were 30 to 50? And why is it 50 and not 45 or 40?

Is there an answer to that? Because I genuinely don't know. Well, the answer is the market, the demand, right? So it's like, one, I think Tesla will be worth more in the future. Obviously, going out to 150 times earnings makes no sense. But then you have the market that gets in there. So that's the point that I'm saying. It's not intrinsic.

It's still subjective. It's what the market will pay. Why does it go from 55 to 35, like overnight? Is it all of a sudden worth less money? Right. So that's the subjective part. And so I think it starts to go, why? Why would I pay 50 times earnings on a company?

Like, how does that even make sense? Like, I won't even be alive that long to make that make sense. And so I think certainly it starts to reprise companies. And really, if we break it down, what reprises companies is I built my investing career on a simple statement. Money goes where it's treated best. So that means that I look at the money that I have and where do I think it's treated best for the problem that I'm trying to solve.

now Michael Saylor talked about his path to Bitcoin was the same way. I have $500 million that's melting. Where do I go? I looked at real estate bonds, whatever, and Bitcoin was the best. And so what happens is when I go, well, shoot, I could buy this 50 or 150 times company that I have no idea about. I was talking to, well, that I have no idea about. I also have Bitcoin. And it's going up at 50% a year. And so it starts to pull from that. I was talking to this old guy at the gym before the Deep Seek moment. And he's, I don't know, he's late 70s at least, maybe 80. And he's telling me how he was buying Nvidia on the dip.

And I said, I said, no offense, but you don't know anything about microprocessors and chips. And neither do I. I'm not saying that you're ignorant. I don't either. We have no idea what it takes to run that business, to invent it, to develop it, we don't know anything about that business. And even if I knew about the microchips, I still don't know about the rest of the business.

So what business do I have trying to judge that, right? And all equities are basically the same way. So you have equities that you have to figure out like products and product market fit and competitors and all these things. And then you have commodities. So commodities would be, of course, oil and gas and wheat and Bitcoin. And commodities are driven based off of supply and demand. So that's a lot simpler.

Like, I can just figure out supply and demand way easier than this whole Nvidia chip and all the competitors and all that other stuff. So I have supply and demand. But trying to figure out supply and demand of oil is not easy. Like, is OPEC going to produce less oil? It's a completely controlled market. It's a controlled market, but also the demand side goes up and down. Like, are we in a recession? Are people not going to drive as much during the summertime?

Or shipping is going to go down because of terror? So it's still difficult, but it's easier than an equity. But then you have an asset like Bitcoin where the supply is fixed. So now I only have to figure out demand. Yeah. And it's just like so much more simple. So then back to what I said, money goes where it's treated best and pulling money from these overpriced equities. It's like I think when people start to look at this like a Michael Saylor lens or like you and I would, it's just like, well, shoot, it's the simplest.

It's the simplest commodity to measure. I only have to figure out one side of the trade versus whatever this is. And so it starts to pull value. It's funny because like Bitcoin is very simple in a lot of ways. But so many people get caught up in trying to understand the like deep in the weeds technical side. of Bitcoin before they're willing to put any money into it. And like I think I, like you say, the only thing you really need to figure out first is 21 million demands probably going to go up. Like that's almost enough to get started. It's enough to get started. But actually this morning

I was brainstorming a new YouTube video and I was thinking about maybe like the 15 lessons I've learned in Bitcoin. I wish I would have known when I started or something like that. And I don't know how many will be, but I was like brainstorming these lessons. And one of them I wrote down is I wish I would have developed my conviction earlier. And the reason why is I started buying Bitcoin in 2015 was 300 bucks. And people hear that like, oh my God, you could buy it at 300.

But dude, at 300 bucks in 2015, it was so risky. Totally. I didn't know what it was. And so like, I didn't put that much money in. Like the amounts that I'm putting in at a single time right now, like I've done like three or four buys in this 80,000 range, just one of those back then would have been a completely different story.

But it was so risky, I didn't know. Yeah. And then I, you know, I wrote up to 2017, hit 20,000. Oh my gosh. I was also into crypto at the time. Me too. Everyone goes through it.

People want to gotcha me on Twitter. It's like I'm not trying to hide that. Very few people go Bitcoin only from the start. Yeah. More so now. Then I think it was a different time. My biggest problem when I first bought Bitcoin in 2016 was I was poor. Like I just didn't have very much money.

But I wrote up to 20, I wrote up to 2017 to 20,000 and I was in crypto. I turned 100 grand into $4 million bucks. Oh, shit. But then it dropped 80%. And I didn't know. I didn't have the conviction. I didn't really know what was going on. And I didn't know if it ever come back.

And I was like, oh, man, why didn't I sell? You know, whatever. And so then I wrote it back up again. And then it crashed again in 2020. And I'm like, oh, man, is this it? Now it's whatever, $3,800 bucks. Like, you know what I mean? And my conviction was growing.

But I didn't, so one, I didn't buy enough back then. Number two, I didn't add heavy enough on the dips. And so this goes back to your comment about, you know, people don't need to get in the technical, weeds, and they don't. They should just get started, but also back to my lesson, if I would have built that conviction earlier, I would have taken bigger positions. And finally, it was like, of course I was adding, right? I was dollar cost averaging, but it wasn't like big. Substantial, yeah. I didn't sell all my real estate for it yet. And finally, it was in, um,

but I don't think you can add that conviction until you have skin in the game. Well, 100%. 100%. So they should just get started to your point. I agree. Um, and finally it was around 2019 and I'm like, I've spent, whatever, thousands of hours in Bitcoin. I've been to all the conferences. I've made all the videos. Like, I have the company. Like, this is my, this is my edge. Why am I not pressing into that?

And so, you know, we start going all in. But back to the point, I should have built that conviction earlier. But it's easy said. It's not easy done. And the funny thing is once you actually have that conviction, everything that happens just becomes funny. Like, to me, when, like, I love seeing price go down. I love seeing people like panic on Twitter,

because you can't shake that conviction once you have it. Yeah. I want to talk about tariffs. This is a complete tangent, but I saw the video you recently did. Yeah. About the myths. The myths.

The myths on tariffs. I love controversy. I know you do. I agreed with a lot of your points, but there's some that I definitely want to get into because I'm not sure I'm fully there. Do you want to start with... So the first one was about consumer price inflation.

Let's start there. So maybe give your overall take on tariffs and then we'll get into that part. Yeah. So first of all, these are super complex issues with like a million pieces of nuance that we can dive into a million rabbit holes. But overall, that one specifically, well, okay, so we know that tariffs are used for a bunch of ways. And if we go through all these, we'll cover it. So I don't know how much I want to cover in the intro. But we know that the United States has used them before. And we have to just keep an open mind on a couple of things. Number one, it's a tool. It's a tool. And tools can be used lots of different ways. I could use a screw. driver to scrape paint. I could use it to stab someone. I could use it as a lever, right? So we could use tools different ways. And tariffs are a tool. And they're not just the tool that people think they are. So are we going to go through all the myths? Because I don't want to just like, yeah. I'm interested when you say tool. We should get into this. So I don't want to jump

ahead here. But when you say tool, do you think the biggest tool that tariffs are being used for right now is just like a bargaining chip for Trump? Yeah, but that's only like level one. I think it's a bargaining chip, but bargaining for what? Okay. Right. So, yes, I would agree 100%. It's more, I would say it's a multifaceted tool. Number one, it is a bargaining chip in order to bring out the fourth or fifth level,

which is this whole world reorganization. But it's also part of our national strategic security as well. So it's both. It is bringing jobs back and national security, but it's also about getting to this end result of this new world order. Yeah. Okay. So let's start with.

consumer price inflation. Yeah, consumer price inflation. Because when these first happened, obviously markets tanked, which is funny to me because Trump had been saying he was going to do these forever, and then when he did them, everyone panicked. I think the way that he communicated it and the way that he implemented tariffs on places like the UK and Australia, there's a lot to be said there, but we don't need to get into the kind of details of that.

But the common narrative is that this is going to cause inflation in the US. I think I agree with that, but you disagreed. So let's get into that. I disagreed with that and there's there's a I broke it down a couple points but for the first point is that um and and back to percent he said it by the way that guy is such a badass he's small lutnik's an idiot but he's small i think letnik's is smart too but anyway percent percent if there's anybody in the world that could pull off what they're trying to pull off he's the number one guy i would believe that if there's anyone that can do it he's the number one guy to do it but anyway

he said um if the consumer's going to pay all the tariffs then why do the other nations care about them. So let's think about that for a second. So let's break this down. So the main narrative that the media, so first of all, anything that the media says, we might want to think about the opposite of that. You might agree with that. At least we should think about it. So number one, the media is trying to pound fear into everybody that prices are going to go through the roof and it's going to cause all those inflation. The consumer is the one that's going to pay the tax. Okay, well, most people don't have a business sense. They don't understand this. So in a business, you would understand that there is a producer of the goods. This is the manufacturer.

or the producer, the exporter. Let's just call that China. Let's call that China. Then there's an importer, and we might call that Walmart. So Walmart is going to buy the products from China, and they're going to import it. So they have to import it.

And then there's the consumer who's going to buy retail from Walmart. That's URI. That's URI. So there's three people. Obviously, there's more, but for simplification, there's three people here.

Now, what happens is who actually pays the tariff? So I think... Oh, who pays the government? Who pays the tariff? Okay, Walmart. Walmart. Pays the tariff. Yeah.

Right. So the importer, Walmart, has to give the money to the government. That's who pays it. But Walmart works off of a thin margin. Now, from a capitalist viewpoint, we understand that most markets are pretty efficient. Not all of them. Most of them are pretty efficient. And when you talk about Walmart, a retailer, they work on razor-thin margins and high volume.

And if Walmart had a super fat margin, another retailer is going to come in and take that margin. That's how capitalism works, right? So if Walmart was crushing it on these goods, then Target's going to start doing it for cheaper, right? So we know that Walmart is running razor-thin margins on high volume. But now they have to pay this increased tariff. Well, they can't afford that. So what do they do? Well, I can't afford that.

So either one, I have to raise my prices and make the consumer pay it, or I have to push it back on China. That's why China is so mad about it. Now, why is China so mad about it if the consumer's going to pay it? because the consumer's not, and here's why. But I don't think it's one or the other. I think it would most likely be both. It would be a combination of the three. The three are going to have to somehow work it out.

So what's going to happen is Walmart is going to have to push a lot of that backwards down the supply chain. But presumably China are also working off razor-thin margin, so they won't have a ton of space to move. Right. So then it goes all the way down the supply chain because, right, we, I mean, someone dug the coal bolt out of the ground, and then it got processed and then put it into it. So it's like it gets pushed all the way to sit down the supply chain. Now, some of it could go up to the consumer as well. But overall, if Walmart could raise their prices by 10%, don't you think they would have?

Yeah, I think that's fair. If they could just raise their prices 10%, why didn't they raise their prices 10%? Because they can't. Well, I guess the idea there, though, back to your capitalism point, is that if they did that, Amazon could undercut them. But now if that tariff is going to be imposed on all these businesses, they may you just have to raise the price is 10%. And there's no way to undercut it. Certainly. So maybe we have a 50% tariff or whatever the number is. We don't know where it is it.

Maybe it's 10% percent, right? So we have a 10% tariff. So maybe 2% goes to the consumer and Walmart eats 4 or 5% and 3 or whatever goes back to China. Right. So that would get divided up. So now you're saying, but Mark, that's 2% to the consumer. Certainly. So maybe there's one or 2% that goes to the consumer negligible. But then the consumer also still has the choice of buying other products that aren't affected by that tariff? True. But then is there another thing that we're not talking about here where Walmart may not raise their prices, they may just reduce the quality of the goods that they're importing? And so that's then another sort of negative for the consumer.

Yeah. Certainly neither of us are fans of big government. We would like to end all taxes. Of course, I do believe in paying for service, so I have no problem paying some reasonable amount, whatever. So certainly anytime the government adds a fee, some sort of regulation, something on to that, someone has to pay for that. In a capitalist system, somebody's going to pay for that, not the government. And so to the point you had inflation or shrinkflation, either increase the prices or deliver

a lesser quality good. China can't afford to increase the tariffs, so they're going to cut corners on their manufacturing to the point that you made. Certainly, yes, that's how it happens. So how can you look at that and think it may be a good thing then? Well, I would say it from a couple ways. Number one, it's a tool. Okay.

So I don't. I would imagine you don't make every single decision in your life based off of the pure number of something. Like you probably pay more for food sometimes than you could just go to Del Taco or McDonald's eat. So you could just eat the cheapest food. You could eat top ramen every day, but you spend more on food. You could buy the cheapest clothes at Walmart, but you probably spend a little bit more money on clothes. Yeah. Right.

you could fly the cheapest airline, but you might want to fly business class. So we don't make every decision based off of that. But we're in quite a privileged position there, and that's certainly not the way that everyone operates. Like there are a lot of people that are like scraping by and this is going to have a big impact on them. Like I think this is a kind of thing that has, again, almost like everything, the biggest impact on the poorest society. Sure, of course. And it's not fair. But then I would also say that it's super dynamic and multifaceted.

So if we can think in second, third, fourth, fifth order effects and think about people greater than ourselves. So remember, back to it being a tool. So part of it being a tool is that, and this gets into some of the other myths that I broke down, but it's also about bringing back national security. It's also about, it's not so much about bringing jobs. Like everyone's not going to go making sneakers and T-shirts and take over Vietnam's business, but it will bring a lot of jobs. So we're going to need new factories.

We're going to new warehouses. so construction is going to boom. These new factories and warehouses will need automation because we can't compete without automation. That's going to bring a bunch of jobs, high-quality jobs. But then there's also the national security piece of it. So what happens is we need the tariffs

to protect certain industries that are important to us. And so in the greater good, I hate to use that, but in the greater good of the country and the people, which then means the government has more income and then could lower taxes to offset the increase of the prices. and it all starts to equal itself out. And so what happens is if we get caught looking in the short term, like, oh my God, Mark is an idiot.

Doesn't he see that the prices are already going up? Like, dude, these tariffs haven't even gotten through yet. Like, this is just like people are trying to figure this out ahead of time. Like, we're canceling orders, we're raising prices. It's not even through the system yet. Yeah. So I tell people all the time, like, if you're looking at your portfolio on a monthly basis, you're just never going to make it.

Like, you'll just never make it in this world. Like Charlie Munger said the RIP, he said that the big money's not made in the buy and selling. the money's made in the waiting. So we need these big opportunities. We should be thinking at least five years out on things. And so things will equalize. We can look back to the two.

Trump started the tariffs in 2018. That's when, that's when tariffs started. Okay, interesting. I didn't explain that. Well, in Trump, and in, so to Lutnik, who's an idiot in your line, I think he's pretty smart.

Either way, he gave a great interview on the All-in podcast. And he said how he's been, friends with Trump in the New York circles for 35 years. And he talked over and over. And of course, it's been out in the news now. Trump has been pounding the table on tariffs since the 1980s, since the 80s. Hey, America, the art of the deal. America's getting a bad deal. Why are we paying for these things? Blu-blah, blah, blah, blah. Lutnik said that he didn't bring the tariff thing to Trump. Trump gave him the tariff thing. So Trump's been on this for a long time. In his first term, he is the one that started adding tariffs onto China. We increased a bunch of tariffs on

China, one for steel, for example. Biden continued and even increased the tariffs. So this isn't all about Trump. I mean, he started it, but Biden continued it. And now there's new tariffs. But what we can see is from the tariffs that were started in 2018, like on steel, for example, there was a short-term price increase, and then the price dropped. Now then 2020 came, and then supply chains broke down and went back up temporarily. But now it's back down to pre-tariff levels. So why is that? Is that just because what happened? Because things equalize. Things equalize. So we stop, and this is why all the myths have to kind of go together. But so the prices get split out, right? Then these manufacturers in the U.S. get incentives, so then they can drop their prices even lower. And things just even out eventually. Interesting. So this is obviously like one of the key parts of this kind of like Mar-a-Laga record. There's tariffs reshoring weak in the U.S. dollar. And tariffs are probably at the center of that because they, potentially allow for the other two. Like the dollar is certainly weakened. Do you think they're

going to be able to resure in any meaningful way? Certainly, yeah. We have to. We have to, right? So the 2020 pandemic and the supply chain is breaking down just highlighted massive, massive problems that we have. For example, antibiotics and medicine, like we can't even get that without China. We couldn't get basic surgical stuff or like even masks, right, or gloves. But even more importantly, military stuff that we don't have in the United States. And a lot of it is because the United States, it's a complex issue, right? But it's like, the United States used to have this massive middle class. Yeah. And you hear Luke Groman talking about this all the time. Luke Roman's super, super smart, so I'm not trying to concentrate anything he talks about, but he talks about

how we shipped all these rust belt jobs, middle America jobs over to China, manufacturing. And now today, society's breaking down. Death rates from drug overdoses are all time highs. And all those are true. But the reason why we had that giant middle class was because we were in the industrial age. So in the early 1900s, 1920, 30, 40, 50 in the World War I, World War II, Henry Ford, back to technological revolution 1908, created automobiles, but also what he created was mass production. And in mass production, you get smart people and dumb people evened out doing the same thing. All we're doing is putting a widget on as it goes down the assembly lines. So you create this massive middle class because everybody was,

equalized. And at the time, those were good paying jobs. You see, a lot of people today are like, oh, yeah, we're going to use slave labor over in Vietnam to sew Nike sneakers. Those are good jobs in Vietnam. The United States used to have slave labor, too. We used to do clothes and textiles. We used to dig coal out of mind, right? But what happens is in a capitalist society is that you move up, right? So you get machines or you get someone else to provide that and you move on higher level things. Like in 17, late 1700s, when the industrial revolution happened, mechanized machines could do the work of 5,000 men in the field. But now what do those 5,000 men do? They're all out of work. They go and find a way to be productive. They did science and medicine. So back to this,

thing. I just think it's important to talk about slave labor for a second, because there's a difference between low-paying jobs in these countries and slave labor where they're forced to be in China. The Uyghurs in China. 100%. 100%. Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. Certainly there is actual slave labor. There is actual slave labor. And I think the United States should certainly not do business with that type of stuff. 100%. Even if that means Americans pay more for their products. Even if your iPhone goes up. Yeah. A hundred percent. And so this is why these are really complex issues. And so if it's like, oh, but my iPhone or my kids toy from Walmart went up, but it's like, dude, we're not using slave labor. Isn't that worth it? Right. So that's why these are really complex issues. But to the point of like Vietnam, for example, they're making two bucks an hour, whatever, five bucks a day, whatever they're making. they're working their way up right and so anyway i think uh the question was can we bring manufacturing back in the u.s um so certainly we can but as i said we can't compete with that slave labor so we're going to have to number one bring back strategic things number two we're going to have to use a lot

of automation and technology but a lot of it is stuff that we've shot ourselves in the foot for so for example um one of the things you hear about is rare earth elements okay super important today. Wasn't so important before. It is today because it's what we put in our electronics, what we need for our missile guidance systems. And we get those from China. Now, China wants to cut us off them that completely. Now, the United States happens to be the second largest producer in the world of rare earth elements. In the U.S. or in the U.S. or just U.S. owned companies operating elsewhere. No, in the U.S. However, we only make a fraction about, I think about a third of what we need in the U.S. So even though we're the second largest producer in the world, we don't even make

enough for our own consumption. Yeah. But we could. Why don't we? EPA regulations, government locking land contracts down, red tape, yellow tape, all of that. So we can do it. We're just not allowing ourselves to do it. And this is part of back to the Mar-a-Lago Accords.

If you look at all the things Trump has been doing leading up to the tariffs, most people are fixed out on tariffs, they didn't see the groundwork that he laid, several executive orders, one of which cuts all the red tape, all the regulations. Any company that wants to invest a billion dollars or more gets fast-tracked. He has a whole program just to fast track them to get him through the permits, all 50 states, everything. Because we can just do it. Why don't we just get the rare earth elements out of the ground? And so, yes, I believe a lot of those jobs will come back, but strategically.

And so when you look at tariffs being a tool, we're not going to grow pineapples and coconuts in America. Like, we're just not going to do that. And we don't need to bring sneakers and T-shirts back either. But we should certainly bring rare earth elements back. Right. And so it's going to be very strategic for things that are important for us. And chip manufacturing is obviously a big one. I know they've spun up a, is it in Arizona or somewhere like that? Yeah. TSM. Yeah. I don't know the quality of the chips that produced there compared to like Taiwan. But I think that's a very important thing to try and bring back.

And by the way, that was started under Biden. Yeah. And they got that done very quickly. It's pretty impressive. How much of that do you know is like just people that basically flown over from Taiwan to do a job here? Like, is that resuring U.S. jobs or is that just having a manufacturing base here and actually just bringing people from Taiwan to do the job? Who's going to grade the dirt for the factory built? Who's going to build the building? Who's going to, right? Like, how many jobs are going to get created? Who's going to bring the supplies off of the docks and get it to the facility?

Yeah. Like, so maybe we bring over a handful of their engineers, but like who's going to build the whole rest of it? Who's going to sit at the front desk and take the phone calls and who's going to work the shipping dock, right? So it's like certainly maybe we bring over their highest level engineers, but like who's going to build it? And I guess even those high level engineers are still going to be teaching American people presumably. And let's think about this for a second, right? And so one of the other myths that I dispelled was in free markets. We have this comparative advantage, right?

So it's like you shear the sheep, all grow the wheat, and let's just trade. But now whatever country you're in, and this is where a lot of Africa and stuff falls into, It's like, this is what you're good at. You just do that. We'll give you everything else. But the reason why that fails is like, what if I don't just want to share sheep? What if I actually need weapons too? Can't I just make my own weapons?

Right. And so it fails to understand that. And even more importantly, what we should do as people, as humans, as business owners, entrepreneurs, and obvious as nations as well, as as Wayne Gretzky said, we want to skate to where the puck is going. So Taiwan, in the 70s, they don't. didn't make microchips. They didn't do that. They should just always fish. Why don't you just always fish and provide fish to the world? But they saw that there was going to be this need. And they

decided that we're going to learn how to do microchips. And now it's maybe the most strategic location. And now it's the most strategic. So to the point, like, can the U.S. do it? Do we have enough high-trained people in the United States right now to make those microchips without importing some from Taiwan? Maybe, maybe not. But Taiwan didn't have them either. Yeah, that's fair. How long do you think this reshuring process will take? And what do you think? And what do you think happens in the interim? Because this kind of gets back to one of the first questions they ask you where it's like, is this fragmentation and making global trade much harder? Is that actually going to be a good thing? I mean, good is a relative term. So things can be good

and bad at the same time. Most people can't get their head around that. They're good and bad at the same time in different areas, right? So, you know, to get a lot of this meaningful manufacturing up is going to be three to five years. I mean, that would be very quick. I would, I have nothing to base on, apart from the fact that government's a very inefficient general, they'd be surprised. Right. And like I said, if you have to go before the tariffs, you have to look at all the groundwork that Trump put in,

all these executive orders that he put in. I mentioned one of them right now. In the video, I broke down a whole bunch of them. But he's fast-tracking these companies. Yeah. So he recognizes, and just, was it just a couple days ago, there was another one that he put through, again, slashing red tape.

Oh, they passed a bill that is going to remove all regulations all illegal regulations that have been passed. So like the Chevron deferrents. So everything that the Supreme Court has overturned, now they're just getting rid of all that. This is a massive deregulation effort. And again, back to Trump's first term, you can think what you want.

Actions speak louder than words. In Trump's first term, he came into office saying, for every one new regulation that gets passed, I'm going to repeal two. I mean, and how did he do, though? Did he do that? He got rid of two and a half. He over-delivered what he had.

promised. So he's now saying, hey, we're going to deregulate. He's got executive orders in, and we're deregulating. So for companies that are going to do these things, they're going to fast track them. And he said they're going to coordinate through 50 states. Now, people are going to fight. California is not going to cooperate. They've only got four homes approved to rebuild in palisades from the frigging fires, man. Is that true? Only four. I'm not actually, so I'm staying in Newport Beach. I've not actually seen, like, L.A. Is the destruction, like, wild there? Yeah. I mean, half the, half the, you know, town, burn down. So it's bad. We're down in Orange County. It's like a whole different world up there.

We don't typically go up there. It's like you don't want to go up there. So, you know, there's going to be a smooth process. Obviously, like I said, some states like Newsom are going to want to try and fight that. But I think they'll get it done in three to five years. Now, that's a rough three to five years. What do we do in the meantime? Well, that's where he needs the fed on board so he can pub stock markets. Yeah. But what does that mean for supply chains during that time? And if China won't sell us any rare earth elements, how long does it take us to get our production up. And like, so yeah, these are not smooth transitions.

They never are. It's the one of the points that you brought up in the video was on the retaliation side, which I think this, I think this is the most interesting thing about terrorists to me. Because I personally, as an outsider looking in, I don't think it's clear whether the U.S. or China will win this kind of trade war. Like China are a dictatorship who are probably far more willing to let their people starve to hold out. And they welded them in their house during COVID.

Yeah, exactly. So if you had to bet on who's going to actually back down first, do you think China will back down before the U.S.? I think it'll be mutual. Like, they'll mutually agree to something. I think they'll both cave, right? That's how agreements are done. Like, we both don't get exactly what we want. And then Trump can say he won and Chi can say he won.

Yeah, I think winning is getting the deal done, right? But I think to your point, I mean, as I commented, I mean, China welded their people in their houses. So they can certainly endure that pain a lot longer. But I think to the point that you said in that video, I talked about retaliation, the retaliation myth. And people think, why is Trump so aggressive is going to retaliate and things like that? China's going to go to war.

I don't think it's a zero percent chance that they try and take Taiwan in the next few years. And maybe this is like the start of that. Right. But they've been running drills four times a year where they run military blockades and parades around Taiwan for years. So why haven't they already taken it?

Like, if they want to take it, they're going to take it. They've been showing their force over there for years now. So it's like they could just take it. That was long before the tariffs even started. And the point that I was making about the retaliation is that, again, for the midwits, they think in terms of black and white. And oh, you made me mad. I'm going to come back at you.

But, like, that's not how business is done. It's not. But like, and this may well be a midwit take. But at the same time, if this puts like the U.S. under serious financial strain. does that just show like a weakness to China and they think maybe now is the best time. Like strategically, maybe now is the time to do it when the U.S. is strained? Certainly.

Certainly, yeah. But I don't think, like I said, they've been running four times a year. They do these war games over in Taiwan. Like they've been angling. They could just take it any time. So, like, why haven't they done it already? And is this going to be what's pushing them over there? I just don't see that, right?

Like I said, when you're a business owner and you're a big business owner, high-powered business owner, you don't run things off of emotion. You certainly don't let someone offend you and make catastrophic decisions that could ruin your company, your business, or your country. When you get to that level, like, you know how many times Donald Trump, I mean, Donald Trump built the skyline in Manhattan. For non-Americans, Manhattan is probably the most prestigious real estate in the world, at least in the United States. And it's been notorious for being run by mob. Imagine running or building the skyline of the most prestigious city in the country and dealing

with the mob. Yeah. You know how many times he's probably been threatened and all these things? Like, you can't let emotions get the best of you. He seems very emotional. Back to Letnik, he's like, look, anything that comes to him, he's already done the research on it first. He kind of comes across that way.

That's part of his style. But even G, he's not going to go, oh, Trump offended me. I think she's far less emotional than Trump probably far less emotional so I just think at the end of the day like certainly they probably get mad but you don't get to that level by by running on emotions and so they'll get it worked out but obviously then we go back to the mara logg of accords if we really want to look at the big picture and I laid out it not in the five myths video I did another video where I broke down exactly what I think the mara law or accords are and I gave specific numbers and levels onto each of these things and so number one I think what Trump is trying to do is break apart the bricks and he wants to get 40 percent of global GDP back around the United States, 40%. So number one, I put 15% of manufacturing in the United States exports. So right now we're down to 10%. So he wants to get from 10% to 15%. It's not a big number.

We can get from 10 to 15%. Number two, 40% of global GDP backed US-centric. And the reason why is because now you're a big enough trading block to kind of have that weight with China, to have a better negotiating tactic. Now, are we there? At the time of this recording, what are we on April 21st? It looks like a deal with India is all but done, in my opinion. I've seen the pictures of Modi. Modi is like singing the praises. J.D. Vance was over there. And he's a troublesome person. And again, if we can look past the tariffs, just in, was it February of 2025, the U.S. did a massive deal with India.

over the last year we've done several deals. India is now licensing U.S. military technology and building it. And their goal is by 2030 to be the largest manufacturer of military technology. Apple had already been moving their iPhone manufacturing from China over to India. That's already been happening for like the last two years. India is basically, you know, on par as far as population with China. And so there's a deal I think it's pretty much done. weapons deal, manufacturing deals, trade deals.

There was also a deal that was recently done with the Philippines. And so the Philippines, I think the U.S. got seven bases in the Philippines. So India, I'm sorry, China had done a deal with the Philippines and this like their belt and road initiative that they've been running and they've been pissing off countries. And they reneged. They didn't do what they said they're going to do. Now the U.S. has done a deal. We've got seven bases over there. And so now with the U.S. and the Philippines and India, you're basically just circumventing.

You've basically trapped China in. And if you wanted to barricade them and cut off oil lanes, I see what you're saying. If you want to cut off oil lanes and trade lanes, all that, like you have that ability from a military standpoint. But let's forget military for a second and just think about just from trade. The bricks, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. And so like India, If India breaks apart, Brazil, I think some deals are already getting done there. 40% is not an outrageous number to think that we could get. And I think that isolates China. This episode is also brought to you by Ledger. If you're serious about protecting your Bitcoin, Ledger has the solution you need.

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So I do want to talk about gold and Bitcoin and how that kind of relates to this, but just quickly on the inflation side of things. Trump is now obviously doing everything you can to get rid of Powell. I think that's probably troublesome in a couple of ways in the sense that it severs any real independence that the Fed claims to have, whether they actually have independence, I don't know. But do you think because of market reaction to tariffs, it's basically just going to be turn on the money printer and we'll have inflation kind of through the back door there as well? Well, first of all, the Fed hasn't always been independent. And if we look back in FDR's term, the Fed, and the president were sort of under the same umbrella. The Fed was under the control of the president back then. So we've seen this before. Number two, I would say both of us would probably just like to end the Fed.

Oh, yeah, for sure. So is getting rid of how... I don't think it's realistic, but... It's not realistic, and especially not just like abruptly, right? But to answer the question, yeah, of course, it's more money printing. We are in a debt-based monetary system. That means debt has to always continue to grow. That's kind of all you need to know.

We can get into the weeds of the bonds and the prices and what the markets are doing and things like that. But it's like, we're in a debt-based monetary system and has to continue to grow. And we have what Scott Besant said is he is, his job is selling U.S. treasuries, selling U.S. debt. That's his job. And so we have to produce the debt.

We need people to buy the debt. And either people buy it or the Fed buys it. Yeah. But do you, so you don't have an issue with Trump having more control over the Fed than he kind of already does in the sense that like right now he has, he can push the Fed to do something, but you can't tell the Fed to do something. Do you think that's an issue

if that sort of tie gets severed? Well, again, let's go back to Trump's first term. So in the first term, he attacked Powell nonstop. Yeah. And he was like... Didn't he hire Powell, though? Yeah. But then he was like,

he needs to lower rates, he needs to lower rates, and Powell waited too long, and eventually he did. Eventually he lowered rates and the market took off. So the first part of the Trump presidency was rough, and then it took off,

and it escalated throughout the year, his term. And so this is the same thing. Trump is a businessman. More importantly, he's a real estate businessman. What does real estate need? Money printer. Low rates. Low rates. So it's like that's his lens. That's what he did in his first term. That's what he's doing right now. You know, I'm not a Supreme Court or an attorney to talk about the legality of that. It doesn't seem like he's going to be able to get Powell out. I think he will. Whether he does it by actually firing him, that may not be possible. But I think he's going to

to get him out one way or the other. Yeah, I mean, he could force him to resign or something like that. But I think what they're doing is they're forcing their hand. And so, you know, maybe by getting the markets down, that sort of forces his hand, obviously, you know, there's a bunch of things that they can do. But would, I guess the question is, would it be a bad thing if Trump got more control? Things are good and bad at the same time. I personally have sort of given up on the debt. We're 36 trillion. I agree with you on that. 38 trillion, 40 trillion, 50 trillion. So what? Yeah. At this point, like, so what?

You can probably only say, so what? Because you have Bitcoin, though. You know what it was? It was in 2008. I was big into real estate. I built this building that we're in right now. And when the great financial crash happened, I mean, I got wiped out. I mean, Southern California real estate, it dropped 60% in 12 months.

It was insane. And I remember that the Fed was going to do a ballot and it was $700 billion. The top bailout. no, no, you can't do this. You're going to ruin everything, right? But today it's like, throw a couple trillion on. Like, so what, right? And I think the reason why I would say that is not just because I have Bitcoin.

I would guess the average American would rather their job, continue to have their job and see their home and their retirement accounts go up in value, even if the prices went up a little bit, then lose their job and see their home and their assets drop by 50%. But their home and their assets wouldn't, would they? What? They wouldn't drop by 50% in that scenario. Why not?

They did in 2008. They did in 2000. That's what they do in a deflationary, the leveraging event. I mean, the stocks are already down 20%. Imagine if you're 74 years old and you're on this, you know, Dave Ramsey plan of selling 4% of your stock every year, but now stocks are down 20%. Yeah, other people get hit the hardest there. But again, is that not just like favoring short time, short sort of short term time preference?

Well, the problem is there's just no way out of it. That's why I don't care about the debt anymore. The debt's never getting paid. It's never getting paid. So what difference does it make? Now, Lutnik, the idiot, he came in and said something very insightful that I thought was very insightful. And he said, look, you hear about the debt, $36 trillion, hear about that all the time.

You hear about the spending, $6.5 trillion. You hear that all the time. You're about the deficit, $2 trillion. You hear about that all the time. You hear about the debt to GDP. You hear that all the time. But as a business owner, as somebody like, you know, you're about the deficit, you hear about the debt, in his position that buys and sells business and invest in business as a business owner,

what's the glaring number that you never hear about? What is it? And I was like, what is that? It's the balance sheet. In my business. As in the Fed's balance sheet. No, as in the government's balance sheet. Okay.

If you go get a loan, they want to look at your balance sheet. Of course. Every single Friday, my CFO sends me three reports. I get my P&L, I get my statement of cash flows, and I get my balance sheet every week. So you hear about, because the balance sheet matters, and we never hear that with the government. So we have $36 trillion in debt, but what's the balance sheet? Against what? Right?

We heard it against income. If I, let's say hypothetically, I have $2 million in debt, but I only make $1.5, well, I don't make enough to service the debt. but I have 20 million in assets. Is that a problem? No. Exactly. So what's the balance sheet? We don't really know what the balance sheet is,

but we think it's maybe $500 trillion, or I don't know. We don't even know. It hasn't really been added up, but it's several hundred trillion dollars. So if we have a $300 or $500 trillion balance sheet, is $36 trillion in debt that bad? That's a fair point.

But that's assuming they've got the gold they say they have. Well, the gold is the note. is not even a trillion, right? So no, it's the land and the buildings. So this, yeah, okay. Is that a good thing, though, if they then have to go and sell this land? No, certainly not. Certainly not. Certainly not a good thing. But what Lutnik is talking about is doing something different, right? So you've dealt with the United States. You've gone through customs and stuff like that. It's ancient. Like, I was just in Malaysia. I was just in Chile two weeks ago in South America and their airport was beautiful and brand new and I land in LA and I'm like, what is this?

The airport in America are the worst. But that's because they were built so long ago. But the entire infrastructure of the government is also like that. All the computer that the Border Patrol, for example, uses is built in the 70s. Musk talks about how hard it is to get anything through because none of the computer systems even talk to each other. And why haven't they been upgraded? Well, as Lutnik says, it's because any government agency is going to be, has to take a full hit. Yeah, they can't amortize the cost. They can't amortize the cost. And so nobody wants take that hit on their term. So what he's talking about is like, why don't we just get our tech companies to build this for us? And we can get them to pay for it. And then they can license out

to the world. And if I'm going to bring that business, why don't they chip in a little bit to the government? That's how business deals are done. So it's a different way of looking at things that can bring a lot of extra revenue to the business. And that's what he's talking about monetizable assets. It just all sounds like centralizing control more and more, though. I mean, if we're going to have border patrol and we're going to have, we're going to have customs and we're going to have import duties, like, why wouldn't they modernize that and turn that into a profit center instead of a loss? Like, why is the U.S. Post Office losing money instead of making money? So it's not adding new things. It's just, it's a...

Is there not another answer there, which is just like privatize all these things? Yeah, but then there's no money for the government. I would rather the government monetize those assets than come after me and have me tax things more or turn them into private business that do no benefit for the other. So it's like the government cannot give something it hasn't taken. So it needs money. It takes it from us. Yeah. Right.

But what if there was another, what if there was another option? Yeah, it just seems like, and then again, this could be a totally midwit thing. But like surely the idea should just be to shrink government as much as possible so it doesn't need to bring it. 100%. 100%. I am not a big government guy. Like, I want to see the government broken apart. I want to get rid of the IRS.

I want to get rid of the Fed. I want to get rid of all of that. So I'm not, I'm not certainly, I'm no champion for bigger government. I'm certainly for smaller government. But in this instance, I don't see it making the government bigger. I would actually see it getting less dependent on me as a person. That's fair.

Right? So we're not talking about adding new government agencies. I already said a couple times, Trump's several of his headquarters are getting rid of a lot of the government, right? So I'm just talking about taking these agencies right now that are losing billions of dollars that now I have to pay for and making them profitable so I don't have to pay for them. So it's not about a new bigger government. It's about getting the government out of my life and allowing them to sort of be sort of self-sufficient. That's fair. So the really interesting

that came off the back of the tariffs, I actually think is gold rather than just gold and Bitcoin. Gold has had like a constant bid now for weeks, months, however long. Do you think this is the world waking up to like neutral money? Yeah, 100%. It's up 70% in 14 months. That's wild. Yeah, it's wild. Pete Shifts having a field day.

I mean, he's celebrating $100 moves. It wasn't it in one day, gold added an entire market cap of Bitcoin, though. Like, they're big moves. Sure, because it's a giant market, right? I think it certainly is. And what it is, it goes back to where we started, which is these revolutions. And so as the world's breaking apart, as the monetary system is breaking apart, as Russia's getting their bank account sees, the world's looking for other options.

And so you have that on top of what's happening in the United States, making the U.S. Treasury less desirable is a good way to put it. So it's pushing gold. And so everyone is seeing sort of the right on the wall. The monetary system is changing. and we should probably be buying gold. We want to put less into U.S. treasuries. And so where are you going to put it?

When you're a nation with billions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars, where do you put that? And so gold is certainly catching a bid. I think finally, finally. Like it took off in 2020 when, you know, whatever the Fed printed about $11 trillion. Gold took off.

And then it took off for about a year. And then it just stalled out and kind of crashed back down and did nothing. And so now it's finally taking off. But I think it really represents the end of this inside money back to the equities and the treasuries and going back to more of like this decentralized form of money and no counterparty risk. So gold is that money decentralized, no counterparty risk. And then of course, Bitcoin is that decentralized counterparty risk. So I think gold, I made a tweet thread yesterday, I think, a day before.

And I talked about how gold and Bitcoin both going up are screaming something. So the U.S. dollar, those are going up. and what is it screaming? And it's basically screaming that the world sees this system changing. And to, you know, for Trump and Bissent, they've been pretty open about that. They want less money coming back into the U.S. and even less money into the stock indexes, unfortunately, for some people. But it's pushing them into this decentralized money. It's funny because they want less money going into, like they want to, they've made it quite clear that they don't want Chinese money going into the NASDAQ, right? Yeah.

But they definitely want it going into treasuries. And that's not really happening either. I mean, Luke Grumman would argue that they don't want it going into treasuries either. Okay. Well, what's the argument now? I don't know the argument. Well, because they want, they don't want the government, these other countries to have so much money. They want, number one, take some of that money through tariffs, right? And two, put it back into the system.

And so that's where they've talked about revaluing gold, pushing the price of gold up. Besant's sort of like, no, no, we're not going to do that, but maybe they are. They can do that. I think. like why not? If they're not going to do it, the next administration will do it. Like someone's going to do it at some point.

Why not capitalize on it now? I don't understand why they're not doing that more quickly. Yeah. Well, yeah, I don't know the answer to that. But what I finished in that tweet thread is saying that, so I think the world's waking up to decentralized money with no counterparty risk. But you have gold and Bitcoin that are both there.

And then I said it's no coincidence that Larry Fink and BlackRock and Wall Street jumped into Bitcoin headfirst. And Larry Fink has been very open, many, many conversations where he said that he thinks it could take over as the World Reserve. He thinks he said that it's time for people to consider it a real asset class. And so it's no coincidence, I think, that they open that up at the same time. He said it's a, didn't he say in his investor letter that it could be a threat to the dollar? And he kind of prefaced it by being like, I don't necessarily want this to happen, but realistically it could. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a very clear signal.

Great. So he's been saying it. And when I saw him on, I think it was CNBC, And he was saying that, you know, I think Bitcoin is a true asset class. Everyone should understand it as a true asset. And he gave the reasoning why. I was like, oh, he gets it. It's not just lip service. And so I think there's no coincidence that you see him, Black Rock, Wall Street, coming into that.

They see this monetary shift happening. For sure. And decentralized money with no, you know, no counterparty risk. Yeah. It's super interesting to see gold have that run. Bitcoin's doing pretty well at the moment. There's obviously all this like decoupling talk. I don't know whether that's true yet.

But do you think this is going to be like the classic scenario, gold runs first, Bitcoin runs fastest. Depends on what time frame you're talking about. So typically when you listen to people talk about financial markets, you always have to ask over what time frame. One guy says bonds are bad. One guy says bonds are good, but like over what time frame, right? Both can be true.

Well, yeah, over the right different time frames, right? So I'd say over a five-year time frame, Bitcoin's going to stop it. Bitcoin's going to stop it. in a short-term time frame, I mean, gold could outperform. And the outlier specifically for gold, I mean, maybe it goes from 3,000 to 5,000 over the next couple of years. There'd be a massive move. But the outlier for gold is if it gets revalued.

Yeah. Because then we could see it go from 3,000 to like 15,000 or 20,000. So if that happened, which I give a pretty low probability, it's not my base case. There is a good case for it, Luke Grumman makes. And you basically have China trying to bring back this gold. standard. Now, they've been, I made a video calling it China's second fatal mistake. The whole world shifted to a silver, or from a silver to a gold standard, well, by metal standard to a gold standard in the late 1800s. China had so much silver. They're like,

we're not going to go to a gold standard. We're going to stay on silver. And because of that, they lost their position in the world. Their purchasing power dropped by 30%. They eventually capitulated and moved over. And now what they've done is for the last 100 years, tried to get back and they've been acquiring gold. They've been the largest importer of gold. They allow all these nations to go mine gold in China, but if you mine it in China, you have to sell it back to China. And there's no real clear numbers of how much gold they own. Some people say they may have as much as 30,000 tons versus the U.S. like about eight, right? But as they've been trying to get back to gold, now the world's switching. The U.S. is now,

we'll go to Bitcoin. And they don't want to go to Bitcoin. They want to stay on gold. But back to the point is, you know, they've been pushing gold. There's been a lot of rumors for years about them trying to launch a gold-back currency, maybe a gold-backed-cd-c-cd-c. They're allowing gold to be converted on their Shanghai exchange. And so if they were to create a gold-back currency, if, then that would really strengthen the demand for their currency, for their markets. And the U.S. could suffer from that. So would the U.S. want to move first? And that's the game theory. And so that's sort of Luke Gromman's case, I believe. And, you know, the US might want to preempt that move.

And so if that happened, then you could see, like I said, gold jump, $10,000, $15,000 bucks an ounce, and it would move faster than Bitcoin. But over a five-year period, I think Bitcoin's going to 10x over the next five years. I think it would be a million dollars. I put a, at my talk I gave at Bitcoin, Meena, I gave a million dollar, 2030, 14 million by 2040, and I think it was 43 million by 2050. And I broke down the math. And I know those are sensational numbers, but I broke down the math of how we get there.

It's funny, they are sensation numbers, but it doesn't sound sensational to me. You know, once you've been in this long enough, you know this thing happens. To me, the funniest timeline would be if the U.S. is, like, signaling everything they can that they're going to kind of move to gold, allow China's, like, go all in gold, and then just rug them and do Bitcoin. Like, and strategically, it's probably a good move. Yeah. And there's a lot of people online on Twitter saying that, you know,

why is the government doing a strategic Bitcoin Reserve and it makes no sense? And there's no advantage to first mover, you know, blah, blah, blah. But I think history shows otherwise. 100%. So other nations can get in. They just get in at a higher price or they lose their purchasing power. So they lose 20%, they lose 30%. That's what happened to China.

Yeah. And the US is starting from a pretty strong footing. Like I know they've got to give back all the bit for next coins. Presumably they will. But they're sat on a decent amount of Bitcoin. And I think there's a huge... Supposedly. Supposedly.

There was an executive order that they had to figure out how much they had when that date has come and passed. Oh, interesting. I didn't know it passed. It passed. Now, they may have gotten the data. Yeah, but we haven't heard about it. Interesting.

Because what I assumed when I heard that is that they, I would imagine people like the CIA have been using Bitcoin in operations for a while. Like there might be different pools of Bitcoin around different government agencies that they're not aware of. And I assumed the reason they were doing it that way was because they may have more Bitcoin than they said, not less. Yeah, we don't know. Same with gold.

Same with gold. I think, you know, a lot of people say there's no gold in Fort Knox. They might have more gold. I remember, I was talking to Larry LaPard, though. telling me about when Germany requested some gold back and they requested specific serial numbers and they end up receiving gold with very different serial numbers. And so like I think there's kind of two things you can take for that. Either logistically they're terrible. They don't know where they've put what parts, what bits of gold or they didn't have the gold and they had to go and buy it

on the open market and give it back to Germany. I don't know. I would not be surprised if all the gold is not in Fort Knox. That's been my base case that it's not. I would think that they probably gave a lot of it back up until severing the tie in 1971 and potentially manipulating the markets to keep the price of gold suppressed. Maybe they went through a bunch. Yeah. So that would be my base case. But there is a case for maybe even having more gold there, especially if they start to see the end of this dollar dominance. They start to see the right on the wall. Maybe there's a case for adding some gold. And either one of those, if the public found out about it, would be equally as bad. Maybe it would even be worse if we had more gold than less. Because then it's like, shoot,

if the government doesn't even believe in the dollar. Oh, interesting. So that's like the same idea of like strategic reserves shows weakness in the dollar. It's the same thing with gold. Yeah. That's interesting. So play this out. Like we're obviously in a super tumultuous time. Like that's undeniable, I think. Do you think the next five years is going to be like good for gold and Bitcoin and the United States or do you think they can't be, those two things can't happen at the same time? The United States is a big country with a lot of people, and so it'll be good and bad.

I see the greatest era of prosperity the world has ever seen right in front of us. And I don't mean like way out in front of us. I mean like over the next five years. Interesting. But going back to really the first conversation that we started with where most people just don't want to do it. So the greatest opportunity is in front of us, but most people won't grasp that opportunity.

So I think we'll see more people become millionaires and multi-millionaires than ever in time, but we'll also continue to see people fall further and further behind. So you think that wealth gap's just going to get worse? Way worse, unfortunately. But I think the wealth gap is a little bit misunderstood, in my opinion. Okay. I guess the reason, I want you to explain that, but the reason I would care about the wealth gap, it's not that I think everyone should be given an amount.

It's more what the societal impact of the wealth gap. Yeah. I think the wealth gap is misunderstood because it's not about how much money you make or have. It's really about your consumption. So it was just yesterday, day before, you know, back to Elizabeth Warren, I think was, you know, it was Bernie Sanders again, talking about Elon Musk and how much money he has. He doesn't have the money. The guy's broke.

Like he lives in a $50,000 house that's 1,200 square feet with plastic furniture. He owns equity in companies that are worth a lot of money. He didn't, it's not cash in his bank. He's like cash poor. But back, so it's not about income or net worth. It's about consumption. So what do I mean by that? Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, whatever.

Jeff Bezos has a flat screen TV. I have a flat screen TV. The guy on welfare has a flat screen TV. Jeff Bezos has a smartphone where he can watch YouTube. The guy on welfare has a smartphone that he can watch YouTube. Like, Jeff Bezos can fly around the world. Anyone America can fly around the world. world. He has access to health care. So does everyone else has access to health care. Now, he has

more TVs and better access to health care. Theoretically, yeah. He has more cars than I have. I have one car. He has a bunch. I have, well, I have a couple houses, but most people have have one house. They have a house to live in. He's got a couple of houses. But like, we all have a house. We all have a flat screen TV. We all have a smartphone that we can watch YouTube and learn anything and meet anybody right here. We all have access to health care. Like, so it's Like, rather than think, well, he makes, he's worth 50 billion and I'm only worth, you know, 100,000. It's like, what is the standard of living? How many cars can you drive at one time?

One, right? How many TVs can you watch it one time? Like one, right? So I just think we should look at it a little bit differently from that perspective, number one. But I do think that it's going to continue to blow apart. And the reason why is back to Bitcoin and AI. So Sam Altman, founder of Open AI, said that, you know, he believes that we'll see the first single person billion dollar company. And we're already seen several companies that

are three to 500 million dollar companies with less than 20 employees. I mean, leave and look at Tether. I was going to say, Tetheth has got 120 employees. It makes more than BlackRock. Yeah. And, but now there's a whole new crop of social media or like AI tools and stuff that are being built up like like, like, like REPLIT or cursay AI or something like that, right, where they're doing hundreds of millions of dollars with like 10 employees. Yeah. But that will continue to where we have five employees and eventually one employee. And so we have this era of prosperity where AI has made everything faster, cheaper, easier, more explosive. And so anybody can now just tap into that and go make a bunch of money. Not anybody. The people who are willing to grow and lean into that. Most of

the world doesn't want to do that. And so they're going to fall further behind. Also with Bitcoin. And so some of us, we saw the opportunity with Bitcoin earlier. We talked about that. I started buying in 2015. My conviction wasn't there, but I've been buying all along. But some people still don't believe in it. And maybe they won't believe in until 20, 27 or 2030. And so those people, just like China will continue to fall further behind. So I think we have this, the great, I mean, as I said, I think we have a 10x in front of us.

Like, it's the cheat code, right? We talked about a whole, we spoke, I spoke at your conference called the cheat code talking about this. It's like, I can just buy Bitcoin and 10x my money in five years and just outperform everybody on Wall Street. And I just have to do that one thing, but most people don't see that. And so what I see is. is the world had the dark ages. The dark ages were interesting because there's no information that was created during that time.

Basically, the world forgot how to read and write and nothing was created. But then we went into the Renaissance stage, which was the greatest era of prosperity. And as Bitcoiners, we talk about this quite often. But what led to that? And what led to that was an explosion of information. We had the printing press, which created 70 years earlier. We had global trade happening through Venice. but we had the Florin, which was the longest lasting gold coin that wasn't debased.

It was like 400 years without debasement. And so we have this explosion of technology. Now, anybody, no matter how much money they make, has a smartphone, you can get an Android phone for 50 bucks at Walmart. You can watch YouTube videos and you can start an Instagram business. Anybody can do that TikTok shop. We have AI that can do the work of 10 people. One person can go on YouTube for one day, watch a bunch of videos, go on to TikTok, start a TikTok shop and use AI to help them with their algorithm. And they can just make 100 grand.

Anybody can just do that. Kids are doing it all day. And so the explosion of information, and we have Bitcoin that can store our value and increase our purchasing power, I believe leads to the greatest era of innovation. And then in the U.S., I think there's two tracks.

So also in the U.S., we're going to have all the people building. So I think construction and the automation and technology will see a boom. So those people. And then the other people who launch and latch on to, it's the information age. I think it's more like the intelligence age.

So like industrial age, information age was the internet now it's like the intelligence age am i smart enough to use it and learn from it and people so you have people who latch onto that are going to really go uh really well then you have the people that are still sort of in the construction automation they'll do really well and then a lot of people are just going to continue to fall further and further behind yeah it's it's um like back to that very first question or one of the first questions on the pendulum shifting um like it seems very clear that what you were saying in 2021 has kind of come to fruition I think the pendulum is starting to shift the other way.

How long is that shift? And at what point does it start going too far the other way? Like I said, there's the big 84-year cycles, and that's like the fourth turning is an 80-year cycle. It's a different. Regime change is different. The fourth turning is like a generational cycle theory, but they're both 80-year cycles. So you have smaller pendulum shifts inside the 80-year cycle and the bigger ones on a 250-year cycle. So about 80 years.

So you think we've got a long period of prosperity ahead of us? Yeah, but I mean it's volatile, right? So it's like as the world breaks apart, we talked about the supply chains and the tariffs and the trade wars and having to, you know, onshore, reshore, all those things. That is volatile, but it creates massive opportunity. This is what most amateur investors don't really get. So many people are afraid of Bitcoin because it's too volatile. How many times have you heard that? All the time.

All the time. But what does Wall Street want? That's why they buy a micro strategy. That's what they want. So professional investors want volatility. Amateurs think they don't want. volatility. I'm a surfer. You know that you surf as well. A lot of people just want to go to Cancun because there's no waves and then go wade in the water. But I just took my whole family

to Indonesia so I could surf the biggest waves over the gnarly dry reef. Because that's the best wave. I want that, right? And so yes, the world will be volatile through this change, but that creates massive opportunity. And so I look back on my own life. I've now invested through like three boom and bust markets, the dot-com boom, the 2008 great financial crash, probably the COVID crash, I would count. And each one of those created like this massive like power up for me. Step up, yeah. And so by the time 2020 happened, I was like, oh, I've been here. I know exactly what's going to happen. I'm all in. Since 2020, my businesses have probably 30xed. My YouTube channel went from 50,000 subscribers to 675,000 subscribers. I went from one employee to 12

employees. I went like my, you know what I mean? It's like I went from kind of one sort of bedroom business to now like four, five businesses that are worth several hundred million dollars. You know what I mean? So it's like each one of those opportunities because that volatility gives us that. So I think that's why I said it's good and bad and it really depends on how you look at the world and what you do with it. Just in very simple terms, I bought Bitcoin in March 2020 is probably the scariest time I've ever bought Bitcoin. Yeah. And it's like probably amongst the best performing Bitcoin I've ever bought. Yeah. Yeah. So I think for people that see this change and think about the world happens for them and not to them.

We're not victims. We just have to learn the new game. The game is rigged, but let me just learn how to play the game. I see these new tools in the world's changing. Let me just figure out how to use them. The world is theirs right now. Let's go. Bullish Bitcoin, bullish people.

Bullish Bitcoin, bullish people. Bullish technology. What I've been saying over and over is build an AI and saving Bitcoin. I like that. Mark, this has been amazing. Thank you for the time. for having me here. Yeah, Danny. Thanks for great. Next time I'm here, we need to go for a surf.

Wow, we should. I don't think there's any ways right now. It's really cold right now. Yeah. Too cold for me. I'm used to Australia water now. But thank you so much for the time. It's been great. Yeah, thanks, Dave.