Episode 36: Investing in Bitcoin and Real Estate with Mark Moss

Ben: [00:00:00] Welcome to the alt asset allocation podcast, exploring alternative investment opportunities available to the everyday investor. Here’s your host Ben Lakoff.

Hello and welcome to the all to asset allocation podcast. Today’s interview is with Mark Moss. So Mark has founded six companies each growing past well past seven figures within the first year, including an exit on a sale.

With a fortune 500 company. Mark has a great YouTube channel is not your typical professional investor, but he has a very well-rounded experience in business, real estate, gold and silver oil and gas, securities, and bonds. In this conversation, we discussed the macro backdrop and what he’s looking at from a contrarian investment perspective, we talk about observing.

Global trends and looking within the trend within the trend, within the trend what’s happening and more importantly, what this means for your investment portfolio. We go into a lot more detail on Bitcoin, including trying to think through when to sell as well as various topics within real estate. Mark has learned a lot about how to think through these sorts of investments and be successful.

In this episode, you’ll get to benefit from his hours of work and learn how to get involved within these exciting growing markets. Before you listen, please don’t forget to like, or subscribe to the podcast or even better leave a review. If you’re watching this on YouTube, please subscribe to the channel and, or like the video.

This really, really helps. There you go. Enjoy this conversation with Mark POS. Well, Mark, excited to have you on the show today. Welcome to the alt asset allocation podcast.

Mark: [00:01:45] Yeah, thanks so much, Ben. I I love alternative assets, so I’m excited for the conversation.

Ben: [00:01:49] like I said before we started recording,  I started doing a little bit of research and started listening to a few of your podcasts.

And before I know it, I binge listened to a ton of them. you’re providing a lot of value for the space. I think we align on a number of very key macro investment strategies and we’ll get into all of that. But before we go there, I wanted to just start a little bit about you, your background.

Mark: [00:02:13] Yeah. So I am I am shoot, where do I start?

I’m going to give you the high level view and we can dig in. But at, at I decided that I love to learn and I love to push myself and I love education, but the formal traditional route wasn’t for me. So when I graduated high school at 18, I started investing and I started buying rental real estate, not rental.

I started buying real estate from the banks. It was at the bottom of the. The biggest real estate crash we had in California and I was buying it from the bank zero down. They were just trying to get them off the books. We fixed them up and sold them. And my first one, I didn’t have the money. It was zero down, but I still didn’t even have the money for the closing cost.

I had to get a partner and we did all the work ourselves. We made like 30 grand and we’re like, wow. Rolled it and rolled it and rolled it and did so kind of real estate investing is kind of where I cut my teeth. I also us also started some businesses. I was there in the late nineties, investing into these new things called internet stocks.

And my roommate quit his job and we were trading these internet stocks. And that was pretty interesting. Of course then the.com boom happened in that crash. I decided it would be a good idea to start a internet. E-commerce business in 2001 at the bottom of that bear market, which was a very difficult endeavor.

I went to these companies and I said, Hey, I built this website and I want to sell your products on my website. And they laughed at me. They told me nobody would ever buy anything online. It was the stupidest idea. I said, well, I beg to differ and it was a very, it was a very tough road from 2001, two, three to actually get products on my site.

Ended up selling that off. I have fortune 500 exits. So business still doing real estate. The big problem, then the big shift for me was in 2008. The great financial crash. So I did really good coming out of the 89 to 92 crash. I did pretty good coming out of the.com crash in 2001, but that, that the great financial crash just caught me.

And I had sold my businesses. I sold my rental properties and I was all in, on developing real estate. And of course it was the biggest projects, you know, 10, $12 million projects, mixed use projects. Those are the three, four year deals, right? You can’t just get out. I saw the end coming, but you just, you just can’t get out.

It was three or four year projects. And so anyway, 2008 came and, and I got, I got wiped out. I got caught pretty bad. And I knew a lot about making money. I had made a lot of money done really, really well and multiple businesses, multiple different types of investments. But I didn’t understand this financial casino game that was going on.

And so I grew up racing, dirt bikes. I’ve broken pretty much every bone in my body. I’ve metal in all my limbs. So I’m used to just kind of like, all right, let’s try this again. And I had to dig in deep, what is this whole financial system? And that’s when I started to learn about. Really dive into the fed.

I learned about gold shout out to Ron Paul, Mike Maloney. Those guys really helped a lot. And, and really, I just, I, I just became consumed with just sound money and how our financial system is so messed up. And of course I vowed to never let that happen to me again. And so of course I had to learn everything I can about it.

And so that’s really what kind of shifted my life into what I do today in 2015. I just fell hard for a Bitcoin. You mentioned earlier, sovereign man. So sovereign man was a huge, has been, is a huge influence on my life for a dozen years now. And the idea of us being sovereign. We’re a country doesn’t own us.

And I was actually setting up a offshore corporation in Panama set of bank accounts in Panama. And I was literally already talking to the attorney as I was ready to fly down and do the paperwork. And I took another look at Bitcoin being involved in internet and finance. Of course I knew about Bitcoin, but I took another look at it and I was like, That’s the same thing.

I’m basically taking money out of the banking system, which is what I’m trying to do. And so I went into Bitcoin and and the more I learned about it, I just figured shoot, man, I need to tell the whole world about this. And so I started writing a newsletter and I started doing videos and YouTube and things like that.

And that’s where we are today. Five years later.

Ben: [00:05:52] Awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah. I think the sovereign man, the book, the sovereign individual nomad capitalist, there’s a, there’s a lot of guys creating a lot of value in the space. So it will all around this, you know, flag theory and thinking about this in, in a more deeper level.

Definitely we’ll link those things in the show notes, as well as your podcast, market disruptors and a number of other things. A few comments there, like metal in all parts of your body. I bet you’re a fun going through metal detectors these days.

Mark: [00:06:20] No, it’s all titanium. So it doesn’t actually set off a metal detectors.

People say that a lot, but it, but it doesn’t.

Ben: [00:06:26] Gotcha. Gotcha. Wow. I don’t, I don’t have any in me yet. Knock on wood, but you don’t want any? No, probably not. I wanted to start off we’re definitely gonna get into a lot of your investment thesis, sound money. These are things that are very important to me.

You know, flight theory, but one of your episodes really stuck out to me. as I said, I’ve, binge-watched binge listened to a lot of them, but the June, 2019 episode. the recap episode, I think you had done like. 10 10 episodes. And you kind of distill what you had learned thus far which was really nice for me, you know, it was like, Oh, I don’t have to listen to these eight.

You just kind of take the bits and pieces from it and, and, and distill it for me, which was nice. in this episode, some things jumped out at me. you talk about observing global trends. Being a contrarian investor and looking within the trend within the trend, within the trend, like a number of layers deep.

obviously you’re very bullish on crypto sound, money principles, but just kind of backing up and surveying the financial landscape at that we have right now. What is most interesting to you? If you could just talk, talk to me a little bit more about like the macro backdrop what’s going on right now.

Mark: [00:07:34] Well, the macro backdrop, I mean, is, is the fed, right? I mean, it’s the fed and there’s a couple things in place. So the trends within the trends, within the trends, kind of like one of those Russian dolls where you open it up and there’s one inside, it’s kind of like that. And so I’m looking for like multiple trends and like where they can intersect.

But but obviously the, the big thing is I mean, it’s, it’s kind of three or four trends kind of wrapped together, but we have obviously the pandemic and the crushing blow to the economy that’s happening. The response to that being the fed and the central banks around the world With the amount of money printing.

I mean, if you would have said to anybody 10 years ago that the government would create a trillion dollars, they probably would have just freaked out. Right. Or I should say in a month, right. Obviously a 2008, they did, but over a long period of time. So the, the amount, the sheer amount of money printing and then the shift in central, so banking to the CBD C’s and what’s happening there.

So it’s, they all kind of fit together. The pandemic. Is causing the money printing. And they’re also using that to reshape the financial system. Right. They’re talking about the great reset, things like that. And they’re saying we’re using this epidemic or this pandemic in order to reorganize things. So that is the big trend that’s happening right now.

Ben: [00:08:42] Right. Never, never let a good crisis go to waste. Right. but for me, whenever I go down this path, I just think that it’s the eventual collapse of this feat monetary experiment that basically started when we last left the gold standard and it gets quite dystopian and pitchforks and torches, but.

You know, putting, putting an investor hat on, well, putting my optimist hat on, I guess it’s like, well, we’ve been through tough times before we’ll get through this. It’s not all doom and gloom, but more so putting the investor hat on, I mean, sound money, gold Bitcoin. Are these the most interesting things to you?

What else? What else is looking really interesting right now from an investment perspective?

Mark: [00:09:21] Yeah. I mean, gold, gold and Bitcoin, right? I mean, so you just think about right. Like you said, right. We’re 50 years into this feat money experiments. So basically, you know, we’re not going through the whole history, but 5,000 years ago has been money and.

You know, it went through multiple levels, but by tooth, by by 71, right. We severed it. So we’re like 50 years from 71 till now in this, in this Viet money, this fake money experiments. So the fed is creating this fake counterfeit money. Right. And so they’re also doing it at a level that we’ve just never even would have imagined or seen.

Right. They’re doing that right now. And I just think that as they continue to create more fake money, it’s going to push the need to go back to real. Hard things. So, yeah, golden Bitcoin of course, but even other commodities, you’re like other types of metals, of course, land food, agricultural, things like that.

So I just think we’re going to see this shift. And so really a lot of times investors, especially macro guys will kind of zoom out and look at it. You know, it was like decades, right? This decade was here. This decade, decade was here. And I just think this next decade is going to be people leaving financial.

Fan the financial system, financialized assets, finance, you know, fake Viet money and move it into real things. At least a smart people.

Ben: [00:10:30] Yeah. Well, and eventually everybody, right? I mean, they, they catch up at one point or another.

Mark: [00:10:35] unfortunately, you know, a lot of people aren’t, most people are not investing at all and, you know This is something that I’ve been talking about quite a bit late lately, not so much on my show, but on with other people.

And it’s that, you know, really there’s three ways that people need to look at money. And I think most people, at least from what I see on my YouTube channel and people that come into my membership group I think people see it the wrong way. And so really we need to focus on first making money, wealth creation.

And most people don’t understand wealth creation. They’re not focused on making money. Then we need to focus on growing our money. Then it’s investing. So it’s not investing in first, first, you got to make more money than investing. And then third, we had to learn how to protect our money. And if you haven’t made a lot of money, you don’t understand why protecting it is important, but I can, I can assure you it’s much harder to keep it than it is to make it.

And And so you need to focus on those three things. And so you said everybody will be doing that. Unfortunately, most people don’t, they don’t have enough money. They’re living paycheck to paycheck. And that’s why we get this growing divide between rich and poor, you know, the people that can invest.

Are keeping up and they’re, and they’re growing their wealth, but the majority of people can’t. And so a lot of people just need to focus on how to create more wealth. But

Ben: [00:11:42] anyway, yeah, no, I completely agree. Actually, it’s like putting the horse before the cart, right? Thinking about how am I going to invest in make all of this money when step one is actually.

Start building that wealth, right. With Bitcoin and I, I actually, I want to dive into wealth preservation, like diversification a little bit later for sure, because these are very important concepts and I think becoming more and more important. Diversification on a number of different levels, but specifically with Bitcoin, I want to stop here for a second and, and dive a little bit deeper.

I love doing it. This is being recorded on the 17th of November. So Bitcoin has reached a new all time high on market cap terms, not a vice terms because the supply has been inflating and the prices, you know, at 17, eight, 17, five say so. Bitcoin right now within our little bubble. I’m sure your bubble is basically the same as mine.

Everybody’s very bullish. Everybody’s talking about it, but if you zoom out and look at Google search trends, like the amount of like how to buy Bitcoin in 2017 in the madness versus now, and even Barry silver tweeted today that although we’re at all time, high market caps, nobody has reached out for asking, asking for an interview.

This time it’s different. It really does feel different this time with the different background, different backdrop. But you know, and then you step outside of the echo chamber. I was speaking about Bitcoin to somebody and they said, Bitcoin, still around.

This was like, Oh yeah. maybe, maybe everybody’s not worried about it.

I’m curious for people like that, like. what is the gigantic value? Like, how do you explain it to somebody like that, that you just, you want to bang them on the heads and say, don’t, don’t you see, like, this is, this is the life raft. Like, how do you go about explaining it to somebody like that for the first time?

Mark: [00:13:33] Also my whole campaign.

And like I said, I started everything I’ve been doing for the last five years, just to talk about Bitcoin. So I’ve spent a lot of time doing this. For me, my personal approach is why. Why do you need Bitcoin? Why do you care about Bitcoin? Why should you care about Bitcoin? And the reason why is different for everybody?

And so really it’s, it’s like, like if you’re a salesperson, it’s like, what’s the one need of my customer and then I’ll match my one benefit of my product to that one need of the customer. And so it’s like, what’s your why? The problem that we have being in the United States is the dollars, the reserve currency of the world.

And so yeah, our money’s losing value. We’ve lost 94% of its purchasing power is lost like 85% just since the year 2000. And everybody knows that lunch used to cost five bucks. Today is 12 bucks. I mean, everybody knows that everything’s getting more expensive. I went to, I took my daughter to breakfast this weekend and she’s like, dad, Sure.

It seems like it’s a lot more expensive than it used to be. That’s what she said. She’s 11. And so everybody knows things are getting more expensive. They don’t realize because it’s, it’s kind of slow, but if you’re in Venezuela or Lebanon or Iran or Chile or Argentina, any other pretty much any other country you’re seeing massive deflation.

And so for those countries, their why is way bigger. In the United States because our dollar seems to be pretty stable or we don’t really understand it. We also believe that our government is good and honest and pure and trustful. And other countries, they don’t, they know their governments are going to try to steal and manipulate.

And so their wise are much bigger in the United States, I think it’s only for the people that have really been paying attention and understand the financial system and all those things. They start to understand the why, if that makes sense.

Ben: [00:15:13] Yeah, that does make sense. And this is, this is what I have trouble explaining it to people in the U S because.

I have a credit card that has a gigantic limit and I can go and I can spend whatever, you know, I’m, I’m plugged into these things and my bank account has never been frozen or anything. And I know there’s people in the U S that don’t have these luxuries for sure. But for somebody like that, I mean, How do you get, how do you kind of stoke this, this Y how do, how do you, how do you talk to those people?

Mark: [00:15:46] What I’ve focused on my channel, I think for the first year, probably every single video was about YouTube. Every video on YouTube was about Bitcoin. And now I don’t talk about as much, but I still talk about the why. So for example, I might talk about trust. Okay. So right now we have this election going on and Whichever side of the aisle you fall on.

Doesn’t really matter. There’s a massive issue with trust. Like regardless, if you think you want, or you think you didn’t win, both sides should want to prove that they want, like they should be a recount and we need people to trust in the process. So why is trust important? And we’ve, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve put trust in our institutions.

We trust our banks not to steal our money and not to inflate our money. We trust the government to not, you know, Spend too much money. We trust the fed, not to print too much money, all these things, but over and over and over, we’ve lost trust in our institutions, Wells Fargo, racks up bank accounts, and they paid out the largest fine in history.

Facebook steals our data, the fed printed out $6 trillion. Like we can’t trust what happens when we lose trust in society. Well, the society falls apart. Bitcoin gives us a way to interact trust lists because it’s open source. So I, so I build up the problem. And then you present a solution that Bitcoin can solve.

And I mean, I can hit that from a thousand different angles. So that that’s one way that I try to get through. To the average person who just doesn’t mean, you know, I guess a US-based person that doesn’t have those problems that you’re talking about.

Ben: [00:17:11] Yeah, no, I love it. I think that’s a great

Mark: [00:17:14] thing. Is the thing that I also like to say is that you know, I just released a video on YouTube two hours ago and it was talking about asymmetric returns.

And so everything that I’ve done, I learned this theory I don’t know, seven, eight years ago, but. Asymmetric bets, asymmetric returns, Mo anytime you an inner investment, you want more upside than downside. I want five times upside with a one-time downside or whatever. And the best way to get asymmetric returns is with asymmetric information, right?

So, Oh, is it too late to get into Bitcoin? Well, how many people even know about Bitcoin, hardly anyone and of the people that do most people still think it’s a scam. It’s stupid at the Ponzi is going to be banned, all these things. So the information that I have asked to you have access to is asymmetric.

We have information that people don’t have. And so that is an opportunity for us to make asymmetric return. So, you know, maybe some people are only interested into the money side. They just want to make money. Some people wanna protect their wealth. Some people. You know are there enough for different reasons for me, I got into it as an ideology for me.

And this may sound maybe maybe hard to believe, but for me, I tweeted if Bitcoin never went up another dollar value from here today, I wouldn’t care. In my opinion, Bitcoin is our only hope for the future. And that’s a big statement. I believe Bitcoin is our only hope for the future. And I have a lot of my, I am irrationally along as Raul Paul would say.

And if I lost all my money in Bitcoin, all my U S dollars that I’ve put into Bitcoin, I almost feel like it wouldn’t matter. Because all the hope has gone anyway. I mean, that’s how I feel about it. And I know most people don’t get that, but I think if they spent enough time to figure it out, they would.

Ben: [00:18:57] Yeah, this is, I’ve heard the Bitcoin be called the mind virus.

Right. Because like, as soon as you start learning about it, you start questioning everything and. The dollars that the $3 that you pay for your coffee in the morning suddenly just feels so different. And you start asking, you know, what’s behind this dollar and why does it have value and what is value and what is trusted and how these Bitcoin meshes together.

All of these, these pretty isoteric principles, all quite, quite eloquently.

Mark: [00:19:25] The problem that people have with Bitcoin is that you have to really have a pretty good understanding of. Six or seven different subjects. So you obviously have to understand technology. You have to understand, and you have to understand monetary history.

You have to understand economics. You also have to understand things like philosophy, right? So you have to understand like all these different things to really grasp it. So it’s pretty difficult. I get that, but like I said, I think people are waking up to it, as you said, right? As I said, my environment, you called it and, and.

That may be Bitcoin’s greatest gift to the world is that it’s got people to start to think. Now, Henry Ford said over a hundred years ago, if people understood how the banking system worked, there would be a revolution overnight. They’ve purposely kept. The way, the financial system where they’ve purposely kept it away from us.

It’s purposely withheld from people it’s perfect, purposely hidden away, but I believe in most people that are in the space, agree that almost every problem we have in society today, all relates back to the money from the never-ending Wars. So the divide between the rich and poor to the, to the incarceration rate and the divorce rate.

Is all tied back to the money. So and, and again, they’ve purposely hidden this from us per Henry Ford’s quote, a hundred years ago. And, and so. The greatest gift that Bitcoin maybe has given us well, so many, but it’s got people to start to think and start to realize. And as you said, question everything, and that is that awakening we say in the space, a red pill, like in the matrix, right?

Blue glow red pill. Once you take that red pill, man, all of a sudden it’s like cognitive dissonance, right? If I believe this one thought that everything I know has to change.

Ben: [00:21:09] Yeah, it’s it’s exciting. I, I could talk to about this for hours because I think both of us are about rationally long and, and bullish on it as can be.

But I I’m curious.  in one of your podcasts episodes, specifically the one with real estate about real estate you talked about. Four pillar investings and selling your, your winners and diversifying into an income producing asset. this is very much appeals to me. I like that idea, you know, bar belling your, your investment buckets, and then putting them into yield, producing assets, getting that income, but with something like Bitcoin, I mean, you know, this, this one’s different.

It is always a very dangerous kind of saying, but. How do you view Bitcoin into tea in terms of when do you know when it’s time to sell, when you do sell, you know, if it’s at a hundred thousand dollars, that means Viet is, is failing miserably. where did you put your cash then? just walk me through your thought process on like when and how to sell.

Mark: [00:22:11] I have a little bit more discipline, I think with some, with something like Bitcoin and maybe other crypto assets as well, but about Bitcoin it’s different. And so you have to understand. Technology, you have to understand technology cycles. You have to understand you have to understand technological revolutions.

There’s only been five and 250 years. You have to understand how those work, how those play out, then understand where we’re going now. How do I think about it in Bitcoin terms? For example, first of all, I tweeted the other day that I don’t look at it like I’m buying Bitcoin. I look at it like I’m taking my earned income and just convert it into something that holds value better.

So for me I make more than I spend, so I saved money, which most people should now, how do you save that money? Do you save it in stocks? Do you save it in real estate? Do you save it in Bitcoin? So I take my earned income and instead of holding it in U S dollars, I want to hold it in something else now.

Ha what am I going with? My Bitcoin? When am I going to know when it’s time to sell? Well, Just like, I don’t look at it as buying. I don’t look at as selling really it’s trading, it’s exchanging. So I’m excited. My dollars for Bitcoin arm exchanging Bitcoin for dollars now something, and I don’t know what this is right now, but something would have to somehow convince me that holding dollars would be better than holding Bitcoin.

And I don’t imagine that world to happen. What I might imagine to happen is at some point I would re I would trade my Bitcoin for a car. I might trade my Bitcoin for a house. I might trade my Bitcoin for a trip, but I wouldn’t trade it for dollars. Why the heck would I do that? So I don’t see a time where I’m going to cash out and go back to dollars.

That’s the way I see it. Again, I make more than I spend, so I always have money coming in. So why am I going to sell my Bitcoin? I have gold collector’s coins that I’ve had for a long time. And I’m passing those down to my kids. I have guns that I’m never going to sell them. Those are going to be passed down to my kids.

I have real estate that I’m never going to sell, and I’m gonna pass it down on my kids and I have Bitcoin and I’m probably never going to sell it. I’m going to pass that down to my kids as well.

Ben: [00:24:14] I love it. That’s a, that’s a really unique way of looking at it and I love flipping it like that. That’s actually, that’s really helpful.

I’m curious though. Okay.  bullish on Bitcoin, the different mindset on investing in Bitcoin. You’re, you’re converting it to a safer store of value. What. Existential risks where you most about Bitcoin or like what, what are you monitoring very closely just to make sure that, you know, you’re not investing in the MySpace when the Facebook comes along or something like that.

Mark: [00:24:45] Yeah. So first of all, that analogy is just so wrong, right? Because Bitcoin was, you know, The 15th, 20th, try at this. So it wasn’t the first, it wasn’t my space. It was you know, it was, it was 15, 20 different versions in, there was all different types of ones that have been tried before. The, the further that it goes along, the more guarantee of success it has.

Right. So every time it hasn’t died. It’s made it stronger, right? The Lindy effect, the longer it’s around, the more guaranteed it is. And so everything that we’re seeing now. So for example just in the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen the biggest names in the investing world come into Bitcoin. So we had Paul Tudor Jones.

That was big, but man, we got Stanley Druckenmiller in, are you kidding me? He’s the, like the largest macro investor in the world. So to see these guys coming in. That’s massive. And then, you know, people say, well, the government’s going to ban it well, okay. But we have fidelity New York stock exchange. We have all these financial companies that have now PayPal, even Goldman Sachs, Citi, Citi, even JP Morgan, advising their clients buy Bitcoins.

We have all these financial institutions that have come in and have spent collectively billions of dollars to build out Bitcoin products. Now who lobbies the government, the biggest, the financial industry. Are they going to be okay with the government making illegal, when they’ve spent billions of dollars to get into it, are the hedge funds going to be okay.

Now we’ve seen, you know, micro strategy we’ve seen Bitcoins or I’m sorry, Twitter square start to put their, their treasury assets into Bitcoin. Are they going to be okay with that? Like we have an army of people now, so the whole government is going to make it legal. We have, now we have our first Senator openly saying that she’s buying Bitcoin.

We have the fed. The federal reserve, which would be the biggest person, the first person that would want to ban it. They give banking, licenses out. They gave a license out to a Bitcoin bank. So all of those. So it’s like the risk factors are starting to fall away. Now, you know, I started buying a couple of hundred bucks.

It was way more risky then than it is today. But today you have to buy an a 17,000. So it’s less risky today, but I’m paying way more. Now some people think it’s still too risky today and that’s fine. They can buy in when it’s a hundred thousand. So you just have to decide what level of risk you want. But at this point that we’re at today.

I mean, in my opinion, most of the risk has been gone now, you know, I don’t know what could happen in the future. And people want to say, well, quantum computing is going to ruin everything and I can play hypotheticals all day. Aliens could come and destroy the earth tomorrow too.

Ben: [00:27:17] Quantum computing would ruin a lot of things

Mark: [00:27:20] that don’t have, right.

So we don’t have, we don’t have quantum computing. So like I said, we can sit here and talk hypotheticals all day. But from what I can realistically see probability speaking, I just don’t really see any massive risk to it. I mean, sure. They could try to do an upgrade and to taproot and mess it up. And I mean, theoretically, somebody could figure out a way to hack it.

I mean, things could happen. And if one of those things did, of course, that would change my opinion. If, if, if, if they changed the consensus to now do 45 million coins. Like that would change my opinion on it. But I just don’t see any of those that the probability I should say of those same low at this point.

Ben: [00:27:56] Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And, and what you said earlier about asymmetrical risk and return, right? this thing It’s highly improbable, obviously not impossible that it would ever go to zero. maybe there’s a, there’s a zero range of like 6,000 bucks per Bitcoin. Bitcoin still works.

It’s peer to peer value transfer. You’ll always be able to find somebody that can sell it. it still works. maybe that’s the downside. What’s the upside. Million dollars a coin. I mean, w what does that look like? Is that five to one? Absolutely. from a risk return profile, it’s, it’s still really, really appealing even at these 17,000 too expensive.

Prices that’s for sure. And I’ll,

Mark: [00:28:36] I’ll tell my friends who you know, I you know, your network is your network net worth and whatnot. And, and I’ve been in investing space for a long time. So I have a lot of traditional investing, friends who have lots of money, and I’ve been trying to get them for you years to come to Bitcoin.

And I’m like, look, put 1%, put 1% of your net worth in it. 1%. If you lose 1% who cares. But if it goes up 10 X, that’s a meaningful number for you, right? One or 2%. So you just have to determine what your level of confidence is. I think anybody could have four to one or 2% bet on it. And then just to, you know, depending on your level of confidence, you can put in more, if you want.

Ben: [00:29:08] A hundred percent. I mean, if you, if you have a lot of money, there’s two things that should scare you and keep you up at night. And it’s hyperinflation and compensation and Bitcoin protects against both of those. like the stakes are getting too high to have absolutely zero exposure. It’s like throw in 1%, if it goes to zero, which it most likely won’t.

You’re not gonna, you’re not gonna miss it at all. Right. It’s nothing. completely agree. I’ll link a fidelity just came out with the dispelling, the myths about this Bitcoin fidelity digital assets, but it’s, it’s quite good and useful when having these conversations with people about all the things that people, you know, volley back with.

That’s for sure.  pivoting a bit, I don’t from your podcast, you’ve interviewed Celsius and block fi these are they pay interest on your Bitcoin. I’d be curious to see as a longterm Hobbler, you know, not your keys, not your Bitcoin. How do you view these like crypto banks in your investment strategy?

Mark: [00:30:09] So, I mean, there are some really good ways to use them. So first of all Again, you have to have some understanding of history and how the financial system works. And you kind of have to understand how banking works. Previous to the federal reserve in the 18 hundreds, we had all kinds of banks popping up and going out of business.

That’s why they said they needed a create federal reserve to keep those banks from going out of business. And that’s because banks take your money and loan it back out. They’re loaning that money back out. And they’re using that as reserves to even create more money the debt. Right? So we have this fractional reserve banking system.

Most people don’t know about that. All right. So they’re basically taking that same model where I can deposit my Bitcoin into their bank. Let’s call it that a semantics, whatever, but put it their deposit there as a bank. And then they loan it back out. Now they pay me a percentage. They pay me interest on that because they’re making money just like a bank does.

So I deposit my money at the bank, the bank. Gives you a credit card charged you 27%. So what they’ve done is just said, Hey, we’re going to cut out all that bureaucracy cut out all that expense. And, and, and I know you want to talk about alternative assets. I, you know, I’ve focused on everything outside of the traditional stock market.

So I do a lot again, being back in real estate today I do a lot of like private money, hard money type stuff. And so I’ll loan money and I’ll take a first trustee position on a house. I make 10 to 12% on that. People. Take it for six, nine months, fix it up, whatever, sell it. And so I’m making 12%, how could they afford to pay 6% who would pay that?

It’s like I make 12% all day. Like I’ve been doing that for years. Like, so people pay that. Right. And so they’re giving you a bigger chunk. Now that bank, I believe something like the average is like 17% is what a bank makes. So obviously home loans are pretty low. Three, 3% today. Auto loans, Oh, six, 8%.

And credit cards are 27%. So they make, you know, they make pretty good money. They just don’t pay you any of it. So they do take that model now. You have to understand that everything in life has risks. And so you give them your money. And we talked about the power of asymmetric returns. This is the opposite.

So instead of, instead of risking $10 to make a hundred, you’re risking a hundred to make 10. I don’t like that. I want the other way. So there is risk. Look at it. You need to do your due diligence. I did just do an interview with block fi founder Zach Prince yesterday. That’s going to air next week.

And I really dug in deep because one of the big companies in the industry just went bankrupt. The company’s called cred and that was a pretty big news. So you have to peel back the layers and you have to understand what they’re doing. I believe that what Blackfin sales guys are doing are definitely a lot different than credit, but you have to understand the, the risks that are involved.

Now, you know, the money in the bank, isn’t yours either legally. Legally, that’s not your money. The bank owes it to you. So if the bank defaults, they don’t have to give you the money, but we, of course we have FDAC and insurance. So anyway, that’s, that’s the way that I look at them. I think they’re useful tools, especially for hardware.

So you asked me about my Bitcoin strategy. I don’t ever want to sell my Bitcoin. Like, as I told you right now, I I was out in Arizona two weeks ago, three weeks ago, hanging out with Robert Kiyosaki. I was on his rich dad radio show and we went out to dinner, had a couple of bottles of wine and just talk business.

And he’s been a huge, huge, huge mentor in my life. And he was saying how I never you, well, first he doesn’t pay any taxes. He doesn’t pay any taxes because he has no taxable income. He also said that he never uses his own money to buy new projects. So he just bought a new apartment building and we were talking about that and he says he never used his own money.

So what does he, how does he not pay taxes and how does he never use his own money to buy him? He uses debt. So he has a bunch of real estate he’ll refinance, one to pull money out that’s debt. So now he can unlock a couple hundred thousand dollars. Let’s say of income out of a building that’s debt.

That’s not taxable. And then he uses that debt to buy another building. And then it goes up in value. The tenants pay it down. He pulls money out of that, which is debt. And so we can basically do the same thing with our Bitcoin, where Bitcoin has gone up in value. It’s at 17,000 today. I don’t want to sell it.

Cause it’s probably going to go to a hundred thousand one day. I believe it will. So I could borrow against my Bitcoin and go buy real estate with it. So it is a good tool. It does fit within the traditional financial system. It is a way to do just like what Robert Kiyosaki does with real estate.

We can do it with Bitcoin. But it’s risky and you have to decide if that’s right for you.

Ben: [00:34:25] Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is kind of the really interesting thing and not to tangent too much into defy, decentralized finance, but like somebody like maker is over collateralized loans. you take that ethos or that WTTC, that you have, you could.

Lock it into a smart contract, and then you can pull out a portion of the value in stable coins. it’s like exactly doing that. He likes structure within the crypto industry

Mark: [00:34:52] within that two different models. So, so you have this, you have the centralized lending platforms, which are the block fives, right?

And then you have the decentralized lending, which are the maker Dalles, and they both have risks, but they’re just different. So both of them are over collateralized loans. So they’re both, they, they both do overcloud was creed was not, and that’s one of the problems they had. They’re both doing over collateralized loans.

So they do de-risk but something could happen. Block fi is essentially controlled. And so they could have some sort of fraud or they could do make some bad decisions or their business could fail. Whereas maker Dow is also over collateralized and it’s decentralized. So there’s nobody there that can make a bad decision, but the protocol could fail.

And we’ve seen many, many times these yield, farm, defy protocols, people they have bugs, whatever people exploit them and they take all the money out. So you have centralized business risk or you have protocol risk and you just have to kind of decide which one you want.

Ben: [00:35:46] Yeah, no, I completely agree. And my biggest worry is that who’s on the other end, borrowing this Bitcoin, are they yield farming in these highly risky unaudited platforms.

And so if they lose all of that money, Like what happens if this whole thing kind of unwinds very quickly as sometimes they often do. And I haven’t read into cried yet on what happened, but I’m, I’m interested to kind of dig in a little bit more deeply there. pivoting slightly Robert Kiyosaki and yourself also big fans of real estate.

Talk a lot about linear markets and investing for cash flows. I’m curious, it sounded like, you know, you got started early with that early win. 2008 was a little rough. What are the, like the key learnings from those early days to now? Like how do you approach real estate investing differently now?

Mark: [00:36:33] Yeah, well, I approach it way different. It changed everything for me. So I live in Southern California and as I said, right, from like 95 to 2005, that was like a decade. That was just unbelievable. And so that’s where I really came up. The problem is that Robert Kiyosaki says that you make your money when you buy, not when you sell.

So I, instead of buying a hundred thousand dollar house, I think I can sell for 120 in the future. I’m buying a hundred thousand dollars a house at eight, but for 80. That’s the difference. And the problem is that we saw, you know, going in 2005, six, seven is that people were buying like track homes and they’d stand in line.

They buy three or four track homes, hoping that’d be worth more in the future. The problem that we have in California is that the rent to own ratios are way off. And so a $2 million house might only rent for $5,000. So you can’t carry a $2 million house. I mean, unless you put 50% down, the rents won’t pay for the payment.

And so that was the problem now is I was in, so I was building spec homes. So I started buying a hundred thousand dollars homes, fixing them and flipping them. Didn’t like a hundred fix and flips. Got Ray. I was in like South central LA in the ghetto and it got dangerous and we decided to come down to orange County and start building a multi-millionaire homes.

We were building $2 million homes from the ground up. Like I said, mixed use buildings, three, four, or five, $10 million buildings. The problem that I had is when the market crashed in 2008, my properties lost 60% of their value. 60%. And I couldn’t afford to keep them because they wouldn’t rent anywhere close to what the payment, since we’re now the worst one, the one that really killed me was a $12 million mixed use building.

I turned down an offer at 11 million and ended up going back to the bank. I forget. Now I think the pain was like $180,000 a month or something crazy. Right. Ended up going back to the bank. They sold it for 4 million for a million dollars today that building’s worth 18 million. If I would’ve kept it, I’d be up 6 million bucks, but I couldn’t afford the carry.

So for me, what changed everything is I don’t invest in California anymore. All my real estate is in the Midwest and the East coast. And I do not. I talked about, I do like hard money loans, so I take first aid position and I won’t loan on a property that I don’t want to own. So I’m only going to loan you the money if I’m okay, taking that building back from you, owning it.

And my criteria is, is it a good rental? Will the amount of income cover the rent and provide me enough return? That I’m good. Good with that. So I make sure that any projects I get into the rents will more than cover the payments enough that I have enough profit, that I’m happy with it because as I saw in 2008, even though the price has dropped, the rent stayed good.

As a matter of fact, rents even went up because more people were forced into the rental market. And so, anyway, that’s my big thing. It’s all about making sure you can carry. And so I don’t enter a real estate unless it can carry yourself.

Ben: [00:39:28] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think there were two episodes that really stuck out to me, the one with Harry dent that talks about changing demographics and how this impacts the real estate market.

And then the one with Jason Hartman as well about the types of homes to invest in. do you want to touch briefly on like, well, how those fit into your thought process and investment process with real

Mark: [00:39:50] estate? Yeah, sure. They’re both a little bit different, but kind of the same at the same time, everybody, you know, we’re all seeing something different and all interpreted differently, but Harry dent has been huge instrumental in my life as well.

And it was actually his book. I read a great mobile boom ahead, I think. And a forecasted the 2005 to 2010 period. And when I read that book, I think it was like 2006. I was like, Oh shoot, I need to get out of real estate. And I sold everything I could, but some of those projects I was still in. But basically what he talks about is demographics.

And so People are different, but at the same time, we’re all kind of the same. So our spending habits, as we go through life are about the same. So in your twenties, you’re going to college and your spending levels are very low into your mid twenties. You may be getting married, you’re buying your first house.

You’re buying your first car. You’re kind of in the works. Of course in your thirties. You know, now you’ve had a couple of kids you’re buying your bigger house. The, your fifties and sixties now, your, your kids are gone. You’re downsizing, you’re now 65, 70, you’re retired, you lower your spending. And so our spending habits are pretty predictable as we go through life.

So you take those spending habits and then you look at the population, the size of the demographics, and then as you move them through society, you can start to see where this. Spending is going to be, so you take the baby boomer generation, for example, which is the largest segment of the population. And they’re responsible for every single financial trend that we’ve seen in this country.

And right now they’re all retiring. Well, what happens when they retire? Well, they want to lower their expenses. They’re also forced to sell their. 401ks and IRAs and plans like that. So they’re forced to sell them. So that’s massive downward pressure in the markets. They’re downsizing their houses.

They’re done with their McMansions. They want to move somewhere where it’s warm, sunny 360 days a year. They can play golf and tennis. They want to live somewhere where the taxes are low. And so there’s massive downward pressure on the, on the McMansions. And then. What’s the population behind them.

Well, the millennials, but they’re not in a position to buy those McMansions. They don’t want to buy those mansions. They don’t want to live in those areas that they were living in. They’re not buying stocks today. Right? So you have like these, all these demographics that are changing and that’s changing the financial system.

And that’s a layer that on top of what Jason Hartman talks about. And I talk about as well, is that we’re facing this great migration and, and And it, and it’s kinda my thesis between the two in one back to Harry dance. We have all these baby boomers that are selling their homes, and they’ve been living in St.

Louis or Minnesota or Iowa or wherever, and they’re tired of shoveling snow, man. They got a five, $600,000 house. The taxes are sky high there in St. Louis they’re in Chicago. The crime’s high, the city is constantly locking down. They’re shoveling snow a couple of months, a year. Their bones are hurting.

They’re tired of paying taxes. So like, Hey, I’m moving to Florida. It’s 360 days of Sonic and play golf and tennis, and there’s no taxes and it’s the cheapest real estate in the nation. I mean, not the cheapest, but some of the cheapest real estate in the nation. So instead of a $500,000 house, I can go pay 150 grand for a brand new house in Florida, sunny, Florida.

And so we’re seeing this massive migration happening from the baby boomers. And then again, What millennials today want to move to St. Louis or Chicago to buy that McMansion? They don’t because now we’re, so that’s the second part of the great migration, which is what COVID happened. So Twitter, Google, Facebook, they said you don’t ever have to come back to work.

You can work remotely from now on forever. And so why would I live in Silicon Valley with the most expensive real estate in the world? When I can go live in the cheapest in Texas or Florida and pay no state taxes, right? Why would I live in St. Louis and the snow? When I can go, I live in Phoenix, Arizona, or Utah or whatever.

And so we have the boomers that are causing this great migration, but we also have like the COVID pandemic, the work from home pen thing. And the millennials are just different and they’re also causing this great migration and this all leads into the bigger piece, which is global migration and Bitcoin.

So it all leads back to that. But so putting Hartman and dent together then is calling for a massive reset in the real estate market potentially bringing prices back to where they were like 2012. So some areas were, as you mentioned, linear somewhere Silical. So if you want to know how far your potential area could fall, just look at what the price was in 2012.

But I think it’s a little bit more granular that, and Jason Hartman agree. So Everything is based off supply and demand. There is no such thing as the real estate market. Instead there’s thousands of sub-markets broken down by property type, a size range and price, everything. Right? So for example, a home like New York, here’s, here’s a great example.

I just did a real estate video a couple of last week on my channel. So New York city in the city and Manhattan sales are down 50% from where they were a year ago, but in Buffalo, New York, same state in Buffalo, New York drop 107%. The same state. They’re both in New York, one’s down 50%, one’s up 107%.

So we’re going to see this mass migration. And I think as I just laid out, people are going to be leaving the McMansions, the cold areas, the high tax areas, the expensive areas, and they’re going to migrate to the better weather, low tax areas. And so a lot of the country, a lot of the markets will, in my opinion, see massive depression, but some areas I think there’s still gonna be really, really well and actually benefit from that.

Ben: [00:44:46] Yeah, I completely agree. And like I said, the real estate, there was no real estate market. It’s all these little sub sectors, which is really interesting. And that, that leads me to my next question. this globalization geo arbitrage, we talked a bit about it before, but yeah, all roads kind of go to Bitcoin, but for you as an investor, thinking about other asset classes, is this.

Making you more interested in international real estate exposure. It’s a little bit of flag theory, diversifying your assets across different jurisdictions. Is this something that’s interesting to you as well?

Mark: [00:45:21] It definitely is. Things are changing really, really fast right now, obviously, right. The pandemic is just changing the landscape of the entire world super fast and we have.

The global leaders, not our elected leaders, but the self chosen people that are deciding how they’re going to shape the world. Apparently the world economic forum, the UN, the IMF, et cetera. They are telling us it’s not conspiracy it’s on their website. Go to the world. Economic forum.com/great reset.

And they’re telling you right now, their plant they’re using COVID to do a great. Reset the IMF on their website. Again, the international monetary fund, they say they’re, they’re, they’re trying to call for a Bretton woods. Two moment. I did a video about that. So you have to understand what Bretton woods one is to know what they mean by Bretton woods too.

But they are trying to reimagine the world. Their goal is to bring United States down. So on the world economic forum, they say. They say these things point blank. They said, quote, the U S won’t be the world’s superpower. So that’s their plan. And to me, that’s an act of war. I don’t know how anybody in the U S is okay with them saying that, but anyway, that’s their plan.

So back to your question it does make sense. And again, I’m a disciple of sovereign man. I’ve been following for over a dozen years. You wouldn’t put all your money into one stock. I said, Bitcoin’s the only thing that gives me hope in the future, but I don’t have all my money in Bitcoin. I wouldn’t do that.

I did in real estate and it didn’t work out well for me. So why would you have all your financial life in one country? And so the developments of the last couple of months are definitely making me rethink things to where, like my game, as you already mentioned, is selling assets to buy more real estate.

And all of a sudden I’m like, shoot, I don’t know how much more real estate I want in the United States, because if I had to leave for whatever reason, All my real estate is tied up there. Now I had friends growing up that had moved from Iran or moved from Afghanistan. Some of my best friends actually moved from South Africa and they all had to come penniless.

They left oppressive regimes, but they weren’t allowed to bring any of their money with them. They couldn’t get their money out of the banks. They couldn’t bring the real estate and they couldn’t bring their gold. So they came penniless to the United States and I, and if, if I had to leave the United States, their goal, their stating their goal to bring the United States down.

So if I decided to leave. I don’t want to have to leave penniless like my friends did, which is why Bitcoin is my hope. But also that gives me that caution about real estate, as you said.

Absolutely. And that’s the crazy thing, right? If you have a gold bar in your pocket, like they can definitely take that, but those 12 words that you memorize, assuming you can get to a computer on the other side, you have access to this, this wealth potentially.

Ben: [00:47:48] Yeah.

we’ve covered a lot of things. And just the last thing I want to cover is more thinking about total asset allocation. a lot of things are changing, but you know, George Gammon talks about like 10% insurance, 80% investment pays you to own. And then 10% speculation. Do you have any kind of big buckets?

And obviously financial advice should be personal for each person. Everybody’s specifics are different. This is not financial advice, but like, do you, do you have some of these principles or pillars that you stick to and what are they?

Mark: [00:48:20] Yeah, definitely. So my attorney always tells me Hey, I’m giving you some free advice and take it for what it’s worth, it’s free.

But I teach something called a, I teach something called the four pillar blueprint, so that’s kind of my methodology. And so I just think that most people should focus on four key areas. And so one, we should focus on growth. Like we were trying to grow our money. Right. So stocks could be in their cryptocurrencies, could be in there, right.

Things that it, it all comes down to why? Why did I buy it? I bought it. So it goes up in value. Great. So that’s like growth stuff. That’s one pillar. The second pillar is I always wanted to be investing for cash flow. Again, Robert Kiyosaki disable pound the table on cashflow cashflow cashflow. So we should be focusing on investing for cashflow, obviously real estate, also dividend stocks, all kinds of private equity deals.

Like I’m talking about like, First for hard money deals, there’s all different types of way to get cash flow. The third pillar is cash. I believe that cash should be a position that you should allocate to. And then the fourth and final pillar is chaos, hedge insurance. So if the world goes to hell on am basket, what are you doing about it?

So that’s really like precious metals and things that are hedges. So those are the four four pillars. Now how much should be in each one? Well, that’s specifically for you. So right now the thing going around is we’re all in this together. Well, we’re not in this together. We’re not in this together.

I am in a completely different place than you are. Health wise. My, my health is completely different than yours, but also on a financial basis, we’re all starting from a different place. My income, my amount of investments, my education, my interest, my skill levels. My risk levels are all different than yours.

And so the first thing is I have to kind of understand what my own investor DNA is. So I mentioned I’m a, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a dirt bike racer. I broke all my bones. So I’m much more risky than a lot of people. I also make a lot of money and I’m pretty knowledgeable because I spend all day studying this stuff for years.

Right. So I’m just different than most people. So. You got to have to figure that out. Now, if you’re more risky, let’s just say after today that was an eight I’m trying to rebuild. Right. So I didn’t have a lot of money and I needed to try to grow it as fast as I could. So I had way more in the growth pillar.

So maybe I had 80% there and I wasn’t even really investing for cashflow. I did have some cash for emergencies and coming out of 2008. That’s when I started finding out about gold. So I started putting a little bit towards gold, but as I started to make more money, I finally got my businesses back on track.

My, my. Own needs and wants and desires changed. My goals changed. I wanted to start investing for cashflow again. So instead of like 80% growth, I trim that down to say, let’s call it 50% growth. And now I put 20 or 30% towards cashflow because that was my new goal right now. Today might. Well, my portfolio is Wade.

My allocations of those four pillars is way different today than it was pre pandemic. And it’s way different than it. And it changes all the time. Right. So I was holding a lot more cash through the pandemic. I was holding a lot more cash. Lately I’ve been taking some of that cash and just putting it back into Bitcoin.

I’m changing my allocation towards that, because as I said, I’m just looking at as like, I’m converting my cash into that. So my allocations change all the time and so should yours. And so I don’t want to give anybody like. This is the percentage. What I want to do is give people the framework to understand that so they can change their percentages based on their own needs, wants desires and goals.

Ben: [00:51:27] Yeah. I really like it. That those very, very, very succinct. And I’ll, link all of that in the show notes. I know we’re bumping up against the time. I had a very ambitious list of all the different things we could talk about. Like just someone’s that we didn’t end up talking about U S dollars, inflation pension crisis, MMT gold, Puerto Rico.

These were all things that I was thinking we could maybe go towards, but Like I said, I could talk to you for hours about this. I really appreciate you spending as much time as you did. And we’ll

Mark: [00:51:56] do that five more minutes. If you want to jump in, I got five more minutes. If you want to jump into one more topic,

Ben: [00:52:00] cover all of them now we’ll I’ll have you on again in the future.

When we have a bit more clarity over the next six months, I think things could be a lot really interesting. It’d be, it’d be fun to revisit some of these things there, but it’s, it’s been a pleasure, really enjoy having you on where can my listeners find out? A little bit more about you or where would you like to send them?

Mark: [00:52:18] Yeah. I mean the best place is probably just follow me on YouTube. I do like three videos a week. They’re just Mark Moss on YouTube and then I’m pretty active on Twitter. So the number one, Mark Moss on Twitter as well. That’s just the numerical one, Mark Moss. So those two places, if you want to get at me on Twitter hit me there.

Like I said, follow me on YouTube. And I would just say, I like to kind of end it with one thing that I’m pretty passionate about right now. And that is we’ve talked about the great reset and what they’re trying to do there. We’ve talked about Bitcoin and. What regulators may try to do there. And the thing that I’m really trying to get through to my listeners right now is that the future is not set.

The future is yours to decide. We’re not victims. All right. We’re not victims in this world. Whatever we want to be, the future is the future. By next year, we’ll probably have a billion people in Bitcoin using Bitcoin Facebook’s brain. I’m gonna start a PayPal is bringing on 350 million alone. We’ll have a billion people on Bitcoin.

If a billion people don’t want Bitcoin to be illegal, it ain’t gonna be illegal. If we don’t want the great reset there shouldn’t be a great reset. And I want people to, I want to challenge people to wake up, to pay attention, to stand up, to voice their opinion. If we don’t want these policies and things.

If we don’t want our financial system, we don’t want our family’s future ruined the stand up, become educated, create your own future.

Ben: [00:53:37] Love it. And we’ll end up there. Thank you so much, Mark. Really appreciate it.

Mark: [00:53:42] Great. Thanks so much.

Ben: [00:53:42] Well, there you go. First off. Thank you very much for listening all the way through.

I hope you got a lot of value out of that conversation. As always. You can find show notes, links, and [email protected]. Please share this with anyone you think might be interested in derive any value from this conversation. And as always, you can reach out to me for any feedback or questions.

Please give the video a like, or even better subscribe on YouTube. Or your podcast player of choice. This really helps others find the podcast or the video as well. Thanks a lot. Hope everybody has a fantastic day and stay safe out there and invest wisely. Cheers.