Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of
Simply Bitcoin IRL. Today we have a very special
guest. We have Mark Moss.
He is the host of Market Disruptors YouTube channel and
the Mark Moss Show. He's one of the most talented
content creators I've ever met in my life.
He's very, very good, huge fan of his show and I'm honored to
have him back on simply Bitcoin. So before we jump into it, I do
want to give a shout out to the Bitcoin company that makes this
show possible. Bitcoin.
Well guys, it's the self custody platform.
It's Bitcoin self custody by default.
Easy setup, easy to sign up. You got to check out
bitcoinwell.com today. They're a publicly traded
Canadian company. They just expanded to all 50
states. You got to check them out.
Check out bitcoinwell.com. All right, everybody, let me
bring on stage. Hey Mark, how you doing man?
What a nice intro. I don't believe it.
But thank you for that. But yeah, always a pleasure.
You say I'm. I'm a legend creating content
man the first time I went on your show way back in the day.
I remember. I've told you many times, man,
so creative, so fun. I love being here.
So thanks for having me back. I mean, I mean I I meant every
word. It's it's what you do is is
incredible like from the script writing to just the production
quality itself. And you know you work in media
and you you you understand how difficult that is and you only
get to that through repetition and experience and like making
every mistake in the book. So yeah, I'm a huge fan.
I'm not just saying that's book. Smoke up your ass.
Thank you. Thank you.
So, so yeah, man, look, so much, just so much to talk about.
You know, crazy stuff. Let's start off with the ETFs.
I know that you've been covering that.
It's it's a complete game changer to the Bitcoin space.
The price ran up. I I suspect that it was
responsible for the run up from 25K to 50K, the whole ETF
narrative a lot of people knew beforehand.
The SEC completely dropped the ball.
Gary Gensler made a fool of himself.
So, Mark Moss, what's your take on the Bitcoin ETF?
What's the significance of it? How you feeling about it?
Well First off I'll say that I've always said that I think
the price of Bitcoin is the least important thing or I
should say the least interesting thing to talk about.
Obviously we throw out you know NGU number go up technology and
it's fun. I was writing that newsletter, a
Bitcoin only newsletter for a while.
I'm I'm not currently still writing it but the opening line
was Bitcoin is the great bait and switch.
You come for the money and then you stay for the freedom.
And so I think there's a much more interesting, much more
important things. There's much bigger problems
that we have in the world today and I think Bitcoin solves those
and that's what's interesting, not the price.
And I I did throw a little I'm just saying this because I did
throw a little shade out on Twitter where I'm like, man, all
I hear is ETF, it's like I'm I'm tired of it.
But here we are. It's important for a couple
reasons. One, we want the NGU to work
because of that that feedback loop and that that bait and
switch as I said, right. We need the number to go up so
we get the volatility down and then people in 3rd world
countries could benefit more from it if the volatility goes
down. So there's a lot of reasons why
NGU and and the ETFs are good. Specifically though I would say
about the price, I would agree with you on that.
I think that because the market is so small, it's got a it's
it's a very inelastic supply which means the price moves up
really quickly And what happens is it sort of becomes like the
self fulfilling prophecy. So what happens is when these
ETFs started looking like they're getting closer, closer,
closer, obviously there's lots of talk going on about that and
what happened is people start wanting to front run that.
So because markets are forward-looking.
So it's like well this is going to happen.
So let me buy now. And what happened is as people
started buying now, I started pushing the price up, which then
made more people want to buy. So when we buy, the price went
up which made more people want to buy and they created this
feedback loop. But also there was something
else going on. I made a video December 5th
saying warning Bitcoin ETFs and the warning was that I I said I
think this is going to be a buy the rumor, sell the news event.
And the reason why is just a week or two before I was in Fort
Worth at the Texas Blockchain Association and I found myself
at dinner with like 10 people. Peter McCormack and Caitlyn Long
and Natalie was there and there was a few bankers and regulators
there. I don't want to say all their
names. And we started talking about the
ETFs and they started explaining the way they worked, and that
was that most of these or these big ETFs, they don't, they're
not going to just go buy the Bitcoin off of the market the
day they open. They've been buying them Bitcoin
and they keep them in a buffer or feeder account.
The feeder, the buffer account will be actively trading the
market, finding the best time to buy.
The ETF will be buying and selling from their account.
And so because of that, it wasn't like we're going to
expect them to go buy a bunch of Bitcoin that day they got
announced, which is why I made the video.
I thought all these people would lead that that run up.
But anyway, I'm I'm saying this because to add into your point,
Nico, it wasn't just the retail people trying to front run it.
It was also the ETFs seeding their accounts and so it caused
this massive run up. Now as soon as the ETFs were
announced, we did get a little sell off.
It wasn't massive, but it, but it did had a kind of a
considerable drop, at least compared to other markets.
And I the video I'd made was warning, you know, don't get
shaken out. Like if you're probably going to
see this, use it as a buyout, you don't get shaken out.
That's exactly what happened. And since then we've seen an
enormous amount of buying, a lot of people trying to throw shade
on them, saying that there was a flop.
You know, Mike Green's out there talking about how it was a
failure, things like that. In my opinion, it was a massive
success. The amount of Bitcoin that's
being sucked and hoovered off of the market is you know depends
on the day, but upwards of 10 times the amount of new Bitcoin
being created and it's creating that feedback loop.
And already Nico, I mean what are we a a month into it
approximately and we're already seeing, I I put up this on
Twitter the other day, about 50% of investors are in passively
managed funds and it's now what we're seeing is a lot of these
managers that manage these passive indexes are starting to
allocate towards Bitcoin and again it's a feedback loop.
So they add it, they out, they start outperforming.
So more people have to buy it, they start up performing, more
people buy it and and man, we're in the thick of it right now.
And and and and I'm incredibly excited for the next cycle, what
you said about how these managers are adding it and and I
remember there was this news coming out of Canada and it was
the conservative all in one fidelity ETF and it got that
sweet, sweet 1% Bitcoin allocation and I'm like this is
a game changer. Why is it a game changer?
Because as soon as they get a taste of this, all the other
eat, they're not going to have a choice, right?
The the market forces are going to do what market forces do
best. And you're going to be in a
position where you actually, you can make the argument that
you're hurting your client by not having exposure to Bitcoin.
And I think that virus has infected Wall Street.
I would agree on that. And that's kind of what I said,
this sort of competitive nature, right?
So it's like, hey, if they're outperforming me, then I have to
do the same thing as them and then that sort of becomes a self
fulfilling prophecy. But there's two things that I
think are important. So one just specifically in in
regards to that, right, That's important and we understand.
Now like I said that chart I put on Twitter I think last week,
most people aren't managing their own money.
So most people are going to end up owning Bitcoin and not even
knowing it. That's a pretty big deal because
if they start doing 12345 percent, they don't have to go
convince everybody. They just move.
Yeah, there we go, there's the chart, right?
They just they just can, they can move the market.
But I think there's something else going on that's that's
really big that a lot of people who don't understand
multidisciplinary subjects like technology and cycles maybe
miss. And I'm talking about
specifically something known as diffusion of innovation.
So in a new technology chart you've all seen the the bell
curve and you have the innovators, the true believers,
I'm sorry, the the yeah, true believers.
Then there's the chasm and then there's the early majority and
there's the late majority. And the reason why I bring that
up is that we've seen Bitcoin go from the innovators, obviously
the coders, the developers, the true believers, that's me and
you. We've been shut, we haven't been
able to shut up at it, you know for many years.
But then there's the chasm. And and typically that was
really it's it's a technology curve but it's really about a a
marketing curve. And the reason why the chasm is
there is something has to change in the mindset of people that
will start to bring in the early majority.
There we go, yeah, perfect chart.
And so I think there's lots of things that start helping it get
across the chasm. But the ETF is the piece that
moves it across the chasm. And now all of a sudden I didn't
even know I was owning Bitcoin. No wonder My Portfolio was doing
so good and it and it legitimizes it, right.
So there's still a lot of stigma as though the government's going
to make it illegal and how do I store it.
And you know all the other pieces of FUD we hear all the
time but I think it's gonna cross the chasm and that's a
really, really, really big deal. We're seeing it not just cause
the ETFs. We're seeing Larry Fink the
largest you know the the manager of the largest asset fund in the
world say that people are running the Bitcoin for safety
like we're we're seeing this thrust into the presidential the
United States presidential campaigns and so we're really
seeing this chasm being crossed. The ETFs are sort of propelling
that, but then it crosses the chasm at the time it's
available. I mean, this is this is
fireworks. The, the halving is on the way,
right? It's it's like this is the ETF
is this is doing its thing. They're buying a lot more
Bitcoin that is being, you know, dropped in the market every
single day. And then the halving's right
around the corner and it creates this perfect series of events.
And that's perfect segue to my next question.
And I think last cycle we had, I think it was a lot of people
felt like it underperformed. I have a theory.
I think it had to do with the China ban.
I think it had to do with the fact that the hash rate, you
know, dropped like 50%. Those miners had to sell to
relocate to more favorable jurisdictions.
And I think that really cut the market short.
A lot of people are saying that it's the FTX stuff.
I really believe it had to do a lot with the miners and I
believe that's part of the reason that we we didn't get to
100K. Now a lot of people what I the
the very strong narrative that I see this cycle, I see a lot of
people talk about Mark is this idea of diminishing returns,
right. So my question to you is are we
late to Bitcoin? Is the opportunity still there
for an investor or someone who's, you know, looking at
Bitcoin, they're seeing it at it's currently at $51,631.00 and
they're like, man, I missed the train, How would you convince
that person? Yeah.
So, yeah, you missed the boat. Sorry.
You're never going to make a million percent again, but you
can still make a few thousand, right?
Like, I mean, think about this, right.
We just have to kind of think about this in, in in like
rational terms, right? Like unfortunately we're in in
in a gamble culture today, which that's a whole other topic if we
want to dive into. But you know, now I I deal with
this all the time. Like people are like, oh, if I
can't make 2000% in the next 30 days, it's no good.
I'll go get this, this altcoin or whatever, right.
So yeah, you missed out, right. You're not going to make the
million percent again like we did if you bought in, you know
whatever 2010, 2011, but you're still got hundreds of percent in
front of you, which is still better than any other assets
that you can potentially get into.
So you you missed that. But what's in front of us is
still better than anything else that's out there.
So back to the law of diminishing returns, that was
sort of what I was talking about with these ETFs, right.
If we get enough people to to bring in the money and we get
the NGU to go up enough, it lowers the volatility.
So volatility works both ways, right?
It goes up and down and so as the asset gets bigger, the
volatility will go down, which means yes the the diminishing
returns the the the pumps will be less but also the draw downs
will be less. Instead of 90% draw downs, we
had 80% draw downs and then 70% draw downs and eventually we get
to 50% draw right. So the draw downs are worse or
less and the and the pumps are less as well.
I do think that's the case. As a matter of fact, I spent
four hours this morning in Deep Work.
I'm working on a new report that I'm putting out.
A couple years ago, I did a video called Michael Saylor
Strategy to Retire off of Bitcoin and it went pretty
viral. And I'm redoing that and I'm
going to put it out as a report with a calculator and
everything. And I'm sort of, it's a very
basic sort of forecast of where I think Bitcoin could go and how
you could use this calculator. But I did.
I put in the diminishing returns into there of going down to, you
know, 25%, fifteen percent, 10% returns instead of the 200%
we've seen as a compounded annual growth rate.
So I would say that. The other thing I would say
though, just to sort of make the newcomers feel pretty good about
this, I started buying Bitcoin in 2015 when it was 300 bucks,
which is great, right? Except for I would say and I
know this is hard for people to understand, I think today is a
better risk adjusted entry than it was back then because it was
so new IT was so risky. I I couldn't risk more than a
couple 1000 bucks right or whatever that that number is to
you small bets today I I make really big bets into it right.
And and and because the risk is gone, so it's a better risk
adjusted entry. You can put more allocation
towards it and we still have, yeah, lots of returns in front
of us. Yeah, And I I completely agree.
And there was one of your your recent episodes you had, you
know, the the legend Jeff Booth on your show 2 Legends, Mark
Moss and Jeff Booth together. And you guys went down, you
know, a rabbit hole. And I think it was you recently
tweeted it out at Jeff Booth through some absurd number of
out there. I think it was like 42.
It was just crazy. Well, a $900 trillion worth of
assets. And so yeah, it's like a $42
billion Bitcoin. And and it's just, it's just
crazy. So I have the, I have the clip
and we'll play it and then we'll discuss it.
Here we go. So, so, so, so, so what's
different here is the $900 trillion of global wealth.
Imagine you you have a percentage of that Ledger.
Right. And you could say if Mark Moss
has $1,000,000, you could just calculate exactly what percent
you have of that Ledger. If that Ledger is 1.5
quadrillion tomorrow because there's a whole bunch more
manipulation of money and you're part of that Ledger doesn't go
up by that amount. You lost money, but you didn't
know you lost money. That's what that's what you're
living in and that's what everyone is pricing there is in
and when they naturally say what is Bitcoin price in this Ledger,
they're making that calculation error.
When I say it's saying decentralized and secured on the
on the on the base Ledger, then it is inevitable.
If it stays decentralized and secure, it reprices everything
in the 900 trillion mark. What did he just say?
Well, what? What he what he said is first of
all I get all excited and I talk all fast.
Jeff just talks so calm and and and thoughtfully.
What he said though is that nobody, he didn't say this, but
we have to think about like this.
Nobody wants money, which is crazy, but we don't.
We don't want money. What we want are the things that
money buys us. What we want is goods and
services. So money is not wealth.
Goods and services are wealth. I use money to get the goods and
services. I use money to store my value
until I'm ready to get the goods and services that I want.
And so when you think about it like that, what what he's saying
and what that means is that I don't want money.
I want goods and services. Goods and services or wealth.
So you take all the wealth of the world and then you divide it
by all the money of the world, which is why you can't just
increase the money supply. You have to increase the goods
and services of the wealth. So what he's saying is you'll
get $900 trillion of wealth of goods and services, and if it
was all denominated in in Bitcoin, then you would have to
divide the 21,000,000 by the 900 trillion.
It's no different than if we went back to a gold standard.
So you might hear like Jim Rickards or somebody talk about
how we're going back to a gold standard.
And what would happen is you'd have to take all the Fiat in the
world, however much that is, and then you'd have to divide it by
all the gold that's in the world.
And that would reprice gold to about 50 or 60,000 an ounce.
They could say, well, we're going to do a 20% backing, OK,
so it's down to 30,000 oz. But you take all the Fiat
divided by all the gold. So this is sort of what Jeff
Booth is saying. We take all the wealth 900
trillion and divide it by all the Bitcoin.
Yeah, no and and and let me ask you something.
If you were to put a number on it and we're getting into
speculation territory, but if you were to put a percentage of
the world's wealth that is going to be allocated to Bitcoin in
the next 10-15 years, what would that percentage be and what and
what would be your thought process to get to that
percentage? I'm sure you've covered this
topic and I'm sure you've put some thought into that.
Yeah, sure. So the way that I look at it,
because I've been a private investor, I, you know, I have
the fund, the Bitcoin opportunity fund, shout out to
the Bitcoin opportunity fund. But I've done a lot of private
equity and a lot of venture capital stuff, you know, over
the last decade and 1/2 or so. And the way that we look at like
a venture cap deal, just super simple, like like I'm pitching
new Uber 15 years ago up in Silicon Valley and you're like,
well, what the heck is this worth?
I don't even, you know, an app to call a, a, a, a car.
Like I can just call it a cab, right.
What's it worth? Oh, it's worth 100 million.
Like where did you get 100 million?
Well, the taxi industry is this big.
The limo industry is this big, right.
If we take 5% from each of those.
So that's sort of what we look at.
If we're looking at it's like some sort of projection.
So I think about like what are the asset categories that that
Bitcoin could demonetize. So certainly store a value
assets, booth is talking about every asset.
But let's just take a look at like what are store of value
assets. So if we look at like, well
people store their wealth or their value in gold.
So gold's whatever, 12-13 trillion, they're storing it in
offshore bank accounts that's 30 to 40 trillion.
I know you posted that clip of Obama like a week or two ago
talking about it's like a a Swiss bank account in your
pocket. So 30 to 40 trillion sitting
there. You know, a lot of real estate
is homes, but a lot of real estate is a place to store
wealth. There's about 300 trillion
there. So if we look at just store a
value assets alone, you're at like about 400 trillion.
So it could certainly take 5 or 5% of that.
And then you know Jeff talks about going all the way to where
it becomes the unit of account and everything's priced in it.
And so I think I think of this as a long evolutionary process
and this is where most people get completely wrong at.
At the Bitlock boom in Dallas and at the pack Bitcoin.
I gave a keynote and I kind of talked about the time frame and
I think this plays out over a 50 year time frame because there's
an evolution. So it starts as a collectible.
Oh look, this is something cool. I'll keep it.
Look at this cool rock, this cool feather, this cool shell,
it's cool baseball card, cool Pokémon card.
If maybe not all times but maybe that collectible could become,
could evolve to a store of value.
So rich people store their value, store their wealth in old
cars, collectibles, fine art, things like that.
Then if it has the right money attributes, it could not always,
but it could evolve to the next stage, which is now a medium of
exchange. If it's portable, divisible,
durable, fungible things like that, it could be a medium
exchange. And then potentially it could
evolve to that unit of account that Jeff Booth is talking
about. So when you asked me the
question, the first thing I wanted, I'm I'm saying this long
answer because I want to clarify over what time frame.
So the way that I think about it is I think it could be worth a
$1,000,000 per Bitcoin by the end of the decade, in five or
six years from now. And I think I mean you you I
was, I was searching for an article doing this report that
I'm working on and you had posted about what's his name,
the guy from Fidelity Jury. Right.
And they're predicting that Bitcoin could be worth a billion
by 2038. So sort of in this calculator
that I'm putting together, I think in in 20 years from now, I
mean, I had, I had Bitcoin getting up to about 18,000,000
per coin over 20 years. That'd be by 2043.
Again, he said a billion. Fidelity said a billion by 2038.
So we'll have to see. Now I do want to just just for
everybody's sake. That means that $1,000,000 is
nothing. So in Zimbabwe, everybody became
a billionaire. But it was 350 billion for one
egg, so you have to keep that in mind and.
And then that goes back to Jeff's original point, which is
like, you don't want more money. Essentially what you want is the
purchasing power that comes with that aspect.
So yeah, it's, it's a very, very interesting conversation.
And of course, the opportunity's still there, right?
It's like. Maybe and and and let me use
another example so people can understand this, right.
So let's just say you know, we hear about the rise of the
bricks and all these nations, the, you know, the BRICS
nations, they're going to ditch U.S.
Treasuries are going to start storing their wealth in in in
gold for example, right. So let's just say one of these
nations, they have a whatever, 100 billion in their in their
sovereign fund. So like the 100 billion we're
dumping Treasury, we're going to buy gold, OK.
Like there's not, there's not 100 billion of gold to buy right
now, You can't buy it. So then someone might say, well
there's not enough gold to go around then well there's not
enough gold to go around at the current price.
So the price of gold would have to go to 4 or 5000, then at 4 or
5000 there's enough gold to go around.
And so then if you think about it like that, that's the same
with Bitcoin, right? Because we can't expand the the
amount of Bitcoin, we can divide it, we can't get more of it.
And so that's why the price has to go up to get the rest of that
value to come into it. Gotcha.
No, it makes, it makes sense. It makes sense.
So Mark, you're in content creation.
We're in, we're both in media and I feel like we are living to
pivot the conversation a little bit cuz I feel like the last
really month or two is extremely historic, especially with the
Tucker Carlson interview. And what I'm basically seeing is
the And then he had this incredible interview a couple
days ago where I forget what the names the name of the guy was,
but basically this guy was saying that the legacy media was
essentially an arm Matt Benz. Mike Benz.
Yeah. Thanks Opti.
And and it was just my eyes, I had the suspicion that a lot of
these, that I call it the legacy media was was captured, so to
speak. It sounds so absurd when you
talk about it. But the reason I'm bringing this
up is the what I'm seeing, the pattern that I'm seeing is the
rise of independent media. So it's no longer these you
know, credible sources. It's no longer CNN Fox News.
It's you're seeing the rise of of of podcasters.
You're seeing the rise of independent content creators and
they're the ones that are getting the bulk of the views.
And because they're the ones getting the bulk of the views,
governments have never been able to How do you control
independent content creator? Like how how do you control the
narrative? How do you, how do you control
what that person has to say. And I think the conversation is
has shifted a lot of the the the in terms of the acceptable
window of discourse, that thing is just moving.
It's it's just keeps moving in a certain direction.
I think a lot of people are getting exposed to ideas that
were normally confined, you know, to the to the dark sides
of the Internet, but it wouldn't be talked about in the
mainstream. And now you're having those
types of conversations talked about in the mainstream.
And it's it's incredibly exciting, right?
Especially for people who make media.
But it's also incredibly exciting from a humanity
standpoint. You know, 'cause now it's it's
it's like humanity's free in a way.
So I want to get your take on that.
Am I seeing things that are not there?
That's my personal interpretation of it.
There, there's a there's a lot to unpack there.
Nico. Mike, it's Mike Benz.
Not Matt. Matt Benz.
And man, I'm so disappointed I missed the freaking boat, dude.
I I've been talking with him, DMS and I I was like, hey, I
want to get you on the show. He's like, yeah, let's do it.
You know, tell me when you want to come.
Hey, when are we going to do it? And I never booked them and that
was like the last couple weeks and now he's on Tucker and now
he's like untouchable. So I missed my, I missed my boat
on that one. But anyway, you know what he
talked about? I mean you said it's a little
bit surprising. It's hard to believe.
I don't think so at all. I mean, this is exactly how it
works. And it's not just him.
So if we look at like, there's a book written called The Revolt
of the Public. Martin Gurry wrote the book.
I had him on my show, Amazing book, highly recommend anybody
read it. And he was AC.
He worked for the CIA and we had the.com run up into two
thousand. We had the sell off in 2001.
He said more information was created than than all of
humanity before that in one year and then double that the next
year, double the next year. He said wow, this is
unsustainable. So anyway, he went and did this,
this book and he talked about basically the revolt of the
public is how the Internet is, is overthrowing governments.
And he talked about like the Arab Spring in Egypt, which Mike
Benz talked about. And he talked Mike Benz talked
about how the the powers that be, the industrial, military,
industrial complex, whatever was using the Internet to literally
overthrow and do these color revolutions.
But once the tool got big enough, where now you and I are
able to do this and specifically more like a like a Tucker
Carlson or somebody got big enough to challenge or actually
to overtake mainstream media, all of a sudden they start
freaking out. So I think having read that
book, whatever a year ago really opened up my eyes to it.
Hearing Mike Benz layout the guy's like a walking
encyclopedia. I mean, he knows every single
name, date. It's just insane.
It really brought context to it. So maybe my mind was a little
bit more open to it. But, you know, to the point that
you said it's what a time, exciting time to be alive.
It's exciting. But Nico, it's also very scary.
And probably a year and a half ago, I told my wife that there's
a good chance that I won't be able to live in America and do
what I do within the next five years.
And and and and you believe that the reason for that is just the
You're expecting a, A. How do I phrase this?
You're expecting a reaction from the system.
Well, not expecting. We're already seeing it.
So let's just, we can already just look at this.
So for example, I mean these, these are fringe examples, but
you start to see the slippery slope, right.
So the founder of Tornado Cash, right?
Like he created a piece of software.
He ends up in jail. Right now they what they do is
like, hey, with Alex Jones, let's just get him off the face
of the earth. But you really can't because the
internet's a little bit decentralized.
We can take away his ability to make money.
We can just sue him to high hell.
We can make sure he can never work again.
But you can't really get rid of them.
And now we have tools that I'm I'm bullish on what a time to be
alive, these decentralized communication protocols like
Noster. But if the government can't shut
that down, then their only option is to kill you.
And so we already see this like what was this, the RESTRICT act
with 26 high-ranking members of the government sign on to this
RESTRICT act, which basically said any piece of technology
that the government deems to be a threat to national security
and today misinformation's a threat.
I mean everything's a threat to national security these days.
So anything that they deemed to be a threat to national security
would be 1 punishable by 20 years in prison, two $1,000,000
fine. And what was a three and a like
a loss of all your property, right.
That's what that's what they're proposing, Nico.
And so this that that's an extreme, but oh, that can't
happen in America. Well, they literally signed the
bill and we can already see it happen in Canada.
So in Canada, as I'm sure you're aware, they have a bill now
where you know, content creators now have to register with the
state. It's insane.
And so it starts with the registration process, right?
For your safety. They start putting these, these
walls in and they have to. And and this goes back to the
revolt of the public. If you, if you kind of
understand this from a psychological and A and a
political level, they the only way a government can maintain
power is by controlling the narrative.
That's it, right. So in the 1500s, during the
before the Protestant Reformation, the church and
state was able to control the narrative because people didn't
have the Bible. The printing press disseminated
that information. And once that information got to
the public, the church and state could no longer hold on to the
power even though they tried, they killed everybody, labeled
them heretics, etcetera. And so today we're seeing the
same thing where we have the the state trying to maintain a
narrative but the the Internet slews, like the Internet
investigators, they they just debunked, they just bring the
information out just so quick the government can't maintain
it. So they'll do just like the
1500s. They'll start to kill all the
heretics or you know kill their their character, assassinate
their character, make them go bankrupt, whatever.
They will hopefully not actually kill them, but it's it's just
not going to work. But but that that's kind of
where we're at. So what a time to be alive,
Nico. But it could.
It could get scary. I I agree.
And you know, I, we, I, I joke around with Opti all the time
and you know as a first generation American that you get
sold this idea of, you know, the US, you know, the home of the
land of the free, home of the brave.
And you know, I, I come from originally my parents and I, I
come from Venezuela, right. So I I saw this country
essentially one of the wealthiest countries in South
America and it fell to collectivism within 20 years.
So seeing the the same signs is so apparent is yeah, you're
right. It's absolutely scary And and I
joke, I joke with Opti. I say, hey man, we're gonna try
to hold it down here. But if not, we're gonna change
simply Bitcoin's name to simplymente Bitcoin and we're
gonna move to El Salvador. So what?
What other locations would you have envisioned?
Where would you escape to? Because there's that, all that,
all that other narrative, which is, you know, if America falls,
everywhere else falls. Do you agree with that?
Yeah, for sure. Because what happens is you
always need one bright spot, right?
Like, like, we should be, like, split testing, right?
Like, wow, let's try capitalism in America, and let's try
socialism everywhere else. Well, it looks like capitalism
worked, right? So we should always have that
and it and it's exactly why they want, why they want America to
fall. Because you can't.
If you, if you read back to like the the collapse of the USSR,
like the Gulag, Acapello and some of the works of those guys,
you can see what the state, the communist state tried to do is
they had to eliminate all truth because as soon as somebody
could break 3, break, break free and live the truth and people
saw that they would want that. It's why.
It's why China has had the Great
Firewall. What what literally brought the
end of the COVID mandates there in China was when the World Cup
was on and they tried to like obfuscate the people in the
stands so that people in China couldn't say they weren't
wearing masks. And when all the people in China
saw they weren't wearing masks, they were like, what they don't
have to wear like we're we're done with it, right?
So that they they can't allow that to happen.
That's why America has to come down.
We can't have this, the shining beacon that people want, nor nor
can we have history because they don't want people thinking about
the good old days. Oh, remember how good it used to
be. So they have to change history
to be bad. So we don't want to go back to
that, right? So that's what happens in a
cultural revolution like Malice China or what we're having here.
But back to the question that you asked, like, where would we
go? You know, we don't know the
answer to that. So I think about we have massive
uncertainty in front of us and the way that we beat uncertainty
is with optionality. So the more options I have, the
more equipped I'll be able to deal with whatever comes up, and
we don't know what those are. Some of the ways I think through
it, though, are, first of all, one there's no, there's no
utopia for everybody because we all want something different.
So for example, I'm a big fan of Mexico.
I'm building a house down in Mexico right now.
A lot of people are fans of Mexico, but some people want to
be in Tulum or Plato, Carmen because it's beautiful there.
And I agree it is, but there's no waves there.
So for me, I want to be on the other coast of Mexico where
there's waves you see. So it's just little, little
things like that. But I would one, I would start
to look at the nation and think about how did they handle the
last pandemic. That's sort of a good litmus
test. And then sort of like, what are
their policies right now? So like in Mexico, for example,
you could easily say that the government is more authoritarian
and more closer to communist than the US is, but they're not
able to really enforce that. So the actual people that live
there live way more free than we do in the United States, for
example, even though the government is, is more
restrictive. And the same could be said
throughout Central America. So I think one, how do they do
that? I think about some of the
Eastern parts of Europe who are sort of freshly out of
communism. They're not going to be going
back to that very time anytime soon.
El Salvador, you mentioned El Salvador.
What's going on down there is so exciting.
It makes me kind of want to go be a piece of that right now
because they're trending in the right direction.
But that being said, I want to say one more thing and I'll take
a break. But we have to be able to hold
two thoughts in our head at the same time.
I'm sure you would agree, Nico, because you make content so you
see it all like I do. One big problem that people have
today is they lack all nuance and critical thinking.
Everything's not linear. There's nuance with everything,
right? So we have to be able to manage
two thoughts in our head and the two thoughts are Dang. the US is
going in the bad direction. It's like really bad and like
the where we're going it it's gonna get bad.
But at the same time, it's still the best place to be.
So I can hold both of those thoughts at the same time.
El Salvador is going in the right direction.
Oh my gosh, look how exciting. Look what they're building.
So it's going in the right direction.
But today it's not that good of a place.
So you have to be able to hold both of those those those points
and you have to be able to balance that out, if that makes
sense. It absolutely makes sense and
that's a really, really great way of looking at it.
And I kind of want to go back to because it's a, it's a very
fascinating rabbit hole, which is basically the the why the US
is heading in this direction. And you know, you can basically,
you know, start in the 60s, right?
And you can go down that rabbit hole.
It's a fascinating rabbit hole. But I want to get your take.
Like, what happened? Like why did this happen?
What happened? Is this solvable, right.
You're starting to see a little bit of a of a push back in the
US, especially from the Tea Party and you kind of see it.
But you know, a part of me it's like, is it too little too late,
you know, is this, is this, you know, is is this just history
repeating itself? So I want to get your take on
that. Well, first I would say how did
we get here? I mean there's let's come back
to that. Let's talk about is it too late
and and it is too late. And here's what I mean by that.
I've said I did AI, did a show with Breedlove and I and I said
I called it the crisis of confidence, crisis and authority
of confidence. And what I said is that the
current form of government we have is no longer compatible
with the world that we live in, not just the United States, all
around the world. So it's too late because the
current form of government that we've known and we've had is not
compatible anymore. It won't work.
We can't go back to it. So what do I mean by that?
You you, you know you've heard me talk about cycles quite a
bit. I I look at three big cycles,
political cycles, technological revolution cycles and and
financial cycles. It's always technology that
changes the world. It changes the world because it
changed the way that we communicate and it changed the
way that we organize, right. And so I I mentioned the the
printing press in the 1500s, the world had moved towards
centralization, right. What happened?
You had the feudal system. So the feudal system was was
very centralized from the top down and then that got
disbanded. We sort of went to the dark ages
and then it was the church that started bringing bringing all
the repair bringing everything back and then it got back to
centralized where we had the church and the state over
everything technology then create the printing press which
then broke the grip of that and we went back to a decentralized
world farms, cottage industry etcetera.
Then 250 years later. So it's a 250 year cycle this
moves right 250 years later you have the industrial revolution.
And so now I couldn't be in the farms and factories anymore.
I had to move into the cities or farms and cottage I had to move
to the cities for the factories. And so then that was a very the
technology created this massive centralizing force where and it
wasn't just like so it had to had to be in the cities and then
we had you know 1908 Henry Ford created the automobile but he
what he really created was mass production.
And so that that centralizing force of technology continue
continue continued for 100 years and it culminated in the early
1900s where we had mass production and in order to
manage mass production I had to have AI had to have a mass
management style to manage the masses like cogs in a wheel.
So I can get maximum performance looking at everybody as a
performance person on like an assembly line, All right.
So we had mass production, which then grew a mass middle class
because dumb people and smart people were equal on an assembly
line. So instead of having this
dispersion like we should have, naturally everybody created this
middle class. We had this mass production, so
we had mass management and then we created mass government to
manage the mass management of the mass production, OK.
But we don't live in that world anymore.
We're no longer in mass production now We're in the.
We're not in the. We're not in the industrial age
anymore. Now we're in the information
age. And that's part of the reason
why that we have this massive disparity between income, this
income inequality gap as they call it.
I don't think it's a problem like people say it is.
We have this massive gap in income because we're not all
equal on assembly line. Now smarter people get further
ahead. But what this means is that
instead of big cities and big factories, big cities, big
factories and mass management manage people like a cog in a
wheel. That's what Kinzian economics
does, right? Manage people like a cog in a
wheel. Now we have people like you and
me making money on the Internet, traveling the world, doing all
these different things, and that form of government that was
built to manage the masses. It doesn't work anymore.
You can't have 330 million people in the United States
under a single regime. It just, it won't work.
Not with the Internet when we were kids.
I know I'm going on a little bit of rant here.
Let me finish this point when we were kids.
You're old, you're younger than me, so maybe you don't remember
as much as I did. But when we were kids, we all
listened to the same music, we all watched the same movies, we
all wore the same thing. But the Internet allowed all of
this diversity that allowed us to all find these little niches.
And we started getting more and more and more niched out.
Right now, we listen to different music, we watch
different movies, we wear different things.
And so the central government that we've had that was created
to manage a world from 100 years ago, it doesn't work anymore and
it won't work now. The way the country was founded,
under 50 independent states, under one government, we could
go back to that, but we can't have one central government over
330 million. People.
Yeah. And I I I completely agree.
And the the IT it's so, you know I I think every, every Bitcoin,
every person at this point you have to read the sovereign
individual. They they they they lay this
out. I completely agree with you.
Information Technologies makes that system, that system,
obsolete and kind of leads me to circle back to the original
question that I asked you which is we're we're we're witnessing,
we're witnessing this happen in real time.
You know, and it's just crazy. And then watching the response,
you know, I'll tell you this, Mark, and you'll appreciate
this. I saw a the Who's the the old
host of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart.
OK, yeah, Jon Stewart. It was Jon.
Stewart, he He's back, by the way, with another show, but
yeah. He came back to host The Daily
Show as a guest, and he did. The first episode he did, He
came back on, he did it on Tucker.
And you're watching and I remember watching this like 15
years ago. It'd be like this is a huge fan
of the show. And I remember I was like
watching the show and with the fake laughs in the background,
like, you know, like the the SNL laughs, like they add the laugh
tracks into the the episodes and I'm looking at that.
I'm like, dude, this is propaganda.
Like this is like, this is this is 10 times better, 100 times
better than the Soviet Union. This is crazy.
They're literally attacking this man's character because he did
an interview that was out outside the acceptable window of
discourse and it was just so fascinating to me, man, how
things are changing. So OK, how can individuals, what
advice would you give individuals other than buy
Bitcoin other than do your own research?
What advice would you give to individuals and what advice?
How would you tell them to deal with their parents that perhaps
can't move with the times? Yeah, I think, you know, I think
it's pretty evident at this point that we're not going to be
voting ourselves out of this. I believe that we have to build
our way out of this. Like, it's up to like if if you,
if you look at like Iron Rand's, you know the Atlas Shrugged,
right. It's like the productive people
of the world are the ones that drive the world.
We're the ones with the ideas, the innovations, the hard work,
the effort and we create the world through building.
And then you have the unproductive class, as she said,
when you have to get permission to produce from men who produce
nothing. So you have this unproductive
class that doesn't produce anything.
They're like parasites trying to pull.
But we have to build our way out of this.
So back to this form of government's no longer
compatible. We can see this like when
they're trying to enact bills like they're going like
Elizabeth Warren wants to like change the way like the Bitcoin
code works. And like she wants to like make
miners have to collect KYC data like travel rule.
Like OK that that doesn't work. You can't self custody.
Like, I can't know 12 words in my head.
Like what? What do you mean Like how does
that work? Right.
So like they're they're not able to keep up with how fast the
world is changing. And so it's up to us as as
builders, as entrepreneurs. I know you are Nico, I am to
build our way out of this. And So what does the average
person do about this one? You have to learn to take care
of yourself. You have to think about your own
health, right? Becomes become the better player
that get your mind right. Learn how to think critically,
learn how to digest and and and discern information.
You have to build up your health and your energy and your focus
and you got to get your money right?
Right. Like there's no way to escape
the matrix unless you have money and influence.
You need money and influence. My kids, they call them MPCS.
If you don't have you're a non player.
You need to be a player character.
You need to be a character right?
Power up your character. You need to up level your life.
You need to create some income and that means like get out of
your mom's basement. Stop watching Netflix and like
work man. Like build something.
Develop something. Go work with people who are
building and developing something.
Learn to create wealth by providing value into the world.
Then yes, when with that excess money of course buy Bitcoin
right. But Bitcoin doesn't help you if
you don't have any savings And we've there was that tweet going
around last couple days with Russell O Kong and he was
talking about how nobody's in these.
I think it was third world countries, Africa, whatever,
wasn't into buying Bitcoin because yeah, they don't have
any savings. And so take care of yourself,
build up your energy effort, think clearly, go start building
either on your own or go help people who are building create
wealth by putting value into the world.
Take that value and then you can start, you know, parking that
over into Bitcoin. But yeah, we're going to have to
build our way out of this. It's the it's the doers, it's
the builders. I'm super bullish on when
millions of entrepreneurs are, you know, backs are against the
wall. Yeah.
And and they're completely unleashed and you know no one's
gonna judge them based on where they're from.
Whatever the Internet is gonna give them.
Not equal opportunity, right. But at least a shot.
Right. And you know it It's I'm, I'm
incredibly excited. So you know there is gonna be a
a backlash and this is talked about in the sovereign
individual and you know the the I think the you you wrote a book
with him. Svetsky calls them the laggards
in iron rands. Atlas Shrugged, They're called
the looters, right? The people that benefit from,
you know, the the welfare state, right?
There's just this idea, you know, that is based on the
wealth redistribution mechanism that is enabled by Fiat, right?
Once that mechanism, you know, gets attacked or, you know,
affected, like how are they gonna be able to, you know, give
away that free stuff that they're promising, right?
I don't think they'll be able to the way that they have in the
past. And I think that's gonna be a
shock to a large portion of the population.
What is that pushback going to look like?
How do people protect themselves?
Is are we just all going to move to a citadel in the middle of
nowhere and just surround ourselves with Electro?
I'm making a joke, but I'm dead serious at the same time.
I think we have a model right in front of us.
We we can see it. Remember I talked about this
competitive nature where we can see these models playing out.
So if if if your listeners haven't been paying attention,
like everyone needs to be watching what's going on in
South Africa. And I don't want to get get into
like the the Super weeds into this.
But like you basically had South Africa which was like one of the
richest nations, you know, the the richest nation on the
African continent, one of the, you know, great richest nations
in the world. They had their apartheid thing.
They decided to break down the apartheid and then they started
doing DEI. So then we had to get instead of
meritocracy, we had to have equity and inclusion.
And we saw we can see how well that's going for us here.
And it did equally bad there. There are a few decades in front
of us, let's just say, let's Fast forward.
South Africa is now in complete shambles.
They can't even keep their electricity on.
Niko. It's been this way.
Some of my best friends came from South Africa.
So in high school I remember hearing these stories and even
back then there was areas where the police couldn't go to cause
the crime was so bad. But anyway, now today it's so
bad they can't even keep the electricity on.
They have between like 12 to 16 hour power blackouts every
single day in South Africa. So now they have no electricity,
which means they have no commerce.
They have no business like all their ports, like some of the
best export ports in the world. They're all shut down, no one.
They can't man them. They can't run them.
I might be over exaggerating some of this, but they they the
power shut down 1214 hours a day.
So then their their economy's crumbling.
There's no tax revenue, they can't fund the police, crime is
ridden. OK, so it's really bad.
However, the point that I'm making is in in South, in South
Africa, there's little enclaves where people have decided to
create their own power grids and have their own police.
And you have these enclaves throughout the country where
people are running, are, are living that citadel, if you
will, now, not the lone wolf. What's happening?
This is a very sad thing. I hate to even bring this up,
but there's basically genocide going on down there and they're
just slaughtering like the the the white farmers that are out
on the farms, but in these enclaves they've built up their
cities, they have their own power generation, their own
police, etcetera. And so that's sort of a model of
like what could happen in a failed state like that.
And yet you still sort of have the citadels to your point.
And I'm sure I haven't been to Argentina, but I'm guessing even
in Argentina, Venezuela, countries that have completely
collapsed, they still have these enclaves, these pockets of of
people that are productive. And what's really interesting
too about these pockets is like not only the the
self-sufficiency but also the self-reliance.
And by being self-reliance it shows that a large central
government is obsolete. It's not necessary in a way.
So yeah and and you hear that but usually in Venezuela the
stories that I hear is is like the the very wealthy class they
have like a, you know, they have, they still have
restaurants they can go to, right.
They still have you know, there's there's ways to live in
in that location and not get as affected.
So it's very, very interesting. We are getting to the top of the
hour mark and I do want to be respectful to your time.
I I do also want to give you the opportunity if you had a message
to the simply Bitcoin audience what is going to happen in the
next 5-10 years and we've been talking about it.
But you know what? What's on your mind?
Yeah, I would say, you know, I I mean I I kind of threw out some
of this already. So might be a little bit
redundant to say it again. But I would say one, everyone
has to kind of take care of themselves again, right.
We can't just hope and pray and and vote our way out of this.
I think that's pretty apparent right now.
So we have to build our way out of this.
So we each kind of have to build up our own lives and sort of
back to these examples of these enclaves.
Even in horrible situations, people are still able to rise up
and live the life that they want.
So even as the world gets worse, you and I as individuals can
still navigate this for our own benefit.
OK, So with this, with this phone, I can learn anything,
meet anybody, do anything. And so we can still be
responsible. So we're, we're not victims.
We can take responsibility for ourselves.
We can build our way out of this.
Now, once we've taken care of ourselves, like the airplane,
put the mask on yourself. Now how do we help other people?
Well, now how can we, as I said already build?
How can I build or help other people build, whether it be with
my money, I invest with them, I go work with them, I learn new
skills so I can build. So one take care of yourself,
then sort of help effect change. That's what I recommend.
The the kind of talk I gave at both those conferences was like,
you can't just go buy your Bitcoin and go sit on a hill and
hope in 10 years that you're rich.
But we need to build the ecosystem so that Bitcoin really
becomes its full, true potential.
And so I think, you know, one of the things I think about Bitcoin
is it changes this incentive mechanism.
And if we can store our value in a way that can't be debased and
stolen from us, it allows us to focus on putting more value back
into the world. And I think that's the real key.
Take care of ourselves, take care of others.
Put more value into the world and we can we can lift our way
out of this. Again I'm super bullish on when
millions of entrepreneurs are you know backs are against the
wall. We know that the whatever the
collectivism, socialism, communism, fascism, we know it
doesn't work as Nietzsche said that which is falling.
Xiao Yi also push. So let's just give him a little
push. Take care of ourselves and we're
going to be. OK.
I 100% agree with that and you know the optimism build through
it. Yes, if you work hard enough, if
you believe enough, I think I truly believe that the world is
kinda you will get somewhat what you wanted, but you really
really gotta fight for it and really believe in it.
So Mark, always an honor to have you on Simply Bitcoin IRL.
Really, really appreciate you joining us today.
Yeah, Nico, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Thanks, Mark. All right, guys.
I hope you enjoyed the show. You know what to do.
Smash that like button, Consider subscribing.
If you feel like we provided you value, consider checking out
Mark's content. It's incredible.
You can find it at the mark at at 1.
Mark Moss on YouTube and check out Market Disruptors, another
YouTube channel that Mark runs as well.
So guys, we'll see you back for the live show tomorrow at 12:15
PM Eastern Standard Time. Take it easy everybody.
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