All right. Hey there.
This is from Constant and you're listening to Bitcoin for
Millennials. Together with my guests on this
podcast, I go on a journey to discover how our current
financial system works, why it's flawed, and why Bitcoin is the
most relevant technology that you, my fellow millennials,
should understand and adopt. In this episode, I'm joined by
Rajat Soni. He's a certified financial
advisor with 10 years of finance industry experience dealing with
hundreds of clients on a personal level.
As a personal finance educator and content creator, he
simplifies complicated concepts with weekly insights on personal
finance, investing and Bitcoin. With this audience of over
200,000 followers across Instagram, X sub stack and
LinkedIn, I'm super excited to talk with him.
As I think people who are like classically schooled in finance
as you are, I assume you know who now embrace Bitcoin should
be applauded for, you know, this turn around and I think we'll
definitely talk about that and I'm happy to welcome you here
man. Thank you so much.
I appreciate it. I'm a huge fan of your podcast.
I, I, I'm constantly listening to it.
I I haven't listened to any of the couple of recent episodes,
but I've been consistently listening over the last couple
of months or so. Love your.
Well happy happy to hear. Thanks for coming on.
Like, I love your tweets. So that's that's great.
And yeah, as mentioned like what I what I love about Bitcoin is
is and especially about making a podcast and and talking to all
these different types of people with all these different types
of backgrounds. You know, who now see Bitcoin
and are active in Bitcoin. Like I love these people who are
like traders for 30 years on Wall Street, you know, who
really profit from a broken system and are now fully into
Bitcoin. Like it takes a lot of, yeah,
personal challenges to, you know review your world view and then
see it in a different way. And I see that with you as well,
right. Like you, you have a long, you
know, personal finance background.
All your tweets are about Bitcoin basically, which is,
which is amazing. And yeah, I just want to start
by asking you how, how did you first become interested in in
finance and and eventually Bitcoin?
So not too long ago, I was actually in a very bad financial
position. I had tons of debt.
I didn't take care of my finances.
I was spending so much money just on entertainment take out.
I mean I didn't know what I was doing with my money right Maybe
6-7 years ago this was and then I started learning learning
about something called fire fire financial independent retired
early. This was after I finished my the
this was I think it was this was during when I was doing my
chartered financial analyst. So during the, during the
designation, during all my education, I always made the
assumption that the US dollar would be the only currency,
right? You don't, you don't think of it
from a different perspective. The perspective is that the US
dollar is the best form of money.
It will always be around. There's no way for it to go
away. There's no way for it to
collapse. It's always going to be here,
right? So I I've been posting about
personal finance, about investing, about stocks, about
real estate, all that stuff for about 3 years.
And in that time, I learned more about money, I learned more
about Bitcoin, and I learned more about just the financial
system than I did during my entire CFA designation.
Like the time when I was studying for my CFA, right?
And that That's insane to think about, right?
I mean most people who do that CFA designation, recurring team.
Also. Sorry.
It's a recurring team also across financially educated
people. Actually, yeah.
Yeah. No, that's exactly what it is,
right. I mean in in the CFA, we just
assume that no other asset will ever take over.
We can have real estate, we can have stocks, we can have all
that stuff. We can't have anything that will
replace money, right. So when I when I started posting
about personal finance but investing, I started getting a
lot of questions. Hey, I don't like investing in
stocks because this company is doing this or real estate is
almost like in my opinion. I mean, I've, I've grown to
think that real estate is almost like exploitation, right?
Because you're holding something, you're offering it to
someone else. And if they don't get it, I
mean, they're homeless, right? If you're if they're not willing
to pay the minimum price that's available, they're homeless.
So I'm just, over time, it made me think, hey, do I really want
to be a part of this system? Do I really want to be thinking
about things this way? I mean, when when you start
diving into Bitcoin, when you start putting in the work to
understand how Bitcoin works, you realize that the entire
financial system is designed to take money from the people who
are financially illiterate, right?
If you're. If you don't, if you don't
understand how money works, if you keep U.S. dollars, nobody's
going to tell you, hey this is you, you're losing money, right?
I think just now in in the time of social media, more people are
realizing that this system is a scam.
Right. It doesn't it doesn't work the
way it should. There was there's actually a
book. I'm not I'm not sure if I can
mention this but this book of course is amazing.
The Fiat standard, awesome. It It goes through how money is
created in this current system. And then it it doesn't talk
about Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is the he had this.
The same author has another book with the Bitcoin standard.
Both books are amazing. I mean they show you the flaws
of the current system and then how the the new system means to
fix all those flaws, right. So I mean in my opinion, a lot
of financial advisors are going to be coming into this.
A lot of financial analysts are going to be coming into this.
They're realizing it. If you look on Twitter, there
are more Cfas. There are more MBAs getting in
on this so. Yeah.
And so how is this current financial system then designed
to profit from the illiterate or or steal from us?
So what most people do today, I've I've, I've done tons of
one-on-one conversations with people.
I've done tons of just meetings, webinars, all that stuff.
And what most people do today is they save in the currency
they're paid in, right. So if you think about it, what
that means is that they're getting paid in U.S. dollars or
they're getting paid in Canadian dollars and they're keeping
those U.S. dollars and Canadian dollars in their bank accounts.
What that does over time is it give somebody else power over
you, right? So let's say, for example, if
the US government wants to borrow money to do something,
they're just going to get a loan, right?
When they get that loan, it seems like, OK, you're not
you're you're not printing money to do so but you you you're,
you're adding more money to the to the economy right.
Even if it's doesn't, if it's, if it's a loan, it doesn't
matter what kind of money it is. It's demand on goods that are
currently available. You can't print goods so you can
print money, right. So when we're, when we're
working for a form of money that can be printed at will and we're
saving in that form of money, I I I mean, I learned more from
Safedine's Bitcoin, Bitcoin Standard about this than
anything else. If we save in a form of money
that's constantly diluted, constantly being printed, it can
be printed at will. We're going to lose all of our
wealth, right? And most people are doing that.
They're seeing that, hey, I'm working so much harder.
I'm spending so much more time at work, I'm doing 3 jobs and
yet I still can't even make my ends and make ends meet because
my rent is going up, right? It doesn't matter how much I
save when my rent is going to go up my the cost of living is
going to constantly increase my the price of my food is going to
constantly increase. Actually went to Costco not too
long ago. The same stuff that would have
cost maybe 150 dollars 5-6 years ago now cost 350.
Two $150.00. So how are people How are people
going to make ends meet? Their income hasn't increased by
4050%. So that's how the system is
broken, right? It constantly devalues the the
reward you get for labor and it increases the value of
everything else. Yeah, right.
So. And would you would you then
follow the the illustration I I used that before in the in the
podcast where you know if you see all the money let's say take
all the dollars that are in existence, right and you view
that as a as a pizza. Every time new money is created
it does not mean the pizza gets bigger.
It means that the slices get smaller right?
And and if you see a slice as your ownership of the amount of
dollars, right, let's say your net worth is $50,000 or
something, then what the energy that that little slice is,
right? That's why the pizza analogy is
so good, because the pizza analogy has like calories,
right? So one slice A has a certain
amount of calories, but once it gets cut in half, then that one
slice you own, one slice you own 50K in in dollars basically.
But the amount of energy that that captures is half of the
previous slice basically. And that's why the prices of the
things you want to buy then the the, you know the amount of
dollar units, basically they go up but you still buy the same
thing. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what
it is. I mean if you if you really want
to, if you think about it, I'm not sure how many of your, how
much of your audiences of how many of them are aware of stock
splits. So a stock split is basically
when a company share increases to a certain level.
So let's say for example Amazon, Amazon shares were at $2000 not
too long ago they did a 24 one stock split one for 24124 one I
think it was. So basically what they did was
they split each share into 20 units, right.
So let's say for example, if you do that and then the value of
the company is going to stay the same, right?
It's not like you have more, more value.
You still have the same amount of value.
The what's being created by the company stays the same.
But if you keep adding more and more shares and then you take
away, let's say for example, if somebody has one share of Amazon
and if you split into 20 shares, but then you give them 19
shares, they have less wealth. They may feel like they have
more. They may feel like, oh, I went
from one share to 19 shares. Units.
Amount of units, Yeah. Exactly.
That that's what it is, right. They think they have the same or
they think they think they have more shares, but they actually
lost value because somebody else took that one share.
That 5% is gone forever and they're never going to get it
back so. And they said then also, well,
safety talks a lot about value also, right, A lot of people.
And of course you talked a lot about stocks and stuff as well.
And I see a lot of people also talk about stocks on Twitter
etcetera. They say oh it's gone up in
value, blah blah. But they they use the wrong
words because it it went up in price, right, it went up in in
well, the units of dollars again that you.
See the nominal value. Yeah, exactly.
Oh, yeah, that's that's a better term.
Yeah, nominal value but it's that does not represent the
value and I feel that a lot of people conflate those two things
and it's also being used against them in a sense, right, that you
can see all the S&P 500 is doing great because it's you know
number go off also there. But that does not represent the
value, right. I saw a great graph.
I think British hotels shared that where you had the NASDAQ,
the NASDAQ graph from I think 1970s or 80s or whatever the
introduction was until now denominated in dollars.
And you see like, well eventually it goes up, it's
almost all time high or something.
But when you denominate it in the M2 money supply, the amount
of dollars, which is the real value, not the price, then the
current point is lower than at the peakofthe.com bubble.
Which is so interesting because you could easily argue that we
are way further along technology wise and that the companies that
came afterthe.com bubble provided way more value within,
you know, the technology sector. But even their value, although
it's provably better, got devalued because there is way
more, way more money than in in 2000, basically.
And yeah, that always struck me as a great illustration, But
nobody looks at it in that way. Yeah, all you see is the nominal
value, right? I, I, I like to think of it as
with Bitcoin, your nominal value is going to decrease over time,
but you're buying power will increase, right?
So if you have, let's say for example, over 10 years, you hold
one Bitcoin, you spend half a Bitcoin during that time, you'll
probably end up with higher buying more buying power at the
end of that 10 year period. Then you started with even
though you spent half of your Bitcoin, right?
With real estate, with stocks, you can keep your real estate.
You can keep your stocks, you can keep getting your three 4%
cash flow, but you're going to end up with a lot less real
value than you begin with, right?
The real value is what you're referring to when when you say
M2 money supply, when you when you have those stocks in real
estate, you're losing value. I actually spoke with somebody
yesterday, he was saying he's in Pakistan, so he was, he invested
in real estate in Pakistan. He was saying how the value of
his house dropped 30% in terms of U.S. dollars, even though it
went up in nominal. In nominal figures, right, it
went up from 5 million to something like 13 million or
11,000,000. But for him to break even, it
would have had to go to 13 or 14,000,000.
So he lost, he lost value. His nominal value went up the
price that he could sell it for. But what's the value of that?
The the nominal currency? When you can't spend it on
anything, you can't buy anything with it.
Yeah, exactly. So sometimes people joke, right?
Like, oh, in the 1960s a bread was $0.10 and now it's $4.00.
But that's kind of where the joke always ends, you know, The
conversation never continues after that.
There's nobody who's like, well, that doesn't really make sense.
I I give, you know, in in I give another amount of units to buy a
bread. Well, OK, or something like
this. This illiteracy are also, you
know, it's not on purpose, of course by the people.
I mean, I took me a very long time to realize that all of the
stuff that I think I knew about money was was totally wrong.
Like how, Where? Where does this come from, you
think? I I I think it's intentional.
I feel like when if people started, it starts at the school
level, right? If How many personal finance
classes did you take in your entire school and career?
0. Right.
Why? Why is that it?
It's to keep you uninformed, right?
I mean, if you start, let's say for example, if you start that,
this is what happened over the last few years, over the
pandemic, more people started thinking about personal finance
and everything started skyrocketing in price because
more people started buying rental properties because they
thought, hey, I want to build wealth for the future too.
My cash is doing nothing for me. So the entire system is
collapsing because of that. When too many people start, when
too many people start building wealth, when too many of the, I
guess the the people at the bottom start trying to get to
the top, the entire system starts falling apart, right?
That that's what. That's what we're seeing right
now. Because too many people started
buying houses, buying stocks, too many people started getting
out of the workforce. They started being able to just
live a passive life without have without being able to produce
anything. So and then they can keep their
real estate forever if they want to, right?
They can technically just keep that real estate.
They can hold on to it until they're 6070.
They can pass it on for generations, right?
They don't have to spend their Bitcoin or, sorry, their their
real estate. They don't have to spend it.
They can keep it. Yeah.
But now you, you turn around obviously after some time and so
like why are so I also know a lot of people want to invest
etcetera. I have a friend who just bought
a store with an apartment above it, which I don't know.
I didn't tell him I thought it was a bad idea, but I think it
is. You know why?
Why are real estate in stocks not a good way to build wealth
anymore? I would like to say I think some
people got rich with that. You know, I think a lot of
people, especially millennials, who are looking for ways to
build wealth end up with these options.
But I see you talk a lot about it on Twitter.
Like why is this not a good option than anymore?
I mean, I think, I think if you're it depends on your
perspective, right. If you're if you don't look at
it from the perspective of Bitcoin.
Stocks in real estate are always going to be great, right?
If you don't, if you don't know about Bitcoin, if you don't know
Bitcoin exists, stock and stocks in real estate are always going
to be the best, right. They're always going to keep
returning more than you then you would get in a savings account.
They'll always return more than inflation in general.
I think once you once you actually wrap your head around
Bitcoin, though, you realize that stocks in real estate are
not, they're not the they're not the primary asset, right?
They're not. They're not.
Prime real estate may be something that's going to
continue to increase in value. But because that's scarce, of
course. Yeah, except that's the scarcity
is what factors in, right. I think if you even speak to
most real estate investors I've, I've actually mentioned this
multiple times, real estate is going to decrease in value in
terms of Bitcoin forever, right? When you speak to a lot of real
estate investors, they don't realize that the reason why they
even own real estate is to store value.
They don't, They don't get it, right.
They they don't, they don't get it.
They don't even think of it that way.
They just think of it as, oh, I need my cash flow, right?
Saying that, oh, I'm not going to invest in Bitcoin because it
doesn't have cash flow is probably one of the stupidest
reasons to not buy Bitcoin. I I and trust me, I've had that
conversation with so many people.
It's something that people are going to regret.
They're willing to give up on a hundred, 5000% returns because
of two or three percent cash flow.
I mean, even if you think about it, the returns don't matter.
Once you kind of do a deep dive into how money works, how
Bitcoin works, you realize that this is going to fix a lot of
things that that we are currently dealing with, right?
And it's the people who are at the bottom.
A lot of the people at the bottom are the ones that are
rejecting it, but they're the ones who are going to benefit
the most. Yeah, well, what if I'd
interesting is that when you talk about this like and that's
also why I think that Bitcoin is a long journey to understand
because when you say like people don't even understand why they
have real estate, they think they need the cash flow, right?
And they say, oh, Bitcoin doesn't have any cash flow.
So it's not interesting. But when you have real estate,
you have occupied mental space, you have all your costs, you
need to deal with your tenants and stuff like that.
You know, maintenance cost, taxes, all the all the all these
things. And so it's not, it's not a it's
not an easy way to create or earn money right with with the
cash flow of course. And so I agree that the
arguments of Bitcoin doesn't have any cash flow is flawed
because, well, when you have Bitcoin, you don't have to do
anything. You don't have to think about
your tenants, There's no cost, there's no maintenance, no
property taxes, no threat of someone disowning you or the
place where the real estate is turning into a ghetto or
whatever, right. But once you, you know, start
going in this direction, then you automatically get to like,
yeah, that's why I said mental space or your time preference,
like safety talks about, right. It's it's way more, it's less
about earning money or investing or building wealth.
It's more about, yeah, almost your mental, your your mental
state, right. The fact that freedom.
Yeah, exactly. Because.
I mean, any if you, if you didn't think about it, how many
people are managing real estate properties full time when they
could be doing something else, right?
How much energy is being wasted? How much how much labor hours,
How many labor hours are being wasted, right?
And when when those labor hours could be going for?
It's something that's a lot more productive, a lot more useful to
society. Maybe maybe we wouldn't be
relying on people working three or four jobs to make ends meet
while other people can just sit at home and do nothing, right?
Maybe that wouldn't be the case anymore.
Yeah, yeah, 100% agree. But that's also where you kind
of end up when you end up at at what you mentioned in the
beginning that this, this owning, owning houses, renting
them out, it's kind of, I don't know which words you use, but
it's, it's predatory in a sense, right?
Just because I have more than you and I can provide you with a
house where the utility value of a house did not change in the
past two 3-4 hundred years, right?
The room roof above your head and walls for security and
warmth. You know, the fact that it got
financialized is of course a big symptom of of the brokenness of
the money. Yeah, so I said it was
exploitation actually had. Exploitation, Yeah, that's.
Bad I had. I had a lot of had a lot of.
I guess economists retweet me when I said that.
And it was really funny because they were saying that, oh, I'm a
socialist. No, I'm not.
I don't, I don't care. I don't care about governments
redistributing our wealth. I don't care about all that
stuff. What I what I care about is
telling people about the asset that's going to outperform
everything else. The reason why I say that real
estate is exploitative is because one group of people owns
it. Like let's say OK, so if you
think about it, my wife and I, we bought a pre construction
house in 2018. Since 2018, the house value has
increased a certain amount. And now we can.
If we wanted to, we could take the equity from the house and we
can use it to buy two more houses, right?
We could put them. Down and you did what?
We didn't do that right. I I.
Actually. Yeah, even even.
I mean, in general think if you think about it, timing is so
important in this legacy financial system that you can't
recover if your timing is wrong, right?
There's so many memes that say, hey, my biggest mistake was
being in Grade 3 when the housing crash happened, so I
couldn't own real estate. Have you seen that?
You've probably seen that, right?
I mean. No, but I love that.
It's the truth, right? That that is something just
because you're a certain age, you can't get exposure for real
estate. Most people who are have a
couple of cousins who are who are around that age.
Maybe they're 18 to 25. They don't even think real
estate is something they can possibly buy at any age, right?
They they, it's out of their minds.
They don't even think about it, right?
So I mean, if you think if, if you put it in that perspective,
if Bitcoin didn't exist, these people would be slaves to the
system forever. Yeah, well, now that you talk
about it, I I I find it interesting because a lot of
people talk about, you know, equal opportunities and stuff
like that. But this is a great example of,
you know, in more modern times than 20 years ago or 40 years
ago, there's less equal opportunity to just have a house
for the utility of having a house.
Not not even about an investment, right.
But but just more moving out of your parents house, living on
your own, building a family, stuff like that.
That equal opportunity is basically gone, I'd say, But
nobody's really touching that, right?
Because when you touch that you, you touch the flawed system.
You make people angry, right? And when when people see that,
no, they're like, no, the system's built to to make make
this happen. I I've said, I've said before,
mortgages have actually turned real.
The the mortgages have made the world a lot more expensive.
People think, hey, now I can finance a house, I'm so much
better off. But I don't.
I mean, on a Bitcoin standard, people aren't going to be
financing their houses. They're going to be buying them
straight out. They're going to be saving for a
couple years. Now you're spending 5-6 years to
save a for a down payment on a Bitcoin standard.
With prices going down five or six years, you're going to be
saving for a house instead of saving for a down payment.
You're not going to have a mortgage because it won't be
profitable, right? If if somebody banks are going
to think of it as, oh, an individual is more likely to
default and because I can't print money to make up for their
default, I'm not. I I can't lend the money.
It's not profitable for me any for me anymore.
If if one out of these five people default, I lose money,
why would I lend them either either mortgages are going to be
at something like 2025% extremely expensive consistently
or there's going to be no mortgages.
So what's that going to do? It's going to decrease demand
for houses. It's going to make housing
prices a lot cheaper. Like we're seeing that right
now. I've seen in quite a few
instances where I I so I'm going to say this, I actually have my
real estate license. I'm saying this as a realtor, as
somebody who who sells real estate for a living.
And because of that, you know for a fact that I'm not lying
here, right? When you look at prices for
houses, a lot of people are taking 500, six, $100,000
losses. Right.
And that's a nominal value. In real value, their loss is
even bigger because they have the inflation to take to to to
account for as well, right? So what they're getting back is
worth even less. And plus they put in their
maintenance, they put in their fees, they have to pay a fee to
actually buy the house, right. All that stuff, all that stuff
has to be taken account. It has to be accounted for,
right? Sorry, I completely lost track.
I was just talking about the real estate.
Well, where? Where?
Were you. Yeah, that that that the real
estate, the the the opportunity for people to to actually own
real estate you know go out leave their parents, build a
family set etcetera that that is actually gone.
And then you mentioned that that when we would have a Bitcoin
standard that also you know the incentive for banks to have
mortgages would go away and that then eventually the housing
prices would, the house prices would go down to you know, the
the, the utility value or what it's worth perhaps except for
you know prime real estate on the coast or something like
that. Yeah, no, definitely.
I I like, if you think about it, there's people who own thousands
of houses, right? I mean, there's.
I'm not sure if you know about him, but Grant Cardone.
Yeah, yeah. I saw a video of him, yeah,
yeah, last week where he talked about he has a home which is
empty, like a huge mansion. And he talked about like, should
I sell this for Bitcoin? And he made a great case, I
think. Yeah, yeah.
See, I mean, that's the thing, right?
These people own thousands of houses.
What's going to happen when they start selling their houses?
What's going to happen when hedge funds realize that, hey,
instead of buying single family homes, I should be buying
Bitcoin? It's going to give me much, much
better profits. Why would I waste my time
dealing with these, these broke people who maybe can't even pay
their rent? I mean, why would they do that,
right? They don't want to.
Their goal is to make as much money as possible, and Bitcoin
is that way. But The thing is that because
Bitcoin doesn't have that physical presence, you're not
exploiting anybody, right? You're incentivized to create
more real goods so that you can accumulate more Bitcoin, right?
That code, the code is so valuable because of its
scarcity, right? I mean, people say, oh, it's
this code, it's lines of code. It's, it has no physical
presence. It's worthless.
But that's the thing that that code has so much value because
people are willing to pay for it, right?
It's like it's like the information on your computer in
the. Network confirm every 10 minutes
that it's still there. Also, yeah, and it's like, it's
like your, it's like the phones on your on your computer, right?
They don't have physical presence, but they're valuable
to you because their memories, right.
This is a different kind of value.
This is more monetary value. You can use it to spend on goods
and services. That's what people want, right?
They don't care about, they don't care about owning as many
houses as possible. They they don't care about that.
Yeah, before we jump deeper into into Bitcoin, I want to go back
one step. When you said, you know there's
a lot of people who are experiencing they are getting
poorer despite working harder, right.
People having multiple jobs who are living paycheck to to
paycheck. There's lots of videos on Tiktok
and Instagram of people, well, while they are sipping six $6
Starbucks in their own car, are complaining about the fact that
everything is so expensive. But it's interesting that
especially in this, this, this, it's kind of this confluence of
where all the information is free, right?
So any anyone can figure out basically anything, right?
And they can also share it in an easy way.
The fact that we now see people share these experiences, it's
really fascinating to me. Like you see that people who
well basically true adversity are figuring out there is
something going on, you know with with the money.
I find super interesting like how how do you view this like is
it could just be like an accelerant like more people
getting on to this. I mean like it.
It's definitely not isolated, right, This experience or
realization. I I agree with you.
I think the Internet has made it a lot more apparent that people
are having trouble right before the Internet.
How would we have figured this out, right?
Most people wouldn't be able to have a voice, right?
With with the Internet, more people are seeing that, OK,
other people are in the same situation as me.
It's not my fault, right? Even that, OK.
Even if they're sipping on $6 coffee, for example, if you were
to save $6 a month or $6 a day for a month, you'd have 6 * 30 a
$180, right? You'd have $180.
At the end of the year, you'd have $2400, right?
You wouldn't even have 20, you'd have $2200 right?
20. $200 saved for 10 years, $22,000 for 100 years.
You have $220,000 right now. A down payment is something like
$200,000 on a house, right? It's going to take you 100
years. If you give up your coffee, it's
going to take you 100 years to save for that down payment,
right? Instead of most people.
See, The thing is, most people don't understand that you have
to buy stocks. You have to buy something more
scarce than the currency that you have because they think that
that currency is the most scarce thing you can you can have,
right? They don't see it as this
currency is losing value because we're not taught that it's
losing value, right? Once they get to that
realization all, a lot of these people are very smart, right?
They they're they just haven't been taught the right things.
And why do you think it's so difficult to actually realize
this, this? I mean, there's also these
memes, right? Where you see like, OK, median
salary in the US, let's say 30 years ago, 40 years ago, I'm
going to say like $40,000 or $36,000, right?
And then it said median home $120,000, and now it says median
salary $39,000, right. It only went up a little bit.
Medium home $450,000 or something, right?
Like, I always think, well, that should be a signal for you to
think like, OK, if this is really the case, I should learn
about this because this doesn't sound right.
You know that this is apparently the case, but for a lot of
people it's really difficult. And that's also, well, actually
I think one of the reasons why I started this podcast, you know,
I always mentioned that if you are a millennial who grew up in
the West, you grew up in the best time ever to grow up from
any person, whoever lived. So you never really had a
problem money wise, right? Well, everyone has personal
problems. Of course everyone has
something, but more in general, right?
Like stuff just worked. But now when when when the
millennials are at the point where they're starting families
and want to buy a house with their spouse or whatever, have
one maybe two sometimes three jobs and a car and they they
they have like the grown up life that they always thought they
would have but now they they run into a problem, right?
But still it's hard for them to to grasp that in their mind,
like how did that go for you or what is your experience with
people that that you work with? I think so.
So I've been posting a lot about this on Instagram.
I've been posting a lot about how Bitcoin will probably solve
a lot of people's problems. I've been getting a lot of
pushback. A lot of people think that it's
still a scam. They don't.
They think that the US dollar is always going to be the best
currency, right? They they, they, they're going
based on a belief that maybe their parents held their parents
transferred over to them, even in in school.
Like, if you think about it, we don't really hear about anything
about. We don't hear anything about
where money comes from. We don't hear anything about how
money retains its value, why it retains its value, why it even
loses value over time. We don't, we don't hear about
any. Most people don't do a deep dive
on that. Because I think if you think
about it, most people are busy either trying to make
relationships, trying to trying to be happy, trying to work,
trying to make ends meet. They don't have time, right?
I I, I'm, I'm regularly speaking with my wife.
My wife is a nurse. I'm telling her you need to
learn about Bitcoin. But she it's because the work
that she does is so stressful. So she's not willing to put more
time into this. I mean, it's it's at the
beginning. If you think about it, it's a
very stressful topic, right? It challenges your beliefs.
It it completely. It's a new paradigm, right?
It's like if you're thinking most people have grown up
thinking real estate is the best way to save real estate is my
savings account. This is a forced savings
account. It's the only way for me to
build wealth. It's like taking that belief out
of your mind and replacing it with something completely
different. People think, hey, physical is
what's valuable. Bitcoin is not physical.
They think, oh, you're supposed to hold your real your assets
forever. You're supposed to hold houses
forever. You don't have to hold your
Bitcoin forever. You can sell your Bitcoin.
You can use it to consume, right?
Even a few weeks ago, I'm sorry maybe a couple months ago I did
AI did a podcast with simply Bitcoin.
I was I was saying, hey, I I at that point I hadn't understood
Bitcoin completely right. I at that point I still thought,
hey real estate is still a great investment.
But once you once you kind of once you kind of put in the time
to understand how Bitcoin works, it's very painful.
Like I said in the beginning, it's very, very painful.
It's going to hurt, right. It's going to challenge
everything. Once you put in that time you're
going to get it. But most people don't have that
time. Yeah, I think it's most people
don't have that time. I I agree.
I mean, took me 10 years to really get to where I'm at right
now. Bitcoin, Bitcoin wise.
It's that. But also what I tried to
illustrate that that I don't have a problem feeling right in
especially in the West, where up until now lots of stuff still
works right. Like yesterday I recorded with
Tony Yasbek and he's from Lebanon and he shared how
overnight he lost everything he had right.
And then he was like, OK, now I understand I have a problem but
that it's unfortunate that that you need that in order to
actually grasp, you know, what is going on, like you cannot
change. It's it's hard for a lot of
people to change themselves before they actually end up you
know in the real big problem stage.
So I also like I agree it, it takes time obviously, but it's
also that right, like the the it's kind of like like negative
forward-looking thinking which is not really an enjoyable
activity of course, right. So it's it's probably also like
a human, you know, your incentive is too strong to just
not think about that. Yeah.
I mean, if you think about it, if you can borrow money for 0%
and you can buy a house and you can make 20% returns on it every
single year, why wouldn't you, right.
It's the base of the system is so broken.
We can create money at will. We can issue it to anybody.
We can. Banks can pretty much do
whatever they want with the money supply, right.
At the same time, I don't know if most people know this, but in
2020, if you look at the Federal Reserve website, they actually
dropped their reserve requirement from 10% to 0%,
right? Most people don't know this,
right. So the reserve requirement is
basically if you put your money in a bank account, they they're
not going to keep all your money, right?
They're going to return. They're going to lend out most
of it. So that's that's what happened
with Silicon Valley Bank. Silicon Valley Bank had a
certain number of depositors who wanted to take their money out.
They had lent that money to the US government, right.
So most people don't see that. Most people don't see that back
end. They don't care about the back
end because it's, it's complicated.
I mean when when you try to learn it, it takes some, it
takes a lot of time to wrap your head around how things truly
work right and and those things it it's almost like, it's almost
like it's made complicated so that most people won't will
ignore it and they'll just trust somebody to do it for them.
Yeah, yeah, I fully agree. I think in the EU it's 1%, not
that much better. But yeah, people should realize
that when you put money in the bank, you loan it to the bank.
The bank doesn't have to hold that in cash.
And when you want to withdraw an amount above a certain
threshold, they will ask you questions why you want to have
your money, the money that you loan to the bank.
You know, this. I always try to use as like the
simplest kind of like alarmist signal to say like hey, learn
about this please like because this is not my opinion, like it
is really the case, right? This is, this is just how it
works. So when you take a risk with
your job or a venture and you deliver value and you get value
in return, you know, in the form of whatever the money is that
you use when when you deposit it in a bank, you actually loan it
out again and you run even more risk, right.
Because when the bank explodes, you can think like, oh, I have
my, what is it in America, FDIC insurance, right.
I'll get back up to 250, K etcetera.
But if the bank doesn't have that money and it has to come
from the government, how do you think the government makes makes
money? Right.
It's again from taxes, from the citizens.
Like I just try to talk a lot about this as well with people
because you have to understand that that is what makes you
stuck in a loop, right in the loop in in this broken system
where, and that's why I want to make the jump to Bitcoin.
Like that is where Bitcoin comes in, right?
It's another system. It's another system, a
standalone system where once you understand that you can move
from a broken system to a system that is provably working and
auditable and all these things, then you are out.
Like, you can do that today. You can do that right now, you
know, take whatever your wealth is and you move it to that, to
that new system. So if someone sees your content
and says, hey, what is Bitcoin and why should I care?
What's like your What's like your reply there?
So I try to tell them that it's, it's almost like a it's an
alternate economy where you have a certain amount of money and
that amount of money is never going to increase.
So it, let's say for example, in the current system, you're
working for a certain amount of money, that money can be created
at will, right? The money that you have, maybe
it was freshly printed a few hours ago, right?
Maybe you received that money after it was printed
immediately. So with Bitcoin, you know for a
fact where that money came from, you know, every single, every
single coin that has ever been issued was created.
By a miner or it was issued to a miner who put in their time and
energy to to create that right? They they actually had to do
something to make that coin appear.
It didn't appear out of thin air.
It appeared because of energy consumption.
It it appeared because of a time investment, right?
It wouldn't have appeared otherwise with dollars.
Dollars can be printed at will. They can be created immediately.
So if you think about it, what there was, there's a tweet from
I forgot. I forgot who it's from.
But it's basically why would I work for a form of money that
somebody else can create at will, right?
Why? Why are we, why are we expected
to to work 406080 hours a week for a form of money that our
governments can just literally press a button and create more
of? Right.
Why are they collecting taxes from us?
It's a it's it sounds like a stupid question.
Hey, why? Why do governments need to
collect collect taxes when they can create money at will, right?
Once you, once you dive deeper into, you kind of start
thinking, hey. It sounds so absurd, right?
Yeah, Yeah, it's absurd. It's, it's, it's funny because,
yeah, I love this example. Like people would reply to that
and say like, oh, it's oversimplifying, etcetera.
But then you have to say like, OK, but give me the answer,
right. Like, if you can print all the
money in the world, why are there poor people?
You know, like it's it's such a stupid thing to say, but it is
rooted in reality basically, right?
Like that this is, if we can give everyone money, why
wouldn't we do that? The answer is because it would
devalue all the other money that that that currently is in there,
but that nobody nobody will say. No, that that's exactly what it
is, right? So with Bitcoin, you can't
create that money out of thin air.
You can't do that. You can't.
If for if If Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and it was it, it held
Bitcoin for people, the financial system would have been
gone, right? Our financial system would have.
It's like FTXFTX collapse. Think about all the companies
that the contagion went to, right?
All those companies would have would have.
It's because FTX tried to to create a fractional reserve
banking system with Bitcoin. But it doesn't work that way,
right? When you have a true form of
money, it doesn't work that way because you can't print your
money, right? You can't.
So, so all of that.
I guess I'll, I'll maybe maybe put into a sentence.
Bitcoin is a new way to transfer account in store for value.
It's a brand new form of money that can replace every other
form of money that that's ever existed.
Right? It's it's a It was almost a Fiat
currencies are almost a placeholder for Bitcoin.
Yeah, I love that. So what advice would you give to
a millennial who's just starting to explore Bitcoin for for their
personal finance? I actually spoke to my
sister-in-law yesterday. She was she she didn't really
get Bitcoin, she didn't care about it.
She started seeing my post and of course she started getting
more curious. So I told her yesterday, hey,
buy a little bit of Bitcoin. It doesn't matter how much you
get, even if you buy 100 dollars, $50.00 worth, whatever
you keep whatever you're comfortable with, buy a little
bit, you'll have some skin in the game and you'll start,
you'll start looking at it more, right?
She's very smart. She knows she she's constantly
sending me articles, sending her sister articles, my my wife,
she's sending her news articles. She's sending me just things
that I wouldn't even have thought of, right?
So now she's bought Bitcoin. I'm pretty sure over the next
few weeks, few months, she's going to be asking me a lot of
questions, right? I I think the the first step is
buying even a tiny little bit. Even if you buy $510 worth, just
have more than 0, right? That five or $10 worth in in in
30-40 years is going to be worth a lot more than it's worth now,
right? So the the amount that she
bought, it's going to be worth a lot more.
But that that's the thing, right?
I actually created a post I I posted a thread maybe a few days
ago where if you invested in the stock market, if you invested
$200 a month, you'd be a millionaire after 45 years.
If you did the same thing with Bitcoin, it'll take you 18
years, right? You don't have to fully put
everything into Bitcoin, right? But even if you put a fraction
of your portfolio into Bitcoin, I think that's the way to start.
Even for millennials, I get it. People are worried.
They don't understand it. They don't.
It could pretend, oh, they think it can go to zero.
It can't. But it takes a lot of time to
actually get to that conclusion, right?
You need to. You need to be able to
understand the white paper. It'll take some time, but that
time is going to cost you a lot If you don't buy a little bit of
Bitcoin, if you don't buy it just a little bit.
I know a lot of people who have bought none.
They keep putting it off. They keep putting it off.
But there's others who bought.
They started studying immediately.
Because it it piqued their curiosity, right?
It made them think, hey, I'm putting money into this, why
don't I learn more? Right?
Until you buy, you're not going to start.
You're not going to start really deep diving deeper.
Yeah, I fully agree. Like, I mean, I think it's
difficult because it's so new, right.
But what you just said hit me when I think like people buying
stocks, like if you buy, well, I like the the stock advice.
Like buy what? You know, right.
Like if you love Nike, you buy Nike.
If you love Apple, you buy Apple.
Like that. That makes the most sense for
me. But but doing any other thing,
you know, like, oh, I'm buying this pharma company something,
something or this physics, whatever, whatever company, you
don't know how they work. You don't know who these people
are. You don't know their product
development, R&D process. You don't know their operational
excellence. Like you know nothing about this
company, right. And there's so much influence
internally and externally on this company that you will never
be able to fully grasp it, right.
Yeah, maybe there's some full time stock traders that only do
that day in day out to figure out like OK, how does a certain
company work and then they buy a stock, right.
But that's not for normal people.
I like I would argue that understanding Bitcoin is way
easier than understanding. You know any any company that
has stocks on on the NASDAQ. Yeah, I agree.
There's people who dedicate their entire lives just
researching one company, right? And they still don't get to the
they still don't understand everything, right.
And if you think about it, you can you you don't have to.
You obviously do the research, but Bitcoin isn't going to
change. There's there's no cash flows
there. No, there's no product being
produced. There's no, the company's not
going to suddenly start supporting certain things that
people don't like. It's not a company, right?
It's a commodity. It's something that everybody
can own. Anybody can own it.
Anybody can. They can spend it.
They can, they can use it. They can use it as a store of
value. They can.
As long as you have a cell phone, you can access Bitcoin.
I've seen the comparison to a global ETF.
Bitcoin is a global ETF. That's exactly what it is,
right? Bitcoin is it.
You can almost think of it as representing the entire global
economy, right? Every Everybody can sell goods
on the on on Bitcoin. They can receive Bitcoin for it.
As more goods are available on the Bitcoin economy, the value
will increase. Value will accrue with the
people who hold Bitcoin over time, right As more people enter
the economy. I over the last few months,
there are some bigger companies that are joining.
Ferrari actually said, oh, we're going to accept Bitcoin for our
cars now. As you keep going, as you keep
getting more and more companies coming in, people are going to
be able to spend their Bitcoin directly.
People are worrying, hey, I'm going to have to pay to have to
pay taxes at some point. At some point.
I don't think that's going to be the case, right.
I think, I think at some point all these governments are going
to be working on behalf of bitcoiners, right?
When, when you, when you look at it, I think I went on a complete
different tangent. But if you think about it, all
these governments are going to be benefiting bit corners right
there because they know that these bit corners can leave
their country with their wealth. Real estate investors can't.
Yeah I talked about this with with Tony yesterday.
This is the thing like it will turn it will like align the
incentives better right. I I listened to Dutch podcast
where they talked about like the an old king of Belgium or or I
think it was him. Oh no, it was an old king in
England actually who like introduced Texas and it started
when he wanted to battle like the French somewhere some
something like that. But it started when he proposed
plans that he wanted to execute, right, like to defend a certain
part of land against the French because there are threat to us
etc. And that is why I need money
from you, my my citizens basically.
And so it was a plan and then he asked for money and then you
know people, people gave money, but now people gave give money
without even knowing the plans, right.
And sometimes there's taxes, for example on plastic uses on
fruits or something and the income from those taxes are not
used to get rid of the plastic on on fruits.
You know, they they get put in another pot somewhere to to
spend on some other, some other subject, right.
So the incentives are misaligned like it it should be that the
government works for the people. It's not that the people work
for the government, which is now the case, right, because they
get money without proving which value they they add, right?
And I like this other example as well.
Like yesterday I think there was news about these suicide Nets on
the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco took like, I don't
know, 20 years and millions of billions of dollars or something
to do something like it's just so misaligned.
But once the the power of the money, right, I think you said
it well, like if the economy of Bitcoin gets bigger and more
goods and services are traded for Bitcoin, that will give
power back to the people. And the government will have to
be more responsible about why they should get Bitcoin from the
citizens to actually execute on, you know whatever plan they want
to, they want to execute on. So I really like that line of
thought and it's also I think what Peter Dunworth shares a
lot. He said that he has like this
crazy 7 billion or something per Bitcoin price target.
But it's really very simple, he says.
If all the global trade fights every day, you know, daily
global trade fights for the issuance of new Bitcoin that
day, then that is $7 billion per Bitcoin, which you know is
probably pretty far away. But it is in line with what you
just mentioned, right? Because if and when people
understand that Bitcoin is the best money to ever exist, then
why would you want anything else for your goods or services to
get paid in, right? So that.
I think even for. Me, a very logical argument.
I think even based on what he's saying, I mean it, it makes, it
makes sense, right? Because if you think about it,
the value, I mean, I'm assuming he's, he's saying that in
nominal terms. But I mean, even even if he was
thinking in real terms, maybe we'll have so much more
prosperity, right? Maybe there'll be so many more
things available for people to buy, right.
Technology is going to improve. We're not going to be spending
all our money on houses. So we're going to be worrying
more about how do I improve my health?
There's probably going to be things in the economy that exist
that will be purely to help people sustain a better life,
right? I mean, if you think about it,
I, I, I, I, I speak to a lot of bitcoiners this regularly.
I've noticed that a lot of them like to spend money on high
quality food, right? It shows you, it shows you what
their preference is there. It shows you that they want they
they don't care about immediate gratification.
They don't care about being able to.
A lot of people say, hey, oh on on a lot of my posts.
A lot of my comments are saying, hey, because I used to post
about legacy financial assets. A lot of people say, hey, who's
paying you to post this? There's no CEO to pay me, right?
There's no marketing. You're helping yourself.
I'm helping myself exactly. And others.
And and yeah, that exactly. I mean, I have an incentive.
I educate people about Bitcoin and I make money from it.
That's my incentive, right? My incentive is helping people.
But my goal is to add more value.
I think that's what what a lot of entrepreneurs are going to do
on a Bitcoin standard. A lot of people are going to be
creating things that never existed.
There's think about how many ideas exist and these people are
stuck working at Amazon, Walmart, Google.
They're they're doing what what those companies want, but their
ideas are just going to waste, right?
There's I I personally know so many people who think of crazy
ideas and and they sound awesome, but they don't have the
time to execute on them, right? So.
Well, and they're not the right incentive.
Yeah, yeah. On.
I mean, on a Bitcoin standard, that's the thing.
They'll have the time to execute because they don't have to worry
about working 60 hours a week at a job they hate.
Yeah, I fully, fully agree. I I tweeted this week.
I think Fiat money incentivizes short term consumption and
Bitcoin incentivizes long term building.
And I think that's exactly, that's exactly what what you're
saying, right. And that is also I love that
that's what Safe Dean also says in his his book, right.
Short term time preference and long term time preference, the
fact that the money that you use right now, the Fiat money that
you use right now, is deliberately devalued at least
2% a year, which the people in charge agree to, is an arbitrary
number, right. And in in in in reality, it's
way higher now. I spoke to friends who live in
New York, they say like, well, they say inflation is 6%, it's
more 50. Yeah, at the grocery store.
You know, the fact that that is happening right now incentivizes
you to do all this crazy stuff and gambling to try to at least
mitigate that the devaluation of the money that you have.
But with Bitcoin, it's going to stay the same and once it, you
know, swallows up all this monetary premium from stocks and
houses etc. The the value will also go up.
But the whole point is that the value stays the same over you
know space and time towards the the future.
And that is what creates the the incentive for long term
building. Exactly as you just said.
Like if you know that your money is still worth the same in 10
years, then you will also choose to spend 10 years on some crazy
project that you otherwise would never spend time on.
Yeah, I mean that that's the thing, right.
When you're people it's going to, I think this is going to
spark a lot of innovation, right.
If you think about it, a lot of companies are creating products
that it's it's planned obsolescence, right?
It's planned destruction of value.
Like if you think about it, Apple, Amazon, all these are
Apple and Samsung have both been sued for creating phones that
intentionally break, right? They stopped working, their
battery, Battery just dies, right?
They've both been sued. I mean, if you think about it,
are they going to be doing this on a Bitcoin standard?
Because they know that their reputation is everything, right?
If because they're the only two, they're the only two that can
survive, there's no competition, right?
I mean on a Bitcoin standard. It's going to be.
Free market capitalism. So companies anywhere in the
world can create phones instead of having to rely on the US
regulations. Anybody can create a phone.
Anybody can create a product that can work and something will
go, something will go crazy, right?
All these companies, if you think about it, people say, hey
Apple is the best stock ever. I think it'll be disrupted
because of Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin will make it so
that the market is free. I think Bitcoin will make it so
that these companies have true competition around the world,
right? Right now, regulations save
them. I don't think that's going to be
the case in 5-10 years. I think all these companies are
going to be revalued significant.
They're going to be completely repriced.
They're going to lose 99, they've lost 99.9% of their
value. They're going to lose another
99.9% of their value. Yeah, find it fascinating.
I I think next to the videos on TikTok and Instagram about, you
know, people not getting putting and putting and and Smeet, a lot
of people also talk about quality of products, right?
And when you were just talking, I was thinking about I have a
son who had like Lego Playmobil and the stuff like like Duplo,
like the little building blocks, right?
I bought new stuff for him, like current stuff, but I also had my
old stuff from 30 years ago which was better, which was more
sturdy, which is when like the stuff now is way lighter.
It feels very cheap, actually. One block broke you know like
it's it's funny to see that that the quality what's not actually
funny it's interesting you know that the quality of products is
just degrading also on on on purpose you know the the they
don't The companies are also incentivized to do this right.
Maybe it's not that malicious as how it sometimes sounds but they
are incentivized to do that and that's the whole point to align
and create better incentives for people to build with a more long
term vision. I mean, I live in an old house,
more than 100 years old. I have crazy woodwork in this
house. Like there are no straight
lines, you know, like Ferry, someone who made a door, didn't
make a straight door like he, he made it nice.
His incentive was to make it nice, right?
And if you buy a new house, now, your door, your door is going to
be cheap wood, super straight, nothing, nothing nice.
And that is, I think, the whole point about where we could go
with Bitcoin also. I think Safedine, you know
Safedine talks about that in the Bitcoin standard.
He talks about how art is trash. Now there.
I mean, it's true, right? If you think about it, all the
music that you hear on the radio, all these hits, they're.
It's short term hits. Yeah, there's nothing there.
There's nothing. You don't listen.
You don't hear those songs again for after a couple, couple
replays. Those songs have no value,
right. Like with old music like let's
say I I like, I used to really like Nas, Nas, Hip hop, hip hop
music. His, his rap songs, he he would
tell a story in a lot of his songs.
And J. Cole tells a story.
Their music is it has a lot of replay value.
Like the new stuff, it's just wow.
If you try to listen to it, it kind of hurts your ears.
Yeah, it's ephemeral, right? Like, that's what the whole
media became. Just ephemeral.
Yeah. Short term satisfaction, easy
money and nothing. Yeah, exactly.
Easy, easy money. But it's also because the people
allow it, obviously, right. And I mean, it gets consumed.
But again, that is kind of like the whole point to to talk about
that, right? Like, you can get the short term
satisfaction, but that does not increase the value of your life.
You know, you can argue that it actually decreases the value of
your life because you don't know what you want, because every new
shiny thing gives you a little dopamine, you know, whatever,
whatever you're into. But that that is an endless
pursuit of nothingness. In a sense, exactly.
Yeah, so you got into Bitcoin, but what was the belief that
made you not get into it when you first encountered it?
I think I first heard about Bitcoin in 2010 and I I ignored
it because I was like, oh this is too difficult.
I wanted to actually mine in my in my basement with my computer.
I was like 1718 years old then maybe 16.
I I think I was younger. I wanted to mine in my basement,
but I was just thinking, hey, this is too complicated.
Screw it. I'm not going to, I'm not going
to waste my time on this. I'd rather spend my time getting
an education and getting a job the way that everybody tells me
to. That's what I thought.
That's what I thought, right? And that was in 20/10/2011, then
2013. I was in university and I was
going through my exams and I was thinking, hey, this job is going
to make me a lot more money than this Bitcoin crap, this Ponzi
scheme, garbage, whatever it is, right?
And then in, I think it was in 20, I think it was 2017, I
started a new job, same thing. My job is too, too difficult.
I'm not going to waste my time on Bitcoin.
This job is going to get me a much better career over the long
term. And then 2021, I think 20, I
think 2020 or 2021, I started learning about Bitcoin, like
really learning about it. That actually happened because
of somebody I met at work, this guy at work.
He was telling me, hey, you need to learn about this thing.
This thing is going to change the world.
I'm so happy that I listened to him with an open mind.
Right before that, I had a closed mind.
I was thinking, no, the way that I know things should go is how
it how it should go. That's the only way that I know
I'm not. I'm not going to pursue a new
path. Right after I started learning
about Bitcoin, after I started listening to podcast, started
really figuring things out. Actually, I left my job right in
2021. I left my job.
I went from somebody who wanted a pension, being able to earn a
certain amount of money every single year.
My my bank is going to pay for my expenses.
I'm going to just stay here for the rest of my life.
Went from that to somebody who I I don't work for a company
anymore, right? I mean, it's hard.
It's actually much more difficult working for yourself
than it is working for for a business, right?
I mean, I think that kind of pushed me more into learning
about Bitcoin because I think right now value isn't receiving
the adding, value isn't receiving the compensation that
it should, right? I think a lot of people.
OK, so let's say I do these live webinars teaching about Bitcoin.
I I can charge $30.00 for them. I can, I can do perfectly fine.
But if I just kept that $30.00, that $30 is going to lose value.
It's going to be worthless, right?
As long as as soon as you realize, hey, if I exchange my
cash holder of Bitcoin, I'm probably going to make a lot
more. I'm going to have to add the
value up front and then over time my Bitcoin is going to rise
a lot more than my business can, right?
I think a lot of people are going to come to that
conclusion. That's the conclusion that I
came to over the last maybe three months.
I think I finally something finally clicked.
Before that I was just struggling.
I was thinking, hey, no, stocks in real estate are the best way
to go Bitcoin. Is so interesting.
I saw that change. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's crazy, man. Like when when you see it, you
can't. It's true.
When you see it, you can't Unsee it.
And most people are going to continue to say that it's a
Ponzi scheme. Most people haven't put in the
time to understand how it works, right?
So they're never going to get it.
They're going to wait until I I I have a feeling most people are
going to ignore this until it hits at least $1,000,000.
Well, to talk about, to talk about that, I actually had one
one question for you because I saw you retweeted someone who
was talking about like the the 60 million millionaires in the
world and there's only 21 million Bitcoin, but a lot are
lost. Actually, you're right.
So it's probably more like 17,000,000, you know, let's talk
about that. There's 60 million millionaires
in the world, and if any millionaires are listening like,
why should they get into Bitcoin?
Well, I mean if if you're a millionaire, it's because you,
you probably have assets, right? You have either stocks, you have
real estate, you have bonds, you have something in, in the legacy
financial system that increased in value exponentially over
time, right? I don't think that's going to
continue, right. There's people, I, I actually
have a lot of people who are constantly telling me, hey, real
estate is going to continue to perform the way that it has over
the last few years. If you think about it, if real
estate prices keep going up five, 1015%, an entry level home
is going to be $10 million in a few years, right?
Yeah. Who's going?
To who's going to be able to buy that, right?
And what's the rent? How much rental income do you
even need to sustain that right? It doesn't make any sense at at
this point. It doesn't make, it doesn't make
any sense. So if you think about it, why
not put just a little, tiny amount of money in your in your
portfolio allocated to Bitcoin, right?
You don't have to go all in. You don't have to do what I did.
I actually sold all my stocks and I bought Bitcoin.
I don't tell anybody to do that. Even my wife.
My wife, she buys Bitcoin, but she hasn't caught on yet.
I mean, she's she's getting there.
She's slowly going to get there, and I don't blame her for it.
The fact that she bought Bitcoin, she opened her mind and
she bought Bitcoin. That puts her head of the crowd,
right? I I think a lot of people are
going to see that if you're a millionaire right now, Bitcoin
cost $45,000. That's 4.5% of your portfolio.
If you can't put 4.5% of your portfolio into something that
could potentially be worth so much more, it's it's like
insurance, right? If you can't buy insurance,
you're you're putting yourself in a situation where one bad,
one bad catastrophe can can just kill you, right?
It can destroy you, right? You have not.
So that's not even about Bitcoin, it's not even about
what your portfolio currently? Is it's about protection, right?
That means you have a shaky. Exactly.
If you don't have, I think at this point if you don't have
Bitcoin, your portfolio is at risk of going to 0.
Right. And so, but also when the price
goes up, right, and let's say we hit $100,000 this year, then
it's 10%, yeah of of that one million and that that is a way
bigger also mental hurdle I'd say to get over for people.
So I really like what the British huddle shares a lot
about as well, like this price. It is going to go up, you know.
Doesn't matter at which pace, but as long as you stay dormant,
it will slowly walk away from you and the decision to actually
allocate a portion of of your wealth.
And you don't need to. You don't need to go all in.
You don't need to go, You don't need to go buy A1 Bitcoin,
right. You can buy fractions, right?
I think that's the. I think that's the thing that
most people don't understand. Most people who are buying
stocks, buying real estate, they think, hey, I can buy fractional
shares. I don't have $50,000 to buy a
Bitcoin. You don't have to.
You can buy fractional units. You'd be surprised how many
people don't understand that, right?
There's whenever I whenever I talk about that.
There are so many people who say, hey, I had no idea.
Now I can finally start buying even $510 worth of Bitcoin every
day if I want to. Yeah, so to emphasize for the
people listening, you don't need to buy one Bitcoin.
You can. One Bitcoin is divided by 100
million units called sets. So you can buy one 100 millionth
of a Bitcoin and the divisible by that.
So you can buy any amount of Bitcoin that you want when you
decide to to allocate some. All right, I have three more
questions. I saw you tweeted if a financial
advisor doesn't understand how Bitcoin works, you should not
trust their advice. Can you elaborate on that bit?
So I think that a lot of people who are financial advisors right
now, they're going based on education that they got 2015,
20-30 years ago, right? When I when I did the CFA, there
was no such thing as Bitcoin, right?
I had to go out of my way. Oh, well, there was Bitcoin.
Bitcoin was there, but I didn't know about it.
It was out of my. It was out of my vision.
I didn't even think of it as something that could make sense.
Right. So if you think about it, a lot
of the financial advisors that are out there that are very
successful today, they're probably a little older, right?
Right. A majority of them are probably
in their 40s, fifties, 60s, maybe they'd haven't even
thought about Bitcoin, right. So if you think about it, if
they're not willing to do the research on their own field of
expertise, why would you trust their advice?
Yeah, I agree. That's it, right?
If you don't understand. Bitcoin in your Pay them to do
that work exactly. You're paying them one.
Percent you pay them. Yeah.
And if you if you think about it, you're paying them something
like 30% of your portfolio returns to give you that advice
over the next 30-40 years, right?
If they can't put in the time to to to listen to a podcast here
and there or to to to learn about this, if they can't read a
book, why are you paying them? What are you paying them for?
Yeah, yeah, fully agree. Like, it's one of the things
that I now do when I want to give people, you know, the
quickest way to understand Bitcoin.
I sent them the Fidelity Digital Assets Report.
It's called Bitcoin Revisited. It's 23 pages and it's great.
Like, really good, you know? And yeah, that's just what I do.
Like if if this morning I had a discussion on Twitter again with
some financial researcher who said Bitcoin was a Ponzi and
like the tulips and I said, OK, you know, well, I, I said a lot
to him, Like I tried to give him some information, but then I
just point him to this, like, just read these 23 pages, right?
And then if those are probably the best, like it's probably the
best condensed like report that I've read about Bitcoin.
You know, if you're like totally new and you don't have like the
time to read all these, you know, great Jeff Booth articles,
for example, just read these 23 pages and then you know that
that should hopefully do it. If you're in and you have an
inquisitive mind, you know? But honestly, you don't even
have to read it. A lot of people just don't want
to read, right. You can listen to a podcast.
You can listen to, you can listen to there's there's a a
live reading of no, sorry not live, but it's it's somebody
reading the big the bullish Case for Bitcoin on YouTube.
Oh yeah, right. You can just listen to that,
listen to that on your on your way to work, right.
I've started sending that to people because I I know a lot of
people. They just.
Say oh, that's. Great.
I think it works so well because you can just listen to it
whenever you want to. It's an hour and 19 minutes.
It's literally 79 minutes of your life.
If you can't find 79 minutes of your life to learn about
something that can potentially change your entire life, you're
going to lose. Like you, you don't deserve to
build wealth. If you're not willing to
sacrifice 75 minutes of your 79 minutes of your life to learn
about something new, right you. You don't.
You don't deserve it. I mean, I I didn't deserve it
either. I I paid.
There's a there's a great quote. You, you buy the coin at the
price you deserve. I bought Bitcoin at the price I
deserved. I saw Bitcoin at $3000 in 2020.
I thought it was a scam. I lost stuff, right?
I paid what I I paid what I deserved.
I mean, it's it's the truth. It's the reality of it.
Whoever doesn't. If if Bitcoin is $1,000,000
tomorrow, it once the ETFs are out.
Once all that stuff happens, if Bitcoin hits $1,000,000 and you
own no Bitcoin, you deserve that, right?
You deserve to pay $10,000 for 0.01 Bitcoin, right?
Because you're ignorant. You're not putting in the time.
I get it. If you don't have the money for
it, OK, that's fine. Put in $1.00.
It's not about that. It's about not being complacent
in your own life, right? Like thinking for yourself and
and you know, if you can record a TikTok in your car sipping the
$6 Starbucks complaining about that, you know you cannot make
ends meet and like, what the hell is going on?
Yeah. Then you can also put on a
podcast while you drive home and start listening to that thing.
Like it's it's the that ethos in Bitcoin of doing the work.
You know, I think it's not. I tweeted that today as well.
Like, understanding Bitcoin is definitely not about
intelligence. Doesn't matter how high your IQ
is. It's not about that.
It's about being humble and recognizing that what you think
you know is probably not true. What you believe is probably
also wrong, which is definitely not a nice experience, but that
will get you to the starting point, whatever the starting
point is right. Listening to the podcast or
reading a report or reading a book, that doesn't really
matter. But it's about understanding
that you have to think for yourself and that you're
currently influenced by third parties who do not care about
you. As harsh as that sounds, right?
And it's really easy to see when somebody hasn't done the work,
right? Yes, it's very easy to say
exactly. And it's very, it becomes very
apparent as soon as they use the word Tulip Ponzi.
Once they say those things, you know, intrinsic value.
What else is there? Intrinsic value, Tulip.
Ponzi. Yeah, let's keep it at that.
But yeah, I fully agree. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. Or I rather use money backed by
the government. Yes.
It's not backed by the
government or governments can ban it.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. I also saw you tweet or retweet
something about, you know, the volatility of Bitcoin and risk.
You know, lots, lots of people use that, use the argument that
followed used the volatility of Bitcoin as an argument against
owning it. But you say volatility does not
equal risk. Why is that?
So volatility is just the increase and decrease in price,
right? Risk is the chance of loss if
you understand both, if you understand volatility, if you
understand where your asset can go.
You need to make sure that you buy your assets with the right
time horizon, right? If you're buying Bitcoin with
six month time horizon, you're going to lose your money, right?
Volatility is going to kill you. But if you have a long time
horizon, you're not supposed to buy assets with A60 daytime
horizon anyways, right? There's no stock, no real
estate, and you can't. You can't buy any investment
with a 60 daytime horizon, right?
There's if even even the people who are losing money on real
estate right now, if they hold for another 10-15 years, they'll
probably end up making money in terms of U.S. dollars, right?
But right now they're losing five $600,000.
Does that make real estate risky?
Does that make it? Does that make you go broke?
Does real estate? Is real estate a terrible asset?
No, it's not. But you have to think about that
for Bitcoin as well, right? If if you're holding Bitcoin
with a a one month time horizon, you're going to lose money,
right? Bitcoin, For all we know
tomorrow it could drop 50%, right?
If if ETFs are are rejected, maybe people will do something
crazy, they'll sell their coins. I don't think that's going to
happen. But I mean if that's the case,
lots of liquidity is going to leave the market, people are
going to be uninterested, leverage positions are going to
get destroyed. So of course, short term you
could lose a lot of money, but long term, if you think 456
years in, in the future, you're always going to make money with
Bitcoin because of the way that the asset is created, the way
it's issued, right. The issuance is decreasing over
time, right. And that four years is
historically where the price turns back up, where cycles
start, it's because all of the during that, so so on.
In Bitcoin in general, there's a two year up where the price goes
up and then two years where the price goes down.
The reason why the price goes down is because all of the crap
is being washed out, right? FTXFTX should not have been
there, right? If it was the legacy financial
system, FTX would be surviving until this day, right?
If. If, there's no if.
There's a great point, actually, this is the whole point.
The whole point is you can only profit from Bitcoin when you
follow the rules of Bitcoin, right?
And if you try to mess with it, if you try to exploit it in
whatever way possible, your paper Bitcoin derivatives
leverage all these things that will go very badly for you.
And that is the entire point of why Bitcoin is so transparent
and has a set of rules that will not be changed, right?
Because in the other system where the rules are changed
constantly and also you know, on different levels for different
people to the closer you are to the money spigot, the more you
profit from it. You know that is where that game
does work and is played, right. But in Bitcoin it's just it's
not possible. And and yeah, it's a good
thought. Like every cycle there are
parties who try to play Bitcoin, but they they feel at it because
yeah, if you don't follow the rules, you will not benefit from
it. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, if if you think about it, even the the money spigot
comment that you made, I think that has to be explained.
So a lot of people don't realize that to be closer to the money
spigot, you need to borrow money, right?
They don't get it because nobody thinks of it that way, right.
If you think about it, you can borrow $500,000 to buy a house.
You can do that overnight, but if you want to earn that money,
it'll take you 5-10 years, right?
So if you're closer to the money spigot, basically what you're
doing is your getting access to money as soon as possible.
You're buying things that are scarce and you're pushing their.
Prices borrowing from the future.
Exactly. You're borrowing for your from
your future itself, right? But that's that's what people
don't really see. They don't understand.
When you don't understand that schools don't teach that.
We don't learn that in school. When you don't understand that,
you can't take advantage of the system.
You can't make the system work for you, right.
That's the thing. This current system is based on
debt. It's based on people borrowing
from their future self, taking their happiness from later and
bringing it to today. Yeah, I once got a argument on
Bitcoin of against me on Twitter of a guy who said the value of
Fiat money comes from the promise of the repayment of the
debt. And then I said, dude, he was a
he worked at the central bank, actually.
And I said dude, that doesn't make and it's not rational, it's
not a rational, you cannot build on that.
Like if you really think that that is what you, you build
upon. And also this comment goes for
normal people because if the if the people on the money creation
level, right, the bank level, if if they don't repay the debts,
then the government will step in, they will save them and
eventually who pays for those debts are the citizens right?
Are the normal people. So, so it's very disingenuous
actually to say that the value of the money you have comes from
the promise of someone else repaying the debt on for which
that money was created. It's so disingenuous.
It's it's crazy to think actually, that some people
actually believe that. And there's probably financial
advisors out there who actually agree with that, right.
They think, OK, yeah, this is the, this is the reason why your
portfolio is going to outperform because of this, this and this.
But all those facts are wrong. Yeah, I agree.
All right. Last question.
I asked everyone the same. What is a core belief that you
will never let go? Oh, oh, that's a good question.
I've heard this. I've heard people answering this
question before, but I haven't thought of it myself.
I think, I think over the long term, adding value, creating
value will always trump everything else, right?
Creating true value will trump everything else.
And people will know, right? I mean, if you're not putting in
the work, people will know. Like it's like it's like with
us, for example, when when somebody talks to a somebody,
when a Bitcoiner talks to somebody who doesn't understand
Bitcoin, they haven't put in the work, they haven't created
value, they won't understand Bitcoin.
And and it becomes very apparent, apparent right away,
Even if you like, let's say social media, if somebody buys
fake followers, you know for a fact that they have fake
followers because their engagement is trashed, right?
Everything takes time to build. Everything that you that's worth
having takes time to build. If you're not putting in that
time, you're not going to get what you want, right?
I think that's, I think that's something that I'm going to that
that's a belief I'm going to hold on to forever.
I think the Fiat currency system has made people believe
otherwise. I don't think that that's how it
should work. I don't think that that's the
way things actually play out for people.
People think, hey, if I buy fake followers, my social people will
recognize me. People will see me as somebody
who's truly adding value. But that's not how it works.
You have to actually put in the work, right?
If you don't put in the work, you're not gonna get anywhere.
Yeah, I love that, man. Thanks for sharing.
And yeah, thanks so much for coming on.
I really enjoyed this conversation.
I'll make sure to link to, you know, your Twitter newsletter,
your link tree. I think your handle everywhere
is Rajat, Sony Finance. Yes, so people can find you
easily online. And yeah, I'll keep following
your thoughts and tweets with interest and hope to do this
again in the future. So of course.
Thanks so much, I enjoyed this a lot.
Great conversation. Me too.
Thanks man. Cheers.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, it would be amazing
if you could rate, review and subscribe on the podcast
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You can follow and connect with me on Twitter.
I'm Brom K That's at BR AM K and if you are or know someone who
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hope you'll be here for the next episode.
Thanks for listening. Bye.