Hal Elrod: Mark, it’s good to see you, brother.

Mark Moss: Hal, always a pleasure.

Hal Elrod: So, you and I met. It’s so funny. I was looking through old journals today, not even looking for this, and I just ran across these pages that said that it was the first time you and I met, and we’re at a mastermind that Tucker Max invited us to. I had no idea we were going to be there. And I had to tell the story because it was so cool. I had been watching your YouTube channel for probably a few months. And when you watch somebody on TV, YouTube, it’s like a celebrity like, “Oh, yeah, you’re the guy that I watch all the time. So, I literally was listening to a YouTube video as I was driving to the Mastermind. I had no idea who was going to be there. And I walk in and you’re standing there.

And like my brain shorts. I was like, “Wait, I was just watching you on YouTube, and now you’re in front of me.” Anyway, it was a cool moment.

Mark Moss: I think you were watching it on your phone when I walked up because you looked up and you looked at your phone, and I was there. And I have a really cool story to tell about that same day.

Hal Elrod: Oh, tell me.

Mark Moss: The day that we met. And I’m going to go back a little bit further because I’m sort of like this big Russell Brunson disciple, ClickFunnels. And I’ve read his books, I’ve done masterminds with him, and I went to his events, Funnel Hacking Live, all the time. And this was early when I first started making videos, and it was a fight. I never wanted to make content, and my old business partner basically forced me to do it. And that’s a whole another story. But I’m at Funnel Hacking Live and I’m in the audience and Russell Brunson’s up on stage and he is telling this story of how he invited, I think, Prince Ea to come up speak or something like that. And he’s on stage, and he is like, “Yeah. And I just sent him this DM on Instagram.”

And he’s like, “No way. Is this really Brunson?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” He is like, “Dude, I’m a big fan.” And Russell’s like, “I’m a big fan.” And I remember sitting there at that moment in the stage because, like I said, early starting to create content and thinking, “How would anybody ever say that about me if I never put out anything for people to read or see or hear or whatever?” Right? And that was a big shift in me to start like making content. Okay. So, now fast forward to the point when I walked in. And I remember you looking up. And I knew who you were, but I had never met you either, obviously. And then I remember the two of us, we walked into the boardroom, or we were going to have our meeting, and there was like all the books on the wall. And we were looking at some of the books, I forget, and I made some comment, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m not Tucker. I’m Hal.”

Hal Elrod: You thought I was Tucker?

Mark Moss: I guess. I thought you were Tucker because I had never met. And I was like, “Hal Elrod?” And you’re like, “Yeah.” I was like, “Oh, no way. I’m a big fan.” And you’re like, “I’m a big fan.” And it was like the moment that I had seen at Funnel Hacking Live had got me to create the content that got me to the point that I was in the room with you, and we were both fans of each other. And then there we were.

Hal Elrod: That’s cool. That’s cool. That’s really cool. Yeah. And that happens frequently, right? You meet someone like Robert Kiyosaki. First time I found out Robert was a fan of Miracle Morning, and Robert’s a fan of you. And now we’re all friends and the whole thing. So, there’s a lot I want to talk to you about. You put out so much content. You mentioned that you were just getting started back then. Like, now, you put out, how often do you put out content?

Mark Moss: I mean, I put out like usually three videos a week. Two like thesis videos and like an interview every week.

Hal Elrod: Got it. Yeah. I mean, I’m a still a big fan of yours. I was watching your YouTube content today. In fact, I was watching on the way here, of course. But you’re known really as a Bitcoin expert. I mean, you are at every Bitcoin conference. You’re going to Hong Kong, you’re going to Prague, you’re just in Prague, right? You’re speaking at every Bitcoin conference around the world. That’s a huge area of your expertise. AI, though, is actually, recently you put out an AI video, and that’s what got me to text you and say, “Hey, I want you to come talk about this on the podcast.” And the context is that right now, AI obviously is very unpredictable. We’re not sure where it’s going. It’s growing exponentially.

But the big fear of AI taking our jobs, right? There’s a report from Goldman Sachs that says 300 million jobs, which is roughly the population in the United States, will be replaced in the next, I don’t know, few years, X many years. Bill Gates is saying 80% to 90% of teachers and doctors are being replaced, plus most white collar workers. Your video was the opposite of that. It was a very optimistic outlook on AI not taking our jobs but actually creating new jobs. So, that’s what I text you about. So, let’s start there. Why are you so optimistic about AI and the future of job creation, not taking away all our jobs?

Mark Moss: First thing I’d say is I think it was Robert Kiyosaki. It might have been Carnegie. Who was it? Maybe it was Kiyosaki or, I don’t know, on my personal development journey. It was Brian Tracy, but they said, “Whenever you’re talking about the future, you’re lying because tomorrow’s not guaranteed.” So, if I say, “Hey, I’m going to meet you tomorrow for pickleball, how do I know? Right. So, basically, it’s a lie. So, why not lie positively? So, I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy. But that’s like a feeling. I like to look at data. I tell my team, we don’t run a business off of gut. We run it off of data. That’s how I plan my life. So, part of understanding Bitcoin has come from understanding the history of technology. And what’s happened is really the big breakthrough in the world was the technological, or sorry, the industrial revolution back in the late 1700s.

And that was when we had the first mechanized machines. And so, this was what’s called a technological revolution where a cluster of technologies get invented all around the same time. And those new technologies give us a new set of building blocks to build things that we can’t imagine. And this is a key piece. We’re going to come back to it. It starts to build things that we didn’t know we needed or wanted or whatever have. It changes consumer demand. So, when we’re sitting here going… I’m going to come back to that. Okay. So, we had this industrial revolution. We had the first mechanized machines who could do the work of 5,000 men. So, at the time, it was all field and cottage industry, tapestries, things like that.

So, basically, the jobs were working in the fields, and now the machines could do the work of 5,000 men. But what do those 5,000 men go to do? Oh my gosh. Remember, there was the tapestry industry. So, one of the first pieces of invention technology was this power loom. There was a group of people called the Luddites, and the Luddites were so afraid of those power looms taking away the jobs, they went and burned them all down. And we use that term, Luddite, these days for people who are resistant to technology. And so, these technological revolutions, they happen about every 50 years. I call them a quantum wave because the world moves in a quantum leap forward.

So, about every 50 years, people might have heard them as called Kondratieff waves or K-waves. We had this revolution. So, then we went, about 50 years later, we had steam engines and railways. About 50 years later, we had steel, electricity. Electricity, it’s pretty big. About 50 years later, 1908, we had the oil fuels, internal combustion engines, automobiles, and mass production. About 50 years later, 1971, we had the birth of the microprocessor, which brought personal computers, telecom, internet. And every single one of those people said, “Oh my gosh, it’s going to displace all the jobs.”

There’s a little bit of nuance in how you frame this up. So, all those jobs, you use the word displaced. Jobs do get displaced. What I’m saying is AI will create more jobs than are lost. So, that’s a difference. Jobs will be displaced. Those five, going back to that, the 5,000 field workers were displaced. What do they do? So, what happens is technology removes low-level tasks so we can go work on higher-level tasks. So, instead of working on the fields, they worked on science and medicine, and technology, like higher-value things. And so, the electricity created electric candles, and it put all the candle makers out of business. So, they were displaced, right?

And so, when cars came around, the buggy makers were displaced, right? But if we understand the way this works, we can see how this changes. And actually, I have some facts and data. It’s been a while since I wrote that paper. So, I had to kind of make a little cheat sheet on some of the data points. But we have like for some data points, going back, first Industrial Revolution. The City of Manchester, when it was farming and cottage, was only 25,000 people. But after the Industrial Revolution, in about 50 years, it grew from 25,000 to 300 people.

Hal Elrod: 300,000.

Mark Moss: 300,000. From 25,000 to 300,000. That’s how many people grew because of the new technology. The first factory, Arkwright’s factory, had 200 workers. But then Henry Ford’s factory had 40,000 workers. So, we had all the field workers before. And now we have all the factory workers. Well, we didn’t know they’d go work in the factory because we didn’t have machines that could even create a factory.

Hal Elrod: We didn’t know what we didn’t know.

Mark Moss: We didn’t know what we didn’t know. And during that time, real wages grew massively. Now, there was a brief disruption. It does take a little while, so there’s like a lag there. In the second industrial revolution, we saw US manufacturing jobs go from 2.5 million to 10 million industrial jobs. That weren’t there before until we had the industrialization. We saw in the computer revolution, computer occupations in 1970 were 450,000 people. By the year 2000, they grew 10 times to 4.6 million people. You couldn’t work in a computer occupation until there was computers. Right? And so, you can start to see that internet revolution, we kind of say the same thing.

And so, what happens is a couple of things happened through this technological revolution of this technology. You remember probably in the early 80s, we had like the first cell phones. And they were like a brick, and they were like $30,000 or whatever they were, right? And the Wall Street guys would carry those. But as the technology progress, it gets cheaper. And as it gets cheaper, it gets better. And as those two things happen, then there’s more demand for those things. And as there’s more demand for those things, then people have to start companies designing new cell phones. And then there’s all the workers that build the cell phones and make the components for the cell phones, and make the screen protectors for the cell phones, and start Amazon store selling cases for the cell phones, right?

And none of that would’ve happened if we didn’t get the cell phone, which displaced a bunch of workers. Right? Because it creates new demand. So, what I would say is we can have this fear-mongering of all these things, but this technological revolution cycle has happened five times. We’re on our sixth time, and every single time, this is how it’s worked. I want to point out just two other studies. I’m going to take a second break here, but you referenced some studies. I think Goldman Sachs, I think you said it was 300,000 jobs or Bill Gates.

Hal Elrod: 300 million jobs.

Mark Moss: 300 million jobs, whatever Bill Gates’ opinion is worth at this point, anymore. But here’s a report from MIT, which probably has a little bit more weight in the technology sector. It says AI will likely complement more than it will actually replace. So, AI is seen as a complementary technology, not a replacement technology. So, what does that mean? It means like I used to carry a single brick across the yard one by one, and then I created a piece of technology like a wheelbarrow so I can carry 10 at one time, but it doesn’t get rid of my job. It just complements and helps me do more. It helps me become more efficient. So, that’s what technology does.

So, they’re saying that AI is a much more complementary technology, which that’s what I see, and we’ll get into this in a minute, but a lot of people are afraid of this Terminator vision where Skynet takes over the world and AI enslaves us all. But I believe that that’s envisioning a technology that we don’t even have in our roadmap or view, and is nowhere near that’s AGI, which is general AI. So, as of right now, it’s complementary, not replacing. The Journal of Management Psychology says that the complementary effects are 50% larger than the substitution effects.

So, it’s complementing us to do more. A goal of a business is to grow. So, people are like, “It’s going to let all these people are going to get laid off.” Why would I lay anybody off? What I would do is I would grow my business without hiring as many. But why would I go lay everybody off? I don’t want to stay the same size. I’m going to grow my business by 30%, but without hiring. So, it’s complementary.

Hal Elrod: Well, let me real quick interject. So, a real-life example of that is Zach, he’s the designer for the Miracle Morning app. And he recently created a whole new workflow for the app of a new feature that we’re launching, an enterprise plan for companies to be able to buy the app for their employees. And he sent it to us, and he said, “This normally would take me five days, eight hours a day,” so 40 hours. And he said, “Using AI, it took 30 minutes.” That’s an example, right? So, now instead of adding one feature every five days, he can do it in 30 minutes, and now he can amplify and accelerate how quickly he can add more value or do more projects. It’s a real-life example of exactly what you’re talking about.

Mark Moss: Yeah. One of my friends, he designed storefronts like retail stores, and then they build them out. So, he’ll like design a Starbucks and they actually go build it out and he is like, “AI’s going to replace my job.” I’m like, “How is it going to replace your job?” So, you have the vision. You have the creative vision. I don’t, right? So, let’s say I want to start a retail store. I don’t have the creative vision. So, in the old days, I’d hire you and you would draw it out with a pencil. And then you got better tools. So, then you did it with like sketching on AutoCAD. And then you got like Photoshop, and you could do it in Photoshop. And now you have AI.

All of those things helped your job to get better, and what you show me to be better, but it doesn’t take away my need for having you. Just because I can use AI, I don’t know how to use AI. I don’t know how to use design, I don’t know how to do any of that. Even with something simple like YouTube thumbnails, going back to YouTube, now, there’s a lot of AI softwares that can build YouTube thumbnails, but I’m not going to do that. I still need someone on my team to get the thumbnail on YouTube for me. Whatever tool they use, I don’t really care.

Hal Elrod: Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah, that’s a great point. You’re still going to stay in your lane. And I’m not going to figure out how to do what my designer does. Right?

Mark Moss: Exactly. I still need the designer. So, I want to go back just a couple more stats here. So, the World Economic Forum, for whatever their opinion,

Hal Elrod: Whatever. Them and Bill Gates.

Mark Moss: They say 170 million new jobs will be created from AI versus the 92 million that will be eliminated, 2:1 ratio. LinkedIn shows 16,591 new jobs related to AI being listed that obviously weren’t there two years ago. The BLS, Bureau Labor Statistics, says that software development jobs have increased by almost 20% in just the last two years, which is way faster than the average. So, we have new AI prompt engineers, AI ethics consultants, AI integration specialists, machine learning engineers, AI trainers, AI authors, synthetic media designers. None of those jobs were available before.

Hal Elrod: So, because if someone’s listening or watching this right now, and they’re thinking they’re feeling a little better, first of all, they’re like, “Okay. All right. I feel a little better,” right? The doom and gloom and the Skynet taking over, which I’ve had those same thoughts. It’s like, “All right, I feel a little better with Mark’s optimism,” and based in data, not based in just your opinion. What does that look like in real terms if you are… Like, Bill Gates, for example, said, doctors and teachers are getting replaced. Right? And, again, I have no idea if that’s true or not, but that’s what he said. If you’re a teacher, if you’re doing a job that you’re afraid AI might replace, because I’m wondering if somebody’s like, I know for me, I got a career. This is what I do.

And so, to think, “Well, wait, so do I have to pivot?” And I think the answer is you got to be open to it. But what does somebody do if they’re in a position that they think could be replaced by AI in the next few years?

Mark Moss: Yeah. And that’s the way to frame it, right? So, again, AI creates more jobs than it displaces, but people’s jobs do get displaced. Now, the government slows this down because they want to throw out universal UBI. So, there’s towns in Oregon.

Hal Elrod: Universal basic income.

Mark Moss: Universal basic income. Right. There’s towns in Oregon that used to be logging towns, but they’re not logging towns anymore. And the people that live there no longer have jobs because they worked in the logging sector. And rather than those people learn a new skill and move to another location, the government pays them to stay in that town and not work. I used to live in Texas, then I moved to California because my dad was in the construction industry. In the 80s, we had the savings and loan crisis, and then the oil crisis, and there was no construction in Texas. So, my dad moved the family to California, where there was construction jobs over there.

And so, all throughout history, we’ve had to deal with these types of things. And so, to answer your question is I learn a new skill and apply it to a different market. And I think what I’ve often been saying recently is that the problem with school, if you go back to its origins in Prussia to when Rockefeller brought it to the United States, it’s designed specifically to create compliant factory workers, which means remove the creativity. So, everything from moving when a bell goes off to standing on a line to sitting at a desk.

Hal Elrod: Taking orders from the person at the front of the room. Yeah.

Mark Moss: All of those things are designed for that. But the problem is that now everyone graduating college, even today, has been designed by a school system created for the industrial era, given a set of tools for the industrial era, a worldview of the industrial era, but that world no longer exists. And so, the problem is, is what you said is these people who say, “I have a career.” And they think there’s safety in that career, but people get laid off all the time, which is what we’re talking about. So, the real safety is in being adaptable to change. So, what could I do with these skills I have now, or what new skills could I go learn to go do something different, is the easy answer.

That might sound a little bit callous but, yeah, if your job isn’t in demand anymore… And actually, let me reframe that even a little bit. We were talking about our kids before we started recording. Both of us have a high school daughter, and I love talking to the guys, the boys. A lot of them are very curious. I talk mostly about money, so they love asking me questions about that. And the one thing I really want to relay to all these high school kids, but people that I’m talking to right now need to hear this as well. You get paid for the value that you provide to the world. That’s it. And I think if you could learn to think along those lines, you start to see the way that you make money differently.

And so, that means that in order for me to provide more value, solve more problems, I have to constantly be learning new skills and applying them in different ways. So, that’s how my career has been. I’m sure that’s how your career has been as well. You’ve learned new skills. You’ve applied them in different ways. And so, rather than that person who’s static saying, “This is my job. I’ve been in this cubicle for 30 years doing this one thing,” they’re stuck. They don’t have that frame of mind. Like, well, if I want more money, I guess I could learn a new skill. And so, that’s what I would say. I think that we’re not animals. We’re humans. We’re very smart. We should learn new skills, and we could apply them in different ways.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. And if somebody is in a career, it’s, yes, this is getting out of your comfort zone. And I think that for a lot of us, we’re so myself included, right? We like our comfort zone, and some are more risk-averse than others. But I think that if you’re listening and you are in that position where you’re like, “I could get displaced in the next few years by AI,” it is again, not to sound callous, right, but it’s like, okay, I’ve got to start by being open to consider that I do need to adapt, evolve, learn something new. Now’s the time to start exploring while you’re in a safe place, versus waiting a few years and just putting your head in the sand. And I think about this is a corporate example, but it applies to the individual, which is Blockbuster Video, right?

Blockbuster Video saw Netflix, saw what they were doing, and just decided, “No, no, nope, I’m safe. I’m in my career. It’s always worked. We’re just going to keep doing what we’ve been doing.” Even got offered to be bought out by Netflix and said, “No, thanks. We’re Blockbuster Video. We’re bigger than you.” So, again, it’s a corporate example, but it’s like because they weren’t willing to adapt and evolve, not quick enough, they tried at the last minute, but they’re gone, this behemoth. And so, that just shows that there is no security, and that’s a hard reality that we have to face. But, yeah, adapting and evolving.

Let me ask you this. I know there are some people listening on the podcast that maybe don’t even use AI. And I’ve done an episode or two on that. Like, hey, because I was late to the party. I didn’t start using ChatGPT maybe nine months ago. And all my friends were using it, and I was like, “No, Skynet.” I just really thought that there’s, and I still think potentially there’s a lot of harm that’s done with AI. For example, you talk about MIT study that it’s making us stupider because we’re replacing our thinking, and literally, your ability to think is atrophying. So, that was my concern. And then I interviewed…

Mark Moss: There’s truth in that.

Hal Elrod: For sure. And I’ve experienced it. So, I try to…

Mark Moss: I experienced it.

Hal Elrod: Yeah, I try to back off AI and not let it replace my thinking but complement it. So, my point is, this is just like a really general question, which is for anybody listening that doesn’t use ChatGPT yet, they’re avoiding it because they don’t like it conceptually, what would you say?

Mark Moss: It goes back to I’m going to answer that question by also bringing back the statement you posed in the last one, which is these people that are resistant to change, they’re stuck in their career, what do they do? And they go together, which is, it’s those types of people that look at life as something that happens to us as a victim mentality or something that life happens for us to either grow or learn or adapt or get ahead, right? And so, rather than looking at AI as something that could displace my job and, “What am I going to do? I got to hunker down,” you can look at this as an opportunity, which is like, “Wow, I could grasp onto this early right now. I could become way faster, way smarter, and I could accelerate way faster because most people haven’t caught up. This is my chance.”

And so, really, that’s just a big paradigm shift. And I’m guessing from the people that listen to your audience, Miracle Morning, they already have that mindset. So, that’s what I would just urge to them is to think about this like, “This is your chance.” I like to say the future is not evenly distributed, even with Bitcoin. So, even today, here we are, 15 years later, Bitcoin’s making the all-time highs. President of the United States, Donald Trump, last week bought over $2 billion of Bitcoin.

Hal Elrod: Now, with personally or…

Mark Moss: Through Donald Trump Media, which he owns over 50% of. So, a company he has control and infrastructure bought that. And Donald Trump has a history. We can get more into that, but a history of sort of leaking information of what’s about to happen. Like, right before the stock started exploding again after the tariff thing in April, he put out a tweet that said, “Hey, you guys might want to buy back into the market,” and then announcements were made. So, even though you have the president of the United States buying Bitcoin, most of the people listening to this audience still probably think it’s ridiculous and a scam and a Ponzi or whatever. So, the future’s not even distributed, but that’s our opportunity.

And so, back to AI, jump on this early, and you have this entire world in front of you right now, number one. So, how do we start? I would say there’s a simple framework that I would just give, I’ll throw this out real quickly. So, when you use an AI, it’s like hiring somebody, but it’s hiring the smartest person in the world that’s the stupidest person in the world. What do I mean by that? The AI is so smart in every single vertical that it can do anything or be anything that you want. But if I wanted to ask health advice, like you’re a cancer survivor, right? You’re an expert in mindset and all these things.

So, if I had questions on mindset, I would want to talk to you. I wouldn’t want to talk to a depressed person in a mental institution. If I wanted health advice, I wouldn’t talk to a 300-pound obese person. I’d want to talk to someone who ran a triathlon. If I wanted to get money advice, I’d talk to a billionaire and not a broke person. So, the first thing we have to do is we have to tell the…

Hal Elrod: I’d watch Mark Moss videos, by the way, if I wanted financial advice.

Mark Moss: Yeah. We have to tell the AI who we want it to be for this specific question that I’m asking. So, we give it a role, a persona. You are a business owner. You are a wealth coach. You are a… So, number one, give it a persona. Number two, then I have to tell it what job I want to do. Your job is to blah, blah, blah, coach me on starting a business, or tell me how to get in shape, or whatever. Then I need to give it all the context so it knows even the context about me. The problem is this year, this is how old I am, these are the health problems that I’ve had. My goal is to do this. Here’s where I’m at. I’ve tried this, I’ve tried this, I do like this. I don’t like this. I have to give it as much context as I can.

Hal Elrod: As much as possible. Yeah.

Mark Moss: And then I want to tell it what format I’m looking for. So, what I want is I want seven days of meal plans broken down into three meals, or what is it that I want? I had to tell it that, then it can give me something good back. So, I would say that’s like a general sort of a template that we’d use it for. But what I’d say even bigger than that is where I think AI really exceeds, because to your point about the atrophy piece, where I believe that AI really exceeds is in helping us think, complementary, not telling us what to think. So, I think people are getting it completely wrong, and they’re getting more stupid for it is when they say, “Write me this paper. Write this email. Give me a…” whatever, right? As opposed to what I do is I typically, so in ChatGPT you have multiple models. So, you have the O3 reasoning model, you have the 4.0 model, and the new 4.5 model.

I mainly use the O3 model because it’s the reasoning model. So, what that means is it reasons through things like a human would. “So, let me go think about this first. Okay, well based off of that, let me go think about this. Okay. Based off of that, now let me think about this.” So, it thinks through in a reasoning model, and it’s all connected to the internet. And it’s also because the way I use the tool. I’m typically using it for brainstorming. So, right now, I just took a new role as the Chief Bitcoin Architect for a new publicly traded company.

Hal Elrod: Congratulations.

Mark Moss: A billion-dollar international company, and I have to go figure out how to sell Bitcoin-backed credit and equity instruments to fixed pools of capital in the UK Market

Hal Elrod: Something you’ve never done before.

Mark Moss: What do I know about that? So, my wife, Stephanie, calls me the other night. She’s like, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “Oh, I’m on the couch talking to ChatGPT,” like I always am. She’s like, “What are you talking to it about?” I’m like, “Well, I asked it to find the five largest of fixed-income bucket pools in the UK. Tell me what the individual investing mandates of each one of those are and then help me think through what type of Bitcoin-backed financial product we could create to specifically fit into each one of those mandates.” And it goes and does all the research and then the reasons…

Hal Elrod: In a matter of seconds.

Mark Moss: Well…

Hal Elrod: Oh, that took a little longer.

Mark Moss: Some of this will probably be for like a couple of minutes. Go do all the research and then think all through. And then it gives me that. And I can go, “Hmm, but I don’t understand this. Why not this? What’s the pros and cons of this? Tell me more about this.” And then I use it as like this thinking. It’s like a sparring partner. So, no matter what I want, whether it’s how to do a book launch or help me come up with questions for a podcast, “But why would I do it like that? What if I do it like this?” And I use it as a brain thinking sparring partner. I think that, to me, seems to be one of the best ways to use it.

Hal Elrod: Yeah, absolutely. And the fact that it takes a couple of minutes to answer those questions tells me you’re asking good questions, right, where it’s really got to dig deep. That I learned from my friend, Geoff Woods, who wrote the AI Driven Leader, and one of the tips he gave me is, instead of asking ChatGPT for something, tell it to interview you, to get… I’ll say, “What are 10 questions you need to ask me to be able to advise me on this topic?”

Mark Moss: So, a lot of times after I give it that frame, I might say, “Ask me what other questions you need or for any more information you need before you give that to me.” Sometimes it needs additional context from you.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. And GPT-5 is supposed to come out and do all of…

Mark Moss: Yeah. So, the new one that just came out just this week, now it has agents built into it. And so, they’re pretty good, to be honest. I’ve been using another platform called Genspark for AI agents, which I think are way better. So, for those that don’t know, AI agents are basically autonomous bots that can work on your behalf. The way I think about it is, going back to job displacement, about 15 years ago, when the internet, 20 years ago, when the internet really started taking off, what happened is the world shifted from being a sort of technical-driven world, STEM, science, technology, medicine, coders, engineers, developers, were like the good jobs back then to all of a sudden those becoming commodity jobs because we brought the whole world online because of the internet. So, my mom wanted me to be an engineer when I was getting out of school, but like I can go hire a dozen of them for $5 an hour in Pakistan today.

Hal Elrod: Yeah, sure.

Mark Moss: And so, we got this technical worker. So, now I’m going to Upwork or Fiverr and I can hire researchers and writers and coders and prompters and all these things, right? Those are agents. They will go. I can hire someone to go do SEO, research, and write blog posts that are SEO optimized for my website, for example. That’s an agent. But now I can create an AI agent to do that for me. And so, ChatGPT has that built in now. Like I said, I think the Genspark ones are really good. But I can get these agents to go, “You go do all this research, bring it back. Okay. Now, you take it and you SEO up. Okay, now you take it and create slide decks. And now you…” Right? And you can do that.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. I want to give an example. So, my dad, I turned him on to ChatGPT, I don’t know, a few months ago, six months ago, and he just loves it. But what happened was his cabin burned down in Orange County in the fires, out where you live. And now he’s got to deal with the city and the state and insurance, and he’s in over his head. And so, he was able to use Chat. He would tell me, “Hal, this is amazing. It knows everything about everything. It knows all the laws.” And so, it was able to help him work through how to approach insurance, how to approach the city, how to approach the state, and then it was able to actually craft the emails to each of those entities.

And then he would copy and paste their responses, say, “Hey, how do I respond?” You know, all of that. And for someone listening that if you don’t use ChatGPT, I mean, like, it’s mind-blowing how much it can do. And what I’ve said to people that are resistant, I go, “It’s a tool.” Well, whatever it’s going to do to society, whether you believe that’s good or bad, whether or not you use it isn’t going to affect that. It’s learning how to use the tool. And like all tools, it can be used for good or it can be used for evil. But we use it for good.

Mark Moss: For your audience, I have a way that I’m using it that I think could be helpful. So, one, I have this little piece of wearable AI device. It’s called the Pendant, but it’s made by Limitless.ai. I don’t have any affiliate deal with them, but I wear it every day, and it records 24/7. Not audio, but it transcribes it all into the AI. So, then I’m like, “Oh, remember two weeks ago when I talked to Hal and we had this conversation,” it could pull it up, and it could like bring all that form. So, that’s number one. But what I do is what I believe, and I think your Miracle Morning sort of sets the tone for this, is like we need to have a target, like where am I trying to get to in 90 days from now? I typically plan like quarters, and then this month needs to get to the quarter and this week to get to the month.

And then each day I do a daily review. All right. So, like what I learned today, I kind of learned some of this from like Brendon Burchard’s High Performance Planner. So, what went good today? What did I learn today? If I was my own coach, what would I tell myself? How much energy do I have today? What do I need to do tomorrow? What are my main tasks? What are the three tasks I have to get completed?

Hal Elrod: Now, are you journaling this in ChatGPT?

Mark Moss: No, no. So, check this out. So, what I did is I created a Google Form, and the Google Form sends it all to a Google Sheet, right? And the Google Sheet has the dates, and then each one of those, right? So, just keeps it in a sheet, right? And then what I do is I built an AI coach. So, I’ve built the coach for me, and it tracks me. And so, I tell it what my goals are, what I’m trying to achieve, whatever. And then I can feed this Google Sheet into it on a weekly or monthly basis, and it can tell me. I think it was in the book, The Power of Habit. It’s like show me your calendar, I can show you your future kind of a thing. So, it can show me based off of what my daily inputs are and my coaching to myself, how if I’m on track to achieve my goals, if I’m off track, right?

So, it has this crazy pattern recognition that it can see through these barriers. So, yeah, I’ve created to coach myself and then through these daily, almost like a Miracle Morning type of thing, right, where I’m sitting down every day and I’m just answering a couple of questions on my Google Form and I feed it in there. Like it can coach me right to that.

Hal Elrod: That’s really cool.

Mark Moss: Another thing I’ve done, going back to taking this new role at the Satsuma company, is now I have to go speak to pension funds and institutional funds to like allocate to Bitcoin. And this is a big step for me. It’s further than I’ve ever gone before. And these people speak a different language than I do, frankly. And I built a… So, most of them now, in ChatGPT, in Claude, you can create projects. So, you can create a project, and then you can fill it with all the information. So, I got everything about Bitcoin treasury companies in relation to that, all the different products. We can create all the regulations, and I put it into a project. And then I built a coach in there.

And the job of the coach is to train me, to quiz me, “Hey, I want you to be like an antagonistic talk show host or podcast host. Okay. I want you to be a regulator. Quiz me on these things, grade me on it, tell me how I could have done better.” And it’s literally coaching. I put it into voice mode, and then it’s literally like talking to me and coaching me through this. So, super powerful, that kind of stuff.

Hal Elrod: That’s incredible. Yeah. I mean, there are few limits to what it can do in terms of helping you get clarity and strategize and learn what you need to learn, and in a very targeted way. I mean, obviously, as an author, it’s like, are people going to keep reading books when they’re like, “Hey, instead of…”? They’re basically going to say, “Write me the book.” Like, for you, for example, with the strategy you’re using, where you’re doing the Google Forms clearly say, “Hey, ChatGPT write me a book based on exactly what I need to know based on the six months of data you’ve collected for me to go to the next level in my business, transform my marriage, and be a better dad. And then that book can be written in.”

Mark Moss: And then you take it to Google’s NotebookLM, and then it creates a podcast around it. And have you done that?

Hal Elrod: I have not. I’ve heard people.

Mark Moss: It is amazing. Amazing. Genspark now has that also. But what I’d say is going back to the write me a book thing, you’re a writer, the one thing that I’ve found is it has no soul. It has no taste. It’s just gibberish what it writes.

Hal Elrod: Yeah.

Mark Moss: It’s really good. It does really good research. And you can use that to write, but it just writes terrible. And most people don’t have that taste. So, they’re like, “Oh, this is pretty good.” But as an author, I’m sure you see that all the time, where you’re like, “It’s just garbage.”

Hal Elrod: Sure. Yeah. And that’s one thing that… Who was it? I was with a bunch of authors the other day, and they said there’s something special about authors pre-2023 or something, because you know they wrote their book.

Mark Moss: Or a ghost writer.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. That’s true. That’s true. And that’s actually what I said to someone that they were saying, “Yeah. I would never use ChatGPT to write a book.” It’s actually kind of like having a ghost ghostwriter, right, if somebody else wrote the book. Alright. So, I want to transition from AI to finances. You’re an expert, one of the world’s leading experts in Bitcoin, but specifically just wealth strategy. I mean, you name it. Like, you’re one of the smartest human beings that I’ve ever listened to in terms of studying trends. Like, I get blown away when I watch your videos. I’m like it would take me three months to prep for this video, but you did three of them this week, you know?

Mark Moss: It takes like four or five hours. It’s not easy.

Hal Elrod: Four or five hours. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, a lot of prep, a lot of research, and you have a whole team that I’m sure helping you to do all that research. So, you’ve said that we’re living through one of the biggest transformations in history right now, economically, in terms of a new money, for the first new money in how many years?

Mark Moss: 500 years. First new financial asset.

Hal Elrod: First new financial asset in 500 years in Bitcoin. We met in November 2021, so going on four years ago, Bitcoin was at $60,000 at that point. We’re at 118,000, 119,000 as of this recording. So, it’s doubled in the last four years. Let’s just start for someone that is not in Bitcoin, let’s start there. And my dad, by the way, is I’m, “Dad.” I sent him your videos. I’m like, “Watch this video, download Coinbase. Just buy $100. You got to dip your toe in the water.” I don’t know if he has yet or not. I don’t think he has, but yeah, so talk to my dad. I’ll send him this.

Mark Moss: I’m going to explain it from the top, but this has to do with AI. It has to do with your Miracle Morning. It has to do with everything. It’s that most people are going through life on a pre-programmed track, and they don’t realize it. And they love personal development because they get these little dopamine hits of like, “Oh, I could do this to improve my life,” but they never do. And the realization that I’ve sort of come to is they never do because none of them are really trying to solve any problems. They’re just going down the pre-program track. If you have a problem to solve, when you need to beat cancer, you hit the books, man. And you needed to solve that really badly. But most people don’t need to solve a problem.

So, with AI, I don’t even know what. I’m coaching, I’m here in Austin. I’m going to do a mastermind event the next two days, and I have all these high-level entrepreneurs come in, and they ask me these questions. And I always answer back with, “Should I buy this house? Should I sell this business? Should I buy Bitcoin?” “I don’t know. What problem are you trying to solve?” They don’t know. So, going back to Bitcoin, most people don’t understand Bitcoin because they don’t understand money. So, if you don’t understand the problem with money, then no solution looks like a good solution.

So, number one, we have to understand that we’re in a debt-based monetary system, and that means that money is created through debt issuance. And the problem with that is that that means that every time they create more money through debt issuance, our money buys us less goods and services in the future. So, we’re constantly being diluted in our share of wealth in the world, meaning we’re losing purchasing power. Meaning, every month you have to work more hours to have the same quality of life. Let me put this into some easy numbers. In 2021, we hit 9% in CPI inflation in the United States, 9%.

Hal Elrod: What is CPI?

Mark Moss: That’s Consumer Price Inflation. So, that’s measuring a basket of goods, tracking it through a period of time, and telling you how much milk and steak and eggs went up. Now, they change the basket all the time. It’s heavily manipulated. We call it CP lies. But just using the government-given number. What that means is for the average person in the United States making $35 an hour, they’d have to work 10 extra hours the next month to buy the same amount of goods they had the previous month. Ten extra hours they’re going to have to work now for the same thing they had before. So, it’s literally stealing your life.

That’s 10 hours I could’ve put into my health or my relationships or my business or whatever, that now I have to work just to have the same quality of life I had before. So, that’s the problem. Why? Why does that happen? Well, because the government continues to print more money, and that continues to… So, we’re getting debased in that. And just a real quick philosophical pivot. I’m sorry you can’t explain Bitcoin in five minutes. But a real philosophical pivot, none of us want money. We want wealth, goods, and services. So, when the governments printed trillions of dollars of stimulus and sent it to everybody, it didn’t make anybody more wealthy.

They went out and bought a bunch of stuff, and the prices went up, right? So, what we want is goods and services. Money is a way for us to get that. So, what we really have is the wealth is the goods and services divided by all the money. So, every time they print more money, I get diluted in my share of the wealth of the world. And wealth always increases. Wealth isn’t a zero-sum game. We’re constantly inventing new things and building new things. So, the wealth grows, but my share of the wealth is diluted as they print money. Does that make sense?

Hal Elrod: Yeah, sure. And inflation is the word, right, that people would…

Mark Moss: Right. They use inflation to understand prices going up. But really, inflation is when the money supply expands as if I was inflating a balloon, increasing the volume of air. Inflation is when I increase the volume of money. So, imagine if I had…

Hal Elrod: My dollars are worth less.

Mark Moss: Right. So, imagine if I had a million-dollar company and you invested $100,000. So, you bought 10% of my company, and I grow this company to a billion dollars. And you think, “Great, I own 10%,” but along the way, I increase the share count, and you got diluted. Now, you only own 3% of the company. So, that’s basically what happens. Our dollar represents a unit of wealth, and when they print more dollars, we get diluted. All right? So, that’s the big problem. We can get into other stuff. I’ll just tip a toe in, but like, the governments have more control, so they want to censor transactions. And if you try to send a bank wire over six figures, they routinely ask me why and where it’s going, and they don’t want to send it.

If you live in North Korea or Afghanistan, no bank accounts. Women can’t have bank accounts, all these things. And so, 1.5 billion adults in the world today is a blow in statistic. Over 1.5 billion adults, not people, adults in the world today do not have access to the banking financial system. They don’t have permission to join. So, the phone’s like the great…

Hal Elrod: You’re saying worldwide in other countries?

Mark Moss: Globally. Globally, yeah. Or even in the US as well, but mostly globally. So, the phone’s the great equalizer. I could jump onto YouTube, learn anything. I can create an Instagram account, make money, or TikTok account. But not if you can’t get into the financial system. And 1.5 billion people have no access because they can’t have permission. They don’t have the right documentation. They left Syria, whatever. They don’t have the documents. They’re a 13-year-old kid that happened to be born in Iran, and there’s sanctions or whatever the situation may be.

So, these are big problems. We saw that when Russia and Ukraine got into their war, the United States and NATO unilaterally moved to seize Russia’s bank accounts. Three superpowers in the world with nuclear weapons, one of which is Russia, and the world sees their bank accounts. So, what hope does any other nation have? So, you hear about the BRICS want to start their own currencies and all this stuff. So, how does the world move on when we can’t trust someone’s controlled money? How does the world move on when most of the world, a good majority of the world, can’t even get into the global financial system to even solve problems and bring value to the world?

And then how do we move on when our money’s being debased so rapidly that we can’t push wealth into the future? Currently, right now, for the last five years, the monetary system has been expanding by 10% a year. That’s the number. Forget whatever the government tells you. The number that you need to be is 10% a year. That means in five years you’ve lost half your wealth. It’s a big deal. So, now back to talking to your dad. Now that you understand the problem, there you go. We need solutions for that, right? So, I need a way to hold my wealth that doesn’t get debased. I need a way that I can beat at least the 10% number.

Now, if you understand that, there are only two assets in the world that beat that number in the last 15 years, the NASDAQ and Bitcoin. That’s it. The S&P 500 doesn’t. The national median home price doesn’t. Only two that have…

Hal Elrod: What about gold? Would that be a third?

Mark Moss: No. Gold has not done nowhere near that level. Now, the point that you’re bringing up, or maybe you haven’t asked yet, but in the last two years, gold seems to have been about on par with Bitcoin, but that’s in a two-year period. If you look back over the last 15 years, it hasn’t. So, I’m trying to draw a bigger window. So, then, okay, what options do I have to beat this? What options do I have to transfer money digitally, electronically, without censorship? And so, that’s sort of where Bitcoin stands. So, Bitcoin is a way that we can get money out of the banking system. It’s a system that nobody controls. It’s a computer protocol.

For people that don’t know what that means, a computer protocol is a fixed algorithm. It’s a code that creates decisions and routes things. So, for example, the internet works off of a protocol called TCP-IP, and it routes packets of data around. If you’ve set up a router at your house, you know what the IP is. Nobody owns it. Nobody controls it. It’s like a common language that everybody uses. SMTP, we send email over that’s a SMT Protocol. It’s a way that email, so I can have Google as a client or Hotmail, but they use the SMTP protocol. Bitcoin’s a protocol. Nobody owns it. Nobody controls it. It’s just a protocol.

Hal Elrod: And it’s got a fixed amount. So, they can’t…

Mark Moss: And it’s got a fixed. There’s no they.

Hal Elrod: Yeah,

Mark Moss: There’s no they, and that’s the whole point. With Ethereum and Cardano and whatever, XRP or whatever, there’s a they. There was a company that started it and creates it and controls it. Bitcoin is a protocol, just like I said, SMTP or IP. Like, no one controls it, no one creates it, so there’s a fixed supply, only 21 million units that could ever be used. And so, what does that mean? Going back to understanding that when they print more money, I’m being diluted in my share of wealth of the world. I believe in the next probably around 2050 to 2055, Bitcoin becomes the unit of account of the world, meaning we start to measure things in Bitcoin instead of dollars. And at that point, I think Bitcoin is probably worth, well, up until that point, it’s probably worth about $45 million per Bitcoin.

Hal Elrod: 45 million per Bitcoin.

Mark Moss: Before it becomes unit of account, then it’s worth, you know, then what it is, is one Bitcoin since there’s 21 million, one Bitcoin will equal 1/21 millionth of all the wealth of the world. And the reason why Bitcoin buys you more into the future, unlike dollars buying you less, is because with dollars, I’m being diluted in my share of wealth of the world, even though it’s going up. But with Bitcoin, my share of wealth of the world never gets diluted. And as the wealth continues to grow, my Bitcoin always grows in value.

Hal Elrod: All right. So, I think that of everything you just said, what caught my attention and potentially the listener’s attention was one of the last things that you just said, which is Bitcoin worth $45 million by 2050-ish, and right now it’s worth $119,000.

Mark Moss: And that’s bearish. Want me to break the math down for you?

Hal Elrod: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Because you did this when I was here for dinner a year ago, and I’ve seen it on your videos, right? But, yeah, when you break the math down, it’s like, “Oh, again, it’s not some pie in the sky, hope. Literally, it’s math.”

Mark Moss: So, what happens is, again, we don’t want money. We want wealth, right, goods and services. And what happens is as we create more money, we have two types of people in the world. We have consumers and we have creators. And creators create more than they consume. Consumers just consume everything. So, if you’re a creator, you’re creating more than you consume. Where do you save the difference? So, we have what’s called store value assets. This is real estate. It’s bonds, it’s stocks, it’s gold, it’s collectibles, it’s fine art, and it’s Bitcoin. That’s where you go park it, right? So, you’re going to buy clothes and gas, but eventually it’s going to get to like real estate or bonds or stock.

Right now, today, that basket of what we call store value assets globally is about $1,000 trillion or a $1 quadrillion. It was $300 trillion a decade ago. And by the end of the decade, it’ll be worth about $1.6 quadrillion. By 2040, that’ll be about $3.6 quadrillion. Now, where do I come up with those numbers? The United States government, which has the reserve currency of the world, we have the CBO, Congressional Budget Office, and they project out the US government’s deficits, debt, and spending for the next 30 years. So, they tell us how much the money supply is going to expand.

So, as they increase the money supply, we’re in a debt-based monetary system, asset prices go up. Because remember, it’s not that the asset prices are going up, it’s that it takes more dollars to buy those things. Why does it take more dollars? Because they printed more. So, all we have to do is we can look at the rate of growth and we can see how much these assets have gone up with the money supply increase for the last 30 years, 20 years, 5 years, 10 years, then we can look at what the government tells us. They’re going to continue to inflate the money supply by for the next 30 years, and we can push out what that valuations mean.

Now, in that basket of goods or store value assets, some go up more than others. They’re more sensitive to liquidity. So, not all of them go up at the exact same rate. Bitcoin’s going up at a faster rate than some of the other assets, right? So, for the last five years, Bitcoin’s going up by 85% compounded annual growth rate, CAGR. For the last three years, it’s about 60% or 65%. Gold on the other hand, the last two years has done pretty good. It’s like 30%, 40% per year, the last two years. But when you look over five years, over 10 years, a little bit different story. But each one has these different assets. So, what we do is we project out where that store value basket will grow to in 2030 based off of the US government’s numbers.

Now, I believe those numbers are bearish. The US government spends and prints way more than they project. So, we’re going to way overshoot that target, plus it doesn’t take into consideration what China is blowing the money bazooka out of the water right now. They’re absolutely blowing it out. The UK just announced a trade deal with the US yesterday. I don’t know if you saw the news thing with President Trump and Ursula von der Leyen, and they agreed to every single concession that Trump wanted on tariffs, including investing like $900 billion in the United States, including taking all of our goods. I mean, she just took everything. Where do they get the money to do that? They got to print more.

So, we’re way underestimating the amount of monetary increase that we’re going to have. But just taking the data for what it is, again, understand that that basket size will get to $1.6 quadrillion and $3.5 quadrillion. So, there’s a few ways that we can look at this. So, we want to look at it from a bunch of different angles. As a venture capital investor, I’ve been deploying venture capital in the Bitcoin space for five years now. We look at a company that is non-existent. Uber, let’s use Uber as an example. So, if you want to invest into Uber, you’re like, “Well, how much could it be worth in the future?” Well, the taxi industry is this big and the limo industry is this big, and the ride share is this big.

If we can get 5% of that, we could be worth $100 million.. Okay. So, then we’d say, well, what percentage of the store of value assets could Bitcoin take? Could it get 1%, 5%, 10%? And we have to make a guess there. Now, when things are better, when Uber was better than taxis, more people just use Uber. It doesn’t mean taxis went away. Taxis are still there today. Uber and Airbnb both got 10% of their markets in less than 10 years. Hotels are still there. Taxis are still there. Just Uber and Airbnb are there now, right? So, Bitcoin is certainly better than any other store value asset for any number of reasons. And we can get into those if you want.

So, it should take a good chunk of that market share. But let’s just say it gets to 1%. If by 2030, if Bitcoin gets to 1.25% of the total store value assets, that puts it at $21 trillion or $1 million per Bitcoin. At just 1%. By 2040, if it can get to 8%, that would put it at $14 million per Bitcoin. 14% of the basket. And that will be in 30 years. Uber and Airbnb got an 8%.

Hal Elrod: That’s roughly a 100X. What it’s at now, I think, if I’m doing math?

Mark Moss: Well, I mean, it’s roughly $100,000, right? So, we’re talking a 10X in the next five years. Yeah. 14 million in 2040, and then about 45 million in 2050. That’s how far the CBO projects out what those numbers are. Now, I believe that then it becomes the unit of account. Why do I think that? I recently built this house in Mexico, and it was a nightmare to get quotes for things because this has to be shipped from Europe and this has to be shipped from the United States, and this is coming from Mexico, and we don’t know what the exchange rates are going to be in a week or two weeks, or three weeks. It was the first time I had to kind of really dealt with this.

If you’re in Mexico, they have one price for dollars and one price for pesos. The reason why the price is different is because the gas station is forced to be a speculator. They don’t know what the exchange rate will be when they go to the bank next week. So, understanding how these currencies all move against each other and people around the world can’t even do business, can’t even plan out their future based off of this, you see how broken this is. The world cannot move forward in the digital age without a neutral reserve asset that it can use. So, we as Americans and people in other countries do the same, but like everything that we think of as measured in dollars.

How much is a home? A million dollars. How much is a gallon of gas? $3. Everything’s measured in dollars. But the problem is that dollar, the denominator, is constantly being debased. It’s constantly being manipulated. So, everything that we’re doing to measure things is completely off. Well, how many barrels of oil is it? How many ounces of gold is it? How many Bitcoin is it? How many tons of rice is it? And so, the world needs this like neutral reserve asset that it can measure things in and it can store wealth in. It’s the only way that we move forward in the world. And so, I think what happens is already what we can see is that home prices are getting more expensive in US dollars, but cheaper in Bitcoin.

Hal Elrod: Explain that.

Mark Moss: So, in 2016, the median US home was about $220,000, which was about 16 Bitcoin. Today, the median home in the United States is about $440,000, but it’s only 4 Bitcoin.

Hal Elrod: Interesting.

Mark Moss: So, it went from 16 Bitcoin to 4 Bitcoin. So, while the world is seeing everything get more expensive, steak and milk and eggs and lumber and houses, it’s getting cheaper if I measure everything in Bitcoin. So, to me, I don’t see everything getting more expensive. Everything’s getting cheaper to me.

Hal Elrod: Well, it’s like that story of that guy that back with Bitcoin was a few pennies per Bitcoin. He bought a pizza for like 20 Bitcoin.

Mark Moss: 10,000.

Hal Elrod: 10,000 Bitcoin.

Mark Moss: 10,000 Bitcoin, Laszlo.

Hal Elrod: Oh my gosh, right? And now he would be a gazillionaire, I don’t know.

Mark Moss: Yeah, a gazillionaire. So, I think eventually the world will be like, okay, this is going to be our new unit of account. It already is. So, a lot of individuals like me have already made it a unit of account.

Hal Elrod: Isn’t Argentina, didn’t they switch?

Mark Moss: It was El Salvador. But now this new trend is these public traded companies are putting into their treasury. So, now, Michael Saylor was the first one with Strategy, MicroStrategy. They now hold over 600,000 Bitcoin. So, now all these corporations are adopting a Bitcoin standard. And now the government, the United States government, is trying to build a strategic Bitcoin reserve on Bitcoin.

Hal Elrod: BlackRock, right? They went big.

Mark Moss: Right. But I mean, when we talk about the United States, then every nation will do that. And it’s pretty easy to see that the US dollar could become, I’m sorry, Bitcoin can become the unit of account.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. And so, for the average…

Mark Moss: And let me just say one more thing real quick. So, what does that mean, though? So, what that means once it becomes the unit of account is that all the wealth of the world now is measured in Bitcoin. So, now we’re taking whatever that is in 2050 at $8 trillion divided by 21 million. And now that puts a Bitcoin to like 400 or 500. I’m sorry. Four or five, what was that? About 400 million per Bitcoin.

Hal Elrod: Per Bitcoin. Wow. So, I think the moral of the story is, if you don’t have Bitcoin yet, get Bitcoin. That’s a moral for my dad, right? We’re talking to my dad. And if anything, whatever you can afford, that would be my advice. I’ll share my advice, my unexpert advice, but simply whatever you can afford, buy. Put $1,000 or $2,000 or $100 or whatever you can afford now, and then set up dollar cost averaging. And that’s, for me, when money was going well, it was $1,000 a week, and when I’m being more conservative, it’s $100 a week. It depends on what I can afford at the time but always growing my Bitcoin.

Mark Moss: Yeah. I would say take all the money that you don’t need for the next five years and put it into Bitcoin. That’s what I would say. But what I’d actually say bigger than that is what you should be doing, what everybody should be doing is spending time researching and understanding what’s actually going on. Because what happens is you can’t borrow somebody else’s conviction. You have to build your own. And if you put the time in, your conviction will grow. And what will happen is you’ll start to understand what’s going on, and then how you should be allocating to this.

Because this is a once-in-a-500-year opportunity. It’s not like once in your lifetime. No, no. Multiple generations won’t get this opportunity. That’s how big it is for us. And you’ll miss out on this opportunity if you don’t understand what’s going on. So, I would say people should be investing their time first to try to figure that out and then start putting their money in.

Hal Elrod: Yeah, that’s a good point. And, I mean, your videos is where to start. Like, my good friend, Matt Recor, he’s very successful, owns multiple houses, did very well in the stock market, doing day trading. And he was anti-Bitcoin for a long, long, long time. And then I think I sent him, it was either one of your videos or one of Michael Saylor’s videos, but that he was like, “Oh, I didn’t realize conceptually what this is.” And then now he’s all in all around Bitcoin.

Mark Moss: Now, I’ve been in the space for a decade and at the highest level. And I’ve yet to meet one person who put the work in and then thought it was worthless. It’s always the opposite way.

Hal Elrod: And Ray Dalio, I mean, all the big investors.

Mark Moss: The brightest minds in the world.

Hal Elrod: Totally. Wait, I can keep going. Our wives are waiting for us to take them to dinner. Here’s what I’ll tell people. So…

Mark Moss: They can wait, Hal. They can wait.

Hal Elrod: They can wait. I wanted to ask you, you touched on this earlier, but you didn’t use the phrase, but what is the illusion of wealth?

Mark Moss: Well, the illusion of wealth is that, I mean, I guess in which context, I would say the illusion of wealth is people think we have it in dollars, but they’re not realizing that even though you have more dollars, the purchasing power of those dollars has gone down.

Hal Elrod: Absolutely. Yeah.

Mark Moss: Right? So, like you watch your retirement account for 20 years or 30 years going up, up, up. I had $100,000, now I got $1 million, I got $2 million. I feel rich. Or I’m sorry, I look like I should be rich, but I don’t feel rich. So, I have this illusion of wealth, meaning like, “Oh, now, I got $1 million,” but $1 million doesn’t buy you what it did 20 years ago when you started. And so, the problem is that because the money supply is increasing so fast, it’s stealing the value of those.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. I was giving a talk at a Cutco conference recently. And I was doing the math because I thought, well, I’m about to tell them how much I sold and how much I made. But that was 24 years ago. And so, it was the first year I earned $50,000. It was like 2001, I think. And I go, “What’s that worth today?” And it was over $100,000. And I go, “Wow.” But here’s the wild part, not including the inflation of goods, which means, so I’d have to earn $100,000 today to be worth what it was 20 years ago at 50,000. But that’s not true because the price of goods was so much less, that $100,000 today not only is it not $50,000 20 years ago, it’s you can’t buy what you could with $50,000 today. Yeah, that’s the illusion of money.

Mark Moss: And you use ChatGPT to figure that out.

Hal Elrod: Yeah, of course. Right?

Mark Moss: Yeah. And it’s actually worse than that, right? Because, again, that goes off of the government-reported CPI data, which is wrong. So, right now they’re reporting in the 3% range, 2.5%-3% range, but it’s really 10%. So, that’s going off of the wrong number. It’s much worse. That’s the illusion.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. So, what I would say is, anybody listening, if you’re not utilizing AI, right, start learning about AI. YouTube is such a great free resource for all of us to learn. And if Bitcoin is something that you’re not invested in or you’re not aware of, I mean, Mark, you’re one of my favorite people. You, Michael Saylor to the best out there in terms of talking about Bitcoin and understanding it at a really deep level. One thing that you talked about, and I don’t know if we have time to cover it now, so people can go look at it. But you have a five-year retirement strategy that you can go watch that video today. It’s funny you texted me. I took a selfie. I was watching.

Mark Moss: Yeah, you were. I saw the calculator on the screen. Let’s walk through it real quick. I mean, I’m fine. I think it’s so important. This is like, man, if there’s one thing I can get through to people, it’s this. So, I think it’s worth talking about. So, going back to these technological revolutions, they give us a new set of building blocks to build new things that we can’t imagine. And so, Bitcoin is that new first financial asset in 500 years. And so, we can do things with it that we could never imagine. And one of which is we could use it as like a retirement technology, but it takes you having to learn something that’s completely different and foreign to what you’ve been taught. And if you’re a Dave Ramsey disciple, this is really going to go against everything that he’s ever taught you.

But for some people, they think it goes against their biblical teaching or whatever, but we’re in a debt-based monetary system. That means money is created through debt issuance, and so we need to use debt. We don’t have to. You can go like Dave Ramsey and just save your pennies. But if you really want to get ahead and you want to get ahead quick in life, you have to learn that we need to use debt because we’re on a debt-based monetary system. So, that’s number one. And what I’d say is that debt is very dangerous, just like fire is very dangerous. And I can cook my food with fire or I could eat raw food. But if I don’t control the fire, I could burn my house down. And we don’t let kids play with fire. But most people, hopefully, most of us grow up and mature enough to handle fire.

The problem is most adults don’t want to grow up and handle debt. And I was on a podcast recently, and they told me, “How dare you advocate this to people. Is it going to be so risky?” I’m like, “Sure. And you should never go surfing either because there’s sharks in the water.” Like, you might drown. We learn how to swim. So, we should mature. So, I want to frame it up that way. So, what we have with Bitcoin is an asset that’s going up right now, as I said, about 60% per year compounding. Now, over time, that will dwindle down. It’s already dwindled down quite a bit.

Michael Saylor, you mentioned me in the same breath. I don’t know if I deserve to be in the same breath as him. He’s projecting that Bitcoin will probably be still doing 30% in the next couple of decades. What we’re seeing is the de-materialization of money, just like books and movies, and music became digital. Money is now being digital. And digital will always move faster than physical. So, Bitcoin will always go up faster than the S&P 500, and companies will always produce more value than debt because debt is what’s used with the savings of the productive company. So, we always have what’s called arbitrage between these.

So, what this means is that as long as Bitcoin is going up faster than the debt that I can acquire against it, I can do this in perpetuity. So, poor people, I don’t want to say poor people, poor mentality and middle class mentality, they think about working in order to earn money to pay their bills. And that’s the relationship that they have with it. That’s the purpose of their work is to pay their bills. And the way they view credit and use credit is to increase their lifestyle, get a bigger house, get a bigger boat, go on a vacation they couldn’t afford. But the wealthy, the 1% do it completely different. So, they work to buy assets, and then they use the assets to pay for their life.

And they also use credit even though they’re wealthy, but they don’t use credit because they don’t have the money. They use credit because it’s cheaper to use someone else’s money than to use their own money. Now, this is typically only available to the 1% because they are the only ones that have enough assets to actually live off of. But Bitcoin makes it accessible to everybody. So, now in that video you’re watching, I have a calculator. You could link to the video and the calculator for free if anybody wants to get it.

But basically, Bitcoin’s going up by 60% a year. If I can borrow it right now, I can borrow it 15% against it. I could do that forever. So, let me give you an example. If I had $100,000 of Bitcoin today, in five years, that could be worth $1 million. That’s the five-year retirement. So, 100,000 today, and I got this idea because one of my good friends, he’s my age. He doesn’t have that much longer to go. He’s got about $300,000 in his retirement account. And I’m like, “Look, man, that $300,000 is not going to be enough for you to live off of. And if that sounds bad, half of all baby boomers today have zero savings. Half. And of the half that do have savings have an average of $240,000. So, they all need it.”

Hal Elrod: And that’s the retirement crisis.

Mark Moss: That’s the retirement crisis. So, my buddy has $300,000. I said, “If you took 100 of the 300 out and put it into Bitcoin, in five years, that could be worth $1 million.” When it’s worth $1 million, I could borrow, and this is why the debt piece is important, I would borrow 15% against the Bitcoin. That’s $150,000. The reason why I want to do this, sorry, Dave Ramsey, is because if I borrow it, debt is not taxable income. So, I get that tax-free, and I still own the Bitcoin going up at 50% a year. If I sell it, one, I pay tax, two, I’d have no Bitcoin anymore. So, I borrow the money against it. Then the next year, because it went up another 50%, I borrow another 15% against it, and I roll the debt. I pay off the year before, and I get the new one, and I basically just do that in perpetuity. I keep rolling the debt.

Now, the one question that people always ask on this is that, “I get that, Mark. That makes sense, but when do I pay off the debt?” Why would you ever want to pay off the debt? So, I don’t have the calculator in front of me, but in 15 years, you owe $5 million against $25 million in Bitcoin, and in 15 years, you owe 10 million against 50 million in Bitcoin, and your grandkids are going to owe 50 million against 300 million. You don’t pay it up. Now, at some point, when the debt is, if hypothetically, the debt grows faster than the value, then sure, pay the debt off at that point, right? But until that point, you just roll it forever.

Hal Elrod: And for anyone listening that’s like, “Well, yeah, that’s if Bitcoin goes to a million,” but you look at the history of Bitcoin.

Mark Moss: Yeah. Well, okay, so it does half of that. It goes to 500.

Hal Elrod: But my point being that if anyone’s going, “Well, yeah.” My point is you look at the history of Bitcoin and those that said when it was at. 4,000 a coin like, “It’ll never go higher than 4,000 a coin.” I remember I got in, I think around eight or nine is when I started buying and I think it got…

Mark Moss: Thousand?

Hal Elrod: Yeah. And then we got to like 12 and then whatever, I don’t remember the numbers, but it took a dip, and I got scared, and I sold a bunch of it, right? But now looking in hindsight, I’m like, “Oh, now I can look at the chart. And you can see the ups and the downs and the ups and the downs, but that it’s trended upward since inception.

Mark Moss: Yeah. And I’ve been making content since it was $300.

Hal Elrod: $300? That’s when you got in.

Mark Moss: And so, yeah, people can ask that. And that’s why originally I said earlier like, “Go spend time doing research first,” because you need to have the confidence here. But even if it did half of that, it got to 500,000, then I just borrow 50,000 or 60,000 instead of 150,000. But it’s still better than what you’re going to get in your Dave Ramsey Mutual fund earning 4%.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. 4% and inflation is potentially outpacing that. So, you’re losing money.

Mark Moss: And you don’t think stocks go up and down? So, we measure. So, we do need to understand the risk and reward, and most people, they think too much about the reward, not the risk. So, in investments, we use something called a Sharpe ratio. And a Sharpe ratio tells us the volatility and the risk, the risk and reward of an asset. It tells us how risky it is because we want to think about a risk-adjusted return. If I could make a lot of money, but it’s very risky, I put a little bit, right? If it’s very safe, I can put more. So, the Sharpe ratio is what we used. And if we look at over the last five years, we have the US Treasury, the bedrock of the global financial system, the US Treasury, the long treasury measured in the TLT. It’s an ETF.

We have the S&P 500. That’s the index. That’s the baseline that every institution in the world tries to beat. And we have Bitcoin. Out of those three, which one do you think is the most risky and the safest?

Hal Elrod: I’m going to let you tell me.

Mark Moss: So, of those three, using the Sharpe ratio, the long bond, the US government bond is I think it was a 0.37, which is very risky. Bitcoin was like a 1.09, which is very safe, safer than the US Treasury, the bedrock of the entire global financial system. And so, people can have all these preconceived notions and these gut checks. And I know your cousin told you it’s a Ponzi scheme, scam, whatever. But like we have data. And that’s what we should be planning our future off of. And so, we should be looking at the data. And so, those concerns are valid, but the answers are out there.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. Well, and I love what you’re advising is education. It’s not jump into this or jump into that. It’s educate yourself about AI and how it works, educate yourself about Bitcoin and how it works, and that way you have confidence.

Mark Moss: And we haven’t even started talking about how AI and Bitcoin work together, because each one of these revolutions is a cluster of technologies where the sum is greater than the parts. But that’s a whole another conversation.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. We’ll save that next time. Well, next time you come to Dripping, you’re 23 minutes from my house, so I’ll come here. We’ll do that again. Mark, any closing words of inspiration or action for people watching, listening?

Mark Moss: I think what I would kind of, after this conversation, probably the words of action and motivation would be, I think the common theme is that the world is changing very rapidly. And we can either have the mindset that’s happening to us and we’re a victim, and it’s scary, and how do we hunker down and protect? Scarcity mindset. Or how do we see this as an opportunity for us to get ahead? How do we see this as having an advantage over the majority of people who don’t see it and jumping on the AI tools to advance my career, make more money, jumping on Bitcoin to preserve my wealth better, and having an abundance mindset in that regard? So, I’d challenge people just to change your frame a little bit and then do the work.

Hal Elrod: Yeah. I love that. The world is changing. Join. And the beauty of it is nobody’s an early adopter at this point, right? Like, you’re not one of the first. You literally go, “Oh, there’s data, there’s track record. Okay. Now, if you’re not already in it, now I’m going to join into these opportunities.” Where’s the best place to follow you?

Mark Moss: Well, you said it over and over, my YouTube. You gave it up. You gave it up. So, yeah, so I’d say, just Mark Moss on YouTube is probably the best way. I’m semi-active on Instagram and Twitter as well, so jump on those as well.

Hal Elrod: And I did on that five-year retirement strategy, I did just download or opt in to download your Retire Off Bitcoin, The New Rich Playbook. And I just sent the link to my dad. I go, “Dad, watch this video,” and literally today before I came over, “and go opt in and get this e-book.” So, thanks for the work that you do, man. The free content you give away is better than most people’s paid content, so I appreciate it.

Mark Moss: Thanks, Hal.

Hal Elrod: And I appreciate your friendship, brother. Alright, man.

Mark Moss: Alright. Cool.

Hal Elrod: Let’s go to dinner.

Mark Moss: Yeah.