Summary
➡ The text discusses the potential for nations with abundant natural resources to arbitrage their excess capacity by converting energy into Bitcoin. The speaker emphasizes that the energy market is oversupplied, suggesting that money could be put into Bitcoin for a higher return rather than selling natural gas or oil right away. They propose major energy producers could become significant Bitcoin miners. A global shift from paper to commodity money could drive this trend as nations opt to store wealth in natural resources or Bitcoin rather than government-issued currency.
➡ The speaker asserts that energy is underpriced in the U.S and western Europe, leading to wasteful consumption habits. They argue that an increase in energy prices, while potentially burdensome for lower-income individuals, would ultimately stimulate more responsible and efficient energy usage. Alternately, the speaker criticizes government regulations for artificially inflating energy prices and adversely affecting lower-income populations. They also signal their commitment to investing solely in the digital and crypto space through Cardone Ventures, deeming this opportunity too vast to divide attention elsewhere.
➡ The speaker discusses the transition of various industries towards digital technologies, using the music industry as an example. He underscores the importance of investing in service-based firms that facilitate the transition into digital assets, particularly for sectors such as analytics, reporting, and accounting. The speaker is keen on investing in businesses that contribute to the growth of the digital asset industry as opposed to holding onto digital assets indefinitely. He also discusses his focus on economic implications over politics and the immense potential in sectors such as mining and reporting. With a background in payments, he criticizes the current system for its high cost and inefficiency, arguing for the implementation of bitcoin for transactions to lower costs and increase efficiency.
➡ The current credit card industry’s model, primarily led by Visa and Mastercard, is facing potential disruption as transactions shift digital. Rapid technological advancements allow for instant transactions with immediate final settlement and low to no fees, a process magnitudes faster and cheaper than current credit card transaction times and costs. However, adoption is challenging due to the need for extensive education and merchant upgrades, setting the scene for a gradual rather than abrupt transition.
➡ The text discusses the struggles of merchants with credit card chargebacks and the low margins in the ecommerce space. It criticizes the credit card duopoly by Visa and Mastercard, suggesting that Bitcoin can address these issues by offering a standard set of terms and conditions, educational programs to raise awareness about chargebacks, and incentives for good consumers. It hints at regulatory issues and intertwining of these card companies with the government, raising questions about unfair trade practices and regulatory challenges for cryptocurrencies. Finally, it questions the high operating margins of Visa and Mastercard compared to other industries, suggesting a potential bias or disparity in industry norms.
➡ The speaker discusses the difficulties in the current financial system, emphasizing the important role of consumer protection. They argue that Bitcoin, while potentially transformative, isn’t ready for everyday transactions like coffee purchase due to regulatory and investment considerations. They mention that advancements in technology and order mechanisms like from companies, for e.g., Bact, enable transactions that utilize the benefits of Bitcoin without the user needing to understand it deeply. They anticipate a slower rate of adoption for blockchain technologies but believe the long-term impact will be significant. The speaker also touched on the investment potential with operating businesses in this industry to gain insight into developing trends.
➡ The speaker emphasizes the extensive job opportunities in the Bitcoin industry, which do not require any upfront investment or traditional qualifications–just willingness to learn and work hard. He anticipates that this industry could potentially employ millions.
Transcript
And if the greenies were smart, it, they let crude oil go to $300, but they keep talking about suppressing prices, taxes, everything’s too high. They’re so dumb. All right, Gary, thanks so much for joining me today. Super excited to sit down and catch up and really see what I can learn from you. I try to approach these, I don’t even want to call them interviews, just conversations, as just a way to learn what I can learn.
And hopefully the audience enjoys that as well. And there’s so much that we can learn from, well, from everybody. But I’m really excited to learn some stuff from you. So anyway, thanks for taking the time to join me today. Thank you. Thanks. Good to be here, Mark. Yeah, man, you’ve had quite the career. And when I look sort of over your resume, if you will, a pretty extensive career in a lot of different areas.
So we’ll get down to that later, like potentially how different disciplines sort of helps you. So I want to talk about a couple of big topics. One, I want to kind of talk about some energy stuff. I think it’s a really big topic for everybody right now. It’s something I spent a lot of time focusing on. I want to get into just investing in general. I mean, you have your venture fund, so I want to talk about some of the ways that you process deals and how you do investments and how you think about operations for those things.
And then I want to get into your brother and as well you kind of known for this real estate. We’ll talk a little bit about real estate and then bitcoin, of course, and maybe some of the correlations between those and different ways to invest into that, and then maybe tie it all together with how we look at energy and investing in real estate, and then it brings it all into bitcoin.
So we’ll see if that’s not too ambitious. So we’ll see what we can get through on that. But I see, going back to sort of, like I said, your resume, I see you work for a company dying energy, where you kind of started out working there. And specifically it says that you were working in the european business market, and I think even in the natural gas markets, and you sort of exited that company.
I know it’s probably been a long time. One, I’m just curious, is this something that you still pay attention to? I mean, it’s energy, right? You’re still kind of watching what’s going on in the european natural gas markets or energy markets in general? Yes, I do pay attention to it. Not at the micro level. I mean, I’m not trading energy. I’ve known a lot of men who have left their wives widows by trading that gas and electricity.
They are brutal. And crude oil. I know two guys on the planet that have made long term money trading crude oil. These are really distinct commodities and they have a lot of geopolitical and local issues that are created you can’t hedge against. But yes, I do watch it. I appreciate your point on, hey, there was two pipelines blown up. That was an act of freaking war in terror, in my opinion, and has really changed the supply chain, logistics, and I think probably put the United States in a position where they’re selling a tremendous amount of lng to Europe within weeks after those pipelines blew up.
So there’s a whole play going on here. I think you’re going to see Europe turn into a totally green, 100% green nuclear industry, and they’ll just float $3 trillion worth of bonds, 50 to 100 year bonds, and turn Europe into a nuclear power community, which really put long term. It’s going to have a lot of long term impacts on global energy if that happens. So there’s a lot going on.
It’s worthy to watch for. Sure. Yeah. And I think it matters because energy sits at the bottom of every market and economy. And so I think I want to get into, like I said, just general investing venture investing real estate, and then, of course, bitcoin. But when I think about bitcoin, I think about we have this nascent technology that’s growing and there’s massive growth potential there, but then sort of we have this macro picture that hangs over everything, and if the entire world crashed, I mean, it’s going to just drag everything with it.
So I think it’s kind of important to sort of understand these different disciplines. And so again, being with energy sort of underpinning this, if it could potentially cause massive disruption to the global markets, I mean, this is something that we should be paying attention to. I think about to your know, the pipeline that got sabotaged, I think general consensus even out of the United States now is it was probably Ukraine in behalf of the United States doing that.
Seems like even the New York Times is saying that now. But sort of going back to that, it looks like last year Europe sort of got saved by this abnormal warm year, and now this year already it seems like it’s gotten much, much colder. They’re burning through their stockpiles much faster than they were before. And so the United States is, to your point, jumping in to fill that gap.
But what happens? Because the United States energy is super cheap compared to the world. Natural gas specifically. Right. Very cheap compared to the world. If they’re able to export a good amount of energy to the rest of the world, Europe specifically, where it’s much more expensive, which of course, the european, I’m sorry, the US energy producers would want. Wouldn’t that wreck energy prices for us in the United States or not really? You mean by driving them up because too much new demand? Yeah, exactly.
If we can sell it for two, $3 an McF in the US, but it’s 25 over in Europe, how does that equalize the market? Well, there’s a huge locational differential. There’s big capital costs. To put it on a big tanker, you’re roughly $280 to $3 here. Look, they’re short in Europe. Europe produces nothing. They don’t produce their own food on scale. They don’t produce their own energy. Each country doesn’t even have its own bank.
It’s literally being controlled by three or four people that you and I don’t know. No one voted these people in office. They’re just part of the euro construct and NATO sitting there. NATO is holding the euro together and the European Union. And I just think it’s all falling apart. So Russia has been selling energy to germans far cheaper than we’re going to ever sell it to them. They have been the discounted decaturm, the discounted kilowatt, and they are now going to find other places to sell that energy.
So I actually think this is going to turn around where you’re going to see energy prices fall because of what has been done. The collateral consequences of what many of these politicians, professional politicians, these decisions have a lot of really long lasting collateral impacts, like dominoes falling and there is so much energy on the planet, mark, at $100 crude oil or $4 nat gas, I think we can continue to find energy at or around these prices.
And the truth is, if we export them to Europe, they’re going to have to pay whatever they have to pay to get it there. Because if we keep all of these, okay, that guy, you can’t buy from that guy. I mean, this does not work in any market in the world where you can tell people who they can and cannot buy from. It’s only benefiting other countries like India, which may be a good thing.
Okay, but India is really benefiting from this. No. Crude oil stopped just because it’s got a russian flag on the crude oil barrel. It’s still being sold and it’s still moving around this planet. And that’s what fungible products do. That is exactly what bitcoin will do without all the transportation and the heaviness and the big ships being exposed. If you get crude oil, you really get bitcoin so quickly.
It’s unbelievable. Why is that? What do you mean by that? I have some comparisons to oil and bitcoin, but I’m curious what your comparisons are. How do you get oil? You get bitcoin. Well, let’s say that you’re a russian oligarch and you own a billion acres of fossil fuel rich geology. Why would you pay a transportation company 3000 miles to move a decotherm of energy when you could place a data center? Instead of building pipelines, they get blown up.
You place a data center right next to your natural gas facility which is producing natural gas at about a dollar or $0. 20. But by the time it gets to Germany, it’s like, been upgraded to $3 because of transport costs. Just like you or I getting on a train. We have a delay to get to where we’re going and we have to pay. You and I are not having to get on a train now.
So we’ve arbitraged the train experience. I think Putin, if I was running his energy division, I can assure you they’re all younger than me and you, these guys are going to look at, I can convert natural gas to a USB and then move that energy anywhere. Anywhere. One. I mean, if there was too little energy on the planet, they don’t have to mine bitcoin. They can just produce those decotherms into the marketplace and the marketplace will pay you.
However, what if in the case of an oversupplied situation, which I maintain, we are always oversupplied? Last 30 years, we have been oversupplied with energy and it always shows up because at $100, if you notice $100, it can’t get past $100 and stay there. All the fracking that we discovered did not occur. That innovation did not occur at $100. It occurred at ten to 30. Because the scientists, the geologists, the drillers figured out shit.
We want to keep drilling. We got to figure out how to do it at 30, not at 70. And that’s where innovation showed up. So I think you’re going to see arbitrage. A natural thing for people to do, a putin would do, would be to arbitrage the availability, the ability to produce or refine natural gas into another product called bitcoin. It’s no different than making a liquid gasoline.
Right. A distillate bitcoin will have its own market share. So why you wouldn’t want to go for the highest margin yielding refined product? I think that’s what market. Well, that’s the point right there. It’s like the highest yielding product, right? That’s the point. So it’s like, if I can get three or $4 in mcf selling the m, the gas, but I could get $10 mcf putting it into bitcoin, I’m going to put it into bitcoin.
And so then you see potentially Russia taking a large amount of natural gas off, right? Plus, like you said, transportation costs, political risks, all those types of things. So then it’s like, well, it’s a higher economic return. If I just put it into bitcoin, I can put it on a USB drive, as you said, send it into the world over the Internet. At some point, maybe this is what a market does, but at some point, maybe then, because all that natural gas comes off the market, it pushes the price of gas up, and then maybe it starts to be a better return to go back to gas at some point.
But I guess that’s sort of how the market would play out. It’d be interesting to see. But I guess, to your point, there’s so much abundance in that natural gas that maybe they’ll just want to continue putting into that, into the bitcoin. Well, look, we just took 1. 7 million barrels of crude oil off the market after the pipelines blew up. Now, crude oil has nothing to do with those pipelines, but China’s demand must be off, just have fallen off the cliff for one saudi company to.
I think it was a Ramco to remove a million. And then Putin said, we’re going to take 700 off, and now OPEC collectively is talking about another million. Well, if you’re taking all this supply off the market, where’s the demand? Because the price is not going up. Furthermore, 20% of all fossil fuel, man, it’s leaked all over the place. This is one of the most inefficient industries. It’s 100 year old pipes okay, so there’s leaking, there’s inconsistencies, there’s swaps that you lose.
It’s just a lot of friction. By no means is the energy market efficient. And let’s say crude oil is at $50 and nat gas is at $2. If I sell into a $2 market, I have to print that, cash, that income. But what if I can store that same amount of money, a billion dollars of natural gas that I was going to sell in March? I actually go, hey, I’m going to roll it till September.
How do I roll it? I don’t have to go to storage companies and roll it. I can roll it into bitcoin, right? And then I move my time and I have very little cost. I only have the cost of the cost of capital to hold that in a vault that is not subject to being blown up. It’s not subject to restraints or constraints by any us government or any government for that matter.
For a piece of my energy, we’re not talking about all the energy, we’re talking about just a little marginal piece, maybe 3%, 5%, 10%. I maintain that the biggest, most successful miners in the world will be fossil fuel producers, sovereigns and super major oil companies. They will be the most effective miners going forward probably end up buying marathon and riot if they have to. And that’s where bitcoin will be produced from those energy producers.
Nuclear power stations, full on nuclear power stations will start selling 80% load factor for the first time in their lives. They can actually be a storage facility and not have to sell base load. That’s nuclear’s biggest problem. They have to sell base load. There’s no modulating like you would a gas plant. Turning it on, turning it off, lowering the volume. Yeah, if you think about it, to your point, right, we have this abundant energy.
The whole world operated on this theory called peak energy until about 2008 where we thought we were going to run out of energy and then that was disproven to your point, with fracking things like that. And of course human ingenuity always finds a way somehow. But in regards to sort of where we’re at in the world, something I’ve been talking a lot about, which I got from sort of zoltan posar talking about, but really sort of this shift from the world had been on commodity money for 5000 years.
1971 we got off of the gold standard. We’ve been in this 51 year, 52 year experiment of this paper money and the world’s rejected that. That paper money experiment is over. It’s falling apart. And we’re seeing this where these nations are now. China bought half the lithium mines in the world. They don’t want us treasuries. They’d rather have lithium in the ground. And we see OPEC and Russia saying, hey, we’ll just hold oil in the ground.
Why would I pump more oil out of the ground at this price? I don’t want to sit in us treasuries. That’s losing money. I’d rather just keep the oil in the ground. But now the picture you’re painting, I guess, so to speak, is that, well, now they could continue pumping the oil or natural gas or whatever that energy out of the ground, but now get it for the $100 a barrel, even though that’s not where the market is, because they can put it into bitcoin.
So rather than say, I’ll just keep the oil in the ground, they could get more oil the ground, but now store it in something other than us treasuries. And so that’s a pretty big shift, I think, that we could see happen. Yeah, it’s big. And I think if you do the research, you’ll find that the net present value calculation of keeping energy in the ground, it’s a 20 year decision.
Every decotherm you keep in the ground, you’re literally rolling out 18 to 20 years. It’s a bad trade, man. And because you have so many different producers, you have a quasi cartel that doesn’t function anymore. It’s literally not functioning as a cartel. My example, just a little while ago, one country said a million barrels coming off. Oh, gosh. They now have a public entity called Aramco. Isn’t that amazing? And then Putin decides to pull off 700,000 barrels.
Right? The price didn’t go up. It might have gone up for a day or two, but it’s right back down to where it was, $71. They’re making $10 a barrel in Europe, and they’re making fifteen dollars to twenty dollars barrels here. There’s not been a dry well drilled in five years. Dude, I have not heard of a Drywall. Have you even heard the word dry hole? Like, there aren’t any dry holes anymore? This is pure science.
They know exactly what they’re going to tap into, where they’re going to tap into, and they can accelerate it, which is amazing. See, that’s what bitcoin can’t do. Bitcoin. You cannot accelerate the production of bitcoin. You can put water, just push water and pressure down a hole and accelerate the volume of crude oil anytime you want, or natural gas if the price peaks. I don’t think you’re going to see peak prices.
Peak oil like that very cold day in Germany, you’re never going to have enough energy. But on an average day, I think we have energy for a long, long time. And if the greenies were smart, they’d let crude oil go to $300. But they keep talking about suppressing prices, taxes, everything’s too high. They’re so dumb. They should let crude oil. I was with Vivek, I said, dude, let’s go to $300 crude oil, $12 gasoline, and we’ll stop war tomorrow morning.
There will be no reason to have war at $300. Cruel. Why would it? Because what are you fighting over? Everybody’s making money, man. America would like, the oil companies make so much money, consumers would control their consumption better. Okay. I maintain energy in the United States and western Europe is way too cheap, especially here. And I think I can prove it to your audience. If 99% of the people didn’t turn on their laptop computer off last night, I’m pretty sure electricity is not priced correctly.
I don’t leave my refrigerator wide open at night, right. I don’t leave my car running all evening. I turn it off. So when electricity is priced correctly, I’m going to start turning things off. We’re addicted to convenience. Well, that might be easy for you to say. I’m guessing there’s a lot of people making a medium wage in the US that would probably beg to differ, that can barely afford their gas to get to working back.
And $12 gasoline would just absolutely crush them. They pay $10 in Europe right now. Okay. What they do is they don’t drive to the grocery store for loaf of bread. All I’m saying is that we are very abusive of what we have and energy because we don’t turn it off. That tells me it’s not priced correctly. Right. It’s priced in a way that allows us to be lazy.
Just give you. I mean, we could probably do an hour on this because it’s a really interesting conversation. If you removed all of the tvs at source, pull the plug out from the UK. There are 72 million homes in the United Kingdom. That’s 400 megawatt coal fired power station coming off the grid. If you were to do that, remove the power card from the tv outlet, that standing energy consumes an entire power station.
Coal fired power station. Imagine that all over the world, especially on the west, because I’ve got eight tvs here dude, they’re all plugged in. They’re all sucking energy. And I never turn them. Unplug them. They’re turned off. They’re turned off. No, they’re plugged in. You’re saying sucking energy, though, to be so that I can hit a button and they instantly go on without any warm up, it is sucking energy from the universe.
So all I’m saying is if it was priced correctly, there’d probably be a company that created out there that would sell a card that would, like, disconnect. This is not complex. Somebody could have done this a long time ago. There’s just no juice in it, for lack of a pun. Right. Well, that’s because what you said earlier, which is we have no shortage of energy. And so back to the market.
The market is always going to price it correctly, if you will. Obviously, government regulations and so forth sort of gum that up a little bit. But we have so much abundant energy. That’s why it is cheap. Yeah, it’s cheap here. Right? And it’s abundant. And. But government regulations want to change that. So you talk about Europe. Energy is expensive in Europe, but yeah, because Germany shut off their freaking energy, man.
And like, I’m in California. In California, we talk about natural gas being cheap. And natural gas has gotten cheaper. It’s the most abundant energy source we have in the United States. In California, natural gas, my natural gas bill went up 400%. How did my natural gas bill go up 400% when natural gas came down? It’s pretty insane. So that’s the government regulation, the artificial scarcity that’s put into place.
And that, I’m sure you’re aware, adversely affects the lower income people. I mean, that’s a massive chunk to their profitability. And restaurants. My friend that owns a restaurant, he can barely keep his doors open anymore. His energy bills went from 400 a month to over $3,000 a month. In California, this is a different topic. But they put a 30% tax on pork because of emissions. Right? And that goes into government regulations.
But energy, they put these costs on the energy, and he can’t pass those energy price increases into his consumers, on the price of food. So he’s getting squeezed at the margins. He can barely stay open. So I don’t know. I think the market is efficient. I think to the point that you’re making, though, I agree. Typically, we would say that high prices are the cure for high prices.
So if energy prices got high enough, then people will figure out a card for their tv, disconnected or whatever. We’ll figure out a way to use less of it at some point. Yes. Not to be disagreeable, but I think markets are rarely ever efficient. No, let’s be disagreeable. It’s more fun that way. They’re never price, right? Like this idea that Wall street is some fucking God. Okay, look, we don’t do good at predicting prices and making allocations of data because the data is skewed.
Like there’s no actual real data. I don’t know what CPI really is. It doesn’t feel like what it came out at 3. 1% today. It feels different to me than that because I look at a price of a dozen eggs and it’s like, wow, now your crazy country is doing exactly what Europe did, which is, hey, we don’t want to be energy intensive. We don’t want to have drilling rigs.
We don’t want to have refineries around like they do in Louisiana and Texas. California doesn’t want any of that ugly stuff. It’s all nail polish and lip gloss. Let’s not have any power stations here, dude. You guys are going to wake up one day and you’re going to pay $40,000 for power because the guys in Vegas, they’re going to take it from you because it’s moving right through Vegas.
And then the guys from Arizona, those utilities, are going to take it because it’s moving through there. You’re at the very end of the food chain and you refuse to do anything down the ground or above the ground in terms of making the state look like a state that actually runs on its own energy sources. One day California is going to wake up, dude, the water is not going to be flowing and you’re going to have to pay $40,000.
That’s an inevitability. Yeah, for sure. Already we have, I think we’re like ten times higher than. We’re not ten times, about five times higher. We have a tiered energy system and so in the summer we’re paying forty five cents a kilowatt hour. Forty five cents at the top tier, right? In Texas it’s like eight, right? Some states it’s even less than that. Yeah, we’re paying for it for sure.
Let’s keep it going. I want to get into more about investing and then we’ll kind of tie all this back together. But your company now, so you’ve sort of exited the energy markets. You had another company, you were in like a capital allocation business, private equity, and now you have your own firm, Cardone Ventures, a play on your name, as you told me, instead of cardone, the own is the one.
I like that. Good play on that. But cardone Ventures, and so let’s talk about that for a minute. I’m curious, having exited businesses before having successful exits, working for private equity, obviously you’ve been allocating capital for some time with Cardone ventures. How are you looking at allocating capital? Any specific markets? I know obviously you’re very interested in bitcoin and technology, but is that your main focus? Are there other focuses? And then how do you go about finding companies and deals that you like in those spaces? Well, Cardone Ventures is really about, and Cardone Digital Ventures is about investing in the future.
So I’ve been in energy payments. You made the comment about the european business. I spent 14 years there building two really big businesses in the energy space. So I got a lot of understanding of lobbying and change and how the governments work with these new ideas. Look, I am a really concentrated human being. I’m not a good multitasker at all. So I tend to go into one area.
I think this digital space is so large. I’ve committed the rest of my life into this space. I don’t have time to be an energy guy and a payments guy and then a digital crypto, bitcoin guy. This opportunity is so large. I basically have sold everything I possibly could that required operational involvement. I had bought a lot of bitcoin over since 2018, started really turning on a lot of volume about two and a half years ago, and ran into node 40.
And I had this whole venture idea. If I could find some technologists that were humble enough to realize just because you have a great idea does not mean that you are a great general or a great strategist. I’ve met a lot of Palo alto people, and one thing, they know how to do free really well. But I don’t believe in free. I think actually free is bad. It creates bad incentives.
I like knowing what I’m paying. Okay? So if I walk into a Range Rover dealer and he’s like, hey, this is a $200,000 car. I’m keeping my car, man. I’ll wait till these prices come down. It’s not right value for me. So I think this industry could consume probably six businesses, like analytics, reporting, analysis, big data tracking, accounting audits has nothing to do with bitcoin, except it has everything to do with digital assets.
And I think we are moving down this slippery slope of digital. We went from the big vinyl reel listening to the Beatles to now I’ve got a telephone that’s got 40,000 freaking pieces of music. And I’m paying four subscriptions, man. Okay? I’m paying four subscriptions. Talk about how deadly technology can be. I’m buying music from Spotify on an Apple iPhone. Apple’s music thing is embedded in that technology.
I paid one, $200 for the bloody phone. And Apple pretty much destroyed the music industry in stage one, right? Put it on a little thing, and I’m not listening to their music. It’s amazing to me, right? So I look at businesses that are needed and wanted that will currently are required in the legacy world. All of those industries will be required in the digital world. Service based companies.
Totally, dude. Reporting there’s 43,000 tax and accounting companies in the United States alone. Four and a half million people accounting for legacy assets. Now, this is already a $1. 3 trillion industry. I think it’s going to a 20 or $30 trillion industry. None of those old companies know how to do this on digital. This is not like tracking a title on a home or the purchase price of a home.
So there’s tons of these businesses. There’s the mining business. So I want to be in a place where I have a choice to buy bitcoin, or, hey, let me go invest money in a business that has some operational risk, has some human error risk, but it feeds the industry. It actually helps the industry expand. I am not one of these guys that have any intention on buying bitcoin, holding it forever and ever and ever and never selling it.
I actually want to sell it so that I can reinvest in the industry at some point so that the industry expands. Right. And to me, these industries need investment, and we can leave it to JP Morgan to do all the investing. I would actually like bitcoin to perform like you. And I think it’s going to do so that I can roll my investment in this space. I become more wealthy and you become more wealthy, and then we can invest in this industry and not have a bunch of outsiders with really tons of capital and insight and they come in and take the whole market.
So when you have an opportunity like this, I start shifting everything I used to do and focus on this area. It’s proven to be really one very fun and very rewarding. I never get the glittery object syndrome where I’m looking over here, right? I’m actually looking at you, okay. There’s enough people for me to learn to know. I need to know more about mining, how the economics of that work.
I’m more concerned about the economics than I am the politics. Yeah, I love that. It’s sort of like the Warren Buffett investing principle. Instead of diversification or diversification, it’s really about concentration, right? And so Warren Buffett calls it like his deal box, right? He only invests into the core things that he knows, understands, and he believes in concentration. And if you look at most of the big investors, well, the ones that we know about, the successful ones, they’ve all got that way through concentration.
And so that makes sense that you want to just sort of focus on where you see not only probably the biggest opportunity, the most alpha, if you will, but probably also where your interest lies as well. Right? So there’s probably lots of other areas you can go make money, but not only do you see there’s a big money making opportunity, but also probably very interesting for you so that you’re sort of chasing your, I hate to use the word passion, but something that gives you excitement, right? I mean, you love it and it has massive legs.
I think back to sort of this oil analogy, right? If you look at oil as the commodity, and you can think about the millions or tens of millions of technologies that are built around the oil industry, from sonar for ships to petroleum transfer pressurizers to measurement technique, there’s a billion, you know what I mean, the new head on the drill rig or whatever it may be. And so then we have sort of bitcoin being this commodity asset as well, and then potentially billions of technologies that we’ve built around the bitcoin industry as well to kind of facilitate that sort of commodity, if you will.
I don’t know if bitcoin, I mean, obviously it doesn’t have a million use cases like oil. Like oil goes into sneakers and cleaners and things like that. But the industry itself, I think, could be built out very similar to your point. Not only just in the mining space, there’s unlimited amount of potential there. But to your point, services, software tracking, payment facilities, things like that. You do have this payments background as well.
Node 40 is more about reporting and things like that, like tracking, reporting. I’m curious what you think about it from a payment standpoint. I know when we had met or talked before at the bitcoin conference, whenever that was this summer, this last summer, you were kind of talking about the amount of chargebacks that payment companies deal with and how costly that is for them. Of course, bitcoin is final settlement.
So I’m just curious what your take is about using bitcoin in the payment space where that potential is. And if that’s something also that you’re focusing on, well, there’s a lot in that question. I think that if you look at the plumbing, I see, I look at the payments industry as a 50 to 60 year old plumbing industry, and the plumbing is falling apart. Okay, what does plumbing look like? There’s only three or four major Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase to the rest of most of these people, Visa, Mastercard, are not a bank.
They are a vendor, vendor and vendor. They literally take zero risk. There is no risk. You cannot go into their PNL and see where they took any losses whatsoever. They’re like a toll between Germany and Switzerland. And the price is always, hey, we make a 51% net operating margin. When you take your car across, boom, boom, boom, boom. It doesn’t matter. You stop your car, we’re still making 51%.
If the car blows up, we make 51%. If the car doesn’t make it, we make 51%. And if you decline to get through the border, hey, we make 51%. I mean, everything they do makes 51%. The other thing is the cost of the chargeback. 656,000,000 chargebacks. That’s a visa number. They actually make money from these. This is not a cost center. You said it. And most people say that, hey, look there.
It’s costing. No, it’s costing, Joe, consumer, me and you. 656,000,000 events a year times 108 dollarsthirty, $0. 06. Plus the 62,000 amateurs that are employed. 62,000 people are employed at Barclays and various banks, issuing and acquiring banks, filing chargebacks like a ping pong game between each other in a monsterly non centralized manner with exquisite bias. Every player has bias there, okay? Barclays issuing, that’s the consumer side of the bank, is trying to reduce the phone calls inbound because it’s a $27 event.
So what do they do? They create an app and they say, hey, go on the Citibank app and just dispute this. The retailers got 8% refunds. Now, can you imagine dude going to 100 podcasts and they’re all 1 hour and 8% of them fail? Can you imagine that? Right? The friction. So, Joe, consumer is paying for it. How? Because the retailer gets screwed, and they take their rates and they take them up further and further and further.
So now bitcoin comes along, right? And I think that the bitcoin decentralized marketing department, which I was laughing about earlier, it took me two years to figure out, oh, wow, they’re so bad on marketing because they have no centralized marketing department, which is a problem, right? Because you’re competing with people that invest tens of millions of dollars at every rugby match. Visa, Mastercard. Visa, Mastercard. This is why it’s so hard to get legacy players to unwind their position because they have been robotized, man.
Okay? They think you notice this thing. Visa says we do 30,000 transactions a second. Yeah, bro, but you don’t settle any of them. Okay, let’s talk about settled transactions. But Joe consumer doesn’t understand that. See, Joe consumer here? Why does Joe consumer even care? He doesn’t. Why do we tell him? Yeah, we’re the ones bringing this shit up. Okay? Like, settlement’s the deal. If you’re a retailer, you care about settlement.
Do I have my money? Yes, I have my money. Thank you very much. No refunds. So this is what I think is going to happen, mark. I think you’re going to find that the very richest part of the value chain and payments. Gaming, gambling, digital, anything. Onlyfans or whatever that’s called. The women do. Probably the guys will do it one day. Adult pornography, all of those are monster, monster rich.
Fat margins that visa and Mastercard make. That all moves digital. The moment we’re ready for primetime to be able to take 40,000 transactions every 30 minutes on adult. Or gaming. Or gambling. This is game over for the credit card industry because they’re going to be left with the in store shit that the whole system was built for. It was built for in store. You and I looking at each other, sharing my credit card with you and then signing it on a wet piece of paper.
That’s how that industry was built. Think about it as a speedway. The problem is you now have a car that does 700 miles an hour, the fastest, most liquid car on the planet. And it does it with electricity, and it’s really fast. And the course can no longer handle it like the course that the plumbing was built on. It’s just too old. Let’s talk about that for a minute.
So you said bitcoin or whatever visa does, whatever, 30,000 transactions per second, whatever that number is, it doesn’t really matter. First of all, for me, let’s just think about it, right? So with technology, it needs to be 100 times. It needs to be 1000 times better, right? We don’t really like improvement offers. But if I go to a merchant and I want to run my visa or my credit card, whatever it probably takes.
I haven’t really timed it. I don’t know, 30 or 45 seconds for me, to sit there and wait for that to go through. Right. Roughly 30, 45 seconds ish, something like that, before they print it and get me the receipt and have to sign it, whatever, but the merchant now not only has to pay the fees, whatever, two, 3%, 4%, depending on their risk, plus their statement fees, et cetera, et cetera.
And then they don’t get the money for maybe 72 hours roughly. Right? So what we’ve done, Technology has sped up our transaction times. We now have instant transactions, but we still don’t have instant settlement. So the discrepancy between transaction and settlement has grown massively wide. So, as a merchant, one, my customer experience is slow, there’s friction. Two, I have to pay exorbitant fees, and three, I don’t get my money for long periods of time, and time is money, so the faster I can get my money, the better.
Now, if I wanted to accept the transaction over lightning, which I’ve done many of these lightning transactions, like in El Salvador, just even at conferences and events and things like that, literally, before I pull my finger off the button, the transaction is already there. It’s not 30 seconds or 45 seconds, it’s 2 seconds. And on top of that, then the merchant receives final settlement. Not just settlement, but final settlement immediately and with no fees.
So it seems like it’s 100 x or 1000 times improvement to me, it seems like we’ve been hearing about for years, like, oh, my gosh. Okay, it’s coming. NCR strike told us two years ago, NCR, one in six payment processors, one in six merchants use them as payment processors. They’re going to integrate this in there. And it is a good idea whose time has come. It is 100 x or 1000 times better.
One, I guess. Do you see it being that much better? And two, if so, then what do you think is the big roadblock holding it back? And three, where do you think, sort of like what kind of time frame or what is it going to take to see kind of more adoption there? I think the best way to approach it is to look at history. It took visa, Mastercard 52 years to get seven credit cards in everybody’s pocket.
Hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of millions dollars of advertising at every major sports event. American Express has its own program for more wealthy people. Look, adoption’s hard, man, okay? Like scaling adoption, global adoption, visa, Mastercard have been massively ineffective in China. Massively. Okay? The only place chargebacks take place is in the Visa Mastercard system. So this does not happen in the east, okay? I mean, I had a half a billion dollar built, half a billion dollar business on a problem that only exists under the Mastercard and Visa.
I think the adoption is going to be a lot slower than we think because I think people misunderstand how adoption occurs. And I’m quite certain that the decentralized state of bitcoin’s marketing department hasn’t helped because you have a bunch of people walking around talking, and I think people think the people that are talking about bitcoin represent bitcoin. But there’s been a lot of misinformation out there, and we’ve missed every target we’ve set out there.
Like you said, like Jack said, hey, we’re going to be in payments. You might be, dude, but not tomorrow morning. Okay? So I think where this happens is that when retailers get smart and they start offering discounts to the analog world, like, hey, it’s $100 for this transaction, or it’s 95, you use digital and the lightning piece like, you know better than me, mark, when is it going to be ready for prime time? Because 50 million merchants are on planet Earth, and I think they’re declining.
That is a lot of carbon. In order to get real adoption, you have to make all those merchants capable of being able to receive this new money, currency, digit allocation, audit ledger, whatever you want to call it. And I don’t think it needs to settle instantly when the settlement process for Visa Mastercard is six months. So you go wipe a transaction on Sony or Apple tomorrow morning, you literally have six months to say, hey, that’s the chargeback period.
Six months to charge it back on your credit card with absolutely no proof. You can literally say, not mine. Six months later, and you might not win that. You might not get it reversed, but you’re going to cause a pain in the ass for the merchant and for everybody in the food chain. Like, when you do that, it sends a ripple through the whole food chain. That’s not going to occur in digital, and that’s extremely valuable and efficient.
If we can stop the abuse that’s going on, whether it’s meant to be abuse or whether it’s just an error, it’s nonetheless a lot of friction. You had told me the number before, like, the financial impact of those chargebacks in the industry. I mean, it’s in the billions, tens of billions. I think we’re talking about over a trillion dollars of losses a year, dude. Trillion? A trillion. Wow.
Big numbers. Oh, yeah, because, well, one thing that’s really interesting is just try to go on Visa and Mastercard’s public documents on their quarterly reports and find out how much they make just from fees, fines and chargebacks. It’s staggering to me that I have a half a billion dollar business in the chargeback business. Yet you can’t now. I’m private. We were private at the time. Still are. Can’t see any of that data on Visa, Mastercard.
That’s interesting. I think they’re making a billion dollars in net income every year for sure. Both of them from calling things fraud. They’re not fraud. And if they are fraud, how the hell can you have nearly 700 million fraudulent events in the United States and european business? 700? That is what? 700 million? That’s about 2000 a day. I think maybe 20,000 a day. How can you have that much fraud? And Visa Mastercard traded a premium.
That is five x Google’s. Excuse me, five x ExxonMobils and two and a half times the valuation of Google. It seems odd to me. Okay, a duopoly. They have 72% of the entire plastic market. And I think you’re talking about 656,000,000 unit events. You’re talking about $106 price. You’re talking about another $300. Every time a merchant gets $100 chargeback, it has cost him $350. How does he ever come out of that? And refunds are going up.
So the system is broken. Okay. Visa’s big pitch was increase refunds, make refunds, easy peasy. Guess what refunds did? Refunds went from one and a half to 2% to eight. And chargebacks went straight up. Did absolutely nothing. You have to educate the consumer. You have to educate the consumer. And the trick, back to your question. The trick for Visa, Mastercard, which stops most foreign payment companies coming in the United States, they used the chargeback mechanism in 1972 to create adoption.
That was the only way they could get you and your wife into the store and go, hey, let’s move off of cash and checks. We want you to hold this little plastic. That’s what they used adoption for. You have seven cards in your pocket now. Real or virtual, dude, adoption is curd. Take the chargeback mechanism away and make the consumer responsible for what he does when he clicks a button.
You and I do a deal online. It’s a legally binding contract, right? Like, didn’t we sign a legally binding contract? I did it electronically. I said yes. I read the terms and conditions, supposedly. And then we have another third party decide, yeah, that legal contract is no longer valid. That’s crazy, right? An early business I started was I was doing ecommerce I was selling motocross stuff online and in the automotive space and specifically on hard parts.
On hard parts in the motorcycle space, the markups are very poor. You have, like, a 30% markup if you’re lucky. And we would get chargebacks all the time where we would ship something to the address that it was, and they would say, oh, well, my husband used my card, and that wasn’t my card, or my kid used my card. I didn’t authorize that, and they would charge it back.
We didn’t even get the product back, and the card company would automatically honor their charge back. Now, we only had a 30% margin on that part, so I sell $100 part cost me 70, right? I was hoping to make 30. I lost 70. Now I got to sell four more parts just to get back to profit off of that one loss. I mean, it was catastrophic for us, and that was early on.
Before today, I’ve seen some numbers specifically that gets bigger and bigger and bigger. But now the amount of returns that are going back to these stores is starting to break them. They have to repackage or they can’t resell at full price or whatever. But that was a long time ago, and it broke us, because, again, our margins were so small. And so I can certainly see from a merchant side how bad that is.
I should say maybe from a vendor side, from a merchant side. I mean, if I could obviously reduce my chargebacks, get my money faster, this seems like a benefit to me, I guess, to the point you’re making is consumers jumped on the credit card bandwagon because of the protection they got from the chargebacks, but it works against the merchant. So now the adoption is probably going to have to come from the merchant side.
The merchant is now going to say, hey, look, we want you to use this, and maybe there has to be some sort of incentive, I guess, to your point, some sort of a discount. Hey, you don’t get to charge it back, but this is what I require. Sort of like, hey, you got to pay me cash, kind of a thing. That’s the way real markets work. The real markets work where? In the oil business? In the energy business, we have IsDa agreements, man.
You want to trade crude oil, we have one agreement, like bitcoin is going to do a lot of things that no one’s even talking about. Why do we have 50 million merchants on the planet? This is a visa number, and we pretty much have about 49 million different terms and conditions on all these websites. Why can’t we have just one standard T and C terms and conditions. The FTC goes out of its way to talk about clear and concise and then they do nothing on clear and concise.
When it comes to terms and conditions. This is how much time you have to refund. This is what a chargeback is defined as Visa could literally spend. I’ve pitched them this. Hey, we raise a billion dollars by charging. 1 on every transaction for one year. Retailers pay for it. And we then do Visa, Mastercard, do a monster education program and explain to people, these are not refunds, these are harming retailers.
If he gets 100 charge back, he’s going to probably be put out of business or his fees and fines to Visa Mastercard are going to go up so much and this is what they do. Hey, we’ll come in and consult for you and get you out of the program for $100,000. Or you can buy our chargeback system and buy all these tools and it’s $100,000 and there’s no guarantees that any of this happened.
So we’re just dealing with a duopoly. That’s the problem. Adoption has occurred. I went to both Visa mascot and said, why do I pay the same amount for some batteries that my secretary pays for? I should pay less. And they were like horrendous. You’re suggesting that your credit, you should be able to buy retail products cheaper than other people because your credit is better and your performance as a refunder or chargeback offender is better.
I’m like, absolutely. They said that will never fly. People will be riding in the streets. If we give you a discount versus your assistant. Okay. Then bitcoin will do it. And that is the answer. Okay. Like the merchants. We need to do a better job with the merchants to show them what the real cost is of using plastic. It is at least 10% of the total retail value and you have no guarantee that your merchant processor is even going to support you.
Okay? If they don’t like what you’re selling tomorrow morning, they can literally just turn you off. So we need to do a better job. And I think this is going to come because I’m happy to buy stuff from you. I don’t refund. I’d love the discount, dude. Pay me. Let me have a discount from being a superior consumer that isn’t raunchy. I don’t have viruses. I don’t send shit back to you.
I don’t create a whole problem in your ecosphere. And I would love to see Visa Mastercard go after these retailers and say, hey, you can’t do that. Watch. They’re going to try and say you cannot offer a discount for bitcoin. They’ve done it on. Okay. Hey, you can’t offer discounts for cash. Okay, this is then, okay. Now we understand what the real rules are. They’re trying to protect their game and then we can attack them for violating the rights of a human to be able to engage in any type of commerce.
And if Visa, Mastercard start telling retailers you can’t take this, well that’ll be a very interesting case in the Supreme Court. In my off, did I go off course on your question? But this is going to be a real battle on payments, man. Yeah. And then I want to talk just one more thing. We’ll talk about the battle over payments and then I want to talk about some of the time frame.
You said a couple of times that you think adoption takes a lot longer than most people think. So we’ll get to that. But just back to the battle over payments. The other big piece in battle over payments in my opinion seems to be the government and just regulations or laws if you will. Right. And so you mentioned earlier taking this big vinyl record and now you have a million records or songs in your phone.
And actually it was different. We used to have, if I wanted to listen to Beethoven I had to have like 100% orchestra. To get 100% orchestra to a vinyl was a big deal and then vinyl to CD and then eventually now we have 1000 our phone. And so we saw like music, movies and books got digitized pretty quickly and that was a hard fought battle. I mean the music labels and music industry and movie industry, they’re big and they fought hard, but yet they were still put out.
Right? Because when the idea is 1000 times better, the problem is now is we have the government and the government doesn’t lose. Not easy. And so the big problem that I see with the payment piece is this tax complication. Now going back, shout out for your company node 40, you’re trying to make this tax compliance piece easier. But no way am I going to try to figure out what my tax is owed on a cup of coffee.
That ain’t going to happen. What’s the point of trying to figure out that for a cup of coffee, even if your software works really good, I still don’t care. Right. And I think that is probably something really big in its way. Now we have game theory, we got Nicaragua, I’m sorry, El Salvador and potentially other countries. But do you think that’s like one massive obstacle sitting in the way for actually going to payments.
You’re assuming that Visa and Mastercard aren’t state owned companies pretending to be public. But I have no history and my entire capability of reading history books where you had organizations turning off entire countries access to credit cards, yet they’re public and their stock price goes up. It’s a very od thing to me. Okay. I think there is so much inner wiggling between Visa, Mastercard and the US government, it’s frightening.
It’s the only way that you can show me why Visa, Mastercard 40 year old companies have a net operating margin so significantly over the Google’s of the world or any company, including ExxonMobil. Okay. I do not think that if the credit card industry failed tomorrow morning that anyone’s going to lose any sleep over it. The system is not going to stop. We’ll go to checks and cash. If energy stopped flowing tomorrow morning, we would be freaking out.
People would be dying, okay? In hospitals. So why does Exxon trade at a 10% net operating margin? And everyone thinks they’re evil. Yet Visa operates at a 51% net operating margin. Zero competition for them and they own 72%. Them and Mastercard own 72% of the entire plastic market. I think you are dealing with already a government, like they’re just pretending to be public. So that’s the world we live in.
This technology is so cool that it’s going to put another. American Express has not been able to tap this thing. Nobody, dude, ant financial tried to come to Europe with Alibaba and they could not penetrate this market. You’re not going to get a piece of plastic in a human consumer’s hand without that consumer protection. No chance without the chargeback mechanism. So it’s a way to block people from coming in the space.
The cool thing is it’s such a large number and it keeps going up. There is no stopping these friction problems. The only way you stop them is you start over. You can’t fix this. There are seven vendors in every transaction, man. There’s a decline rate. Have you ever had a decline on a bitcoin transaction? No, it doesn’t happen. 13% in the United States, dude. 13% decline rate. After all these refunds and after all the chargeback, the entire system is broken.
We don’t really need to even compete with them. Okay. What we need to do is make sure we understand how long adoption takes and that we’re not being stupid. Like you’re not going to get adoption from the consumer in America on scale with bitcoin you might do it with a CBDC initially, okay, and get them educated. But you got to decide, is it first an investment vehicle or is it a spending tool? To your point, you don’t want to spend bitcoin for coffee and you probably shouldn’t right now.
It’s probably not ready for that level of its evolution. What if that needs to be in five years? I build the case that bitcoin needs to be at about half a million to a million dollars each so that we stop talking about bitcoin and we start talking about satoshis. Okay? And then by that time you could differentiate and go, hey, look, this is going to be a regulatory problem.
Once they validated it as a commodity, why are you spending it on orange juice? Right? Because you’re going to pay capital gains on that. How we get that fixed, what we don’t want them to do is go, okay, now it’s a security, it’s a commodity. So I don’t know the answer. I know that anyone spending money on coffee, literally, you’re exposed to capital gains. I don’t think anyone’s going to come after you for it, but it’s clearly something that needs to get addressed.
Okay, because I don’t spend my dollars. Somebody said the other night, hey, every time you spend your dollars, your tax. That’s not true. I don’t get a capital gains every time I spend a dollar a unit of paper. So I don’t know the answer on the retail. I would say that it doesn’t make sense today to spend any of that on coffee. And maybe if you’re in El Salvador and it’s prominent, well, it’s in San Salvador, it’s El Salvador.
Nobody’s going to see it. So I don’t know the specific answer to how we get there when the scaling happens, but we will underestimate how long it takes and then we will overestimate how long it, like, it just happens all at one time. There are a lot of people coming in this space, though, and the plumbing on plastic is so bad, mark, that it’s just going to take off the tops.
And that’s, to me, if you look at it from gaming, gambling, adult, whatever you think about those industries, they’re microtransactions and plastic won’t work with micro, less than a dollar. Plastic really is problematic. You and I, you know, you and I are going to have robots in a year and a half. We will have robots. I think my robot will send you money and it’s going to send microtransactions and we’re going to be a leased economy, and plastic is not set up for lease.
Look what’s happening with your subscriptions. One of the reasons they have so much friction and chargebacks is the subscription model. Well, the industry wasn’t built for subscription, so anyway, that’s my answer. And look, Visa and Mastercard are going to invest heavily in this space, man, as long as the regulator. The problem is, I think to your point, the plumbing is all messed up, and this is sort of what strike had said they wanted to do.
Now we see ice, which is the parent company of NYSE, has a company called Bact. And what backed is doing is something similar where they want to use the bitcoin rails to transact the payment. But you don’t actually work with bitcoin. So I send you pesos, you receive, and you end that transaction. Moved over a bitcoin rail. Neither of us know that, and it doesn’t matter. So they’re doing that.
I think they rolled that out a couple of months, two months ago maybe, and then they’re trying to create, what do they call them, l URLs or whatever, where basically we could have, like Gary@lightning. com. Right. And I could just send you transactions that way. But getting to that point where you said no one’s talking about bitcoin, they’re talking about sats, but where you could use this or you could benefit the technology without having to know it’s about bitcoin, right? When you turn on your light switch and you don’t know how that light came on, you just turn the light switch on.
Right? I facetime my wife and I don’t know how the heck her face shows up on the screen. Doesn’t matter. I just use it. And so that is here. It’s starting to take hold right now. Backed is enabling banks to send dollars and receive yen, and it just happens to go for bitcoin. They don’t need to know that. And so it’s happening. And I would agree. We’ll kind of wrap this up.
I agree. I’ve talked about sort of an adoption over like a 40 year period, and we’re about a quarter of the way through that. If we look at venmo, I was looking up earlier when you were talking and we saw that I had it in front of me here. It took from 2015 until 2022 to get to 80 million users. And so things just take time. Most of us just expect way too much too soon.
So I think give it a couple of decades it’s certainly coming on and yeah, no stopping a good idea. When you’re disrupting an environment, you will really want it to come faster. Right. I’m always optimistic that it’s going to happen faster, but it always takes longer than I think. But when it happens, I then underestimate the impact. Every time I’ve done this now four times, I’m quite certain that I am underestimating how long this is going to take.
And then I’m grossly underestimating the impact, which is so exciting for me, having this background in energy and payments and seeing this happen again. It really allows me to put on a monster, monster position with a huge amount of conviction. And it’s literally like, hey, am I off by 18 months? It’s only about that, really. So to me, it’s an awesome. Just starting back on the venture piece, it’s an awesome investment thesis that quite frankly, all the operating businesses, like, I’ve looked at a few mining deals and every time I’m like, damn, dude, I just like buying bitcoin at 42,000.
It’s less headache. Yeah, I don’t think I can do that. Mining. It’s no human error issues. I don’t have a CEO to deal with. I don’t have his wife to deal with. There’s issues in these operating businesses long term. I think you want some big operating businesses in this ecosphere because it’s going to also bring you a lot of intel as to what’s going on. So that’s my long interest is in owning companies in the industry.
So that’s just the way I look at it the next three years. Man, this is a no brainer. All right, Gary. Well, we went long. A lot of good information there. I appreciate it. It’s fun conversation. Look forward to seeing you again in person in real life, as we say here on the interwebs. What do you want people to check out? Where should they go to find more about what you’re working do? I’m starting to do a lot of stuff on YouTube and Twitter, bringing on people like you.
I think I would like to help educate people and get them out of the noise and try to bridge the gap between the old world and the new world. I think I’m the right age for it. I communicate pretty simply. To your point, you don’t know how Facebook works and you use it every day. You don’t think, are they stealing all my data? Yeah, they are, dude. They’re probably stealing all your data.
But I drive down the road in 100 miles an hour in a Range Rover. I have no clue how that car works. So I don’t need to understand everything. I need to understand who am I dealing with on a human level and who are the people against me on a human level. And then I get to make investments and build my life around the risk I see out there.
And this is a cool opportunity. And you don’t have to be rich to buy bitcoin. You could not buy any bitcoin. You could build a career in this industry. That’s the cool thing. Without a resume, man. Just come into the industry, start learning. How many people could you hire tomorrow? I mean, if they had the right skills, certainly. We’re hiring. Yeah, and you’re having a hard time finding people that show up on time, work long, study.
Like my secretary. First thing she’s got to do, man. Hey, dude, you need to go learn some robotics, chat GBT, read the bitcoin standard. First four months is just dive, go deep, figure out what you don’t know. So, I just think you’re going to employ millions of people in this industry, and that, to me, is a great story that’s not told very much. Yeah. Good. All right. Well, with that, we’re going to sign it off.
Carrie, again, like I said. Oh, yeah? You got something said? No. No, thank you, man. I’ve enjoyed. All right, thanks, Gary. All right, budy. Ciao. .
